How to Accept Crypto Payments as a Business

What does accepting crypto actually involve?

Less than most merchants expect. A gateway sits between your checkout and the blockchain. When an order is placed it generates a payment request, an address or an invoice, and shows your customer an amount and a countdown. It watches the chain for a matching payment, waits for the number of confirmations it considers final, then calls a webhook on your server that marks the order paid.

Everything else is a variation on that loop. Hosted checkout means the provider renders the payment page. An API integration means you render it. A point of sale flow means the same request appears as a QR code on a terminal. The mechanics underneath do not change.

What does it cost?

Published processing rates across this index start at 0.4% and reach 2% plus a fixed amount at the expensive end, checked August 2026. For comparison, card processing in most markets sits between 1.5% and 3% before interchange, so crypto acceptance is usually cheaper on the headline number.

The headline number is not the cost. Conversion is, for most merchants. A provider charging 0.5% that takes 2% converting to your settlement currency costs five times what the rate implies, and most providers in this index do not publish a conversion figure at all. The all-in cost is processing plus conversion plus payout, and you can only compute it for providers that publish all three.

Which decisions actually matter?

Custody. Does the provider ever hold your funds? Non custodial means payments land in a wallet you control and the provider only watches the chain. Custodial means they receive, then settle to you later, which is what buys you fiat conversion. Both are legitimate. Signing without knowing which one you have is not, and the answer is frequently absent from the pricing page.

Settlement currency. Taking crypto and keeping crypto is a treasury decision your finance team may not have agreed to. Taking crypto and settling to fiat daily removes the volatility question entirely at the cost of a conversion spread. Decide this before choosing a provider, because it eliminates about half the market either way.

Networks. Your customers will pay in whatever is cheap for them. For stablecoins that usually means Tron rather than Ethereum, because the transfer costs cents instead of dollars. A provider that supports Tether but not on Tron supports a product your customers will not use.

How do you go live?

Start in test mode and reach a working transaction from public documentation alone. If a developer cannot do that in a day, you have learned something the marketing pages do not tell you, and it is a fair prediction of how the next integration change will go.

Then test the failure paths deliberately, before launch rather than after. Underpay an invoice by about 2%. Pay one after it expires. Send the right asset on the wrong network. All three happen in normal trading, providers handle them very differently, and almost none of them document the behaviour.

Finally, decide what your refund process is. Crypto payments do not reverse, so a refund is an outbound payment somebody has to authorise. If you refund often, check whether the provider treats payouts as a real flow with batching and approvals or as an afterthought bolted onto the refund button.

Where should you start?

The full catalogue lists every provider with the same fields. If you know the shape of what you need, the shortlists filter it: lowest published rates, WordPress and WooCommerce, or developer APIs. If you already have a provider and are leaving it, the switching pages cover that case directly.