By Will Cole

Zaprite’s #1 priority, and reason for existing, is to build the simplest, most intuitive product for you to be paid in bitcoin. Whether you’re a contractor invoicing customers or have a business with an online store, we facilitate bitcoin transactions directly to your preferred wallet. However, hyperbitcoinization is still a work-in-progress, and we recognize that fiat is still necessary to running practically all businesses today. We’ve long supported credit card payments and payment via ACH, and will continue to support fiat payments for our bitcoin customers. 

Enabling bitcoin payments as an option side by side with fiat is how we see merchants driving the shift to bitcoin long term. Ok, but you’re a bitcoiner and you want bitcoin, despite the fact that you’re supporting your customer’s choice to pay in fiat. Some of your customers don’t want to spend and replace, or can’t stand holding their melting ice cube of fiat money, and they’d rather pass them off to you. That’s fine, but starting today you can show your preference for bitcoin by charging a premium on all fiat payments. And if your customer or client wants to pay in fiat, it also creates a seamless way for you to offset the friction and cost of fiat payment rails while simply providing the option to the customer. 

How It Works

When building a payment link to sell a product, or creating an invoice, there is a ‘Payment’ section that will show your default wallet selections where you’ll receive bitcoin and fiat, as well as a ‘Custom’ tab for you to toggle on or off any payment option you have connected.

On the ‘Custom’ tab, if you have enabled any of our fiat payment methods, such as Stripe, or adding your ACH or SEPA information, you’ll see an option to add a percentage premium for these payments.  Simply add in what premium you want to charge, and save. 

When your customer or invoice payer is paying, they will clearly see the premium applied on any fiat options provided.  

The fiat premium will show as a separate line item on the checkout screen once a payer has selected a fiat payment option with a premium.

This is the view your customer will see prior to selecting fiat as a payment option.

And this is the view your customer will see if (and after) a fiat payment method is selected.

Premiums can be applied to all new Invoices and Payment Links. To add a premium to an existing Invoice or Payment Link, simply edit the item and adjust the Custom payment options.

Importantly, the Fiat Premium line (and amount) will ONLY appear if you actively choose to set a premium percentage. It is available to everyone as an option, but it will not impact your customer experience should you choose not to use it. You can also choose to use this feature on certain invoices (and payment links), but not on others. 

What’s Next?

We’re excited to deliver this oft-requested feature to incentivize bitcoin payments, but we’re also hard at work on many more features, the next of which is bringing Zaprite payment solutions to where so many of you who have eCommerce stores already are: WooCommerce. We love payment links, but recognize that many of you already have large existing stores on various platforms. One-by-one, we’ll make our way to you.

If you run into any issues charging fiat premiums, or have general questions about using Zaprite, feel free to reach out at https://help.zaprite.com.