Electrum for Bitcoin payments

Electrum is the long standing desktop Bitcoin wallet and the practical choice when the order is being paid in BTC. It is more configurable than it needs to be, and two of those settings matter here.

Tor routing

Electrum can be pointed through a Tor proxy in its network settings. Doing so keeps your wallet queries from revealing which addresses you care about to whichever server it would otherwise talk to. This is worth setting once and forgetting.

Fees, which actually matter here

Bitcoin fees float with demand. Electrum estimates for you, and the estimate is only as current as the data behind it. During a busy period a low fee leaves the transaction waiting, sometimes for hours, and an order sitting unfunded while a payment is stuck in the mempool is a support conversation nobody enjoys.

Set the fee to be added on top of the send amount rather than deducted, or the order arrives short by exactly the fee.

Seed

Written on paper at creation, stored away from the machine, never typed into a page. The same rule as every other wallet on this site and the same reason.

What it does not fix

The ledger. Routing your wallet through Tor hides which server sees your queries. It does not make the transaction private, because the transaction is public by design.

Verified addresses

Before you sign in. Open these in Tor Browser only, then compare the onion printed on the login screen against your browser address bar. If they do not match, close the tab.