What do you gain when you accept Bitcoins from your customers?

For most merchants, the main upside of accepting Bitcoin boils down to saving money. Bypassing the traditional credit card processing system, with its associated fees, has its benefits.

Let’s face it: It costs money to deal with MasterCard, Visa, Discovery, and American Express. No matter how you source your credit card processing—through your bank, through an independent sales organization (ISO), or direct with First Data or another large processing company—you pay these guys to move money from one hand to another. For smaller merchants, these fees can run anywhere from 2% to 5%, and can be the difference between making a profit and posting a loss.

With Bitcoin, you don’t pay those fees. (And you don’t have to deal with the credit card and processing companies, which is another major upside.) Most Bitcoin processors charge 1% or less, which is a considerable savings for any size of merchant. We’re talking about cutting your processing fees by two-thirds or more.

In addition, Bitcoin payments don’t come with the risk of chargebacks. That’s because Bitcoin payments aren’t reversible. If you have an unhappy customer, you won’t wake up one morning to see that entire transaction charged back by your processing company. (You’ll still have to deal with that unhappy customer, but at least you’ll be doing so directly.)

For online retailers, Bitcoin presents a potential to grow your international business. Bitcoin is a currency without borders, remember, so it’s just as easy to accept payment from a customer down the street as from one across the ocean. You still have to deal with international shipping, of course, but you no longer have to work with international exchange rates and currency conversions. It’s all Bitcoin, wherever the buyer happens to live.

Then there’s the business of attracting new business. Announcing that you now accept Bitcoin should generate a bit of publicity (you will be on the cutting edge, and that’s good press) and attract some new customers who are into the Bitcoin thing. At this stage of the game, all you have to do is get the word out and they will come.