How Retailers are Seeing Big Upside by Accepting Bitcoin

By Michael Krieger: For a while now, I have been highlighting the fact that it is an absolute no brainer for small businesses to accept Bitcoin. Not only are you providing your customers with another method of payment with essentially zero downside (if you use a payment processor such as BitPay or Coinbase), it is the best free PR you could ever achieve. Back in November I wrote the following in my article You Can Now Buy a Plane Ticket with Bitcoin:
Notice the CEO’s comment about people coming to his site just because of Bitcoin. This is undoubtedly true, and as I have mentioned before on several occasions, it is a no brainer for a small business to accept bitcoin. It is early enough in the adoption phase that it will still drive tremendous press and buzz for your business and make you look technologically savvy.
It seems many businesses in NYC are finally recognizing the upside. According to the New York Post:
Sure, its value might rise and fall by the day, but some small-business owners in New York City are buying into bitcoin by accepting the buzzed-about currency at their brick-and-mortar locations. They’re saying the benefits are many, and the disadvantages are next to none.

That’s right, the digital currency — infamously linked to the purchase of drugs and guns — isn’t just for buying illegal goods anonymously online. It’s becoming a preferred method of payment for innovative business owners.

Daniel Lee, owner of Greene Ave. Market in Fort Greene, is even incentivizing with a 10-percent-off discount offer for customers who pay with bitcoin.
This “Bitcoin discount” is a trend that I expect to accelerate, and could be one of the primary drivers that sends Bitcoin adoption into the stratosphere in 2014. One recent example of this is the huge 40%-60% discount New York property firm RentHop is offering for clients that use Bitcoin.
More from the New York Post:
In April, EVR “gastro-lounge” in Midtown became the first brick-and-mortar location to accept bitcoin. Operating owner Alex Likhtenstein says the fact that EVR is able to process bitcoin with a minimal fee of just 1 percent (compared with the up to 3.5 percent that some credit cards charge), is one upside.
For the first few months, Lee says, he didn’t have any bitcoin customers, but now he counts between five and 10 bitcoin transactions a day among his businesses. Though this makes up “probably not even 1 percent” of his business, Lee said, accepting the currency is beneficial.
Looking forward to a very exciting year for Bitcoin and crypto-currencies in 2014.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike

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