Newegg has positioned itself as a major proponent of cryptocurrency and make no bones about it, that includes the two most popular doggie coins, Dogecoin and now
Shiba Inu. The online retail giant announced it is adding the latter as yet another crypto-payment option and will be accepting Shiba Inu in time for the holidays. Or a little more precisely, sometime in "early December" (though an exact date has been announced).
The timing is a little bit curious in that
Newegg chose to wait until after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. At least technically speaking, that is the case. In all reality, holiday bargains and sale events tend to stretch throughout the month of December rather than being two-day or weekend affairs. Still, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest shopping days of the year, and for whatever reason, Newegg decided to wait a little bit longer.
Who knows what went into that decision. Either way, Newegg is awfully excited to adopt Shiba Inu. In addition to shouting it from a social media mountain top (Twitter), It also rented the largest digital out-of-home (DOOH) billboard in North America to promote the announcement. Called The Reef, the brightly lit digital billboard sits at the intersection of I-10 and I-110 in downtown Los Angeles.
"We are always looking for ways to innovate the shopping experience on Newegg.com, and something our customers want is greater flexibility and options, including the ability to pay with a wide range of cryptocurrencies," said Andrew Choi, Director of Brand Marketing at Newegg. "Through our partnership with BitPay, we have the ability to move quickly and lead the market with flexible cryptocurrency payment options. To that end, we’re excited to offer SHIB as a payment option on Newegg.com."
Newegg says it was the first major ecommerce platform to accept Bitcoin back in 2014. Since then, it has added several more to the fold, including Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and others.
What You Need To Know About Paying For Newegg Purchases With Cryptocurrency
The site uses BitPay to process cryptocurrency transactions. Buyers should bear in mind that purchases paid via BitPay are final and cannot be returned for a cash or crypto refund, no matter what the reason. Instead, users who paid via BitPay are issued a Newegg store gift card when returning an item.
There are also certain exemptions to accepting Shiba Inu or any other cryptocurrency. They include…
- Will Call orders
- Newegg gift cards
- Marketplace items
- Subscription orders
- Preorders
- Return shipping labels
- Newegg Mobile app purchases
What this means for Shiba Inu remains to be seen. A so-called meme coin like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 and has since risen in value by over 54.3 million percent. However, it's fallen by more than 35 percent over the past month.
In addition to soon being
accepted at Newegg, Shiba Inu scored another victory with cryptocurrency exchange Kraken today listing the coin. At the time of this writing, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.0000481.