Some general notes about paying with Bitcoin.

First of all we offer two different Payment approaches to pay with Bitcoin (or alt-coins on that matter), first one being through the Merchant BitPay.com and the second one being handled via Coinpayments.net *Update 22.07.2019: Coinpayments is currently disabled, hopefully back in 1-3 days*

About BitPay.com in particularly see below some general notes and potential problems with it and how to solve it.

Update 29.03.2018: Incase you run into troubles when paying with Bitcoin using Bitpay.com have a look at this KB article for the reason: https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005701523

Update 22.07.2019: In order to pay an Invoice from Bitpay.com there is another trick to decrypt the invoice url and find the corresponding wallet address that way :)

1. Click on Bitcoin payment method:

2. Click on "Copy payment URL":

3. Now go to https://alexk111.github.io/DeBitpay/ and paste the copied Invoice URL into the box:

Long story short: Bitpay.com most recently made using their so called "Payment Protocol" payment approach a must, without a doubt it has many good sides, but a few bad sides too, the cons are some / many wallets, simply do not support it yet.

About payments in generally (this applies to BitPay.com and Coinpayments.net in the same way):

When paying with Bitcoin, it is important to understand that we do not possess an own BTC address (wallet), but instead use well reputed third-party merchants www.bitpay.com or www.coinpayments.net respectively to process the payment.

Therefore all possible problems in relation to the actual payment flow, need to be directed to www.bitpay.com or www.coinpayments.net since we have no control over your payment. 

Why is this info important? 

It is important because in rare cases (around 2-3%) payments are not successfully going through, as in not reaching our payment API at all, therefore no account gets created/renewed. As stated we dont have any control about the payment process and/or which type of payment notice is actually transmitted to our website in the end, remember everything is handled through bitpay.com / coinpayments.net.

From experience the status codes for failed payments, atleast with BitPay.com it can be either one of the following:

- Invoice UNDERPAID (means your payment sum was less than Bitpay.com has requested, read more here)
- Invoice EXPIRED (Bitpay.com allows a 15 minute time window to pay, payments after that will not be processed in an automated manner anymore and instead have to be manually processed)
- Invoice INVALID (A payment arrived, but has not yet confirmed on the bitcoin network after 1 hour. For a variety of reasons, a payment can take a long time to be confirmed. In such cases the payment will not be applied to the invoice until it confirms.)

If we are lucky we will receive a status email on such failed payments, but we have had cases where we didnt receive anything, read here. Sending us a ticket about where the payment has gone is useless, since we cant further debug this, because failed payments simply dont show up in our BTC ledger and without any email notice, we are as equally clueless as the buyer.

Anything i can do to improve the payment flow?

Yes, make sure to use a HIGH fee in your Bitcoin wallet, it will help alot to get your payment confirm faster on the Bitcoin network!

Is the money lost, if a payment fails?

NO, it is is not!

1. To be safe keep your invoice URL open in the browser after the payment, which as example usually looks like https://bitpay.com/invoice?id=TLjkBkfCE22mW4K4suT5tB where "TLjkBkfCE22mW4K4suT5tB" is your bitpay.com invoice ID. Incase the payment failed, simply click on the "REFUND" button in this invoice URL and bitpay.com is handling the further refund process!

2. As mentioned in under "Invalid" invoice status, the bitcoin blockchain can be slow at times and this leads to delays in order processing as well, to get an idea how much unconfirmed transactions are currently present check here (if the amount is more than ~40.000 its some indicator that the bitcoin blockchain is slow again).

3. Incase you lost/closed the invoice URL, try contacting bitpay.com with your blockchain transaction details and go with them through the next options accordingly as described here Alternatively you can try to send us a ticket and include your exact order time/date and the correct order email too, if lucky we are able to find your order in our system too, but if the invoice status is underpaid, expired, or invalid then logically no account has been created on our end, meaning we would not be able to find it either.

Coinpayments has its Buyer support formular over here: here

Conclusion: Failed Bitcoin payments are very rare, but as described could theoretically occur from time to time. Whatever be the case, dont panic the money is not lost, it can be a normal delay, otherwise if needed bitpay.com or coinpayments.net will be able to find your transaction either way.