For online workers, freelancers in India, at times they receive their payments in the form of Amazon.com gift card.
For instance as Amazon Mechanical Turk worker from India, I have been receiving my payment in the form of Amazon gift card since 2016.
The same goes for many other online jobs such as writing a review for Capterra.
The option of using the Amazon.com gift card to order products to India involves high import and shipping fee.
The other option of converting Amazon.com gift card balance to Indian rupee with Purse.io and WazirX.com is not instant or automated and involves cost as well as we will see later in this article. There are a number of steps you need to perform manually through Amazon.com, Purse.io, and finally WazirX.com platform.
After signing up with Purse.io, click Earn.
“Rate” in the second column (Fig. 4 above) after Country reads % above market rate and perhaps needs an explanation. Asked Purse.io customer care over their chat button and received the following reply over the email:
It is perhaps not straight forward to comprehend what the “Effective Rate” in the above third column means. What you can do is if the Rate shows say 25%, buyer will be getting a product priced 100$ at 75$ if he or she buys from you. In other words, you in the process of Earning Crypto will let the buyer in the Amazon.com buy 75$ goods by paying 100$ when dollar converted to Bitcoin at the prevailing exchange rate.
Buyer gets 100$ product at 75$.
Or for 75$, you are paying 25$ extra.
Therefore for 100$, you are paying 25/75 x 100 = 33.33$ extra.
I believe Purse.io should also include a column that shows the cost from the perspective of the one in the process of Earning Crypto as well explicitly. Maybe for marketing reason, they are not doing this.
Fig. 7: You need to perform a number of manual tasks like adding a tracking code of the product ordered by you for the buyer through Purse.io.Once you place an order on behalf of a customer through Purse.io on Amazon.com, your Bitcoin will be released only after the buyer confirms that he or she has received the shipment. So, the process may take 3 to 10 days or more.
The next step in WazirX is to sell BTC (Bitcoin) balance in the marketplace to receive payment in USDT.
Then converting USDT to INR through P2P.
For 25$ item order placed on behalf of a buyer, I received 1200 INR to my bank account. With 1$ = 69.46 at the time of writing, this amounts to 1736.38. So, received 69.10% or ended up paying 30.90% as cost for converting the gift card to cash. The choice if you wish to get involved in the process of converting Amazon.com gift card to cash by discounting (in this case 30.9%) or order a product for yourself on amazon.com is yours. Import fees and shipping vary across products and you need to check item by item on Amazon.com.
Though P2P process in WazirX while converting USDT to INR depends on another individual or peer coming and transacting, WazirX has the liquidity making it possible to convert your Bitcoin to USDT and then USDT to INR within two hours or so by my experience of four transactions till now.
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