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Ethereum (ETH/Ether) has recently become a popular altcoin. Merchants on Shopify may be looking to accept it as a payment method for their store.
At the time of writing there is no plug and play gateway which you can use to accept payments with Ethereum and Shopify doesn’t natively support alt coins. We’ve written an in depth article here about how to accept Bitcoin with Shopify and this article also covers Litecoin and Dodgecoin if you wish to accept those. But if you want to accept Ethereum with Shopify then you’ll need some custom work doing on your store by a Shopify developer.
Those looking for Bitcoin & Ethereum Mining Hardware should check out StrikeMine.
Requirements: shopify store (start one for free here if you don’t have one) + coding skills (Liquid, js, css, html and a third programming language of your choice – e.g. PHP or Python) & a server.
If you have those things then crack on reading to get the gist of what to do. If you don’t have coding skills you’ll need to hire a Shopify developer. Just contact us.
Quick and easy method:
Step 1 – build a currency file for the store which includes all the currencies you with to display as well as a conversion for Ethereum. This will be used to convert your prices via js on the front-end for the user. I’d suggest setting a cron job to update these conversions 2-4 times per day and it needs to sit on an URL with SSL. This is something you’ll need to do on another server. Pull that onto the store-front and give the user a currency picker or display ETH & another currency. You’ll be able to use a few API’s to get the ETH price but I’d suggest using Coinbase.
Step 2 – build a widget for payment in Ether using Coinbase. If you don’t have a merchant account yet with Coinbase you can open one here. It must be a business account and you must setup as a merchant there.
This should give you some embed code which you modify with some liquid variables to build the correct payment/order.
Step 3 You’ll need to hijack the order process at some point and ask them if they want to pay with Ether or other payment methods. I would do this on the cart page unless you’re on Shopify Plus (when you can do it during checkout). I’d probably bind a function to the checkout button.
Step 4 – regardless of where step 3 happens you’ll also need to create an order with the orders API and bind it to the same event.
Once this is done then the user will be able to checkout and pay you with Ether. It will be a bit of a hack but it will work.
They won’t go through the usual order process on the Shopify checkout. They will pay via a Coinbase widget and then the order will be created with the orders API.
The downside to this method is that orders must be verified manually before being dispatched which isn’t practical in many situations.
The more complex/complete solution would be to pass the order details to a second server (i.e. your server) from Shopify, create/accept a payment with the Coinbase API and then post a new order to the store using the Shopify Orders api on purchase confirmation. Then send the user back to Shopify. That could be done and would be the ideal solution until one of the main alt-coin start updating their apps to accept Eth.
Need help accepting payments with Ethereum (ETH/Ether) on Shopify? Contact us and we’d be happy to give a quote.
