Amazon Funding Workaround: Tip-of-the-Day #341

I recently took part in a 4-hour focus group for which I was paid a handsome $350. It was presented to me in the form of a pre-paid Visa debit card. Great! (I thought). The only hitch: my plan was to add it as a payment method to Amazon and fund my most heavily trafficked shopping destination. DENIED. Not once, but half a dozen times because I stupidly kept trying, assuming it was user error. Nope! I called Amazon and they blamed the issuer. I called the issuer (Visa) and they blamed Amazon. Gah!

Long and short, seems Amazon changed their security settings and you can no longer add your three-digit code to their payment profiles and for a credit card it doesn't matter but for a debit card, the bank won't approve the transaction without it! Serious fail.

I Googled "best ways to use a pre-paid Visa debit card" and found a whole host of ideas I'd already thought of: shop at retail, create a pin and extract the cash value from an ATM (minus the handling fees), etc. etc.

But I WANTED to use the card to fund my Amazon account because I'd been able to do that very thing a few short months ago!

Then I realized that I could march myself over to Walgreens, and use my debit card to purchase an Amazon gift card worth $350. Circuitous? Yep. But, it worked. And I didn't have to pay fees and I didn't have to worry about the value expiring (the card expires in three months so if I had tucked it away for a rainy day I would have been very disappointed!).

All by way of saying, where there's a will there's a way. My recommendation for using a pre-paid debit card is to go to Walgreens, CVS, Target, etc. and buy one or more gift cards with your favorite retailer(s). You can use them yourself or gift them. Voila!