ELI5 How iPayYou.io works

iPayYou.io is an Amazon.com gift-card-for-cryptocurrency trading service.

Currently, iPayYou will buy your gift cards at a fixed rate and pay back in cryptocurrency.

Accepted coins include Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. As of 2020, the BitcoinSV currency was no longer listed as an available cryptocurrency.

At one point, it was very popular to exchange Amazon gif cards to/from Bitcoin and then shapeshift them again using Virwox, until the latter was shut down in early 2020.

Early iPayYou Wallet

The iPayYou.io Amazon gift card service was initially launched as the iPayYou wallet.

The automatic cryptocurrency for gift card exchange wallet was conceived by former Amazon.com executive Gene Kavner and initially aimed to support gift cards from several shops, including Starbucks, Apple and BestBuy.

iPayYou Home Page

Here’s a sample promo from their current live website home page:

How iPayYou.io Works

The service allows you to trade your Amazon.com e-Gift and Physical Gift cards for cryptocurrencies.

Electronic gift cards are sent by email while traditional ones are sent in by mail.

Processing takes around 8 hours for e-Gift cards and same-day processing (no fixed amount of hours set) for physical cards received.

For e-Gift cards they discount a 17% fee and for physical cards the discount is 13%. The iPayYou.io fees are considered reasonable for the kind of risk taken (gift cards are voidable whereas cryptocurrencies aren’t).

Note: Rates may vary with your account history. The above rates are taken from the public sample provided by iPayYou, therefore they shouldn’t be taken as definitive rates. Please contact iPayYou support for official information.

Users can trade between U$ 1000 and U$ 2000 worth of cards.

The higher limit is for physical gift cards.

Bitcoin to Amazon.com – Is it secure?

iPayYou also offers another interesting service: they allow you to fund your Amazon account using Bitcoin and other cryptos.

But there’s a catch.

They require your Amazon.com username and password.

This is unusual, so we recommend our readers to reconsider using this feature.

Requesting customer credentials for a 3rd party website is extremely unconventional, to put it mildly.

Video Review

On this video, Youtube reviewer Dave Taylor claims to use the service and praises it:

iPayYou on Reddit

At least one iPayYou representative maintains an active presence on Reddit.

The iPayYou tech support representative on Reddit seems to be legitimately concerned with customer satisfaction.

Their Reddit profile has been active for 4+ years. Since you cannot change usernames on Reddit, it proves their claim that they’ve been active for at least the past 4 years.

iPayYou Alternative

iPayYou seems to have become a popular alternative to the purse.io service.

Purse.io also accepts Bitcoin [BTC] and Bitcoin Cash [BCH] and allows you to shop at Amazon.com.

Purse.io works using wishlists. Amazon customers build a wishlist and send crypto to the Purse app. The crypto buyer fulfills the wishlist using their regular credit card. Once the wishlist is shipped to the buyer, the Purse.io app releases the crypto.

No relation to Ipayou

iPayYou bears absolutely no relation to the Appclose Ipayou application.

There seems to be some confusion about this. Note that the Amazon.com cryptocurrency app has one extra Y.

Conclusion

Despite the relatively clumsy implementation and some quirks (like requesting your Amazon.com credentials), there are no serious reports of iPayYou being a scam that we found at the time this article was published.

We haven’t tested the Amazon.com transaction but it seems to be working for some.

I’ve heard that Amazon.com has begun limiting some accounts based on the gift card trading pattern.

Since iPayYou limits gift cards to U$ 1000 to 2000 a day, that’s a volume level that would immediately trigger an internal Amazon review.

This type of review may cause your Amazon account to get shut down for TOS violations.

So, unless you’ve got some gift cards and wish to trade a certain volume, I wouldn’t recommend you do this systematically at high volumes.

But for occasional transactions it may be a nice gateway between crypto and Amazon.com.

As always perform due diligence and do your own research before sending or receiving crypto online.

This article is not an endorsement of the described service. Provided for informational purposes only.

Links

Support email address: Support@iPayYou.io

Official iPayYou Twitter

iPayYou Website

Reddit Comment

Is iPayYou Legit? [Bitcointalk Discussion]

iPayYou – Safe Bitcoin Wallet For Gift Cards, Amazon & Starbucks?