Over the weekend, we rolled out several enhancements and new features to our world-leading bitcoin merchant service.

Improved Checkout Experience

We’ve taken feedback from our merchants and their customers and redesigned our invoice to provide a better checkout experience. Greater emphasis is placed on the bitcoin: URI and QR code, which enable faster and more accurate interaction with all conforming bitcoin wallets. Both the QR code and URI are supported by the majority of wallet clients now (view our recommended wallet apps). The bitcoin address is still there for people who prefer the copy/paste payment method.

Five New Shopping Cart Plugins

We have added osCommerce, X-Cart, and Commerce:SEO to our list of bitcoin shopping cart plugins. Merchants that perfer a SaaS hosted cart for their webstores can also access our new integration with 3dCart. Sign up for the 3dCart-BitPay webinar on August 28 to learn more. We also now support Drupal 7 Ubercart in addition to Drupal 6 Ubercart. The Drupal 7 plugin can be found in the BitPay GitHub repository.

Faster Invoice Creation

We have made some infrastructure improvements that will eliminate the occasional long response time when creating an invoice.

Exchange Rate API

We pull exchange rates from multiple bitcoin exchanges to give buyers the fairest possible price. Our method is listed in this recent blog post. We also now offer an exchange rate API to let merchants query the rate for 1 BTC. These rates are updated once per minute.

New Merchant Support Fields

Merchants can display their own support phone numbers and support emails on their BitPay invoices. This will direct customer support inquiries to the merchant instead of us. On the merchant dashboard, use the Support Phone and Support Email fields to complete your profile.

New Integration Partners

We've added several new bitcoin integration partners to help merchants get up and running with our service in Canada, Germany, Japan, and other regions globally.