Topic: decentralization needed on the spend side: SpendBitcoins competitors, step on up (Read 1295 times)

I have a significant inventory of Walmart and Target gift cards and Amazon.com claim codes for the US market via Bitmit.  They are available on an on-going basis EXCEPT between mid-Nov and mid-Dec 2012 for the physical gift cards due to personal reasons.  They are replenished when sold, especially the $500 gift cards -- I have the most of these.  Check them out here:

http://www.bitmit.net/en/user/heavysteel

Cheers.

It's biggest strength was being able to piggy back BTC onto mainstream, ordinary daily spending instead of just niche or occasional purchases.  I'm not sure how many other countries have an equivalent of the BPay system which is far and away the most popular method of bill payment used by Australians - meshing BPay with BTC meant that Australians were able to pay most of their recurring expenses using BTC and that's certainly something which needs to be emulated elsewhere.

Link:
Spend Bitcoins out of the US market - Australia only for now
 - https://spendbitcoins.zendesk.com/entries/21806042-spend-bitcoins-out-of-the-us-market



The real shame is that these conversion services are even needed.  Spend Bitcoins offered the sole method for trading BTCs to get a Southwest Airlines gift eCode, for example, but what is really needed is for SWA themselves or any one of the thousands of travel firms to add bitcoin as a payment method.

Spend Bitcoins is a pioneer and took the arrows while proving that bitcoiners will use their coins for spending.  I paid for many domain name registrations thanks to GoDaddy egift codes offered by Spend Bitcoins.  Spend Bitcoins was unique with a number of offerings ... like Costco gift cards, and much more.

It is becoming easier for a merchant to start accepting bitcoins themselves.  Bit-Pay's list of merchants coninues to grow.  Mt. Gox's merchant tools is fairly simple to implement for one-off purchases and they provide a Magento shopping card extension.  

What needs to happen to get merchants onboard is a good case of where a nimble merchant added bitcoin and enjoyed a good amount of new business from that as a result.    Perhaps this will be the NewEgg competitor that Roger Ver has described as something in the works.   But you'ld think that some account rep at GoDaddy who was responsible for Spend Bitcoins' account would have noticed the volume drop and think that maybe accepting bitcoin as a payment method might be a good idea.  Or that a rep from Amazon would notice that the volume for those gift codes was pretty respectable.

But it is good to see that Australians will now get the full attention of Spend Bitcoins and hopefully their continued success will be a model that others elsewhere can follow.

Electricity in Australia is over 20c a kw. This is the reason there are not many Australian bitcoin miners to buy cheaper coins from and why we have to pay more.

Spendbitcoins no longer operates within the US nor deals with any US customers. Check out their site, payout options, and announcements.

I have been trying to think of ways I could start a similar service, but Jeremy had a big advantage in that Australians were willing to spend a lot more for btc than Americans are. (can be seen in difference of his service and fastcash4bitcoins)

The other hurdle was the profit (estimate 2-4% volume, leaning toward low end) isn't really worth the risk of having the necessary bank accounts in my name and all the work that would be involved keeping them liquid. With all the flags that will be set off by this type of business by a person living in the US.

I've used spendbitcoins and say jeremy does an amazing job, I doubt anybody will open a franchise and have to pay jeremy a % of their revenues

Franchising is a good idea.

I have used and love Jeremy West's spendbitcoins service... but it's clear that there's an inherent difficulty faced in servicing requests when counterparties (e.g. Amazon/paypal) can delay processing. Additionally, because Jeremy lives in Australia and I live in the US, there's sometimes an entirely reasonable, but still unfortunate time delay for orders because it's 0-dark-thirty in the morning in Australia when its mid-afternoon here.

Because of these reasons, I think we need more services equivalent to the spendbitcoins service. These could be franchises, or simply competitors, but the key property should be geographical distribution: ideally one each in the US, UK, Germany, and perhaps Brazil & Russia. This allows for decentralization in legal environment as well as normal operating hours.

Thoughts?

-bgc