Crypto Payments on Shopify: The Honest Version

Search for a Shopify crypto payment gateway and you will find a dozen apps that all work the same way, none of which explain why. The reason is a Shopify rule, and understanding it tells you more about what you are buying than any feature list.

The constraint

Shopify reserves real payment gateway apps for approved payment partners. A gateway that is not on that list cannot insert itself into Shopify Checkout the way Shopify Payments or PayPal does. This is not a crypto-specific rule and it is not arbitrary: Shopify Checkout is the most sensitive surface on the platform, and the approval process exists because a payment app that behaves badly there breaks the store.

The practical effect is that essentially every crypto gateway on Shopify, including ours, integrates through the same pattern: a manual payment method plus order webhooks plus a custom app token. Anyone claiming a native checkout integration without being an approved payment partner is either describing this same pattern in more flattering words or describing something that will stop working.

What the pattern actually is

Three pieces, and each one does a specific job:

1. 1A manual payment method named something like "Cryptocurrency". Shopify offers these for bank transfers and cash on delivery, and they are open to every store on every plan. The customer chooses it at checkout, and Shopify places the order as unpaid.
2. 2An order webhook from Shopify to the gateway, which fires when that order is created. This is how the gateway learns the order exists, what it is worth, and who to send the payment link to.
3. 3A custom app token with read_orders and write_orders scope, which is how the gateway marks the order paid afterwards. Custom apps are created in your own admin and never go near the app store.

The customer chooses "Cryptocurrency", places the order, and receives an automatic email with a link to a hosted payment page carrying the exact amount and a QR code. When the payment confirms on-chain, the gateway calls back into Shopify and the order flips to paid.

What it costs you

Be clear-eyed about the trade-off, because this is the part the app listings leave out.

The payment happens after checkout, not during it. The customer completes checkout, then pays. That is one more step and one more place to lose someone, and it is unavoidable without payment partner approval.

The order exists before the money does. An unpaid order is a real order in your admin, in your reports, and potentially in your inventory. Set your reservation and cancellation behaviour deliberately: an invoice that expires leaves the order unpaid, and your normal unpaid-order flow has to handle it.

Email deliverability becomes part of your payment flow. The payment link arrives by email. If that email lands in spam, the customer thinks the store is broken. Worth testing on the mail providers your customers actually use, not just your own.

None of this is fatal. Stores run it every day. But a gateway that describes this as a native checkout integration is not being straight with you, and you should read the rest of its claims with that in mind.

Setting it up

The full guide is on the Shopify integration page. In outline:

1. 1Create a custom app in Shopify. Settings, Apps and sales channels, Develop apps, Create an app. Give it read_orders and write_orders on the Admin API, install it, copy the access token.
2. 2Connect it to your Oxialink account and register the order-created webhook.
3. 3Add the manual payment method. Settings, Payments, Manual payment methods, Create custom payment method. Name it clearly and say in the instructions that payment details arrive by email.
4. 4Place a test order and follow it all the way to paid.

Step four is the one people skip and the one that finds the problem. Do it on the sandbox first, where the coins are free.

Which coins to offer

For a Shopify store, stablecoins on cheap chains are almost always the right default: USDT or USDC on TRON, BNB Smart Chain, Solana or TON. The balance stays dollar-denominated, so a payment that confirms twenty minutes later is worth what it was worth when the customer paid, and the network cost is cents rather than dollars.

Bitcoin is the coin customers ask for and the one with the worst checkout experience: confirmation takes as long as the next few blocks, and the fee is whatever the mempool says today. Offer it if your customers want it, but do not make it the only option.

What you get that cards do not give you

The reason to do any of this is not novelty.

No chargebacks. A confirmed on-chain payment cannot be reversed by the sender. For digital goods, high-risk categories, or anywhere a dispute rate has been used against you, this is the entire argument.

No underwriting. No merchant account, no rolling reserve, no category review, no country restriction on accepting the payment itself.

No account freeze that stops all revenue. A gateway can drop you. The address a payment settles to is still yours.

What you do not get is the conversion rate of a one-click card checkout. Both things are true at once, and the honest way to run this is as an additional method alongside cards rather than instead of them.