I Tried Accepting Crypto In My Retail Store & This Is What Happened
Hi Steemit,
I'm a business owner in Charlotte, NC and cryptonaut for a bit over one year now. My primary business is two small chains of retail shops selling Vape & Smoke products.
While I have known about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for many years, I had never taken the leap until last year, when a scouting trip exposed me to a bitcoin ATM first hand. I had known of these machines, but never really considered that my customer demographic was a great fit for them. While my plans to incorporate ATM's went cold, I had already caught the virus and was building out my small mining farm, trading, and sticking my finger into every pie crypto had to offer. Flash forward to mid 2018, I finally introduced our first ATM into one of our locations. While I didn't own it, it was very neat to be exposing customers to cryptocurrency on a daily basis. I soon found the ATM's drew a tremendous amount of interest and traffic, so the choice to pilot crypto payments was a no-brainer.
Detailed in this video was the day I stopped by our newest store to make a short, fluffy video accepting a crypto payment for products. It soon became apparent accepting crypto payments needs a lot of polishing.
While the transaction was eventually successful, the time spent opening the programs, initiating the payments, and waiting for confirmations made it very clear it wasn't feasible to use during any times of real volume.
I've received many great comments and suggestions thus far, and am exploring new platforms and projects that will both reduce transaction times and streamline.
However, I ask that people consider my viewpoint as a business owner, not as a crypto champion.
In order for merchants in Brick-and-Mortar retail to adopt crypto payments, crypto will need to offer something better than traditional means of payment. Again, I ask you look at this through the prism of a merchant who isn't passionate or otherwise involved with cryptocurrency.
Right now, massive infrastructure exists to handle payments. While processing fees are expensive, they are predictable, easy to implement, have great support, and are fast.
Many people in comments have asked me to look into projects whose aim is to accept payments cheaply and rapidly. As I detail in my supplemental video in this short series, projects that fix these issues almost always require users to pay with their coin or token. This simply won't work, as no customer is going to first purchase Electroneum, Nano, Smartcash, or Digibyte in order to make purchases at a retail shop, nor will merchants require them to.
This isn't a dig at these projects. Some of them are great, but speaking as a merchant and not a cryptonaut, crypto payments in traditional B&M have a long way to go before anyone is going to take them seriously.
Thank you for reading. I'd greatly like to have you subscribe to my youtube channel. Perhaps you'd like to watch a few videos to see if they're to your liking.
I can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChP0_D9OiM5lIG_rCE_S-AQ
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