Popular electronics retailer TigerDirect began accepting bitcoin earlier this year in January, and it’s made an absolute splash in the community, making the company the second-largest to adopt bitcoin after Overstock.com.
It’s been successful, too. In the first day of acceptance, TigerDirect brought in a whopping $250,000 worth of bitcoin payments, and by the time March rolled around, the company had managed to bring in over $1 million in bitcoin sales.
Today, the company has announced they are bringing bitcoin payments to their Canadian arm, TigerDirect.ca. Effective immediately, the company’s Canadian customers can take advantage of buying their wares with bitcoin, which is made possible in partnership with Atlanta-based BitPay.
“We are very pleased with our BitPay implementation on TigerDirect.com and are excited to roll it out across our other sites. As of today, TigerDirect.ca and our mobile/tablet sites will be accepting Bitcoin as a payment method,” said Steven Leeds, who heads Marketing for TigerDirect.
BitPay’s service allows merchants to allow consumers to make payments almost instantly, and they’ll quickly convert the bitcoin revenue to local currency should the merchant desire.
That’s almost certainly what’s happening in this case, though the company has made no indication as to whether or not they are accumulating bitcoin holdings (by comparison, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne says that his company keeps about 10 percent of bitcoin revenue in its digital form).
“TigerDirect has taken an interest in bitcoin not only as a payment option but also a new product line through the sale of bitcoin mining equipment,” said Paige Freeman, VP of Sales at BitPay. “It is great to be working with an organization who is as just enthusiastic about bitcoin as we are.”