How to Shop with Bitcoin in LATAM?

As many as 70% of Latin America’s residents are underbanked or unbanked, meaning they have no meaningful access to financial services. Many live in countries where dollars and euros, not the national currency, are used for daily transactions. And that’s not all.

An even bigger number of Latin Americans (75%) has no trust in their government. This suggests that there’s no hope in immediate sight. The continent’s financial systems are unlikely to get better in the foreseeable future.

This is a big part of the reason why Latin America is seeing cryptocurrencies boom right now. The people living there can’t rely on traditional currencies and financial systems. As a direct result, in 2017 alone, crypto use rose by 1,000% in Venezuela, 450% in Brazil, etc.

The question is, how do people actually use cryptocurrencies to shop without bank accounts and reliable national currencies? In this article, we explore the question by going over various store types that accept cryptocurrencies in Latin America.

Shop with Bitcoin online and offline

At face value, one would assume that shopping with crypto means going to an e-store. This is not the case.

In Venezuela, a major department store reportedly accepts Bitcoin and other coins. Also in Venezuela, the Church’s Chicken fast food chain now lets customers pay with DASH: a cryptocurrency popular in the country.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, real-estate developer Tecnisa accepts Bitcoin too. Looking at these examples, it’s clear that businesses accepting payments in crypto run the gamut from big to small. Whether you want to buy lunch, go grocery shopping, buy clothes or invest in real estate, you can do it all using crypto.

If anything, making online purchases with crypto is a little more difficult. The reason is that many online businesses in Latin America are either unreliable or a little dated. Fortunately, some do work with crypto – and if you can’t find what you want, there’s always Amazon.

Shopping on Amazon.com with crypto

If you can’t find what you want in national online stores, you can always use Bitcoin to shop on Amazon.com. Not directly, unfortunately – but through a nifty intermediate service called Purse. Here’s how it works.

If you go to Purse.io, you can choose to buy any item on Amazon.com using Bitcoin. What’s more, you can get discounts as deep as 25% if you’re lucky. We won’t get into how the system works, but it really does do exactly what it promises to. With Purse.io and Amazon’s help, you can get items that are usually unavailable in Latin America, which is cool.

Where else can I pay with crypto?

In Latin America, crypto adoption is very high. Many businesses and individuals will let you pay in crypto – even if they don’t advertise it. So long as they have the means to accept your payment (i.e. a wallet), you can always try to negotiate on the spot.

That might sound far-fetched, but remember: for many people, cryptocurrencies like DASH are the closest thing they have to PayPal. Go to a local farmer’s market, a family-owned cafe or restaurant, or an area store, and you’ll find that many people are happy to cooperate.

Now that you know how to use cryptocurrencies to shop in Latin America, why not buy some of the most popular ones? With CoinCola, the whole process only takes minutes meaning you can get your coins and start shopping almost immediately.

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About CoinCola

Founded in 2016, CoinCola is a Hong Kong based company offering both over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading and crypto-to-crypto pair trading exchange. CoinCola now serves millions of users from over 150 countries with our fast, secure, and reliable trading services. We support BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, USDT, DASH, and XRP. Visit www.coincola.com to invest in digital assets.

Disclaimer: Trading and investing in cryptocurrencies, also called digital currencies, crypto assets, and so on) involves substantial risk of loss. All informations are used at your own risk, and any content on this site should not be relied upon as advice or construed as providing recommendation of any kind.