Bitcoin investors, traders, and stakeholders would be heading out for the Thanksgiving holidays with a piece of good news today. iPayYou has just announced a way for consumers to buy items on Amazon using Bitcoin through a service called Amazon Direct. Amazon Direct makes it easier to shop on the world’s biggest online store for everything using Bitcoin. More so, the service is another step forward in the bid to make Bitcoin the default currency of the world.
Here’s how to shop on Amazon using Bitcoin
Now, you can shop on Amazon using iPayYou – you can easily transfer any amount of Bitcoin from your BTC wallet to Amazon. With Amazon Direct, all you need to do is to transfer your Bitcoin to the required account and voila, you’ll have USD in your Amazon account to spend when shopping. The launching of Amazon Direct at this time is strategic and it will meet the needs of shoppers just in time for the holidays.
The National Retail Federation has forecasted that U.S. shoppers will spend an average of $935.58 during this year’s holiday season. The average spend by shoppers in the 2016 holiday season is 3.6% more than the average spending in the 2015 holiday season. More interesting is the fact that the federation submits that online sales will increase by 10% this year to $117 billon. A decent part of that holiday spending can now be spent using Bitcoin through Amazon Direct.
Gene Kavner, the current CEO of iPayYou is a former worldwide director at Amazon and he knows the right doors to knock. In a press release, Kavner observed that “during my time as an executive at Amazon, we closely studied the friction points and obstacles faced by shoppers, including and especially with payments. Bitcoin is a solution to so many of those problems. That’s why today, in time for the holiday season, we’re launching the most direct way to spend bitcoin anywhere, starting with the world’s largest retailer.”
Here’s what happens under the hood with Amazon Direct
From the foregoing, it is obvious that Amazon Direct provides simple way to shop on Amazon using a Bitcoin wallet. Most users won’t really know about the heavy lifting that goes on under the hood before they can shop on Amazon with Bitcoin. Here’s what we know about what goes on under the hood of Amazon Direct.
To start with, Amazon Direct works because iPayYou purchases digital gift card balances through a Washington-based firm called ACI. iPayYou then transfers the balances on the gift cards it purchased to your personal Amazon account. Of course, you won’t even know that gift cards were involved in operation of Amazon Direct unless you check through your transaction history on Amazon.
iPayYou however goes a step further to ensure that the value of the USD balance in your Amazon account fluctuates in line with how Bitcoin (BTC) trades in the market. iPayYou is working on solution to lock in the USD-BTC conversion balance for users who would prefer to have a fixed dollar amount in exchange for their BTC. However, for now, the value of the Amazon balance will fluctuate with Bitcoin prices when you use Amazon direct.
Nonetheless, Amazon Direct remains the best solution for shopping on Amazon with Bitcoin. iPayYou CEO, Gene Kavner observes that “We’ve removed a lot of complexity compared to other options… We actually transfer funds from iPayYou’s bank account to Amazon. They don’t even know it’s bitcoin.”
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