As I've talked about before in various comments, the biggest problem is getting merchants onboard to accept currencies their customers are not asking to pay them with. We integrated Bitpay back in 2013 so thousands of Foxy stores could use it, and almost none of them did. Same thing with our Coinbase integration. I've blogged about it many times, but stores don't care until their customers demand it. It's the customer that drives what the merchants do.
Stores need to provide incentives for us to use, to drive demand. As we know, they can save on credit card fees, so give us a little discount and then we'll have a good reason to spend our bits. Gyft does 3% back, so I use that more than not. If they had a Vermont Flannel gift card, while VF directly accepted btc with no discount or cash back, I'd have no incentive to use btc direct.
New Egg nailed this by offering that heavy discount when they first started accepting bitcoin. It was $150 off $500 or more anywhere in the store for the first weekend. This got people to at least start using it.
I do think that SteemDollars will be different, however, as sbd is more spendable, given its lack of speculative upside that btc presents, while still providing all of the friction-less advantages. Love that FoxyCart could be leading the way! :)
Hey! I've used your cart before without even knowing it at Vermont Flannel. Maybe I can buy a new hoodie with some steem dollars soon :)
Very cool!
As I've talked about before in various comments, the biggest problem is getting merchants onboard to accept currencies their customers are not asking to pay them with. We integrated Bitpay back in 2013 so thousands of Foxy stores could use it, and almost none of them did. Same thing with our Coinbase integration. I've blogged about it many times, but stores don't care until their customers demand it. It's the customer that drives what the merchants do.
Stores need to provide incentives for us to use, to drive demand. As we know, they can save on credit card fees, so give us a little discount and then we'll have a good reason to spend our bits. Gyft does 3% back, so I use that more than not. If they had a Vermont Flannel gift card, while VF directly accepted btc with no discount or cash back, I'd have no incentive to use btc direct.
New Egg nailed this by offering that heavy discount when they first started accepting bitcoin. It was $150 off $500 or more anywhere in the store for the first weekend. This got people to at least start using it.
I do think that SteemDollars will be different, however, as sbd is more spendable, given its lack of speculative upside that btc presents, while still providing all of the friction-less advantages. Love that FoxyCart could be leading the way! :)