MultiBit Merchant provides you with a seamless way to get in contact with potential customers and grow your business. This page aims to provide you with sufficient information to understand what MultiBit Merchant can offer you and why you should take advantage of it.

A common problem with selling online is chargeback risk. This is when a customer places an order with you and, after delivery, fraudulently claims that they never ordered the goods and claims the money back through their credit card providers. In most cases the card provider will side with the purchaser and refund their money, leaving you with the bill, and often a fee.

There are ways to reduce this risk, but they all cost money which eats into your profit margins.

Bitcoin provides a solution to this by making chargebacks impossible. When a customer makes a purchase from you, the funds are as good as cash within an hour. This gives you peace of mind because you can make accurate predictions of cashflow, the hassle of dealing with chargeback fraud is removed and this directly improves your bottom line.

It costs nothing to receive payments through Bitcoin. You will incur fees if you decide to exchange bitcoins for a different currency. This is because anyone offering exchange services is operating a business and is making profit and some exchanges charge more than others.

However, if you are able to build a supply chain that consists entirely of bitcoin then you can mitigate these fees to a considerable extent. After all, once you can buy from your wholesalers in bitcoins, sell on to your customers in bitcoins and meet your daily needs with bitcoins, then you don't need to exchange to a different currency. Meeting your daily needs could simply be finding someone willing to sell you gift cards for bitcoins which you can then enter into your local supermarket's website for home delivery.

The typical member of the Bitcoin community is an early adopter, very technically savvy, financially aware, privacy conscious, and mostly under 50 year of age. If you are attempting to start something completely new then this is an almost ideal first community to pitch your idea to.

You will get almost immediate feedback about your idea and have the opportunity to make changes early.

If you want to, you can take the MBM code and host it yourself. It is split in half, offering a back end that does the heaving lifting (accounting, order processing etc) and the front end that provides the attractive website that your users interact with, such as MultiBit Store. This split allows the application to scale significantly since the front and back ends can be given dedicated resources as required. It also means that if you don't like the offered front ends, you can modify them as you require by getting your design team to work on them.

One typical hosting solution is to use Heroku, which for very low traffic sites can even be free.

After the hosting is complete, your role is to ensure that the customer orders are fulfilled and keep your business running.

If the idea of running your own version of the platform is not appealing, then you can delegate this responsibility to someone else and pay them a operating fee. They take care of all the IT work and you simply work within the constraints that they place on you in terms of inventory size and transactions processed per hour and so on.

Even though someone else is running the MBM platform, they will not be able to charge on a per-transaction basis. After all, why should it cost more to process high value purchases than low value ones? It is only a number in a database.

In MultiBit Merchant, you are in control of your money. Your service provider cannot slap an additional "transaction processing fee" on to you since they do not control access to your payments. You provide them with a list of Bitcoin addresses to use for your transactions which they must use. When payment is made it is reflected in your Bitcoin wallet, not theirs.

Consequently, the charging model for MBM hosting companies is subscription based.

Overall, by using MultiBit Merchant you will be able to run your online business cheaper using Bitcoin than any other payment processing solution.