The process of creating an e-commerce website in the past has been somewhat of a challenge. Hiring designers for the front end and developers for the back end. It was also considered to be costly.
But in the last few years, the advent of free and open-source e-commerce content management systems have changed the game entirely. Now most individuals with a basic understanding of computing (and networking) can set up their own e-commerce shop in just a short while.
This has brought a slew of new stores online, offering online shoppers no shortage of choices in places to buy from — if you’re using fiat.
Bitcoin enthusiasts, on the other hand, prefer to pay with digital currency. Often times, they’ll even avoid shopping with a store if they don’t accept digital currency.
Enter bitcoin payment processor BitPOS. This Australia-based company recognizes that bitcoin acceptance is becoming a big thing, and has announced that they have launched wooCommerce and Magento plugin support.
Let’s clarify this a bit.
What’s wooCommerce and Magento? These are pre-built e-commerce systems. wooCommerce is a free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Which means anyone running a WordPress website (like us) can download this plugin and have access to features that essentially allow the site to serve as a storefront.
(Here’s additional reading on wooCommerce.)
Magento is similar, save for the fact that it’s not a plugin. It’s an entire CMS (content management system) which can also be downloaded for free (although they are now offering premium solutions).
So what we have from BitPOS is a plugin for a plugin for wooCommerce and a plugin for a CMS for Magento.
The company says they’ve been hard at work building these utilities, which will allow anyone in Australia who’s running wooCommerce/Magento to accept bitcoin payments with minimal hassle (since these solutions don’t natively support bitcoin payments).
Australia-based merchants looking to get started will need to sign up with BitPOS first. Once done, the plugins can be found on GitHub, where they’ll be ready for downloading.
(You can get the links to the downloads on the BitPOS FAQ page, at the bottom.)
Moving forward, it will be interesting to see who takes advantage of the plugins. Will it be newly-established bitcoin businesses? Will it be existing businesses looking for additional revenue from the bitcoin community?
Time will tell, but at least in Australia there’s now an option.