has anyone used http://www.bitcoinshop.us/index.php ?
they have the widest selection of stuff ive seen from most online BTC stores...
to add to the list, Ive used http://bitstickers.net/ and they were very good.
Topic: Useful sites for every day Bitcoin spending (links and reviews) - page 5. (Read 12183 times)
February 02, 2015, 07:44:44 AM
February 02, 2015, 07:39:43 AM
cardflip.com - huge discounts on some gift cards, plus 3% more with bitcoin
egifter.com - similar to gyft
whollyhemp.com - soap and other products
tinyfootprintcoffe.com - coffee
All are favorites of mine that I use all the time and would confidently recommend to others.
egifter.com - similar to gyft
whollyhemp.com - soap and other products
tinyfootprintcoffe.com - coffee
All are favorites of mine that I use all the time and would confidently recommend to others.
February 02, 2015, 05:02:20 AM
Using http://www.bitwage.co I am getting paid 100% in Bitcoin so most of my spending is in Bitcoin. As I find more useful sites I will post the links and write up a quick review. Post here if you have some useful sites for every day Bitcoin spending (not obscure "you can buy knitting needles at this place online" links).
http://www.purse.io
http://www.bitwa.la
http://www.cheapair.com
http://www.expedia.com
http://www.steampowered.com
http://www.localbitcoins.com
http://www.gyft.com
http://www.egifter.com
http://www.anxpro.com
http://www.bitronictech.net
http://www.takeaway.com
http://www.bit-x.com
http://www.bitrefill.com
http://www.billpayforcoins.com DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE!!!
Purse.io
I love this site when I need to buy most things online. If you can buy it on Amazon.com you can use purse.io. Purse.io allows you to buy anything on Amazon and get around 8% to 30% off, every time. Even if you don't use Bitcoin for anything else, it is a no brainer if you are going to buy something on Amazon to use purse.io.
How can they give such big discounts? Amazon has this thing called Mechanical Turk, people all over the world can do simple tasks that computers cannot yet do and get paid a small wage. People in poor countries will do this and make a few dollars a day. But they get paid in Amazon points. It takes months for them to get those points turned into their local currency.
Purse.io allows people to buy your Amazon order for you and they get paid when the shipment arrives. If you're worried about people using stolen credit cards or anything for the purchse, Purse.io has a $10,000 guarantee that they will put toward any problem with your order.
Bitwala
Pay your bills with bitcoins in Europe. It allows you to make a SEPA transfer paying with bitcoins and the recipient receives the payment in euros. They charge .5% for the payment and the exchange rate they use is close to the EUR/BTC rate on most exchanges. You can send up to 200 euro per month, 500 with a simple e-mail verification and 2000 euro with utility bill scan and passport scan. I used it to pay 500 euro of my rent and am waiting on verification of my documents to pay the rest. I will also be able to use this to pay the many speeding tickets that the cameras like to send me.
Cheap Air
I use this site all the time for booking my flights. I have compared the prices to other sites and their price is usually within one or two dollars of the cheapest site. It's easy, convenient and you can pay with bitcoins. One cool feature they have is that if your fare drops any time after you buy the tickets before your flight, they will give you a voucher for the difference (up to $100). I used it once and was quite pleased.
Expedia Hotels
Though I do like using airBnB for some of my stays, they do not accept Bitcoin so I tend to go with Expedia. You can book a hotel room and pay with bitcoins. There are some hotels that do not have Bitcoin as an option (I'm not sure why) but about 90% do accept it. I've built up gold status on there and while it gives me a few perks on hotels it is not as good as some hotel reward programs that I have used (like Holiday Inn and Marriot rewards programs). But I did get a $150 coupon for a hotel stay by reaching that status and some hotels have VIP status that gives me stuff like a free bottle of wine or candy in my room.
Steam
Haven't used this myself yet but it appears to be working well for people to top up their steam accounts using bitcoins. You can't pay exactly for the game, you choose your amounts (like a gift card) but it should get you close enough. Great place to buy video games.
