How to set up an account?

Congratulations on creating a merchant account on NOWPayments! Now, it’s time to explore its features and see what you can do.

Basic preparations: set up a wallet and the API key

To start working with NOWPayments, the first thing you need to do is set up your crypto wallet. We accept 70+ currencies, so you’ll certainly find the one that fits you best.

Once you’ve logged in, go to the Store Settings:

Scroll down to the Outcome Wallet section:

Here will be your wallet address — the one where you’ll receive the funds that your customers will pay you with.

1. Click “Add another wallet”.
2. Select the currency and paste the wallet address from your crypto wallet.
3. Click the green check mark on the right to add the wallet.
4. Click “Save”.

Alright! Now, you are ready to create an API key. This is a unique ID used to create payments and monitor their status. This key helps us track all the transactions and update you on their status.

To create the API key, scroll to the top of the same Store Settings page. Click “Add new key”.

Congratulations — you’re one step away from being ready to accept payments in crypto. Now, scroll down to the Base Currency section. Here, set the currency in which the prices will be displayed in your online store. USD is what most of the merchants choose, but of course, this depends on your geography.

Click “Save changes”.

More in the Store Settings: Instant Payment Notifications, Payment markup and covering

Instant Payment Notifications, or IPNs, are a feature that allows you to receive quick updates on your payments’ status. Find more about it in this FAQ. To enable IPN, a Secret key is used. We recommend you to create it only when you’ve set up your NOWPayments integration and are ready to add this feature: for security reasons, we show the key only once. However, you can always generate a new one.

Payment settings. Here, you can set the markup and covering for your payments. Markup is a percent above the displayed price that will add to the final amount your customers pay. It’s 0% by default and can go up to 10%. Payment covering is in some way a reverse thing: if you set it at 5%, your customer will only have to pay $95 out of $100, and the payment will be considered done.

OK, what next?

These were the base settings. Once you’ve completed them, you can start your NOWPayments integration right away. Here, see the full list of the available options and their installation guides, or simply contact us — we will help you choose the most relevant one.

Account Settings

In this section, you can:

1. Change your Company name. You’ve already set it at the registration but can change it anytime if you want. This doesn’t have to be the official company name: this title is only required for internal use in NOWPayments.
2. Change your password. Please remember to set a safe password: use upper and lower-case letters and numbers, don’t use a password that you’ve already set at any other platforms. Save it in a secure password manager. After you change the password, we will ask you to sign in again.
3. Enable the two-step authentication. Protect your account: ask for a security code in addition to your password every time you enter the account.

What are the other sections of the Account?

Dashboard. See the payment statistics and the details on the last payments. Here’s how it will look when you start accepting cryptocurrency:

Payments. Find the full list of your payments here — use filters to sort them by date, price, and status. Here, we display purchases as well — these are also payments, but the ones when your customer sends you the whole sum for one purchase in a few parts. You can enable this feature in your API integration.

Balances. Instead of receiving the money from the payments right away, accumulate your income and withdraw it once per week to save on the network fees. Contact us to learn more and to enable the feature.

Affiliate Program. Bring new merchants to NOWPayments and get a percentage from each of their transactions! For details and to see how you can start, follow here. In the Affiliate Program section of the Account, you can see how much profit you’ve made and request a payout.

Got confused?

This has been quite a load of information — don’t worry if something doesn’t make sense at the first glance. Contact our support — we will walk you through if you wish!