Showroomprive is a Paris-based online shopping website for clothes, cosmetics and household items that offers discounts of 30–70% off of leading brand-name products.

The firm's more than $500m in annual revenue make it one of the leading e-commerce companies in Europe, with figures from 2013 placing it just behind LVMH Moët Hennessy, and the second largest private sales website behind Vente-privee.

These figures could increase, the company hopes, now that it has integrated bitcoin into its payment options.

In an interview with CoinDesk, cofounder and chief executive Thierry Petit said:

Showroomprive has an active mobile app platform through which it currently generates more than 50% of its fashion-driven sales. However, at present, it does not accept bitcoin on its apps.

Petit’s business targets consumers that are looking to buy leading brand-name products at the most affordable prices, so being able to offer his customers an additional payment option seemed like “something very disruptive and interesting”.

“For me as founder of the company – I’m an engineer to be honest and I love technology and seeing how it can disrupt our industry,” he said.

Bitcoin first piqued Petit’s curiosity about a year and a half ago, he said, and this year the major US corporations that began integrating it as a customer payments option turned him on a little bit more.

Petit said:

Showroomprive first implemented bitcoin payments into its operations in the Netherlands because the market was primed for payments innovation.

“As for France,” he added, “we are adopting a practical approach, but we believe that consumer tendencies are evolving. The two are compatible.”

Petit said the learning process has been surprising for him, and that the doom and doubt communicated about bitcoin by so much of the media and financial industries made him wary of the concept – at first.

He said:

He then turned to the regulatory sphere, where he spoke highly of French senator Philippe Marini and defended his approach to regulating bitcoin activity.

“In France that they want to [regulate] for something positive, and not to kill bitcoin,” he said.

Petit spoke to bitcoin’s practical uses and advantages to his business, citing perks like instant transactions and lower transaction fees.

He added that he’s observed a lot of new digital wallet companies and other technology platforms enter into the payments, banking and e-commerce space, and surmised that the growing trend might be the result of an increasingly mobile way of life.

He said:

He added: “The payments industry at this time in Europe is like a war [...] maybe bitcoin will have something to play in this industry.”

Image via Shutterstock