GoBTC Pay for WooCommerce

GoBTC Pay for WooCommerce adds Bitcoin as a payment method to your store. The

customer is sent to a hosted checkout operated by GoBTC Pay, pays there, and —

if your store is served over https — comes back to its usual order-received

page. Your store never handles

private keys, wallet software or on-chain transactions.

The plugin keeps the order in step with the payment through two independent

channels: it polls the payment status on a schedule, and it accepts signed

webhook deliveries from GoBTC Pay. The two overlap almost everywhere, so a

single missed poll or a single undelivered webhook does not strand a paid

order. They are not interchangeable, though: once an order’s payment window and

its grace period have both run out, polling for that order stops, and a payment

that arrives after that reaches the store only as a webhook. Keeping the webhook

endpoint reachable is therefore not optional.

Two payment routes, and they do not behave the same

This is the part worth understanding before you install, because it decides

when your goods are released.

Paid from a wallet inside the GoBTC Pay ecosystem (instant). The payment

reports as paid in one step. The order is marked paid and moves straight to a

state that allows fulfilment — Processing, or Completed for an order that needs

no shipping. There is no waiting period. The plugin keeps polling in the

background until the on-chain settlement time appears, but the order is already

paid and the merchant is not asked to wait for it.

Paid from an ordinary Bitcoin wallet (external). The transfer is first seen

in the mempool, and the order is held On hold while it waits for network

confirmation. Only once the payment is confirmed on-chain does the order move

to a state that allows fulfilment. This usually takes about 10 to 30 minutes,

but it can take considerably longer when the Bitcoin network is congested.

Confirmation time is a property of the network: neither the plugin nor your

store can influence it.

Both routes end with a paid order. The difference is the path the order takes

and how long it takes to get there, so an On-hold order from an external

payment is a normal, expected state and not a fault.

Late payments

If the payment window closes before the customer pays, the order is held rather

than cancelled, and the plugin keeps watching it for a configurable grace period

(12 hours by default). A payment that arrives inside that window still pays the

order.

What happens after the grace period. If nothing arrives before it ends, the

order is cancelled: WooCommerce restores the stock and sends its own

cancellation e-mail. In most cases that is the end of it, because the payment

is cancelled on the GoBTC Pay side at the same time. Occasionally the money is

already on its way and that cancellation does not go through. The payment is

then applied after all: the order returns to Processing, the stock is reduced

again, which leaves the count correct because cancelling had returned it, and

the order gets a note saying it was cancelled and paid after all. The

cancellation e-mail your customer has already received is not retracted, so

tell them the order is going ahead. Treat it as any other paid order and ship

it.

What the plugin does not do

• It does not process refunds. Refunds are handled outside the plugin.

• It does not support subscriptions or pre-orders.

• It does not store card details or private keys, because it never sees any.

External service disclosure

This plugin is a client for a third-party service and does not work without it.

See “External service” below for the service, its endpoints and its legal

terms. This subsection covers the one thing that section does not: exactly what

leaves your store, and the one configuration that can cost you real money.

Endpoints contacted by your server: the API base URL you configure in the

2 for production, or

2 for the separate non-production

contour operated by GoBTC Pay. That contour runs on Bitcoin mainnet: payments

made against it move real BTC. It is not a sandbox and there is no test

network behind it.

What your server sends to GoBTC Pay:

• When an order is placed: the order total, the order currency, and a reference

string built from a random identifier of this installation, the WooCommerce

order ID, currency and total (for example

wc-a1b2c3d4-order-1234-USD-4999). The installation identifier is a random

value and is not derived from your site address. No customer name, e-mail

address, postal address or cart contents are sent, and the customer’s IP

address is not sent.

• Afterwards, to follow the payment: the identifier of the payment that GoBTC

Pay returned.

• When an order is cancelled or its total changes: the identifier of the

payment that is no longer valid.

• To verify your credentials: your secret API key, so the platform can confirm

it is usable. This runs when you save the settings, and is retried in the

background — for up to about a day — if the platform could not be reached.

• When you press the webhook test button: a request to deliver a test webhook to

your store.

What GoBTC Pay sends back to your server: the payment’s status, amount,

currency, identifiers, timestamps and, where present, its on-chain transactions.

Webhook deliveries are signed and their signature is verified before anything is

applied to an order.

What the customer’s browser sends: the customer is redirected to the GoBTC

Pay hosted checkout, so their browser contacts GoBTC Pay directly and that

service sees whatever a website normally sees about a visitor. The redirect

carries the two addresses the customer is returned to on your store — the

order-received page and the pay-again page.

com/terms

com/privacy-policy

External service

This plugin connects your WooCommerce store to GoBTC Pay, a Bitcoin payment

service operated by GoMining. The plugin does not process payments itself:

it creates a payment through the GoBTC Pay merchant API and redirects the

customer to the GoBTC Pay hosted checkout page to complete it.

The service is contacted in the following cases:

• when a customer places an order and selects GoBTC Pay as the payment

method, to create the payment and obtain the checkout URL

• periodically after that, to read the current payment status until the

payment reaches a final state

• when the plugin validates your API key, sends a test webhook, or cancels

a payment from the WooCommerce admin

The customer is redirected to the hosted checkout page at

com. Whether they are sent back afterwards depends on your

store: a return address is only handed to the hosted checkout when the store is

served over https, and without one the customer stays on the checkout page after

paying — see “Installation” for the requirement. The payment itself is

unaffected either way: the plugin reads the payment status from the service on

its own schedule, so an order still reaches its final state whether or not the

customer comes back.

The data sent to the service for each payment is the order amount, the

order currency, and an order reference generated by the plugin. Your secret

API key is sent as an authorization header and is never exposed to the

customer’s browser.

Service provider: GoMining (GoBTC Pay)

Merchant API: the GoBTC Pay merchant API, at the base URL configured in the

plugin settings

com

com/terms

com/privacy-policy