LocalBitcoins
This is very useful for me, my paycheck is in dollars converted to bitcoins through BitWage but I live in Germany where they spend euros. By selling my bitcoins on localbitcoins I am able to have some cash to pay for local things like food and restaurants. LocalBitcoins is actually banned in Germany but I still talk to one or two guys that are willing to trade so I have enough spending money for rent and food.
Gyft
I used this site to buy an eBay gift card. It was pretty easy to sign up and buy a card with bitcoins. Right after I bought the card I received the coupon code. I then went onto eBay and plugged in the code and got the discount (the site says to wait up to 4 hours but it took it right away). On eBay I still had to "pay" the $0 charge with PayPal but that was just a matter of signing in and accepting the $0 fee. Everything beyond that was just like buying something on eBay. For that card I could only choose $5 increments up to $50, then the increments increased. I actually chose an item based on the fact that it was $43.97 instead of a more expensive version over $60 because of this. I received some "points" for using bitcoins which I assume will go toward a discount on a future purchase. I believe it is 3% back for bitcoin purchases.
Gyft and Egifter have around 100 or so businesses they sell gift cards for from Home Depot to Applebees, Chilis, Lowes, Amazon, TJ Maxx, Burger King and on and on...if I was in the US I would use this a lot.
Egifter
Egifter is similar to Gyft but I was able to buy an eBay gift card in $1 increments, I purchased a gift code for $95. With this one it took a few hours before I could use the code on eBay but it worked the same as Gyft taking the purchase price to $0 before asking me to pay with my PayPal account. Gyft and Egifter appear to have about the same amount of stores, they could be off by a few I'm sure. Egifter gave me some points, more than Gyft but I have not explored how to use them yet.
BitWage
If you are working in the US and you get your salary direct deposited you should try this site. They work with payroll companies to convert your paycheck to bitcoins. Most companies allow you to break your paycheck into multiple direct deposit accounts with a percentage in each account. I suggest you try the site and at least do 5-10% of your paycheck converted to bitcoin to see how convenient it is and useful for having bitcoins to spend.
ANXPro
ANXPro is an exchange but they offer a debit card that you can fund with bitcoins. I received my card and am a bit disappointed by the charging cost and the delay. When I received and activated my card I went to the site and chose the option to fund my card with bitcoins. The site converts your bitcoins to dollars, the bitcoin dollar price when I went to charge the card was about $246. They charged the card at a rate of $235/BTC. So they are basically taking 5% to charge the card. So then I went to the store and tried to use it and it was declined. It was not until about 3 days later that I received an e-mail that said that my card had been funded. So as of right now, though they offer a solution, I do not see it as very useful. I would rather not lose 5% in purchasing value, and needing to charge the card several days in advance means I am not really converting my bitcoins to pay for a purchase, but instead just converting my bitcoins to dollars and funding a debit card (which could likely be done quicker and cheaper another way).
Bitronic Tech
I use this site for my hosting service. They have good rates, they do a lot of different hosting configurations giving you a Linux server of whatever variety you might want. I like that I can pay their monthly bill in bitcoins because throughout the month if the price goes up a lot I just pay my monthly hosting bill before the price settles down. And the fact that I pay in bitcoins means I can drop them at any time (just by not paying) and they won't keep charging my card until I jump through hoops on the phone to get them to drop me.
Takeaway.com
Takeaway.com is a great website for finding a local restaurant (mainly pizza) that delivers or offers take-out. You give them your zip code and it gives you a list of all of the restaurants in the area they support. It has reviews of each restaurant and the minimum required purchase for delivery. It even has a good timer to show if it is open or how long from right now it will be open. When you click on a restaurant it gives you a simple menu to choose from. You choose your food just like you would buy anything else online, putting it into your cart. When you check out you give your address and phone number which you can create an account to save for you. Then you just choose payment in bitcoin and send your bitcoins. Very simple. I ordered a hamburger and some dessert last night from a local burger place. Everything went smoothy, I received an e-mail when my bitcoins were received and one acknowledging that the restaurant was working on my order. I'm in Germany so I was redirected to www.lieferando.de but they have sites all over the world doing the same thing. My order went well, I won't critique the meal because that has nothing to do with the site. But I like that I can buy food with bitcoins. Update: used this a second time, for both orders I tried to add a message to the "remarks" box and both times the remarks were ignored (no onions on pizza, etc), just an FYI.
