Bitcoin Forum

We really need Amazon to start accepting Bitcoin as payment again.

Has anyone heard anything in this space?

I doubt it will be happening anytime soon. For now, you could use Bitrefill to buy gift cards for Amazon and redeem them, or simply use Purse.io and get up to 20% off.

Nope, but it could be great if amazon starts accepting cryptocurrency since it can help boost the market demand of cryptocurrency and also can make payment easier for it's user.

I came accross this article and might be worth to read since this is somehow related to your post.

 https://www.google.com/amp/s/ethereumworldnews.com/rakuten-exchange-could-push-amazon-to-accept-cryptocurrency/amp/  (https://www.google.com/amp/s/ethereumworldnews.com/rakuten-exchange-could-push-amazon-to-accept-cryptocurrency/amp/)

I doubt if Amazon would dip their payment feet into Bitcoin soon, because of two reasons. 1. They have a strong partnership with PayPal and Credit card companies and they will not jeopardize that relationship. 2. Bitcoin are not acknowledged as a "currency", but rather as a commodity, so the legal issues and accounting problems will be significant, if they experiment with payment options that are not defined as a currency.

We might see more merchants accepting Bitcoin as a payment option, as soon as regulators sort out the regulation regarding Crypto currencies and the definition of currencies.  ;)

I have purchases stuff from Rakuten(Xbox gift cards etc) before successfully which is why it is good to see their positive stance towards crypto, but I don't think this will change Amazon's stance towards crypto anytime soon.

Am not expecting a big bull run in this case either.

Amazon is one of the biggest retailers in the world. If they start accepting Bitcoin it would be huge for the adoption aspect. It would set the standard and the other big retail chains will surely follow their initiative. I hope this will happen sooner than later.

Obviously, but I doubt Amazon will accept bitcoin in the near future. There are some theories why Amazon wont accept bitcoin as payment method like what are mentioned by Kakmakr and some other possible reasons such as about its volatility that give some confusions on pricing products.
The best way to use bitcoin to buy something at amazon has been addressed by OmegaStarScream.

Why, though?

I think it's very unlikely. Don't forget the transaction fee "issue" that Bitcoin is having some time. I mean except for crypto enthusiast, paying $5 dollar in fees and have to wait for an hour to get the transaction confirmed is not appealing. When there are other options like Paypal and credit cards, I doubt people would choose Bitcoin over them. If their current payment system is OK and there's not a big enough demand from the customer, what urges Amazon to implement Bitcoin payment?

Well, Rakuten an e-commerce giant is in the process of implementing bitcoin to their platform. So, if its successful, may be others might follow.....

It's way too early to expect that. The market is not very liquid and with Amazon's volume, they risk not being able to easily settle to fiat currency without losses. I don't think a company of Amazon's size can just set up a Bitpay account, nor would they want to. Then there's the scalability aspect to consider.

I could see it years down the road if/when the markets are more liquid and Lightning is more ubiquitous and easy-to-use. Until then, you can buy Amazon gift cards with bitcoins. I buy them through the Bitpay wallet myself.

do we really need it? it would be a good sign for mass adoption but in my opinion its not really a need. rakuten is going to be accept bitcoin as far as i have noticed lately. as long as some other mid / big shops accept bitcoin we are on a good way.  :)

Perhaps the community does but Amazon has no interest to accept BTC, whatever the Bitcoin's price is.
Bitrefill is a good option but the rate is not so good last time I checked. I used Purse.io before without a problem.

just wait till the facebook coin is launched. Amazon and other competing rivals will also see this act and start taking actions on crypto technologies. till then just keep spreading everyone information about bitcoin, because bitcoin community is very large and big companies like Amazon are not going to ignore that, Have faith and patience they will surely accept it as payment soon.

I have no idea why people have such a boner about this. It's irrelevant. If people wanted to spend their BTC we'd see ever expanding merchant adoption but it's been consistently falling.

The only incentive is on the merchant side. It's superb for them. For the customer there's no reason for them to use it. Since most merchants don't make enough profit to be able to offer the discounts that might draw people in it's a dead end.

If I were Amazon I might go as far as officially sanctioning one of the places that does gift cards for BTC. There's no need for them to go any further.

Why do we need Amazon accepting crypto? They would charge heavy fees and plus we would end up paying more for a product when we can easily buy gift cards at 15-30% discount from many websites with bitcoins. The volatile price doesn't make crypto a feasible option.

Just curious, where do you buy giftcards for 15-30% off?

Sites like bitrefill (which i consider to be the really the only legit supplier for amazon GC), charges an 8% premium...?
https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/amazon_de-germany/?hl=en

I doubt Amazon natively accepting bitcoin would incur fees that high.

