You are right there is friction for customers to acquire bitcoins. My post was meant to expose the advantages for merchants, for whom there exists practically zero downsides (as opposed to customers.) But again I am not suggesting "forcing" customers to pay with Bitcoin. I am suggesting to add it as an extra payment option.
That said, it is becoming easier than you think to purchase BTC. There is no need to wire money anymore. In the US bitcoins can be purchased instantly with a credit card via Coinbase, as easy as signing up for Paypal.
Re:Paypal Horror Story 40k Frozen No Answers
by vectorpush on Monday March 13, 2017 @03:29AM
(#13855867)
> There is no need to wire money anymore. In the US bitcoins can be purchased instantly with a credit card via Coinbase, as easy as signing up for Paypal.
The caveats being a 3.75% surcharge and the fact that many of the big banks will not authorize bank card transactions from Coinbase. You might have luck calling up your bank and getting them to release the hold on Coinbase transactions, but that's already more trouble and more expense than paypal.
This in addition to it being virtually impossible for ordinary users to even get bitcoins. People here are talking about losing double-digit percentages of their purchases from Paypal forcing users to create a Paypal account, which takes like 30 seconds. What percent of your customers do you think you'll still have after you force them to do a wire transfer to a moderately sketchy exchange website, wait 2-3 days, set up a Bitcoin wallet somewhere, figure out how to do Bitcoin transfers, etc?