Bit-x
Bit-x is a debit card where you load bitcoins and upon purchase with the card the charge is converted to the currency used by the merchant. As of right now I only used it for one purchase so I will go by that. When setting up the card you choose the currency you want the card denominated in. Being in Europe I chose euros. I have not yet used the card in europe but when I was in the US I was at a restaurant that did not accept cash so I pulled out this card hoping it would work. Surprisingly it did even though I forgot the PIN (used it as a credit card). From a quick glance at the balance the card converted my total from bitcoins to euros to dollars. The euro/dollar conversion looked legit (not an outrageous conversion rate) but I did not check for exact numbers so I'm not sure if they add an exchange rate per purchase. I will likely start using it more and check the numbers for rates. But all around it is a decent card and works as advertised.
Bitrefill
The phone plan I use uses prepaid cards. My carrier is 02 but this site covers dozens of prepaid phone choices. It conveniently just asks for your phone number then finds your carrier for you. Then you provide your email address and choose the card amount you want to buy. Simple QR payment and 10 minutes or so later your phone is topped up. I used to have to go to the store, buy the card, get the number on the receipt then go home and go the the 02 website to give the card number and wait for the phone to top up. This so much easier.
BillPay For Coins
This is a bill pay website where you enter the address of your payee and they send the payment for you. I am still in the process of trying my first payment, I will give more information on how it goes. The current fee is 1.99%
DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE!!!
Suggested websites in the thread:
http://cardflip.com - huge discounts on some gift cards, plus 3% more with bitcoin
http://egifter.com - similar to gyft
http://whollyhemp.com - soap and other products
http://inyfootprintcoffe.com - coffee
http://bitbrew.net/ - coffee
http://www.bitcoinshop.us - several items
http://bitstickers.net - stickers
http://allthingsluxury.biz/ - luxury goods
https://www.namecheap.com/ - hosting service
http://www.9flats.com - rooms for nightly rent
http://www.newegg.com/ - computer stuff
http://www.tigerdirect.com/ - computer stuff
http://www.dell.com/ - computers
http://www.microsoftstore.com/ - microsoft products
http://www.overstock.com/ - online store
http://www.rakuten.com - online store
http://www.pexpeppers.com - hot sauce and honey
http://www.cryptosextoys.com - sex toys
Canada:
https://bylls.com/ - pay your bills
Phillipines:
http://rebit.ph
http://bills.ninja
http://mobileshop.ph - top up your phone
http://piiko.com - top up your phone
http://www.purse.io
http://www.bitwa.la
http://www.cheapair.com
http://www.expedia.com
http://www.steampowered.com
http://www.localbitcoins.com
http://www.gyft.com
http://www.egifter.com
http://www.anxpro.com
http://www.bitronictech.net
http://www.takeaway.com
http://www.bit-x.com
http://www.bitrefill.com
Purse.io
I love this site when I need to buy most things online. If you can buy it on Amazon.com you can use purse.io. Purse.io allows you to buy anything on Amazon and get around 8% to 30% off, every time. Even if you don't use Bitcoin for anything else, it is a no brainer if you are going to buy something on Amazon to use purse.io.
How can they give such big discounts? Amazon has this thing called Mechanical Turk, people all over the world can do simple tasks that computers cannot yet do and get paid a small wage. People in poor countries will do this and make a few dollars a day. But they get paid in Amazon points. It takes months for them to get those points turned into their local currency.
Purse.io allows people to buy your Amazon order for you and they get paid when the shipment arrives. If you're worried about people using stolen credit cards or anything for the purchse, Purse.io has a $10,000 guarantee that they will put toward any problem with your order.
Bitwala
Pay your bills with bitcoins in Europe. It allows you to make a SEPA transfer paying with bitcoins and the recipient receives the payment in euros. They charge .5% for the payment and the exchange rate they use is close to the EUR/BTC rate on most exchanges. You can send up to 200 euro per month, 500 with a simple e-mail verification and 2000 euro with utility bill scan and passport scan. I used it to pay 500 euro of my rent and am waiting on verification of my documents to pay the rest. I will also be able to use this to pay the many speeding tickets that the cameras like to send me.
