Contact each merchant and ask them if they are accepting Zcash. You will be surprised to find that some accept it already but are lazy to advertise it. If they are not, ask them if they are willing to accept it. You will also be surprised to find that most of them will have no problem accepting it. Since they already accept BTC, BCH or other coins, it means they have a wallet solution set up already. In my experience, most of them use multi-asset mobile wallets like Coinomi and it’s super easy to accept anything. It costs them nothing and they can only win by accepting more customers. Don’t try to shill Zcash. Most merchants won’t care and there is no point to try and sell them about privacy. They just want more customers. Actually, if you try and shill them Zcash, there is a chance that they will not want to accept it because they would think that you are trying to get some direct personal gain out of it. Be plain and simple. Don’t try to market anything. If they don’t want, don’t insist. I actually had a case where they didn’t want to accept it. I thanked them for their time and the next day they got back to me and said they changed their mind.
While this is a call for all community members, it is also a call for the ECC and ZF. If I could do it that easily, I could imagine what you could do with your resources. @joshs@elenita@acityinohio@sonya
Thanks @anon16456014! This is also a great way to collect user research. If you have any notes you’d be willing to share on why merchants were or were not accepting ZEC, that type of information is useful for our product team (and other ecosystem partners we are hoping to engage). Cheers!
@anon16456014, great work and thanks for writing about it!
I’d love to see another step inbetween 2 and 3: what did you advise the merchants to use for accepting and converting payments, and how did it work out?
I purposely did not get into that kind of conversation with merchants.
A couple of points.
From those that we exchanged a few emails, I understood that they had no intention to sell. They were crypto enthusiasts and planned to hold. Hence the use of personal wallets and not of POS solutions.
Back then, and to an extent even today, the ecosystem was not ready for shielded adoption so I wouldn’t dare mention the shielded element. To be frank, even if I had to do it today, I would be very hesitant to tell them about the advantages of using shielded transactions because the ecosystem is still not ready. Since the majority of them appeared to be using mobile wallets, there is currently no good solution for both iOS and Android. Hopefully by 2021 the ecosystem will be in a totally different place.
I recall the main reason for not accepting it was not related to ZEC at all. A few of them were disappointed that even though they were offering crypto payments for a while, they had very few crypto customers. So basically they were complaining about lack of adoption but the other way around! They were considering to stop accepting crypto payments altogether.
Yeah I’ve seen the same thing. The most common response from merchants has been about demand. If there’s demand, most crypto-leaning small businesses are happy to accept Zcash (and vice versa).
I always ask the vendor if they could consider accepting my payment in zcash instead of bitcoin, no one as yet seems interested. It is still a little too esoteric with no significant demand. The more they hear customers asking for it, eventually they will adopt.
