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PayPal has absolutely dominated the e-commerce payment provider space and continues to do so. Many people are looking for an alternative to PayPal due to their high fees and tenancy to allow shady customers to charge back their purchases and get refunds when they are not warranted. The best alternative to PayPal has been right in front of your eyes all along, cryptocurrency. Yes, crypto is a new technology and won’t feel as cozy as that familiar PayPal account you’ve known for so long, but the switch is well worth it.

Crypocurrency is booming, even though we are currently sitting in a bear market. The use cases and transaction rate has never been higher and it appears blockchain based currencies are here to stay in one form or another. However, many stores fail to implement a crypto payment processor into their checkout. This is a huge missed opportunity as some people have traded their fiat for crypto and only shop at stores that will accept their coins. Many people search for stores that accept bitcoin, which is a small and profitable niche to fall in. People are looking for places to spend their bitcoin, especially those who bought in early and haven’t converted their profits to fiat. A huge advantage that a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin has over a payment provider like PayPal is it’s decentralized entirely. The fees are low to send money and the transactions are guaranteed to be 100% genuine so the risk of fraud is low. This puts the power back in the sellers hands and secures your money in a way that PayPal cannot compete with. So why are we calling crypto the ultimate alternative to PayPal? It’s the ease of access and the next to non-existent fees you have to pay for using it as a payment gateway. Follow our guide to find out how you can get your store setup to accept Bitcoin or cryptos and embrace the greatest alternative to PayPal.

It’s extremely simple to turn your website into an online store that accepts Bitcoin. This article will help to explain how you can accept cryptocurrency on your WordPress site or at your brick and mortar store.

Using Bitcoin and crypto is extremely simple and the fees are lower than any fiat payment processor on the market. Cryptocurrency is the ultimate alternative for PayPal.

The first step to becoming a Bitcoin Friendly Business

The first steps to hanging that sign in your window that says “Bitcoin Accept Here” are the same first steps for any crypto : open a crypto wallet. There is a good guide on Get Ethereum Canada on how to setup your first wallet and make your first crypto purchase. This is focused on Ethereum, but the process is the same for any crypto currency.

Once you have chosen a wallet to store your Bitcoin, you are now ready to accept payment. Yes, it’s that simple – there is no verification time or process to opening a Bitcoin wallet, however buying and selling Bitcoin is a different story. It can take some time to get approved on a Bitcoin exchange, which is where you can sell your coins on the open market in exchange for USD or CAD. Depending on where you are located, your options will vary.

Which exchange should I sign up for?

For the purpose of simplicity, we like to recommend Coinbase. They are the biggest crypto currency exchange in the world and have a strong reputation. They also allow small purchases without having to authenticate your ID. However, if you want to sell amounts larger than $100 a week then you will need to verify your ID before you can begin selling.

Coinbase will allow you to sell your coins much like a traditional stock market, except you are the broker. Coinbase takes a small fee for being a middle man, but other than that you can easily buy and sell coins once verified. We recommend getting your account fully verified before accepting crypto payments because you will most likely want to convert your coins to fiat eventually and will be restricted without verification.

Becoming a crypto friendly retailer

Retail Store:

If you have a brick and mortar store, accepting Bitcoin or Crypto is extremely easy. Simply setup your wallet as explained above and provide your public wallet ID to the person looking to complete the transaction. They will send you the crypto and you will see it appear in your wallet only moments later. The customer cannot refund the coins or attempt a charge-back after leaving your store, so the money is secure. No fees, no overhead to worry about and most importantly – no PayPal sticking their hands in your pocket.

There is more advanced ways to setup a commerce terminal that accepts cryptocurrency, however this is the fastest track to getting started.

Image result for woocommerce — WooCommerce

WordPress Website

Setting up your website to accept payments on WordPress couldn’t be easier. Assuming you have followed the above steps and are familiar with how a crypto wallet works, we can get started.

WooCommerce:

Before you start to install the required plugins, you need to ensure your WordPress site has WooCommerce installed which is their free to use commerce platform. It’s simple to setup and should only take you a few moments.

Once you’ve installed WooCommerce, you’re now going to install GoUrl which is the Bitcoin payment gateway we will be using for this tutorial. You can find the download link for this plugin at this link here GoUrl WooCommerce. You do need to make a GoUrl account, but everything else is quite simple to set up and free. Follow their instructions on how to link your coins wallet and further installation instructions.

Conclusion

This article was short and sweet, just like the effort it will take to convert your store to crypto and move away from PayPal. It can be a little uncomfortable embracing new technologies, but crypto is the future and is more secure than what any payment gateway can currently offer you. Take the plunge into the best PayPal alternative, you won’t regret it.

At one point, Future Shop was a household name for Canadians and the go to place when you wanted to acquire the latest tech. These stores were everywhere in Canada and featured a full commission sales team to assist you with your purchases. The commission aspect of Future Shop was a turnoff to some customers but it also meant that if you were going to survive as an employee of Future Shop, you needed to be educated about the products. However, the year is 2019 and Future Shop is a distant memory for Canadians as it was bought out by Best Buy in 2015, laying off all Future Shop employees in the process.

Why did Future Shop close and what lead to the demise of this iconic Canadian brand. This article will help to explain the culture of Future Shop and why Best Buy Canada eventually took over.

What was Future Shop?

Future Shop was the most popular Canadian electronics store from 2001-2015. With locations in every province, it was a national business that paid commission to it’s employees. During the early to mid millennium commission pay structures were much more common compared to a store in 2019 which has to compete with an educated customer and vast online competition.

Future Shop started to feel the pressure of the E-Commerce world as they introduced a price match policy that allowed customers to match any price of a product that was in stock online and sold in Canada. This was fantastic for the end customer as they were able to scrape the web for the lowest price, but this was a huge pay cut for the commission based work force. Employees were paid based on an algorithm that factored in margin, product cost and services added to calculate commission payouts. Once the prices were being slashed and matched so aggressively, this cut deeply into the pockets of the employees and their customer service suffered.

The beginning of the end.

Once the commission started to suffer, so did the customer service provided by the employees. Outside companies such as Samsung or Apple offered vendor backed promotions that would give a kickback on certain products sold. This kick back was a separate payout from the Future Shop commission structure, so employees were happy to sell these products at any cost. However, this ideology that price matching would benefit the customer in a commission based shark tank was false. Future Shop employees started to only target customers who were interested in buying these vendor funded kickbacks and would ignore what they deemed lower tier customers. A customer who once was treated with a fulfilling customer experience no matter what their buying habits was now ignored. This was just the climate of the market and commission sales jobs weren’t viable at this scale anymore; things needed to change or big box electronic stores might have folded in Canada. This is when Best Buy came into the picture and took over.

Best Buy vs Future Shop

The battle of big box retail had begun, however it was a false battle. Best Buy had actually acquired Future Shop long before they re-branded it to Best Buy Canada but they were split testing business models to see if Future Shop was worth keeping around. They began opening up Best Buy Canada stores within a block of Future Shop locations which appeared to be an attempt to directly test the customers response to both styles of big box retail. The results quickly spoke for themselves – the non commission, low pressure style at Best Buy was actually outperforming the seasoned crew of sales people at Future Shop. Best Buy Canada employees were selling warranty, higher margin products and in house service that the commission team couldn’t beat.

It appeared that Future Shops time had come and death was just around the corner. In 2015 Best Buy Canada officially converted all Future Shop locations into Best Buy stores. All previous Future Shop employees were laid off and new management was brought in. The end of an era had come and another iconic Canadian business was added to the graveyard.

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