The Netherlands' biggest food delivery network now accepts bitcoin

The Netherlands' 10th biggest online retailer Thuisbezorgd.nl, a brand owned by takeaway.com, the European-wide food ordering and delivery website, has just announced it is now accepting payment in bitcoins.

The company has around 5,000 restaurants for which they take care of the order processing and payment. According to marketing manager Imad Qutob, it processes about one million orders each month.

Takeaway.com currently operates in nine different countries and their Dutch, German and Austrian takeaways are all slated to accept bitcoin. The company declined to respond directly to questions on whether it would expand its bitcoin service to Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, the UK and Vietnam, although it did suggest that it seemed like the logical thing to do.

Half of Thuisbezorgd's customers pay in cash on delivery, but the other half pay with various forms of online payment, for which Thuisbezorgd adds a surcharge of €1 or more. Bitcoin customers won't have those surcharges.

Yesterday, the first day the company started taking bitcoin orders, they processed 250 bitcoin transactions out of about 30,000 orders in total.

An avid cryptocurrency devotee and fan of takeaway.com said: "As a bitcoin user I find it nice to see a leading merchant platform such as takeaway.com/thuisbezorgd.nl adopt bitcoin as a payment method. I will definitely pay for my orders there with bitcoin, both for the ease of use of paying online and because of the lack of transaction fees that other methods take."