Why not? Funds can instantly be liquidated.
Especially with a market as big as amazon, i'm sure there are tons of exchanges who are willing to offer specific services to instantly liquidate funds at spot price etc.

Purse.io but I've never been inclined to try them myself.

I've no idea why anyone would pay a premium. For Amazon.de stuff you can buy at face value through Bitpanda. For Amazon.co.uk there's Giftoff.com. For Amazon.com you can buy inside the Copay wallet.

Yeah, but you'll have to essentially dox yourself (shipping info) to an unknown individual, and hope that the user paying for your stuff isn't carding/chargebacking/doing other shady stuff, right?

I'm not too keen on opening myself up to that, no matter how big the % off.

Not sure about the shipping. There's a guaranteed 5% rate bought through Purse directly. The individual discounters do it through the wishlist so they don't see your address.

Carding is the most obvious turn off and I'm sure there is a mountain of it going on. They don't release the BTC until the item is received so there's some protection, but the buyer might be caught out later on.

https://purse.io/shop is the website that gets you 15% discount on Amazon website. If you buy from local sellers, you can easily get even more discount.


It's not easy as you think. Converting to fiat from Amazon's end involves sending fee, conversion fee, withdrawal fee etc. Amazon will all impose it on the buyer and we already know how they treat their sellers by making them pay high fee for everything. You can easily end up paying min 10% more than now.

Amazon doesn't even accept payal, doubt they will accept bitcoin anytime soon.   I suspect its easy to buy Amazon giftcards for 20% off value because of people doing return scams to get free Amazon credit.  Happens all the time but they just bite the bullet since its a small percentage of total customers.

Correct me if I'm wrong but they did accept bitcoin a while back? I never used it but heard they did.

I never heard that Amazon did accept bitcoin already because I never use Amazon to buy any product, or maybe I am missing something before.
Maybe they will not use bitcoin in the near of this year or the next year, but we don't know what will they do if many online stores are using bitcoin as the alternative payment method.
The Amazon will make it easy to add bitcoin for a new option to their user because I am sure they still think about what will the benefit to them if they use bitcoin as the payment option.

again? they never have accepted payment in bitcoin or any crypto, it would be cool though if they start now, eventually they will or maybe a decentralized amazon will emerge.

No, you can make the shipping address on your wish list private, people don't see your personal address, (not even your name if I'm correct), it's a feature in your Amazon account, I always did it while using Purse.io.

Too bad Purse.io doesn't have an offer from my country, anybody recommends a good place to sell Amazon.fr GC? (other than in this forum)


no, never

1. Amazon never accepted bitcoin if I remember correctly.
2. If they knew accepting bitcoin would significantly benefit their business, they really would've probably done it a long time ago. It's either the potential customer increase is minuscule, or they aren't willing to go through the hassle with it, or both.

Really though, I don't think we should expect them to accept BTC any time soon.

Not anymore, but it's still available in the Bitpay wallet. No premium, of course. It seems insane to pay an 8% premium for the privilege -- Bitrefill is crazy with their premiums. It used to be that we'd get a discount through Gyft or eGifter for using Bitcoin.

I agree on the number 1 thing you had mentioned.They wont tend to risk out their current reputation yet it would mainly affect their relationship with those
traditional payment options like Paypal and Credit Card companies and theres no brainer that they would still stick to it no matter what.They might
consider crypto as an option but it wont still be possible as of today.

I don’t think it will affect their relationship with paypal and visa cards if they include cryptocurrencies in their payment means though you are right when you said that there could be an accounting problem in their part with this matter. There is a lot of crypto-users who do not have visa credit cards and though they want to purchase from Amazon they don’t have the means and they don’t find it easy using PayPal too so if they include cryptocurrency that will be great not just for crypto-users but also for an increase adoption and usage of cryptocurrency.

Amazon doesn't even accept Paypal on its websites. If people don't find Paypal easy to use then really, they shouldn't buy on the internet at all. Even a 10 years old kid can use Paypal after 5 minutes using it.
There is no accounting problem for a company, just 2-3 more columns to add in their accounting database. From all companies accepting BTC I have never seen one removing it because it's too difficult with accounting.

Well, Amazon is no small market bud, its not enough that only big and leading shops accept bitcoin as payment, as much as possible we want all of them to include bitcoin in their accepted currencies because we want mass adoption for bitcoin. Amazon probably is afraid of possible conflict between them, visa companies and PayPal if incase they include cryptocurrency as a mean of payment.

