Amazon Gift Cards

January 11, 2013 1:38 AM

Can I use an Amazon Gift Card to pay for items on Amazon.com AND the Amazon App Store or do they each have their own gift card?

I want to give a Amazon gift card to someone who doesn't want to put their credit card online as payment. Will a regular Amazon gift card be able to pay for items in either store?

posted by boby to shopping (3 answers total)

Note: This is all on Amazon UK.
I have a gift certificate balance on my Amazon account. I just went into the Amazon Appstore on my Android phone and purchased Angry Birds Star Wars. It gave me no option to choose how to pay, it just said "Purchasing... Downloading...". In the purchase receipt email I just got, it showed that it had used my Amazon gift certificate balance to pay for it.

So yes they use the same certificates.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:25 AM on January 11

Presumably to encourage impulse purchasing, buying from amazon through a devices (e.g. Kindle) or App (Kindle App, App Store, Amazon Mp3 App, etc.) generally requires a one-touch payment arrangement, which automatically links to one form of payment set in the first transaction, though not set in stone. This should be configurable in the Amazon store when accessed through the app, and if not there, try through a browser.
posted by Sunburnt at 7:33 AM on January 11

When purchasing non-digital items, you have a choice at the end of the process whether to use the gift card balance or not.

When purchasing digital items, "one-click" purchasing, the gift card balance is used by default. However, in order to set up "one-click" to begin with, you must use credit card information (seach Amazons Kindle forum for alternatives to personal credit card, i.e. prepaid - some work, some don't). Once credit card information is set up, then keeping a gift card active for purchases works. At one point, I seem to recall deleting my credit card information entirely. Also, my card is a prepaid one through a bank program.
posted by batikrose at 12:26 PM on January 11