- Luxury fashion house Gucci announced it will accept Bitcoin in physical stores.
- The rollout is a pilot project that will begin at five US locations and will be rolled out to all of the company’s directly owned stores in North America.
- It’s unclear if Gucci will automatically convert payments received in cryptocurrencies into fiat currencies like the US dollar.
Gucci is launching a pilot to test Bitcoin acceptance at five of the luxury fashion house’s US stores, with plans to expand the functionality to all non-franchise North American stores, according to a report by Vogue shop
Initially, Gucci stores accepting BTC are located on Wooster Street in New York, Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, the Miami Design District, Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, and The Shops at Crystals in Las Vegas.
“Gucci is always striving to embrace new technologies when they can provide an enhanced experience for our customers,” reportedly said Marco Bizzarri, Gucci President and CEO. “Now that we are able to integrate cryptocurrencies into our payment system, it is a natural progression for those customers who would like to have this option available to them.”
Customers can pay with Bitcoin and a handful of other cryptocurrencies. The store sends a QR code to the customer’s email address, allowing customers to interact with the wallet of their choice.
Gucci’s process will use an unnamed service provider to aggregate bitcoin price values from multiple cryptocurrency exchanges in real-time to attempt to determine the most accurate amount of BTC charged to the customer.
If an item is returned by a customer, the company plans to pay it back using the cryptocurrency used at the time of purchase.
The report states that typical retailer setups that allow companies like Gucci to accept cryptocurrency usually involve the retailer automatically converting the cryptocurrency into fiat. However, it is not directly stated whether Gucci plans to make an immediate conversion into US dollars or hold the received bitcoins as payment.
