More than 40 independent and local shops in the UK are now accepting bitcoin. Some of them don’t even know about it.
As of April 1st, We Deliver Local, a UK-based e-commerce solution for local shops added bitcoin as an official payment method.
We Deliver Local allows registered customers to buy products online from their nearby greengrocers, butchers, fishmongers and delicatessens. The company also provides a delivery service for a flat fee of £2 where drivers pick up all the orders from shops and bring to the customers’ address.
Below is a short video produced by We Deliver Local on how their system works:
[youtube id=”a-JqM2spfCw” width=”620″ height=”360″]
Supporting two communities at once
If a customer were to pay in bitcoin, We Deliver Local would take about a week to remit the shops in Pound Sterling.
“Some of the shops probably don’t even know they are accepting bitcoin,” said We Deliver Local’s director and developer, Lee Parkinson. “Many of them don’t even know what bitcoin is.”
However, according to Parkinson, the decision to accept bitcoin is good for both the local shops, and the bitcoin community. Bitcoiners looking to spend their digital currency now have another outlet, and the local stores just got themselves a new set of customers.
Parkinson said:
“The great thing with bitcoin is that the entire bitcoin community is so passionate. We put a press release out and it started trending on reddit. So that drove a lot of traffic to the site and people were keen just to use bitcoin and buy something in bitcoin. It’s almost like people are looking for an excuse to pay in bitcoin.”
In the last 11 days of bitcoin payment integration, We Deliver Local has received about four bitcoin payments.
A growing company
We Deliver Local was launched in April 2013 and it currently serves many of the major UK cities including: London, Manchester, Bristol and Sheffield. However, the entire network only has 40 stores as of now.
Parkinson said that the company is regularly adding more shops to its network across the UK.
“We are a new company, but we are growing quite quickly,” added Parkinson.