BitPay continues to surprise the industry with its innovative and forward thinking. Along with being one of the largest digital payment processors in the world it also supports many efforts to promote Bitcoin. Today, the company unveiled a new pricing plan that includes basic payment processing free of charge. The company stresses that this is not a limited time only offer. The basic service will remain free to merchants forever. The company hopes that this business strategy will work in much the same as when Sprint offered the first “rollover” minutes and encourage new businesses to begin adopting Bitcoin as a payment option.
Co-founder and Executive Chairman Tony Gallippi said in a press release today that:
“We have set a goal to enroll one million merchants by the end of 2016. When we started BitPay in 2011, we saw an opportunity to finally give merchants around the world relief from interchange fees. By offering a basic plan that is free and unlimited, forever, we give merchants yet another reason to be excited about Bitcoin.”
- Tony Gallippi
Gallippi is correct on a couple of levels. Depending on the credit card discount rates (the fee paid by the merchant to the bank or Credit Card Company) can be as high as 5%. This gives a business that accepts Bitcoin a growing advantage over businesses that do not. Also adding your business to a Bitcoin network will open up the possibilities for international business without having to worry about high bank transfer fees or currency exchanges
There are now three plans available with BitPay. The Free Plan includes the following features:
- Unlimited processing volume
- Free, instant conversion
- Daily bank deposit
- Retail POS solutions
- 22 eCommerce integrations
- Email support
-The three plans offered by BitPay
The other two plans, the Business Plan and Enterprise Plan of course have a more extensive and detailed list of features. The company also has an impressive list of more than 40,000 businesses and has integrated some of the most sophisticated tools for ecommerce, billing and retail POS including Shopify, WordPress, VisualTouch, Magento and SoftTouch for easy integration by any business.