A look at the All4BTC Shopping service
So as we’ve been generating some bitcoin for a little while now from our mining pool reviews. As we’re running them to generate bitcoins for us to run reviews on the site, we had a look at the excellent Steamloader last week, and at the same time we ran an order through German company All4BTC’s service. As our item arrived in the post today, we thought it would be a good time to write about our experience.
I’ve had a lot of discussions with my wife about bitcoin, and she’s “loving” having a group of antminers buzzing away in the corner of the room. But she said that unless she can just spend bitcoin in any place she wants to (primarily Amazon and eBay), then it’s kind of pointless. I had come across All4BTC and their chrome extension on BBC Click about a year ago when the price was peaking, and have it bookmarked since. So now I have some bitcoin, I thought they’d be a great service to review.
So as it’s Halloween at the end of the month, and we needed to get a piece for one of our costumes, we thought we’d see how the service worked buying off ebay, although you can select pretty much any site as long as it’s not on tor or a subscription. The process is relatively straightforward. Go to the site, put in the link, price and postage as specified. Then you put in your details, and confirm them.
There is a fee for the service (outlined here), but as I’m buying in euro, there is a surcharge of 2.38% with a minimum charge of €5 for the service. As this is a review, I know that I am paying a large charge for a relatively cheap item. but if you’re buying more expensive items this proportion will be very reasonable.
So you then send your bitcoins, and after a confirmation the site will send you an email and update the order status page. In my case, there was a query, received a day after I ordered it, about my postcode (which we don’t have in Ireland until next year), so once that was answered, there was another message sent shortly after saying the order was processed. I had ordered Friday evening, and it was processed on a Sunday. The following Tuesday (Monday was a bank holiday), in my postbox I had the item 🙂
So it certainly works as described, and the delivery times were pretty much the same as if I’d ordered myself. being in Germany, I have EU distance selling rules in place, and they have a clear and straightforward refund/exchange policy.
So in review, All4BTC is essentially a personal shopper service. It lets you get around the fact that only a small proportion of online stores accept bitcoin by default. It opens up pretty much every online store on the internet to you to shop with, and with Christmas coming up, I’d happily recommend their service for those of you looking to get your presents in early, or if you have something bookmarked that you with you could buy with bitcoin. In all likelyhood, now you can!
