I agree that not all people will have problems with wire transfers. I still believe Black Arrow would be better to make BTC price totally transparent by taking the payment straight away. These decisions are already difficult to make, why make it even harder?
I know one of the big issues I know they have been having is being understaffed- To many tickets with too few people. As for using BTC-e, not sure why that was chosen, could be for money could be because thats the easiest exchange to get $ into via wire? Not sure, I only use CB or Local for all my BTC.
I think it may actually be the worst place to get USD into, take a look at the Scam Accusations thread. This is said to be the reason that the BTC exchange rate is so low on btc-e, because there is low confidence that the USD wire will arrive in your btc-e account.
Out of interest, what satge of the proces do you take customer BTC on your site? As part of placing the order, or an indeterminate amount of days after placing the order? I suspect the former, as this is the norm with all BTC webmerchants.
When my btc payment processor was working (bips.me) It would take the weighted average at checkout. After its clusterfucking last week, I have had to switch to manual till my new webstore (with native BTC) is finished. I try to email the customer within minutes of placing the order with the current rate, but I have to sleep. The easiest thing to do is just offer refunds- if they dont like the swing or the waiting for manual, they always have the option of emailed me to cancel and refund their order, no hard feelings.
Im open to suggestions on how to do this better... But as far as I know without an automatic processor, by hand is the only way.
Interesting about BTC-e... Ill have to look more into it (Again, never used it)
I think it's just a case of using the API on the exchanges to calculate a weighted (or otherwise) average for yourself. Maybe not such a small task, but it would be better to get it done, as it only a case of keeping up to date with any changes in the exchange API's to maintain the system. Then you can take the money at checkout, and the customer actually reliably knows how much they are paying.