South African Retailers Catching Bitcoin Bug

A few days after Pick n Pay, one of South Africa’s largest grocery and food stores, announced it would be testing out Bitcoin in one of its stores, there are rumblings of other retailers wanting to join the bandwagon.

OneDayOnly, a major eCommerce player in the country, has announced that they are looking at accepting Bitcoin. This also follows on from Takealot.com who have been accepting Bitcoin for a number of years though the PayFast service.

Exponential growth

OneDayOnly’s expansion into potential using Bitcoin is coincidentally being announced at the same time as Pick n Pay’s decision for the eCommerce store which they’re looking to expand.

The company has doubled its revenue year-on-year for five years, and had to move warehouses in Cape Town and Johannesburg to accommodate its expansion.

“We’re offering more products, more big brands, and even greater deals and savings,” OneDayOnly said.

The company has grown from an operation with 40 staff members in 2016, to employing nearly 100 people in 2017.

With this expansion, OneDayOnly admit that they would like to keep moving forward, as well as innovating, and with South Africa seemingly pretty progressive in terms of its Bitcoin adoption and regulation, it could be a viable option.

Pick and pay the guinea pig

The announcement that a major chain like Pick n Pay was looking into Bitcoin sent ripples through the South African Bitcoin fraternity, as well as the world’s, as there was much positive feelings about it.

Retailers have been skeptical about digital currencies and their implementation, but Pick n Pay’s Richard van Rensburg, deputy chief executive, says:

“Accepting cryptocurrency holds the promise of being both frictionless and safe, and therefore has the potential to be a game-changer for the retail industry. Our pilot resulted in a transaction that was safe. There is no cash risk and no card fraud risk.”

For a limited period, customers at the store on Pick n Pay’s head office campus in Cape Town were able to use Bitcoin to buy goods and services. The checkout process involved scanning a QR code using a Bitcoin wallet app on customers’ smartphones.

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