Savvy.io

Cryptocurrency Payment Gateway Integration
for Magento 1, Magento 2, WooCommerce,
OpenCart, and PrestaShop

platforms

750+

development hrs

3000+

merchants

The Overview

Savvy (previously PayBear) was founded in 2017 as a crypto-wallet that supports receiving, keeping, and exchange of cryptocurrencies. Over the years, the company has rapidly developed and gained the customers loyalty.

Soon after the launch, Paybear startup turned into a profitable business with several hundreds of regular clients.

Due to the rising demand for cryptocurrencies processing, the founders of Savvy decided to widen the range of their services and provide a crypto payment gateway integration for merchants who are willing to accept cryptocurrency as one of the methods of payment for their products.

Subsequently, Savvy came to the Whidegroup team with
the request for the development of payment gateway
extensions, based on their API.

The extensions need to:

Integrate with the most popular ecommerce platforms
Provide customers with the opportunity to safely pay
for online purchases with the Savvy wallet
Provide merchants with a reliable payment gateway
that can accept and process payments following
the best crypto-processing practices

The Challenge

Our task was to develop crypto payment extensions for the following platforms: Magento 1, Magento 2, OpenCart, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. First, it was important to analyze all the features of each of the selected platforms, match them with the particularities and challenges of cryptocurrency payment transactions, and choose the right approach to the development of each required module.

The development of payment gateways to process cryptocurrencies is always accompanied by several major issues which are not faced in standard payment methods.

One of the main problems when purchasing goods online with cryptocurrencies is the fact that the customer must manually launch their crypto-wallet, type-in the payment amount, and send funds to the indicated destination. Usually, the whole process can take from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Customers likely found this process very cumbersome.

Registration and confirmation of crypto payments is not instant, unlike standard card payments.

There is one more issue that is not visible immediately, especially for merchants who accept traditional payments. Namely, a payment amount must be submitted by customers manually, which may lead to them making a mistake and sending you an incorrect sum.

Due to the volatility of cryptocurrencies, it is almost impossible to sell and buy them at the same price twice. By accepting payments in digital assets, merchants run the risk of receiving less money than they expected.

To develop high-quality extensions, we had to sidestep each of these and other issues. We needed to ensure that the whole process, from the initialization to the successful payment notifications, was reliable, secure and comfortable for both parties – the merchant and the customer.

The Solution

At the very beginning, we had at our disposal the client’s API, which was an essential base for the development of Savvy payment gateway extensions.

We decided to start the development from a Savvy extension for Magento 2, as the most relevant, complex, and functional solution. Then, one-by-one, we completed the rest of the extensions for Magento 1, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and WooCommerce.

Issues on the side of ecommerce platforms

Unlike standard card payment methods (when the entire process is carried out on the online store checkout page), crypto payments always imply a transition to a third-party resource (in our case, to Savvy’s website). In general, modern ecommerce platforms like Magento, when initiating payment on the third-party resource, automatically create a new order in the admin panel with “Pending Payment” status. After the payment process is successfully completed, a special controller receives an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) from the payment provider’s API.

We faced a problem when we switched to the development of the WooCommerce payment gateway plugin. Wordpress CMS does not have any controllers that can accept IPNs. Additionally, available Wordpress plugins that enabled the platform to receive and respond to such notifications did not resolve our issue entirely, and were suitable only for card payment processing.

To solve this issue, we developed a script specifically for Wordpress that allowed WooCommerce-based online stores to receive and process payment notifications in a way crypto payments required.

Currency exchange rate guarantee

Imagine that a customer wants to pay $100 for their purchase with a cryptocurrency. From the checkout page, they pass to Savvy, convert $100 to the selected cryptocurrency, and then for some reason, postpone the payment for 15-20 minutes. Later, they proceed with the payment, submitting the previously calculated amount in cryptocurrency. Even just during these 15-20 minutes, the cryptocurrency rate could change significantly and you, as a seller, run the risk of getting less money than expected.

In this case, all the risks lie entirely on the merchant. The only solution to this problem is guaranteeing the cryptocurrency exchange rate. Every merchant independently chooses how long this guarantee should last. On average, it is 3-5 minutes. If a payment is made after the set deadline and the merchant receives a smaller amount, then the system sends a notification to the customer saying that due to the delay in payment, the exchange rate has changed and that the customer must pay the difference.

Mistakes when submitting a payment amount

If a customer initiates a payment with the Savvy crypto-wallet and enters a wrong amount (for example the required sum is 0.015 btc, but the customer mistakenly submits 0.012 btc) the system immediately notes that the payment has been made but the amount is incorrect. Subsequently, the customer receives a notification with a request to pay the extra amount needed.

The Result

While the Whidegroup team was working on the integration development, Savvy continued to upgrade their API. We kept the upper hand on each update and instantly modified the processing features so that they could meet all new requirements and provide maximum reliability and security for merchants and their customers.

After our work was done, the client received five unique plugins ready to be integrated with the most used ecommerce platforms. With these plugins, ecommerce owners can accept crypto payments easily and effortlessly. To start accepting crypto payments, they don't need to know anything about blockchain technology or the features of crypto-processing. Here are simple steps a merchant should take:

1. Set-up a Savvy wallet to accept non-fiat money transfers
2. Install a Savvy integration on your online store
3. Start accepting crypto payments

After the Savvy payment gateway integrations were released, Savvy reported a significant increase in the number of merchants interested in accepting crypto payments.

Today Savvy Merchant is one of the world's leading cryptocurrency payment gateway providers, with more than 3000 merchant customers and over $10 million worth of transactions.

Mark Bardi Savvy

Partnerships Manager

" We partnered with Whidegroup for several months. At every stage of the extensions development they showed deep expertise in ecommerce business processes and perfectly coped with every challenge of development. The result is outstanding! "

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