One of the biggest deterrents to Crypto adoption is the inability to easily use Cryptocurrencies to make purchases of goods and services.
Awhile back I heard the Jordan Crawford from Purse.io talking about their service on CryptoStreet Podcast. If you want to take a listen it is from episode 49, you can find it here: https://cryptostreetpod.podbean.com/e/episode-49-jordan-crawford/
Basically, what the service does is match people who want to buy stuff on Amazon with people who have unused gift cards, or just want to buy Bitcoin and are willing to do so by making purchases on Amazon for other people.
So you create a quick account on Purse.io and choose one of two methods for shopping. You can either browse and add to your cart, or you can import your Amazon Wish List. It will then tell you how much BTC the items in your cart require and give you a BTC address to send to.
Once you send in your BTC it goes into Escrow while you are "matched" with an "earner". The Earner is the person who is going to buy the items for you, they place the order and send you an order number and projected delivery date.
The kicker is, you can get a discount on the items you are buying. 5% off is automatic, but you get a slider and can aim for bigger discounts if you are willing to wait a little longer to be matched with an earner. The slider goes all the way up to 50%, but from what Jordan said on the PodCast, 18% seems to be the sweet spot for getting matched with an earner for quick delivery. I'm not sure how that part works, as the max discount you can request on your first order is 15%.
So on a recent trip I managed to put a very small crack in the screen of my kindle paperwhite. It's a tiny crack, but the LED light reflects off of it and it is a huge annoyance. So it needs replacing.
I found a refurbished Kindle Voyage, which is the next step up from the Paperwhite, put it in my wishlist with a case to use on roadtrips and went over to Purse.
Sure enough it imported right in, gave me a price and a deposit address. I sent my BTC over from my Ledger Nano S and waited for confirmations to come in.
It wasn't 5 minutes after the order confirmed before I had an earner matched up. But they then declined the order saying that additional fees were required. Uhmmm.. What?
So I go looking for how to deal with this and what kind of additional fees I need to send. But then, lo and behold, another Earner grabbed my order and fulfilled it. Guess the first one was just money grabbing.
While at 15% they estimate delivery in 3-7 days, my order number was posted with a delivery for Monday within 10 minutes of placing the order. Good ole Amazon Prime and Holiday Deliveries.
I saved myself over $25 on my order, and only cost myself one day (if I had purchased through my own Prime Account I would have gotten free 1 day shipping, with Sunday delivery).
Now... there's the problem of giving random strangers your personal information, so if you have issues with that sort of thing, you might want to have the items sent to a public mailbox. I personally think a lot of these sellers, and certainly the two that I saw pick up my order had usernames that did not sound like US citizens, so I am not terribly worried about that part.
If you are interested you can sign up on https://purse.io/?_r=NzPPJY. You'll get $5.00 worth of Bitcoin after you make $100 in transactions.
One thing to be aware of is that there seems to have been an issue of people trying to buy Amazon Giftcards and having used giftcard codes sent to them but by the time they figured out it was a bad code their BTC was long gone. So maybe stick with tangible goods with this service.
Give it a go. If you are buying things from Amazon and can wait a couple of extra days then Purse may be a good way to not only buy with Crypto but also get some nice discounts along the way.