Yeah but it just is not the same as Amazon directly taking bitcoin.  If they did it would be about much more than buying items from Amazon with cryptocurrency.  It would be another huge step forward for bitcoin.

There was talk about this at least two years ago but there has been no progress and no further discussion about it.  Amazon sells a wide variety of crypto related things if you browse their site, so they are not anti crypto at all.  Perhaps they don't want to deal with a payment processor other than the large credit card companies and banks.  They're all in bed together as far as I'm concerned.

True. There are too many people who do not have visa credit cards and not even PayPal and I bet they also want to buy something in big online shops like Amazon but they don’t have the choice, but its impossible that some of them do not have bitcoins and other cryptocurrency. This thing if it happens will just add another freedom to bitcoin users from being tied to banks and other institutions.

Amazon doesn't sell anything related to cryptos, merchants do.
Bitcoin isn't yet enough used to attract Amazon to think "oh it could be great to add it". Remember, Amazon has no benefit to add Bitcoin, it's working well as it is. Also, Amazon/Bitcoin is like Amazon/Paypal, it's like cat and dog, old story, that's why Amazon always refused to add Paypal. Especially since Amazon has a competitor product to Paypal, Amazon Pay.


They can use bank transfer, amazon vouchers. I can buy vouchers at the supermarket or where I go to buy cigarettes.

There are many articles recently and also video that says that amazon are now accepting btc through lightning network. This is a very good start to dominate a huge market of online selling. You can guys now shop products if you btc through lightning network so cheers to us guys because we are very close to mass adaption.

that's probably because amazon owns a competitor to paypal---amazon payments. i'm guessing amazon not accepting bitcoin has more to do with lack of market liquidity (for settling to fiat) and volatility. if it weren't for those issues, accepting bitcoin is a merchant or ecommerce platform's dream. no fraud issues, no chargebacks.

regardless, it's always nice to see new options for using lightning payments.

Number 2 is the main reason the won't allow it in the United States.

They might allow it outside the US, but the country concerned would have to demonstrate an existing willingness to use crypto before amazon dipped their toe in.

Amazon does not accepted bitcoin directly so far but indirectly with the help of purse.io there are accepting the bitcoin from the past 2 year in my knowledge. We need to know the way to use the bitcoin that's it.
One more thing few months before this amazon team announces that they gonna add bitcoin payment gateway api soon but they did not tried it. Lets hope they accept soon.

We are not seeing that happening now but it is going to happen in future.  A time will come that any business that has not adopting bitcoin or blockchain technology will not survive including big online store like amazon and Ali express.  However bitcoin need to be a bit stable for it to used as a mode or medium of exchanging goods and services.  The up and down of the market is the many reason why big wholesales and retails business cannot used it.  Amazon will certainly adopt bitcoin in future but the time is not what we can tell now.

It seems that if I don't miss the news, I've never heard that Amazon started accepting payments using bitcoin. because it might need preparation so that it can be realized and that may not be easy because we know the price of bitcoin is not stable at all times, so there may be difficulties in determining the value of payments. who doesn't want comfort, of course, all want.

I've been using Amazon with the help of Bitpanda for quite some time and it's almost as smooth as direct payments. You basically get an almost instant transfer from the exchange to your Amazon account. Of course this is only for the German Amazon as all branches like UK, US, DE, have their own laws and requirements.
I don't really need Amazon to take my coins directly, as long as there are reliable intermediaries.

Yup. That's as far as it needs to go really. Bitcoin spenders are a niche inside a niche. It works well enough with third parties who take on all the risk and all the ball ache. Amazon don't need to expend any effort and they won't. If I were them I'd look to expand availability to approved card vendors and that's it.

Amazon will surely accept bitcoin as they will see more investors and business community is attractive towards it. No company can survive in future if they do not accept digital currencies in the future. The Mass adaption phase of crypto is yet to come and at that time we will see big companies migrating to bitcoin for their payment solutions.

Dude, people spend their money in Amazon, they don't invest in. And its the type of company that will do fine with or without Bitcoin lol. If a day happens Amazon is interested to use the cryptography and/or to issue a coin it would rather create its own coin rather than add Bitcoin as a payment method.

A lot of people have been clamoring for Amazon to consider accepting Bitcoin as one of the mode of payment available on the giant eCommerce site but until now it seems that Amazon is not really interested. And it can be because they know for sure that the market is not that viable enough...they know that other merchants have done the same and the business volume they experienced is not really impressive. Amazon is business, they want to make money and they know when it is time to be a part of the bandwagon if they can see one.

