Feathercoin, Wordpress, WooCommerce and Coinpayments.net
A complete merchant package to trade and accept payment with Feathercoin (and other currencies).
Introduction:
Have you ever wanted to create a business, no matter how small, and offer the world a service or product you feel passionate about? Perhaps you considered the idea of setting up as a merchant but then looked in to how to achieve that goal. You then researched banking, web stores, receiving payments, web design and creating an online presence to sell your services. Did it seem like an impossible dream? Maybe new technologies, tech speak you didn’t understand, learning new skills or just not knowing where to begin put you off. It needn’t have. Setting up your own business and accepting Feathercoin as a currency is really quite simple.
This guide will empower you to trade in FIAT, Feathercoin and other crypto-currencies.
Whilst there are many tools to create and build an online trading presence, this guide will focus around a website backbone called WordPress. I will refer to WordPress as WP from hereon in. I will also show how you can add a fully functional shopping cart to WP and enable you to trade and sell services via it. This shopping cart is called WooCommerce, and I will refer to it as WC from hereon in. Finally you’ll want to accept Feathercoin as one of your payment choices. For this we will be using another piece of web technology and the services of a company called CoinPayments.net.
To explain the ingredients to our solution a little more
Wordpress the CMS:
This is the backbone to your future commerce solution. It is a free to use and download. WP is a CMS or Content Management System. In the simplest sense, a CMS is a pre-created web page that has built in tools for article creation and handles user management for example. It is skinnable, meaning that the default look or template can be changed so that your website looks unique. Many CMS’s have extras that can be downloaded to add more functions to the website. These might be ‘Chat Rooms’, ‘Forums’, ‘Image Galleries’ or in our case ‘Shopping Carts’. These are often free. Bonus! This guide is not aimed at teaching you how to install a WP site, though this may be a future guide, but is aimed at users who have WP installed, running and are ready to create a webstore.
Links: Wordpress - Plugins - Themes - Premium Themes
WooCommerce the Store:
WC is an extra for WP. It is a complete tool that allows you to create a store and publish it in your WP site so that users may make purchases from you.
Do note: Some WP themes do not play very well with WC. This is due to layout, permission and coding considerations. So check that the theme says it works with WooCommerce. Also consider a theme that is fully ‘Responsive’ so that the website can be viewed on as many devices as possible from TV’s and Tablets to regular computers.
Again is free to download and use. WC do sell extras that require payment, however these are not needed in the short term (or ever) but you may wish to investigate what extras they offer at their website.
Links: WooCommerce - WooCommerce Getting Started Guide
CoinPayments.net - Your Feathercoin Payment Solution
CoinPayments.net offer a full service that works with WP and WC to allow you to accept Feathercoin as one of your accepted currencies. This is not only an extra piece of software but a service that handles your payments on many levels. It is free to sign up as a merchant with CoinPayments.net and also free to download the software they have created to use in your store. However, there is a charge for transactions of 0.05% per transaction. This is a very reasonable transaction fee when you consider what the service does and how much other services charge like PayPal and Debit/Credit Cards.
The cost is 1p in every £2.00 or 1c in every $2.00 or 1 FTC in every 200 FTC
Once this payment system is set up it handles everything for you.
- It calculates the cost from FIAT to Feathercoin.
- list itemTakes the customer to a secure payment page.
- Emails the merchant that a ‘new Payment has been submitted’.
- Emails the merchant that ‘funds have been received’ and awaiting 10 confirmations of payment from the network.
- Emails the merchant to inform that ‘Payment is complete’ and the Feathercoins will be sent and received soon.
Links CoinPayments net - Shopping Cart Payment Plugins
Installing the CoinPayments.net Plugin for WP and WC.
Follow these steps to installing the Coinpayments.net payment plugin. Be sure that you have WooCommerce installed first and activated.
- Download the correct plugin from this page. The one you require for this guide is: WooCommerce (Wordpress)
- From the Admin panel of Wordpress select ‘Add New’ from the ‘Plugins’ menu. Select ‘Upload’ from the options at the top of the page. ‘Browse’ to where you saved the plugin, select it and then click on ‘Install Now’.
- Once the plugin is installed, activate it.
Create a CoinPayments.net account here and complete these instructions.
The next step (although this may be done first) is to create an account with CoinPayments.net and verify your email address. There is a system of ‘Double Authentication’ in place for your protection. Thus, when you sign in - you will need to refer back to your email for a random code to authenticate that it is you signing in.
Once you have an account you will need to gather some information and set some up too. Visit ‘Account Settings’ from the ‘My Account’ drop down menu. Once there you will see these fields in on page.
- Your Merchant ID - [b]Make a copy of this as you will need it to set up your cart.[/b]
- Public Name - This will be the name used when your customers are contacted.
- IPN Secret - Fill this in with a secret phrase or number. Again you will need this to set up your cart.
The next step is to instruct CoinPayments.net what coin you wish to accept, the address that you wish them to be paid to and how often you wish to have the payments sent to you. CoinPayments.net will send payments after each sale or alternatively once every 24 hours. The choice is yours. So select ‘What Coins to Accept’ from the ‘My Account’ drop down menu. Fill in the required fields and select which currencies you intend to accept.
Return to your WP admin panel and prepare the final steps to be able to accept Feathercoin.
Now all we need do is instruct your shopping cart that you wish to accept Feathercoin as a currency.
- From the ‘WooCommerce’ menu item on the left, select ‘Settings’. From here you will see tabs at the top of the screen.
- Select the ‘Payment Gateways’ Tab. From here you can enable the Coinpayments.net payment gateway. Remember to click ‘Save Changes’ once you have done this.
- Important: The next set of options may not seem visually apparent. Look under the tabs at the top for ‘Payment Gateways’. You will see a horizontal list of installed payment gateways. Click on the one that says ‘CoinPayments.net’ to fill in a few final details.
Set the options out like this:
- Enable/Disable - Clearly this should be ticked in order to accept Feathercoins on your store.
- Title - A header for the checkout process. No need to change unless you want to.
- Description - A little information so that the end user knows what they are looking at when checking out.
- Merchant ID - As mentioned early, get this from your account settings at CoinPayments.net and paste or write it in.
- IPN Secret - Extra protection just in case someone knows your Merchant ID. Enter the same details you recorded in the
CoinPayments.net account settings.
- Invoice Prefix - Allows the invoice to have a custom reference. It really depends on your business and how manage it.
- The last two options are more for sandbox testing, so that a website owner can test the payment gateway without making sales. I haven’t tested them so I won’t instruct on how to use them.
- Save Changes. Very Important.
Now all things being equal, your cart should be fully functional and able to accept Feathercoins and any other currency you opted to accept. After installing, why not test out the service by creating a cheap 2FTC product to sell and make a purchase.
Note, if you are using an Android Wallet (like me) to make the payment there is an issue with scanning the QR code. I have contacted CoinPayments.net to look in to this. You can type the FTC address in manually.
This has now been fixed. This folk at CoinPayments were fast to get this sorted out. Great service. It may require an update of your CoinPayments plugin to do this. Also, the plugin is now available to install direct from the search function of the plugins section of your WordPress installation.
When I have a little more time I will demonstrate the route the customer takes when using this cart system with CoinPayments.net so that you get an idea of how this all works.
Feel free to ask questions or give suggestions that would make this guide a little easier.
Let’s see some merchants set up and use this.
Entimp