Coinbase Puts Change In Purse

Purse, a specialized bitcoin platform that lets customers buy products on Amazon at a discount, has partnered with Coinbase to simplify the process, the company announced on Monday (March 16).

Under the new agreement, Coinbase customers will be able to transfer bitcoin from their Coinbase wallets for Purse transactions. “At Purse we strive to make saving on Amazon as easy as possible. We’re happy to announce an update that will make it much easier for mainstream users,” Purse’s blog post said. “With our Coinbase partnership, shopping on Amazon will be as easy as checking out at a Coinbase merchant. Customers can transfer funds from their Coinbase wallet and start using Purse within minutes.”

The partnership with Coinbase will also help with the implementation of new apps and features, the post added, but gave no further details.

Purse’s appeal is built around the relative difficulty of spending bitcoin as well as the difficulty of acquiring it in the first place, and it uses Amazon’s wish-list feature to tackle both those problems. On the Purse platform, a customer who wants to buy a particular item from Amazon posts the item he wants to buy and the amount of bitcoin he’s willing to pay — usually at a discount from Amazon’s price. When a second party agrees to the transaction, the second party pays Amazon for the product and has it shipped to the original customer, who transfers the appropriate amount of bitcoin to the second party.

In effect, the original customer pays bitcoin to get a product from Amazon, while the second party uses a payment card or PayPal to acquire bitcoin.

Purse also recently opened a brick-and-mortar retail store in San Francisco’s Mission District called Nakamoto’s, where only bitcoin is accepted for purchases. The products Nakamoto’s offers are also priced at a 10 percent discount from Amazon’s prices, CoinDesk reported in February.