How to start receiving crypto-currencies payments on-line in 5 minutes with CapPay [at 0% fee]?
Crypto-currencies like Bitcoin are often sold as "the internet's money". However, most probably your latest phone or computer bought online has been paid using your credit-card.
The adoption hasn't been complete, among other reasons, because the crypto-market suffers (citation needed) with price fluctuation, and e-commerce owners aren't really crypto-investors: they have bills to pay and cannot be surprised by a price drop on an early morning.
That's when payment gateways like CapPay comes to the rescue: the payment gateway built at the top of Capitual API offer solutions for merchants who want to start receiving crypto-currencies but do not want to have the additional task of selling and protecting against market fluctuation and price drops: as soon as your customer pays, CapPay will convert the funds to the currency of your choice (even fiat currencies), which you can receive on your bank account. This way, you can receive payments and donations
Oh, and before I forget: at no fees. None. Zero.
That sounds amazing, but I am not a coder
If you are not a coder, don't worry (but if you are, please keep reading). CapPay has an automatic payment button generator that generates all the code for you, and all you must do is to copy-'n-paste it.
All you need to start receiving payments in crypto is an account in Capitual. If you are not registered yet, click here and open your account (you'll be surprised with how fast it is).
After creating your account, open CapPay website clicking here and click "Merchants Central".
After it, click "Create a CapPay Button". Note that it's needed to login with your Capitual account. Just click the "Login with Capitual", accept the app permissions and you'll be taken to the generator.
The generator is quite simple: you have a sidebar with three tabs. On the right side, you have a preview of your button and the code generated for it.
The first tab, "Style", is where you will choose the options for how users will see your payment button (language, colors, layout etc.).
The second tab, "Payment", is where you set the details of the payment. The first important thing you have to note here is that the invoice currency is not necessarily the currency you want to receive, neither the currency your user is willing to pay. The currency you're going to receive in is the currency of the "Receiving Wallet", whereas your user is free to pay in the currency of your choice. The invoice currency is just how to define the amount you want to receive, regardless of how you receive or how your customer pays.
Another important thing to note is that the invoice value (and currency) are optional. If they're not provided, such data will be requested from the user before the payment. This is useful if you are creating a Donate button and you want your user to set how much this donation is going to be worth.
The final tab, "Advanced", is completely optional. You can set a human-readable description (visible to the payee) and a due date.
After it, copy the HTML code and paste where you want your CapPay button to show up, in your website or blog. Visitors who click it will be taken to the payments page, to choose the currency they'll be paying in and viewing the wallet address. If they're also Capitual customers, they can also pay using the funds on their Capitual accounts. Once the payment is confirmed, the funds will be available on your account (you'll be notified by email, SMS or push, depending on your notifications settings that you can change here).
Again this is very cool, but I don't maintain a site or blog…
Still not a problem. CapPay was really made for those who will receive payments over a website, blog or digital platform, but all it does is automatizing Capitual's invoices features.
If you want to receive payments in crypto-currencies and still safe from price fluctuation, you can simply login to your Capitual account and, in the top bar menu, click Invoices ↝ Send Invoice. You'll see basically the same informations being requested on a different page. What's interesting is that you can send invoices to any email address or phone number, even to those who aren't Capitual users. If that's an email address, the remote part will receive the invoice on his email. If that's a phone number, the remote part will receive it by SMS (but remember to include the country code — the plus sign is optional). Once it's paid, depending on your notifications settings, you'll also be notified, but you can also track the payments going to Invoices ↝ Sent Invoices.
I am a developer, dude.
Glad to know that!
In this case, CapPay offers an official documentation that will allow you to create invoices with just one HTTP request. You can check it out by going to CapPay website clicking here, then accessing "Merchants Central" plus clicking "For Developers" on the sidebar.
For PHP lovers, CapPay has also a SDK which makes it even easier to create invoices. You can include it on your project by directly download the library or using Composer. The instructions are here. Let's check how requesting a payment with CapPay's PHP SDK looks like?
$invoice = new \Capitual\CapPay;$invoice->merchant = 1234; // your merchant ID
$invoice->wallet = 'CAP-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXX-XX'; // your receiving wallet$invoice->currency = 'USD';
$invoice->value = '100.00'; // how much you want to receive$invoice->payee = 'johndoe@mailinator.com'; // payee's email address$invoice->description = 'Payment for order 123'; // optional
$invoice->expires = strtotime("+48 hours"); // optional due date// this line creates the invoice
$invoice->create();// now let's just show the link to the user
$link = $invoice->getShortLink();
echo '<a href="' . $link . '">Click here to pay</a>';
That's all! Refer to the documentation to know more about how to retrieve an invoice's status and how to receive a webhook request once your customer makes a payment.
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Next article could be "How to create excuses not to receive crypto-currencies payments?" but we really ran out of ideas…
