The third biggest personal computer seller in the world today, Dell, will now accept bitcoin on its website. The multinational billion-dollar company announced in a blog post Friday that it will start permitting the peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency as a method of payment for its customers.
Laura P. Thomas of Dell wrote in the blog post that it’s piloting bitcoin on Dell.com for consumer and small business clients in the United States – no word yet if it’ll be expanding to Canada and elsewhere. Dell partnered with Coinbase for this latest feature, which took only 14 days to integrate.
Dell joins the growing list of merchants and retailers accepting bitcoin, including Overstock.com, Expedia, TigerDirect, the Sacramento Kings, the Dish Network and many others.
“We’ve fostered a close partnership with the Dell team and that’s been instrumental in getting the Coinbase integration up and running in such a short timeframe. We look forward to continuing to support the team as they explore other ways to offer even more functionality when it comes to bitcoin payments,” said Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, in a statement.
Michael Dell, founder and CEO of the PC maker, tweeted the news Friday:
“Dell is now the world’s largest ecommerce business to accept #bitcoin http://www.dell.com http://fb.me/1d9ojMrZw,” Dell tweeted.
Dell is now the world's largest ecommerce business to accept #bitcoin http://t.co/xC41rKTYXi http://t.co/0YqPK7MfVG
— Michael Dell (@MichaelDell) July 18, 2014
The process is a simple one: add whatever item to your shopping cart and select bitcoin as a payment method – or view Dell’s video to understand the entire bitcoin payment process. Also, customers who purchase the new Alienware system can save 10 percent off their order when they pay with bitcoin.
Thomas also listed a few FAQs, the benefits of the virtual currency and tips from bitcoin experts Joe Stewart, director of Malware Research for the CTU, and Pat Litke, CTU security researcher. One tip is to use a non-web-based wallet, back up your wallet and encrypt it. Also, allocate a large sum of your bitcoin holdings to a cold storage, according to the two men.