Omg people keep repeating one single topic again and again. like seriously why do you even care anymore to make amazon accept cryptocurrencies. they simply are going to take their time they are like being mommy here. in the meantime, there are a lot of amazon gift cards you can buy at a marketplace in this forum if you feel lonely so its 100% amazon accepted right now even if it is not official.

Isn't it obvious? People don't want an alternative way to get around the fact that Amazon doesn't accept Bitcoin. People want them to accept Bitcoin solely because they believe the price will pump hard.

I hate to pop people's bubble, but I have to point out that Amazon with a very high probability isn't going to accept something like Bitcoin. It doesn't work on a large scale, and it might end up working against them.

What if a certain percentage of their customers get so upset about them using Bitcoin that they will ditch Amazon and look for an alternative? People here don't think about it, but it's quite a realistic scenario.

Not using Bitcoin is the safest bet.

They have strong partnership with credit card companies, not with paypal, they don't accept it but rarely have some relationship for some reasons. Amazon's aim is promoting amazon payments but accepting of crypto won't ruin their plans. Problem is that there is not so massive demand and refund system seems difficult task in this situation. Personally I don't want to see amazon accepts bitcoin for some reasons but will be glad if some ebates similar companies will offer me bitcoin/altcoin payments.
Still, bitcoin wasn't meant to have huge demand.

This is exactly what I tell people also! I can understand for merchants they have almost no motivation to accept Bitcoin. Get a new wallet, what? It may be worth half of what is was last week or twice as much, what? You still need to sell it to get cash, what?

So the easiest? Have a section called crypto and say: we don't accept crypto directly but you can buy gift cards with bitcoin here and here, and we accept those. Finito.

There would be no problem with refunds, as Amazon is the intermediary between the 2 parties and everything is automated anyway. Amazon doesn't have relationships with credit cards companies, it does with banks.


By accepting Bitcoin as a currency method, merchants aren't interested to hold the bitcoins in the hope its value increase the next week. They usually convert to fiat by the way. They just hope to increase their sales

if for me it is really not very important to be able to do Amazon transactions using bitcoin. maybe there is something that actually requires once there can be transactions with bitcoin.
indeed it was finally returned to individuals.

I don't seem to have listened and it seems because I feel I don't need it, I just want to know, but I might not use it.

There was a lot more news about the same in the past and also there were some petitions where bitcoins were  been demanded to be used in major marketplaces like amazon, aliexpress, etc but it didn't really showed any growth. Amazon has a great opportunity to start accepting bitcoins as what I think is doing so will maximize the amount of users on their platform and also a lot of crypto enthusiasts will start buying/selling on amazon which will expand the marketplace entierly throughout the globe. There really is a need for bitcoins to have such major growth as it may lead in the hike of price. Bitcoins possesing various benefits may soon be accepted on such major marketplaces.

We are perhaps in need of it. Why would we not appreciate bitcoins being used on amazon? Instead it would make our daily purchases much easier. There are platforms where we could buy amazon giftcards for bitcoins but soon the day should arrive when we could directly shop on amazon with our bitcoins.

The day this will come true will be the day when bitcoins will expand globally and lot of new peoples who never had any relation with cryptocurrencies will come to know about bitcoins and the demand for bitcoins will constantly keep rising up. For now, we need a mass amount of peoples to see how bitcoins regulate and to trust them and in such situation, amazon accepting bitcoins would really be a good headstart.

That would be a game changer, I'm optimistic of that happening, but I don't want to expect that it will be soon, maybe in the long run
when more and more institutional money coming in the space. All I read in the internet is just a mere speculation, no confirmation from Amazon yet.

There are mediums to use Bitcoin on amazon , but not directly. Big companies like Ebay , amazon cant use bitcoin as it is too much Volatile and they cant justify there sellers with the price. I prefer they stay with USD it will not make there sellers loss.

The volatility isn't an excuse for merchants. I don't understand why people keep repeating the same argument. Most of them get the coins directly converted to fiat once the sale is finished, there is no loss due to volatility. Also, following your logic, a large company can't start to accept BTC, but a medium or small company can. Why? The volatility depends on how big is the company? And they don't have to "justify" the price to sellers, do they do it with the dollar, euro, etc...?

There was a thread created few weeks ago regarding this matter, actually it was a news that says there is a browser extension that connects to Amazon and offers option of payment in bitcoin. A lot did not agree with the idea because there could be possible risks or danger in the part on the buyer and besides the channel that they will be using was  not that known much.

I think its because large companies are usually owned by shareholders and they can't be taking huge risks when they have all their investors to answer to.  Since small companies are usually privately owned they can afford to partake in more risky behavior.