CheapAir’s CEO and Founder Jeff Klee updated the info regarding some challenges that they have been facing while struggling to find a replacement for their previous processor Coinbase.
The crypto exchange platform had informed them a while ago that they were shutting down the merchant platform.
Klee says in an email that since 2013 they have been relying on Coinbase to facilitate their acceptance of Bitcoin and they found themselves “in unfamiliar territory to be suddenly scrambling for an alternative.”
CheapAir found they don’t need a processor
In the same email, Klee writes users that “I cannot tell you how grateful I am for the overwhelming amount of thoughtful feedback we received. We went into the process thinking we were on a desperate quest to find a new processor. But thanks to many of you, we came out of it realizing we don’t need a processor at all.”
He went on and explained that the team has been testing an open source Bitcoin payment processor, BTCPayServer.
There seems to have been a slight learning curve at the beginning and there was a need for a bit of engineering work in order to create the flow for turning crypto from users into USD for hotels and airlines.
The result is more than satisfying and BTCPayServer enables them to circumvent BitPay’s controversial BIP-70 wallet requirement.
Klee admitted that after the whole thing with Coinbase, they find it quite liberating to not depend on a third party anymore.
“We now have much more control of the process, which has made possible faster, more efficient order processing. We can also do a much better job of gracefully handling the occasional anomalies that are still inherent in crypto commerce,” he writes in the same email to their customers.
As a conclusion Klee believes that accepting crypto has been a win-win situation for both CheapAir and the company’s customers.
They now also have a dedicated support team only for crypto users and they also began accepting Bitcoin Cash, Dash, and Litecoin.
