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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

As a European, I have never heard of Overstock. Though they actually do ship here and prices can be displayed in Euro's.

How big is this site? What is their angle? Are they just like a smaller amazon.com? Overstock sounds a little like lower priced articles from left over stocks or something...

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While I know Alexa is far from accurate, it does show overstock.com to be the 621 largest universal site and 160th in the USA. That should show you scale.

In 2010 (Fiscal Year) they has $1.1 billion in revenue with 1600 employees. They are publicly traded with a market cap just under $750 million.

That is actually many times bigger than I would have guessed. That they're accepting Bitcoin is pretty huge for the Bitcoin movement then.

"Bitcoins are only accepted on the domestic (US) version of Overstock.com. Currently they will not be accepted for any orders shipped internationally."

https://help.overstock.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5794

I wonder why this is. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that once you send it it's gone so there if you wait for enough confirmations there is no chance of charge back fraud. I'm not sure what they are worried about happening with international orders. Stolen bitcoin?

The site is pretty big. Been around for a while. I just watched a documentary from many years back about stocks and they talk about overstock.com being a victim of naked short selling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overstock.com

Is there any evidence that the naked short selling was a real thing beyond the insistence of the CEO?

Pop over to deepcapture.com and see for yourself. (It's maintained by Overstock's CEO as a side project, but it seems to me that the endless stream of scathing accusations would have brought swaths of libel suits if the stuff had no basis in reality -- enough for them to defend themselves against a court shutting them down anyway.)

"Hasn't been sued for libel yet" isn't quite the quality of evidence I was looking for.

Think of it as a proxy… Follow the links and the references on that site, and see for yourself. The site has tons of them.

I didn't look into it further. A lot of counter suing going on.

Overstock is pretty awesome. One of their big marketing angles is free shipping over $50. I've purchased large furniture, rugs, desks and other very heavy things from them and have always had free shipping. Often that "free shipping" meant "local delivery and bringing it into your house for free" which is pretty amazing.

They are big. For short they also own o.co which directs to overstock. They currently sponsor a multi purpose stadium named 0.com. the MLB, NFL, and MLS have a team that play there. side note: noticeable brands that sponser a American stadium: BofA, Gillette, Qualcomm,FedEx, AT&T, Mercedes-Benz.

Overstock is great I've bought a lot of things from them in the past including my bed and mattress. I like going to them equal to Amazon. Good prices, good selection, $2.29 shipping on all all orders. One of my favorite online places to shop.

I have a few thousand usd in coinbase if I needed anything I'd buy something from Overstock in principle!!! I like Bitcoin

They also have TV commercials in the US they used to at least.

I think the left over stock is how they originally started. Based on where they are now, I'd categorize them as a smaller Amazon.

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