Facebook Debate Prods Europe’s Largest Military Surplus Dealer to Accept Bitcoin

Taking their lead from a group of Bitcoin enthusiast customers and a ‘serious, public conversation’ on Facebook, Europe’s military surplus giant, Varusteleka, now accepts bitcoin payments.
Varusteleka trades in military surplus clothing and equipment from around the world and is now aiming to expand its sales reach to customers where international payments have proven difficult. Using BitPay as a payment platform, the company now aims to ease that friction while opting to still receive the payments at their end in Euros.
The founder of Varusteleka, Valtteri Lindholm, explained to CoinTelegraph:
‘Payments within the euro zone are easy enough, but payments even to EU countries not part of euro are sometime so hard that no business gets done. Euro’s not going to gain popularity anytime soon, so there is good room for bitcoin. I think international webshop sales are only at their starting point.’
When asked what had prompted the move to accept bitcoin, Lindholm explained:
‘We got a number of requests for accepting bitcoin last year, and to ease the work on our customer service department, I wrote a piece on why we do not accept bitcoin and published it on our Facebook page. […] A serious, public conversation ensued – a rare event for any Facebook post – after which I came to accept that BitPay does actually currently offer a deal too good to be true, but at no risk to us. From then on, we set about getting bitcoin as a payment option.’
‘It’s been on for 5 days and 3% of our web payments have been made in bitcoin. I’m inclined to believe that the percentage will drop as the dust settles, and that for a long time practically all of those who pay with bitcoin would be able to pay with Euros too.’

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-03-04.