Bitcoin Forum

1. What’s the best way to use BTC to shop at Amazon and other online retailers?

2. One source says the answer is to purchase gift cards at sites like Bitrefill.

3. I tried buying an Amazon gift card on Bitrefill but hit a glitch: the software showed a fee 100 times the purchase price.

I hope someone can clarify these issues!

the "best" way of buying stuff from any retailer is when you pay the retailer directly using bitcoin (from your wallet to their wallet) without any middleman. going through third parties to make a payment or going through them to buy a gift card and then using that will always have many additional fees (since they have to also make a profit!).
as for bitrefill i can't comment on the fee issue, but did you really see a fee of at least $1500 (100 times the minimum gift card value) because that seems unrealistic?

ps. checking the site it seems like the smallest default one is $200 and they charge $202 (only $2 fee) or 0.017781BTC. and smallest custom one is $10 which they charge $10.10 or 0.00088900BTC

There is no other way than gift cards as amazon doesn't accept BTC payment directly. If you're looking for other alternative, you can try https://purse.io/shop The homepage says you can get a 15% discount when you buy using BTC. There are more services that offers gift cards. You just have to compare the fees they charge, if any.

Another alternative is to pay someone to buy things for you with BTC, or use a prepaid card that you can top-up with BTC to pay your orders.

Is there no alternative seller to buy the things that you need? It would be easier as mentioned above when the retailers are accepting BTC directly.

Did you report this glitch to them?

Coordinate with them. This is helpful for them if you have found a glitch/bug that their customers encounter because this could lead them to lesser sales/service if they'll never fix it.

You can use Paxful to shop with BTC. Here is the list of offers for Amazon gift card: it is for the USA.

• Buy: https://paxful.com/buy-bitcoin/amazon-gift-card
• Sell: https://paxful.com/sell-bitcoin/amazon-gift-card

Some notes

• Offers for your location: Change it
• Click on Any currency to choose the currency you want to trade with.
• Include offline offers: Turn it On or Off.
• Filters: there is a list of criteria, you can choose one or some of them. I suggest you to choose Automated; Receipt required.
• Rate per bitcoin: you can sort it ascendingly or descendingly but keep in mind "Too good to be true" offers can put you under risks of scammers

Read more

• The Automated trade for giftcards (https://paxful.com/support/en-us/articles/360013505739-Using-automated-trades-for-gift-cards)
• Buying cryptocurrency with giftcards (https://paxful.com/support/en-us/articles/360009281094-Buying-cryptocurrency-with-gift-cards)
• Common gift card scams  (Awareness for our customers) (https://www.amazon.com/giftcardscams/b?ie=UTF8&node=15435487011)

Of course, one of the best third-party sites to buy products from Amazon is Bitrefill. It's really easy to use bitrefill and it's safe. You can use Moonpay as well, it's another safe third-party that will help you to pay for products online using crypto. And for developers who buying domains, hosting packages, or similar products, they can use coinpayments to pay for such products by crypto via hostinger.

Thanks for helping to solve an earlier problem with my wallet!

I’m sure the Bitrefill glitch is connected with this note that appeared: “for processing without confirmations we require a transaction fee of at least 6 sat/vbyte”. The solution is probably to confirm the transaction, but I don’t know how to do that. I have a web source that explains how to do it on a phone, but I’m using a laptop.

BTW the fee was actually $4000 for a $40 gift card.

Bitrefill is well known website, report the glitch in their telegram they will solve it.

if you want your transaction to confirm fast (which is probably what that quote from Bitrefill means) you have to pay a high fee in comparison to other transactions that are in the mempool at the moment you send your transaction.
keep in mind that you don't confirm your tx, the miners do. they see a lot of transactions (in their mempool) and select the ones paying the highest fees until they fill one block. most of the times mempool is not crowded so paying the minimum (1 sat/vbyte) is enough. but sometimes it is filled with more transactions and a competition is formed.

the wallet you use should be capable of making this assessment itself and just inform you about the priority with the advanced option to edit the fee yourself. for example Electrum wallet has this option with a slider and a textbox.
you can also take a look at mempool yourself, like the last chart in this page: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h shows that right now paying 1-2 satoshi/vbyte will give you a high priority (anything smaller than 1 MB size in that chart).

here is a topic with more information about fees: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5153031.0

this is indeed very strange.
you should contact Bitrefill support and inform them about this serious flaw in their system. it would help if you had something like the session ID, or a screenshot that you could provide to them so that they can fix it.

You can buy goods from stores which accepts bitcoin. However Amazon does not accept cryptocurrencies yet however you can purchase Amazon gift cards but its complicated. I will wait until amazon accepts bitcoin as a payment method. If a store accepts crypto, its pretty easy to buy things from there.