New Delhi: The Amazon Pay app allows users to recharge its wallet balance only through debit cards or UPI (Unified Payments Interface). It has barred credit cards for this purpose. This would mean credit card holders cannot earn cashback rewards on loading their Amazon Pay wallet. Well, here’s a workaround to this. Apart from debit cards, an user can also load the wallet using an Amazon gift card, which can be bought with a credit card. So, you earn rewards on buying a gift card, which can then be used to load the Amazon Pay balance.
Amazon, like other payment wallet companies, discontinued loading of wallet through credit card about 18 months back. To be sure, payment companies have put in such restrictions to wallet loading to plug credit rotation loopholes. Cardholders would load wallets to maximize rewards and then transfer the balance back to the bank account–a feature supported by most wallets. This also allowed cardholders to rotate cash through credit cards. Even though some payment wallets allow loading of balance through credit cards, banks have barred reward points on this spending category.
The feature to load Amazon Pay wallet with gift vouchers also allows those cardholders to pay for utilities and earn rewards on them which the bank would not allow directly with a credit card. For instance, HDFC Infinia credit card doesn’t earn rewards on electricity bill payment. Similarly, paying for utilities with SBI Cashback credit card doesn’t earn rewards. So, instead of paying for these utilities directly, a cardholder can buy Amazon gift vouchers, earn the 1-1.5% reward offered on the gift card and load the Amazon Pay wallet with the gift card to pay for utilities.
With some credit cards, like Axis Magnus, paying utilities through this workaround may be more beneficial as buying gift cards earn accelerated reward points.
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Published: 22 Jan 2024, 10:58 PM IST