Amazon recently complicated their ‘reload your balance’ checkout system: whereas previously it was all done with a single click, it’s now more similar to the standard checkout with a few pages to click through until final checkout.
Personally I like it better, but for those who do multiple transactions to meet a transaction requirement (e.g. on Everyday Preferred) it’s certainly more painful to do. Everything else about the balance reload is the same, including the $.50 minimum reload.
Reload your Amazon balance (affiliate link)
Just got around to doing my 58 month debits and it was painful. What I ended up doing was opening this page https://www.amazon.com/cpe/yourpayments/wallet in a new window, changing my default payment method to whatever card I needed, doing my purchases, then switching to to the next one. What used to take 5 minutes took 30.
This is my first month using this new page… haha and jesus christ they made it much worse. It takes like 5x longer to reload my balance now.. ugh.. sucks when I have like 50 reloads to do every month.. I’m sure they did this on purpose. So annoying, Amazon.
and also there is now a delay between putting the order through and getting the e-mail saying “your balance has been reloaded”.. so now it’s harder to keep track of how many I’ve done.
I mean it’s good it’s still possible to use Amazon.. but they definitely made it more cumbersome to use now. :/
Yes – I am probably going to pay other bills- I have a few where I can make $1 payments- but I have not tried doing them in bulk so it might not be any better
I also have a large balance at amazon that far exceeds what I will spend in a few years
I put in a 50 cent reload no problem. You have to type the leading 0. You can pick any of your cards. It’s one more page to click thru, ultimately. Not that big a deal.
I did mine but it was a lot of extra work for me- and it does not allow you to change your saved card on the same page
Its still worth the time but it easily took twice as long or more than before
(I do 49 each month)
I love how it’s listed as “Amazon’s Choice” for gift card reload.
I just checked out the reload page and it has an option for “auto-reload” and you can set frequency to daily. If you are trying to hit a quota of transactions (let’s say 30), why not just set-up your card to do a daily charge of $0.50 and then just forget about it?
If I recall the auto reload is only for I think $5+
You’re right, did not see the minimum until I entered an amount. I guess only for people who spend a lot on amazon (i.e. $150/month+). I think you might be able to do with 1-click with gift cards, but the minimum is $1…so maybe some people here who do not like clicking will prefer if they spend over $30/month. I personally am not a fan of Amazon, but remember when their minimum for gift cards was like $0.01 or $0.10. I am sure Amazon has special deals with the payment processors, but I think some cards have a flat fee like 1-2 cents on top of the percent of purchase so it deters stores from doing very low price transactions.
And I just realized with gift card purchases you have to manually load the cards into your account, scratch that idea.
Pro tip if you need to do a bunch of transactions:
Walmart will allow you to do split payment at the self-checkout, up to four splits (haven’t tried more than four in one sale). You can meet a transaction requirement by going to Walmart and buying a bunch of bananas individually and making one cent purchases. Just do it at a time where it isn’t too busy.
Can you split payment by yourself at Walmart self-checkouts? Or do you have to have call the self-checkout associate over to charge your card $0.01 multiple times? From my experience, when I do card payment at the checkout it will do the full balance. Maybe I need to pay attention for more options on the screen next time. This would also be helpful with certain prepaid cards, with Mastercard at Walmart I found out when I hit the end of a prepaid card it will charge the available amount then ask for the rest on another payment method (like with a gift card), but with Visa when I hit the end of a prepaid card it would do like most stores and decline it if over the amount. I like doing self-checkouts so would be awesome if I could charge the partial amount on Visa prepaid cards without having to wait for a cashier.
I don’t think Amazon cares whether it’s convenient to meet your transaction requirements. It makes sense to have unified checkout page sitewide for regular customers
Maybe leaving a review on that reload page about the new change will help bring some sense into Amazon and hopefully they can reverse the system back to the old simpler way.
What a shitload of fuck. Why does every update have to make everything worse?
Can’t do reloads with different payment methods anymore. You can only purchase a reload with your default payment method, at least on my end. Hopefully the other page will come back sometime soon.
u can still change payment at checkout
Unfortunately, my account does not let me change my payment method unless I change my default payment method. It doesn’t matter what browser I use or whether I use the website or app. I am not sure of why this is or what I am doing wrong, but I just assumed that Amazon doesn’t want you using lots of different payment methods anymore.
You must’ve done something to flag your account