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Why should a merchant directly accept bitcoin?

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ademczuk

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Posts: 123
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Please help me work out why a business would want to accept bitcoin because its starting to look like they can only accept fiat with a bitcoin intermediary.

I was about to write up a business case for a university project to have a local store here accept bitcoin. Madelines egg's is already quite familiar with Bitcoin after raising over 60k through crowdfunding using bitcoin. Currently they have an online store and farmers market stall but they do not currently accept bitcoin for their products.

However, here in Melbourne it appears that if people want to buy items with bitcoin they can easily do so with swipe with EFTPOS. Also if people want to integrate bitcoin into their shopping cart then the recent news provided by Paypal indicate that it's not far off.

It appears that here in Australia unless you accept bitcoin through a merchant to be exchanged for 100% fiat then your profits will be choked out by through double taxation and the burden of accountancy it requries.

Posted on September 24, 2014 at 5:43 PM
Last Edited: September 24, 2014 at 5:44 PM

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• Cryptonaut

  

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  Posts: 1944
  Location: Canada

  Most businesses probably wont keep much or any at all until they can do efficient B2B transactions with it. As in able to pay their suppliers in bitcoin. e.g sending some coin to pay a manufacturer in china instead of waiting for an international wire transfer. Until then they will need to keep converting to fiat right away just so that they can stay operational.

  Posted on September 24, 2014 at 6:06 PM
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• ademczuk

  

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  Posts: 123
  Location: Melbourne, Australia

  @cryptonaut Most businesses probably wont keep much or any at all until they can do efficient B2B transactions with it. As in able to pay their suppliers in bitcoin. e.g sending some coin to pay a manufacturer in china instead of waiting for an international wire transfer. Until then they will need to keep converting to fiat right away just so that they can stay operational.

  Interesting. However I have also chosen this company- Madelaine's Eggs because it is both the supplier and distributor. They are a farm that sells eggs and meat products. Other than packaging they are relatively self sustainable. Yet it's increasingly difficult to explain how accepting bitcoin will benefit them without using a payment processor to avoid extra taxation.

  Posted on September 24, 2014 at 6:19 PM
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• Halo

  

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  If nothing else, it gets that merchant a whole new customer base that they never had before and free advertising on top of that. I say free advertising because although merchant adoption is picking up, the density of adoption in certain areas is still low and being the only merchant who accepts bitcoin will spread by word of mouth.

  Posted on September 24, 2014 at 6:25 PM
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