Over the weekend, BitPay rolled out several enhancements and new features to our world-leading bitcoin merchant service.
1. Improved Checkout Experience: we’ve taken feedback from our merchants, and their customers, and redesigned our invoice to provide a better checkout experience. Greater emphasis is placed on the bitcoin: URI and QR code, which enable faster and more accurate interaction with all conforming bitcoin wallets. Both the QR code and URI are supported by the majority of wallet clients now, and we publish our recommended wallet apps. The bitcoin address is still there for people who prefer copy/paste payment method.
2. Five New Shopping Cart Plugins: We added osCommerce, X-Cart, and Commerce:SEO to our list of shopping cart plugins. Also, we’ve been embedded into http://3dcart.com if you prefer a SaaS hosted cart for your webstore. Signup for the 3dcart-BitPay webinar on August 28 to learn more. We also support Drupal 7 Ubercart in addition to Drupal 6 Ubercart. The Drupal 7 plugin is on our github repository and will be added to the website shortly.
3. Faster Invoice creation: We have made some infrastructure improvements that will eliminate the occasional long response time when creating an invoice.
4. Exchange Rate API: BitPay pulls exchange rates from multiple bitcoin exchanges, to give buyers the fairest possible price. The method is listed on our blog post. BitPay now offers an API to let merchants query what the exchange rate will be for 1 bitcoin. These rates are updated once per minute. The API is at https://bitpay.com/api/rates
5. New Merchant Support fields: Merchants can provide their own support phone number and support email for BitPay to display on your invoices. This will direct customer support inquiries to the merchant instead of to BitPay. On the merchant dashboard, use the Support Phone and Support Email fields to complete your profile.
6. New Integration Partners: We added several new integration partners to help merchants get up-and-running with our service in Canada, Germany, Japan, and more.
7. New About Us page: We’ve been growing so fast we haven’t had time to take pictures, but check out our About Us page to meet our whole team.
8. Updated Media page: We’ve been in the news lately, visit our media page for any articles you may have missed.