Purse opened its doors last year with a fantastic idea. They unite people with bitcoin to spend with people with unwanted or unused Amazon gift cards or other discounts (sometimes neither one) to purchase with.
How Purse Works
Like most incredible ideas the one underpinning the Purse business model is an incredibly simple one and one that has been the model of hundreds of traders for years. However traders lacked a solid platform tailored for this. You can still do the very same thing on Paxful, Bitwallet, Localbitcoins.com, and other peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms however not without sacrifice. When a trader exchanges an Amazon.com purchase bit a defined amount of bitcoin, the only way to utilize the escrow services these platforms provide is to let the escrow sit. Escrows sitting hurt trader statistics and inadvertently hurt the party with the bitcoin to spend by adding copious amounts of hours on top of their release (escrow release) times. These platforms also do not integrate with Amazon.com.
This is where Purse fits like a glove. Purse is fully integrated with Amazon.com and escrow times waiting on shipment deliveries do not hurt statistics.
The way this works is that an individual with bitcoin to spend makes an Amazon.com wish-list. They then post that list along with a desired price in bitcoin to the Purse marketplace. The Amazon.com buyer, typically armed with gift cards, discounts, and a long-standing Prime account (free shipping) comes along and accepts the wish-list. The Amazon.com purchaser pays for the item(s) and enter the order number followed by the tracking number when available.
Amazon then delivers the merchandise to the bitcoin seller who reviews the delivery and finally releases the bitcoin from escrow and the order is complete.
The traders then leave feedback for each other much like eBay but without words. There are three simple options, positive, negative, and neutral.
The Purse Amazon.com for Bitcoin Market
The Purse Process
- User1 wanting to purchase something from Amazon.com and has bitcoin to spend creates an Amazon wish list.
- User1 sends enough bitcoin to cover the purchase with shipping and sets the rate he or she would like to trade the bitcoin for wish-list-purchase for.
- User2 wanting to purchase a wish-list in exchange for bitcoin chooses from a list of available offers and selects User1's request. User1's bitcoin are then placed in escrow with Purse as the additional signature.
- The order is placed by User2 and User2 updates Purse with the order number.
- 4.1 Amazon.com completes fulfillment and notifies all parties of shipment.
- The shipping company (FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc...) delivers the order and notifies all parties of its delivery.
- User1 reviews the shipment for accuracy and once satisfied, releases the bitcoin in escrow to User2.
At this point both users can then leave feedback for each other.
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| Purse orders earning bitcoin |
Purse also offers 5% off any order from Amazon.com instantly as a direct purchase instead of going through a listed vendor or peer, however the real savings are using the aforementioned technique.
New Merchant Services
Purse has furthered their platform now to include merchant services. Think Amazon.com and eBay but using bitcoin to make payment.
With 21 Marketplace for developers and Openbazaar for discreet purchases both opening this week its fitting to see the Purse merchant Marketplace open this week as well.
The Purse Bitcoin Merchant Marketplace
The interface is much like an eBay seller interface where you can enter your product(s) and enter various types of information to aide in selling it. |
| Seller product listing interface |
Once complete you can publish your listing and it's available on the Marketplace (below).
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| Purse Marketplace listing example |
You can view the listing above at this link to see a live example. This is a real listing we added for one of our dinbits full graphic t-shirts (we won't hold it against you if you order one, help yourself).
Summary
We'll put together a tutorial for creating listings but it's very straight forward. If you've ever listed something on Purse or eBay, you've already got the process down since its very similar and you can sell new or used items on the Purse Marketplace.Purse has done great job with this so far. It's clean, attractive, well thought out, and the wish-list portion that [has] been in production for a while now appears to be successful so far. The ease-of-use from a sellers perspective is exceptional with just a single easy-to-understand user interface that allows a quick and streamlined product listing experience.
Due to the marketplace portion of the platform being brand new (we created the above example this morning) we cannot comment on the process past listing but will provide more information on that in the future.
If you're looking to spend bitcoin or sell for bitcoin Purse is certainly worth looking into and giving a try. This week in general has been phenominal for buyers and sellers in the bitcoin space since there has been three platforms introduced. Purse being the more likely candidate for mainstream use.
Check out Purse and let us know what you think.
Purse Link: https://purse.io
Story by dinbits
Banner image by dinbits.com staff
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