Patrick Byrne, the company’s CEO, said just before Christmas that Bitcoin implementation would take a few months. Instead, his company brought Coinbase on board and got everything up and running in a week, according to Business Insider.
Within two hours of the announcement, about $10,000 worth of Bitcoin was already spent, according to Byrne.
“I felt I had tipped my hand,” Byrne told Wired. “I didn’t want someone else to beat us.”
The website now has a special landing page set up to educate shoppers on how to use Bitcoin to buy from Overstock.
Among the first 100 purchases, according to Business Insider, was a 13-piece set of patio furniture.
The Bitcoin ball really got rolling last Tuesday, when Overstock struck a deal with Coinbase to handle Bitcoin payments. The engineers at Coinbase worked around the clock to get Bitcoin payments set up two months ahead of schedule.
Said one Wired commenter:
“I just bought a toaster oven with Bitcoin on Overstock. The integration with Coinbase is dead simple — if you're logged into Coinbase, you can just press a button to confirm the transaction. This is huge because I no longer necessarily have to trust a bazillion websites with my credit card details!”