Pock.io Review: Gift cards in UK for Bitcoin

Yesterday I found myself with some Bitcoin in my wallet, and a need to purchase something from Amazon. LocalBitcoins would be the usual place I went, but this time I decided I’d try bypass that route by way of purchasing an Amazon gift card from Pock.io.

Pock.io are a UK-based company, offering various gift cards for UK retailers in return for your Bitcoin (as well as a few other cryptocurrencies). I’d browsed the website a few times before, but never made use of it until now.

Plenty of choices on offer…

When arriving at the Pock.io website you’re met with a rather neat and tidy web design, and a tagline that informs you it’s “the easiest way to by gift cards with cryptocurrencies”. From my experiences, I couldn’t argue with that claim.

Creating an account was simple, not requiring any real personal details — just a username, email address and a password. Once logged in your free to purchase gift cards that open up a bunch of possibilities for ways to spend your Bitcoin.

Amazon was obviously the retailer I was looking for, but there’s iTunes, Spotify, Steam, and a whole bunch more available. There’s even several that are delivered as a PDF and can be used in brick and mortar retail stores — bagging you a coffee from Starbucks or even your weekly grocery shopping from Walmart-owned supermarket ASDA.

I headed to the Amazon page to proceed with my purchase. Here’s where the next cool part was noticed, I could enter any value I wanted for the gift card — it didn’t have to be rounded up to the nearest 5 or 10, as I thought may be the case. I slapped in the amount I wanted, selected Bitcoin as my payment method (although Litecoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin and several others are available too), and was prompted to make the payment.

For Bitcoin, one of those handy links was available to click which opened up my Multibit wallet and filled in the wallet address and amount on my behalf. I checked it over (as any responsible crypto-user would) and proceeded to click send. As ever, when sending coins to a service I’d not used before, I crossed my fingers — doubly so this time as at £83 it wasn’t exactly a small purchase.

All went smoothly, though. Your purchase appears on your dashboard page immediately, with a couple of status icons to let you know how your order is progressing — along with a couple of email updates along the way. Once the payment had been confirmed by the network, everything turned green and within about 10 minutes of this the Amazon voucher code was displayed for me to go and enter into my Amazon account.

It was a very pleasant experience from start to finish. The automated system worked a treat, and my lower-back is likely going to be happy once the delivery man arrives with the new office chair I purchased using the gift card. It opens up a bunch of new ways for users to spend their Bitcoin without going directly into Great British Pounds.

If you’re in the UK and are looking to buy gift cards with cryptocurrency, it would be hard to recommend that you go anywhere else. Providing they have the gift cards you’re looking for, of course.