Cheap Air
I use this site all the time for booking my flights. I have compared the prices to other sites and their price is usually within one or two dollars of the cheapest site. It's easy, convenient and you can pay with bitcoins. One cool feature they have is that if your fare drops any time after you buy the tickets before your flight, they will give you a voucher for the difference (up to $100). I used it once and was quite pleased.
Expedia Hotels
Though I do like using airBnB for some of my stays, they do not accept Bitcoin so I tend to go with Expedia. You can book a hotel room and pay with bitcoins. There are some hotels that do not have Bitcoin as an option (I'm not sure why) but about 90% do accept it. I've built up gold status on there and while it gives me a few perks on hotels it is not as good as some hotel reward programs that I have used (like Holiday Inn and Marriot rewards programs). But I did get a $150 coupon for a hotel stay by reaching that status and some hotels have VIP status that gives me stuff like a free bottle of wine or candy in my room.
Steam
Haven't used this myself yet but it appears to be working well for people to top up their steam accounts using bitcoins. You can't pay exactly for the game, you choose your amounts (like a gift card) but it should get you close enough. Great place to buy video games.
LocalBitcoins
This is very useful for me, my paycheck is in dollars converted to bitcoins through BitWage but I live in Germany where they spend euros. By selling my bitcoins on localbitcoins I am able to have some cash to pay for local things like food and restaurants. LocalBitcoins is actually banned in Germany but I still talk to one or two guys that are willing to trade so I have enough spending money for rent and food.
Gyft
I used this site to buy an eBay gift card. It was pretty easy to sign up and buy a card with bitcoins. Right after I bought the card I received the coupon code. I then went onto eBay and plugged in the code and got the discount (the site says to wait up to 4 hours but it took it right away). On eBay I still had to "pay" the $0 charge with PayPal but that was just a matter of signing in and accepting the $0 fee. Everything beyond that was just like buying something on eBay. For that card I could only choose $5 increments up to $50, then the increments increased. I actually chose an item based on the fact that it was $43.97 instead of a more expensive version over $60 because of this. I received some "points" for using bitcoins which I assume will go toward a discount on a future purchase. I believe it is 3% back for bitcoin purchases.
Gyft and Egifter have around 100 or so businesses they sell gift cards for from Home Depot to Applebees, Chilis, Lowes, Amazon, TJ Maxx, Burger King and on and on...if I was in the US I would use this a lot.
Egifter
Egifter is similar to Gyft but I was able to buy an eBay gift card in $1 increments, I purchased a gift code for $95. With this one it took a few hours before I could use the code on eBay but it worked the same as Gyft taking the purchase price to $0 before asking me to pay with my PayPal account. Gyft and Egifter appear to have about the same amount of stores, they could be off by a few I'm sure. Egifter gave me some points, more than Gyft but I have not explored how to use them yet.
BitWage
If you are working in the US and you get your salary direct deposited you should try this site. They work with payroll companies to convert your paycheck to bitcoins. Most companies allow you to break your paycheck into multiple direct deposit accounts with a percentage in each account. I suggest you try the site and at least do 5-10% of your paycheck converted to bitcoin to see how convenient it is and useful for having bitcoins to spend.
ANXPro
ANXPro is an exchange but they offer a debit card that you can fund with bitcoins. I received my card and am a bit disappointed by the charging cost and the delay. When I received and activated my card I went to the site and chose the option to fund my card with bitcoins. The site converts your bitcoins to dollars, the bitcoin dollar price when I went to charge the card was about $246. They charged the card at a rate of $235/BTC. So they are basically taking 5% to charge the card. So then I went to the store and tried to use it and it was declined. It was not until about 3 days later that I received an e-mail that said that my card had been funded. So as of right now, though they offer a solution, I do not see it as very useful. I would rather not lose 5% in purchasing value, and needing to charge the card several days in advance means I am not really converting my bitcoins to pay for a purchase, but instead just converting my bitcoins to dollars and funding a debit card (which could likely be done quicker and cheaper another way).
