The global bitcoin payment service provider has launched a new solution to help users deal with overpaid or underpaid invoices – the struggle that lasted over the past two years.

Usually, when a user on a BitPay-supported e-commerce platform or online store makes a payment to a specific merchant, the entire sum of bitcoin is sent directly to the merchant’s listed bitcoin address. Until now, if a user underpaid or overpaid an invoice, it would require both the merchant’s and BitPay’s manual confirmation to process a refund.

For instance, if a customer of TigerDirect – an online retailer dealing in electronics, computers, and computer components partnered with BitPay – paid US$200 for a set of wireless earphones which actually cost US$180, the user would be required to submit a refund request to BitPay, for the company to manually check and return the extra amount paid.

The manual process took around 24 hours, that is one to two business days, due to the human labour involved in various stages of settling the refund. Thus, users that are in urgent need of their funds would have to wait up to two days to retrieve their bitcoins to an external crypto wallet.

As a solution to this inefficient process, BitPay has launched a new system in its Modal Invoice to automate the handling of overpaid and underpaid BitPay invoices.

With the newly deployed mechanism, all such invoices will be automatically processed by the bitcoin network instantly without the need of manual verification. The BitPay development team added a specific user interface that enables users to enter an external bitcoin address and process their own refunds efficiently.

Besides, BitPay has introduced a critical option for merchants to adjust the range of under- or overpaid payments to be accepted automatically.

As seen in the screenshot, a merchant can select maximum percent of invoice price that they’re willing to accept and handle manual processing at later stages.

The BitPay innovation shows their understanding that new technologies like bitcoin undergo a learning curve to meet the demands of users and merchants. In payment-reliant industries like the e-commerce market, bitcoin will need to evolve to meet the standards of mainstream users by automating previously manual operations such as refunds.

If the cryptocurrency continues to grow as a mainstream payment option with the help of bitcoin payment service providers and innovative mechanisms that increase its overall efficiency, bitcoin has a good chance to revolutionise industries and markets that suffer from expensive payment networks and financial services.

Joseph Young