Decision Center
Retail Stores: accepting crypto
One buyer, one total, one tender at a counter. The simplest environment for crypto.
Which platforms appear promising for retail stores
These platforms serve your kind of business, and our documented (not yet lab-verified) reads apply:
- Clover: Worth considering, at low confidence. Clover has no built-in crypto acceptance, but unlike some registers it has a Custom Tender system a crypto app could plug into. Whether a ready-to-use crypto app exists, and whether it reports and settles cleanly, is still unverified.
- Shopify POS: Worth considering, at low confidence. Shopify supports crypto on its online checkout, but not at the in-person POS. At the register, crypto runs beside Shopify, and even recording it in Shopify POS is unverified.
- Square: Worth considering, at low confidence. Square has no built-in crypto acceptance. You can take crypto beside the register and record it in Square as an external payment, then reconcile by hand.
Retail is where parallel acceptance is least disruptive.
Which are poor fits
These platforms are not focused on your kind of business, so we do not lead you toward them for this use, though nothing stops a beside-the-register flow anywhere:
- Toast: not this platform's focus for retail stores.
What remains unanswered
For every platform, the same crypto questions are still open and matter to retail stores: whether a crypto sale appears in reports, how a refund behaves, and how the checkout actually feels in your environment. These are unknown today and are exactly what our lab is set up to answer. We will not guess them.
What lab testing matters most for you
Whether the crypto sale appears in reporting and how a refund behaves, since retail returns are routine.
Some retail stores are better served by starting from how you sell rather than from a platform. See accepting crypto with no POS, and the free Payment Card Builder for a counter QR.