Bitronic Tech
I use this site for my hosting service. They have good rates, they do a lot of different hosting configurations giving you a Linux server of whatever variety you might want. I like that I can pay their monthly bill in bitcoins because throughout the month if the price goes up a lot I just pay my monthly hosting bill before the price settles down. And the fact that I pay in bitcoins means I can drop them at any time (just by not paying) and they won't keep charging my card until I jump through hoops on the phone to get them to drop me.
Takeaway.com
Takeaway.com is a great website for finding a local restaurant (mainly pizza) that delivers or offers take-out. You give them your zip code and it gives you a list of all of the restaurants in the area they support. It has reviews of each restaurant and the minimum required purchase for delivery. It even has a good timer to show if it is open or how long from right now it will be open. When you click on a restaurant it gives you a simple menu to choose from. You choose your food just like you would buy anything else online, putting it into your cart. When you check out you give your address and phone number which you can create an account to save for you. Then you just choose payment in bitcoin and send your bitcoins. Very simple. I ordered a hamburger and some dessert last night from a local burger place. Everything went smoothy, I received an e-mail when my bitcoins were received and one acknowledging that the restaurant was working on my order. I'm in Germany so I was redirected to www.lieferando.de but they have sites all over the world doing the same thing. My order went well, I won't critique the meal because that has nothing to do with the site. But I like that I can buy food with bitcoins. Update: used this a second time, for both orders I tried to add a message to the "remarks" box and both times the remarks were ignored (no onions on pizza, etc), just an FYI.
Bit-x
Bit-x is a debit card where you load bitcoins and upon purchase with the card the charge is converted to the currency used by the merchant. As of right now I only used it for one purchase so I will go by that. When setting up the card you choose the currency you want the card denominated in. Being in Europe I chose euros. I have not yet used the card in europe but when I was in the US I was at a restaurant that did not accept cash so I pulled out this card hoping it would work. Surprisingly it did even though I forgot the PIN (used it as a credit card). From a quick glance at the balance the card converted my total from bitcoins to euros to dollars. The euro/dollar conversion looked legit (not an outrageous conversion rate) but I did not check for exact numbers so I'm not sure if they add an exchange rate per purchase. I will likely start using it more and check the numbers for rates. But all around it is a decent card and works as advertised.
Bitrefill
The phone plan I use uses prepaid cards. My carrier is 02 but this site covers dozens of prepaid phone choices. It conveniently just asks for your phone number then finds your carrier for you. Then you provide your email address and choose the card amount you want to buy. Simple QR payment and 10 minutes or so later your phone is topped up. I used to have to go to the store, buy the card, get the number on the receipt then go home and go the the 02 website to give the card number and wait for the phone to top up. This so much easier.
This is a bill pay website where you enter the address of your payee and they send the payment for you. I am still in the process of trying my first payment, I will give more information on how it goes. The current fee is 1.99%
DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE!!!
Suggested websites in the thread:
http://cardflip.com - huge discounts on some gift cards, plus 3% more with bitcoin
http://egifter.com - similar to gyft
http://whollyhemp.com - soap and other products
http://inyfootprintcoffe.com - coffee
http://bitbrew.net/ - coffee
http://www.bitcoinshop.us - several items
http://bitstickers.net - stickers
http://allthingsluxury.biz/ - luxury goods
https://www.namecheap.com/ - hosting service
http://www.9flats.com - rooms for nightly rent
http://www.newegg.com/ - computer stuff
http://www.tigerdirect.com/ - computer stuff
http://www.dell.com/ - computers
http://www.microsoftstore.com/ - microsoft products
http://www.overstock.com/ - online store
http://www.rakuten.com - online store
http://www.pexpeppers.com - hot sauce and honey
http://www.cryptosextoys.com - sex toys
Canada:
https://bylls.com/ - pay your bills
Phillipines:
http://rebit.ph
http://bills.ninja
http://mobileshop.ph - top up your phone
http://piiko.com - top up your phone
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