This past year has been a great one for Bitmo users. Back in the app’s early days, they only accepted ACH payment from your bank account and only occasionally offered promo codes that gave a discount on gift cards.
This past year they’ve started accepting PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay as forms of payment. They also launched BitmoPerks and Perk Points that reward you for gift card purchases. While the number of Perk Points you earn for every day purchases of gift cards in the app has significantly dropped since they first launched it, they do still run frequent deals offering bonus Perk Points that can be great for personal use and/or reselling.
Credit & Debit Card Payments
They’ve made another update to the app today as they’re now accepting payment directly via credit or debit card. When selecting payment method, you’ll see it as an option there:
On the one hand this isn’t too exciting because you’ve been able to pay via credit card to earn points or miles since they started accepting PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay. This might have potential though depending on how Bitmo codes on your credit card. I’ve no idea yet how they code because this only showed up for me today, but if their merchant code happens to be one that offers bonused spend on certain cards, that could be a great development.
It only just occurred to me when writing this post that the fact that they accept debit card payments could be helpful for liquidating certain cards provided their BINs aren’t blocked. Seeing as Bitmo offers Perk Points rather than discounts when buying gift cards, it means you’ll usually be buying in $25, $50 or $100 denominations which means it’d be much easier to drain those debit cards. I’ve maxed out my purchases today on the Total Wine gift card deal, so I can’t test that right now though.
One thing to be aware of is that if you select the credit/debit card payment option, the app prepopulates the cardholder’s name and zip code. That won’t be a big issue for most people who only have one address, but it’s a pain for those like myself with a couple of different billing addresses depending on the bank. Bitmo requires that you contact their support team to change zip codes, so it’s not like you can just switch it back and forth as needed in the app yourself. It also means you can only pay with a card in the Bitmo user’s name which isn’t unreasonable, but just something to be aware of in case you wanted to pay with your partner’s card.
I’ve paid with my partner’s card using my name and the transaction was approved. As long as the billing zip code matches, I think you should be fine. Everything else is just a nice-to-have but I don’t think it would decline your purchase because the card holder’s name didn’t match the name associated with the billing address.
I do like Bitmo a lot, but they’ve let me down the past few weeks. Basically all of my card linked purchases have not flown through since NOV 1. Id seen a large descrwase in the accuracy of their reporting on this, had a high volume ($$$$) of Sam’s club 3rd party gcs that did not track
coincidentally or not some of this happened after I joined Dosh. Dosh and Bitmo card link may not stack at least not for me, I have yet to have a stackable Dosh and Bitmo card link transaction.
I’ve had a similar thing happen at retailers that aren’t on Dosh. I wouldn’t be surprised if gift card purchases are excluded and that transaction values are easy to filter for that kind of activity.
I think I’m going to pull the plug on card linking on Bitmo. I’ll continue to buy discounted GCs on there because the Bitmo points can be redeemed for eBay now, big value add there.
Look, like you I’ve done well in the digital Wild West of card links data shares etc. but, if Bitmo is not going to hold up their end of the bargain (particularly on the high dollar revenue pumping GC purchases I make) than I’m out. The data they are getting back is far too personal and valuable (Bitmo ask for access to all of your account balances and all purchase details for all purchases on your linked card)..and in exchange we get 1/10th of 1%…aka to get $1 you need to spend $1000..it’s only valuable if they actually pay out on the big dollar stuff. I’m actually kind of disgusted with the bait and switch Bitmo did on the card link , and disappointed in myself that I blindly trusted they would be as reliable as I’d hoped.