Should You Accept Crypto Payments For Your Business? (Guest Article By WDWP #4)

Oct 7, 2022 | Guest Articles

If you’re wondering “should I accept crypto payments for my business?” the answer is everyone’s least favorite…

It depends.

If you like navigating it depends answers, read on as Wolf Den Wolf Pup (WDWP) #4 lays down the foundation.

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Crypto Payments For Your Business

Crypto payments have come a longggg way since I first started using blockchain back in 2017. And they still have a long way to go.

But with crypto payment solutions like Coinbase Commerce, Moonpay, and NowPayments it’s easier than ever for businesses to accept crypto payments.

This also means it’s getting easier for your customers to pay you in crypto.

But does that mean you should accept payments in crypto for your business just because it’s “easier”?

That depends on a few factors.

Lower processing fees/no chargebacks
Business treasury
Opens new business opportunities

The main reason to accept crypto payments is the reduced payment processing costs & chargebacks.

Platforms like Coinbase Commerce and NowPayments charge a low, flat transaction fee, whereas credit card processors like Stripe charge fees of

NowPayments has transaction fees starting as low as 0.4%.

If you process 10–100 transactions per year totaling $1 million in sales this is savings of $26k per year which is not insignificant as this goes straight to bottom-line profit!

Not to mention, it eliminates potentially costly chargebacks and ensures that customers have to be adults and have a conversation with you if they have an issue or want a refund, which can allow for better remediation of issues vs. the dreaded possibility of ghosting you after crying fraud to their banks.

If you have a subscription-based business, platforms like NowPayments do have a subscription and invoicing feature.

However, in my experience it becomes an admin headache to chase up unpaid invoices and my preference is still that recurring payments are set up with a credit card.

Another reason you might want to accept crypto payments is if you are building a business treasury involving crypto holdings on your balance sheet.

Many companies ranging from MicroStrategy to Tesla have done this.

And even small-to-medium sized companies have done the same.

We have business owners in The Guardian Academy who have managed to more than beat inflation and produced an additional source of cash flow to fund operations with their business treasuries built using stable coin lending, Guardian ($GUARD) staking, and other decentralized finance strategies.

You could accept fiat and purchase crypto to implement a decentralized finance strategy with your business treasury.

But accepting crypto payments shortcuts this process.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water

You might not want to abandon fiat payments altogether in favor of crypto payment processing.

Here’s the thing, only a small segment of the population already has crypto and would know how to spend it.

Forcing customers to pay in crypto may create unnecessary buying friction, and lead to more cart abandonments.

In this case, the savings on chargebacks and processing fees is not worth the potential lost sales.

So it is still better as an option vs. being the only option.

And there are some outlier cases where accepting crypto might actually open up more sales opportunities.

If your target customer finds it easier to pay you in crypto than in fiat currency, then accepting crypto payments is probably a no-brainer.

For example, if your target customers are crypto maxis, they might be more willing to do business with companies that accept crypto.

If your target customer is in a country like Argentina where inflation is eroding their currency’s buying power and they are storing their savings in USD-denominated stable coins…it might make sense for you to accept crypto payments.

You might even live in a country where there is no crypto tax, or spending crypto isn’t a capital event for tax purposes so they benefit by spending it vs. converting it into fiat.

In all of these cases, accepting crypto might open up a market of previously untapped customers.

What Are My Options?

As highlighted above, there are many options to accept payments in crypto. Here are some for you to explore with attached links to their website.

Each one will have their own benefits but also limitations which you should consider your unique business situation before going with any provider. CoinBase Commerce, for example, is limited to ERC20 coins.

Our favorite from the list is NowPayments for a few reasons.

First, it’s easy to integrate with Shopify and other eCommerce platforms.

This means that autoresponders, thank you pages are still functional. All the little bells and whistles that help make your customer journey feel complete.

Second, we have the option of being paid in $GUARD, which is what we are building our treasury with. The way NowPayments is set up allows us to accept virtually any crypto and it automatically converts it to $GUARD for us.

The integration guide for NowPayments:

Setup an account: https://account.nowpayments.io/create-account

2. Enter confirmation code (check your email)

3. Select the Cryptocurrency you’d like to receive as a payout and add the crypto address to send it to (our favorite is $GUARD for obvious reasons but choose whichever you prefer)