If money came in after an hour, they would immediately send an email to the customer asking for a refund address. My understanding is that the customer ate the first fee and Stripe ate the second.

We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.

>We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.

There are actually bitcoin users out there who aren't up-to-date on how long it takes to process a transaction?

Bitcoin’s tech-savvy early adopters phase was years ago. Users like that are probably the majority now.

With BitPay at least, you pay fees both ways. They'll refund you whatever they got minus the $40 of transaction fees to get it back to you. And of course they charge you the single-transaction rate, while they do a batch transaction that them costs much less (i.e. they are making money off refunds).

Happened to me a few weeks ago - I tried to buy something and it got confirmed, but not fast enough for Bitpay, and they cancelled the transaction. So I was out the fees both ways. It was unpleasant, but not surprising, given how shoddy the whole system is.

Everything is fees with Bitcoin - fees for transactions, fees for exchanges, fees for mining pools, dev fees for mining applications, etc. There are no end of middlemen, and they all have their hand out. Sure, each of them is providing some legitimate service, but it sure makes 3% merchant fees for Visa look positively cheap in comparison. And did I mention the instant transaction times, the fraud protection, and the complimentary hardware token that's accepted by millions of businesses worldwide!? Try a credit card today!