Shopify is one of the giants of the e-commerce world, enabling easy-to-implement shopping carts for over 100,000 websites. If you’ve ever ordered merchandise directly from the website of a band, sports team or popular website, odds are that their store was powered by Shopify. Starting today, all of those online stores will be able to accept bitcoin, simply by connecting their accounts to Coinbase.
According to the Shopify blog post about the integration, the move has been in the works for months. Optional bitcoin support was enabled early this year, with “thousands” of Shopify-using merchants enabling the feature. That integration option didn’t come with Coinbase support, however, meaning those merchants had to find their own solutions for storing and cashing out their BTC. The Coinbase-integrated system has been in beta test for months with a “select group” of merchants including Soylent and Leap Motion.
With more than 100,000 merchants able to easily accept bitcoin simply by creating a Coinbase account and adding a few new details into their existing accounts, it’s entirely possible that a huge range of businesses will be joining the bitcoin fold in coming weeks. International merchants, in particular, stand the most to benefit from the addition. Merchants also have the option to give discounts to BTC-using customers, something that is increasingly becoming the standard due to the lack of credit card fees on bitcoin purchases.
