Buy Rare Books using Bitcoin! (...and how we set Bitcoin payments on the website)

I recently added an option to pay with Bitcoin for a website I'm working on, The Rare Book Sleuth (http://www.rarebooksleuth.com/). This is the first business I've done this for and likely the first of its kind in the rare and antiquarian book world.

We ended up using a somewhat manual process with Bitpay (https://bitpay.com/). The goal was to provide an intuitive user experience, but also a back-end process that isn't cumbersome for the business owner. Here is how we found a balance between the two:

1. A user submits a form to request buying a book with Bitcoin (http://www.rarebooksleuth.com/bitcoin) The form includes fields for their name, email, the book they are interested in, address (for shipping) and a comment box for any detailed shipping requests or questions - only what we need.

2. Once, notified via email of a request for purchase, the owner logs-in to Bitpay and goes to Payment-Tools --> Payment-Buttons

3. On the Payment Buttons page, he changes the "Default Price" to the listed price for the book (or discounted price) in USD ($)

4. Then, he scrolls to the bottom of the page to the Generated Code box and clicks "Copy code" just below the box.

5. We then created a "Pay with Bitcoin" page to add the code from step 4. In this case the code creates a "Buy Now" button. Here is an example: http://www.rarebooksleuth.com/pay-with-bitcoin/

6. For each new customer, he updates the code for the "Buy Now" button by pasting in the copied code from step 4. This will ensure the button includes the specific price from step 3

7. He then sends an email to that customer with a link to the Pay with Bitcoin page for them to make the payment

The process takes about 5 mins tops and keeps us from having to create and maintain custom buttons for every single book on the website. I'm sure this will become fully automated once Bitcoin payment options better integrate with CMS platforms and payment processing apps (we are using Squarespace/Stripe), but this is fine for now.

Has anyone else found creative ways to provide effective shopping experiences using Bitcoin as payments? Do you have recommendations on how the process above could be improved?

See original post here: http://www.simplebranding.us/blog/how-to-add-bitcoin-payments-to-a-website