Are theese cards good or bad for bitcoin? Are business like amazon avoiding accep bitcoin with this cards?
A lot of people change their bitcoins for gift cards when they need buy something. They can do it, but are they hurting bitcoin or helping it?
Well, Amazon for example still has incentive to accept bitcoin over giftcards. They get a much higher total amount of profit from a theoretical direct bitcoin purchase over a gift card or credit card purchase.
Why would they have an incentive to accept bitcoin over their own branded gift card? I would argue the opposite. Once a gift card is paid for Amazon will have zero incremental costs in accepting the gift card as payment. They know 100% that the money is there.
Because when you buy a gift card through Gyft or another company you're getting few percent off the value and the company selling the gift card has to make a profit as well. So Amazon is selling them to the company at a pretty large discount relative to what they would be paying if they used BitPay to directly accept bitcoin(around 1% I think).
Amazon may offer discounts to people who buy gift cards in bulk to reduce costs like shipping the gift card. But once the gift card is sold all of the costs associated with the gift card has been incurred.
Gift cards also give customers to spend more money on purchases. A customer will not want to leave the gift card with a small amount on it, so if they wish to make a $95 purchase with a $100 gift card they will likely purchase something in addition to what they were going to spend so they can use all of the value on the gift card.
