I would have been disappointed and slightly suspicious if they didn't start a subscription model, honestly. Something like this can't pay for itself. I saw it coming for awhile, and $49 is really not an unreasonable price considering all the stores you get access to.

Well, things aren't so rosey at the PayWithChip marketplace these days.

On July 5th, or going on two weeks ago, I went to place an order, but couldn't access Amazon through PayWithChip, so I ended up placing the order directly through Amazon's web site.

It turns out that PayWithChip was migrating to a new server and was told by Amazon that the new server was fully authorized to access their API, so PayWithChip switched over to the new server, but found out after the fact that Amazon had been wrong and that the new server wasn't authorized so there was no access to Amazon, and apparently PayWithChip burned the bridge to the original server so they couldn't roll back to it.

Almost two weeks later and there is still no access to Amazon through PayWithChip. As much as I like the service, I'm giving them until the 20th to fix it, or I'm going to cancel my subscription and ask for my money back.

I tried searching for the things I wanted at their other stores, but none of them had what I was looking for. So, no Amazon? Then PayWithChip is of little value to me.

Me too, after Amazon announced raising the price of Prime earlier this year, I let mine lapse with the intention of using PayWithChip instead.

At least the outage is a good part Amazon's fault for misleading PayWithChip about the server authorization, but PayWithChip also carries some blame for not leaving a path to the already running server in case there were problems with the new one.

PayWithChip might find themselves in a tight spot if they can't get the server issue resolved as I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that I might need to cancel my subscription while a refund is still possible.

Well, how do you like that for dirty pool?

Amazon up and decided that they didn't like that PayWithChip offered so many different vendors to buy from because it made price shopping too easy, so they basically told PayWithChip that if they wanted access to their marketplace that they'd have to drop all the other stores. Alternatively, PayWithChip could keep all the other stores but would be required to track shoppers and gather information on what they look at and what they buy and from which store, and provide all that information to Amazon.

Rather than do that, PayWithChip has decided to drop Amazon from their marketplace. Subscribers to the PayWithChip marketplace will have the choice of either being refunded the cost difference between subscriptions with Amazon and sibscriptions without, or they can decide to cancel the PayWithChip subscription entirely and get a full refund.

On a brighter note, I really should give it to them for refusing the lousy deal Amazon gave them, deciding rather than surrendering all the user shopping data to Amazon, just to remove Amazon entirely. It's probably an unappreciated move by some but looking at the bigger picture it's a step in the right direction as it really shows that they genuinely care about privacy and keeping the data safe. They did tell me they are going to go down other avenues as well, music streaming and gaming among other things. Hey, maybe that means they could actually provide an accessible interface to...Steam?

And then later Microsoft got busted for basically the same thing. That was my first thought when I thought of what Amazon is trying to do. It is indeed getting ridiculously out of hand, and that's putting it lightly. Didn't I hear somewhere that they're also trying to jump into the rideshare race as well? anything can be a rumor nowadays, but if that's actually true I wouldn't be too surprised. As for Valve, I do agree, if there is actually an alternate interface that does come out and make Steam accessible, that's still no excuse for Valve to plainly ignore the issue. Even if they are fixing it behind the scenes, if you aren't at least semi-transparent about it you've already lost me. AS luck would have it, I haven't really done much in the way of pc gaming video-anyway anyway so I'm naturally not using steam, perfect timing as Valve either wastes our time or doesn't update us one bit. Meanwhile the Xbox is rightfully shitting on all the naysayers with their solid accessibility approach not only throughout the windows10 part of the console, but the actual xbox operating system driving the games, referring to the system-level text to speech environment of course. But that's another topic altogether, but you can't compliment that effort enough.

I haven't heard that but have heard that they want into the pharmacy business, I honestly don't know if that's such a good thing or not. But if I had to choose, I'd think not.

I'd be willing to bet that UPS and the post office aren't happy with them since they started their own delivery service, which I don't trust because I've caught them several times outright lieing about deliveries. Not to mention the Amazon driver caught on video surveillance returning to a home he visited earlier to steal the package he left at their door. He'll be paying for that dumb ass move for the rest of his life, the package ended up having over $2,000 worth of gift cards in it, so that was a felony. Though to be honest, I think they are considering all such thefts a felony regardless of the value of the package as a deterrent.

But you have to know Amazon is too big when it's reported that they were responsible for more than 50% of the last holiday season's online sales.

The DOJ and FTC were hot to trot in regards to AT&T and Microsoft, I wonder where they are now?

@turtlepower17 Here's one for the books. I went to report a bug concerning turning autopay on and off in the settings, it acted like it was partially implemented and produced an error which I won't go into detail about on here. So I post about it on Twitter. They respond, basically saying pretend that option isn't there because we're not doing autopay anyway. All subscription payments are 100% manually engaged. Why? Well so they don't have to collect your card info, because they've never even stored that info for their own sake anyways. Also, their stance I 100% agree with, that it should be pay as you go. I like that so much better than the so-called free trial bullshit business model we see, I wonder how much money businesses make off of people who forget to cancel their trial? So this and their refusal to make Amazon happy are definite reason to believe that the marketplace really does take privacy and security seriously, as it should be, not just barely skirting the line. As for returning items? I don't know how true this is since I've never had to return one before, but I heard a thing or two about them being able to handle returns or at least direct you to them if you used the feedback mechanism within the Paywithchip marketplace.

Especially because, you have to admit, they kind of had it in the bag. Amazon cut them a deal that as long as they got their keep, they wouldn't bother Paywithchip, and they would not even cave to that. I am infinitely more supportive of companies who not only refuse to feed off data mining, but also aren't even phased by a bribe. That says a lot, yes it may lose a few customers, but the fact that there are about 50 or some odd venders they offer, in my opinion makes the brouhaha with Amazon anything but a showstopper.

Interesting. I was just going by what I saw on email lists, having not had to do it recently, as in, maybe in the past two years. I don't buy that much from Amazon to begin with, and when I do, I've had good luck with the stuff I've purchased, so maybe I'm just lucky.

As it turned out, Publix did carry Amazon gift cards, so I bought four $25 cards, why that instead of just one $100 card? Because I don't plan to redeem them on Amazon's site until I need them. A little more work for me, but since I only plan to use Amazon for things I can't find anywhere else, I don't plan to need them all that often.