Merchants using Shopify as their e-commerce platform now have the opportunity to accept bitcoin payments thanks to an integration with San Francisco-based Coinbase’s merchant services starting today.

The way it works is simple: the merchant signs up for an account on Coinbase, enables the integration on the Shopify backend, and then enters their credentials to complete the process.

From there, it’s bitcoin madness.

Already, four merchants have decided to use the integration. They are: Leap Motion, Boosted Boards, Soylent, and iOgrapher.

A statement from Soylent on the integration:

[blockquote style=”2″]We have been looking for a simple and secure way to accept bitcoin ever since we decided to build our ecommerce website on Shopify. Our customers have been asking for it from the very beginning. We are excited to offer bitcoin payments via Coinbase’s Shopify plugin because Coinbase makes checkout extremely simple while still maintaining a high level of bitcoin wallet security. Compared to other processors, Coinbase provides a seamless end-to-end experience – from the customer checkout to the Shopify storefront to our own secure Coinbase wallet. With Coinbase’s Shopify plug-in, paying for Soylent with bitcoin is easy – customers can log into their Coinbase account during checkout on our site and pay in one step. We believe bitcoin is a valuable and growing currency and are excited that Coinbase is making it simple for us to securely accept bitcoin via Shopify.[/blockquote]

But it should be noted that Coinbase is behind BitPay on the front of integrating with Shopify.

Back in late November, it was announced that Atlanta-based BitPay had integrated with Shopify, which has allowed merchants to accept the digital currency with relative ease.

At this point, it basically boils down to merchant preference. But hey, at least merchants have a choice!