Amazon Gift Cards

You just have to add the gift card to your account before buying the books. If you go to "My Account", there's an option to "Apply a Gift Card to Your Account". This will be used first for all purchases.

Eltanin Publishing said:

You just have to add the gift card to your account before buying the books. If you go to "My Account", there's an option to "Apply a Gift Card to Your Account". This will be used first for all purchases.

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This is correct - once you add a gift card to your account, that balance will always be used for any one-click payments, including Kindle purchases. If you use one-click for all your purchases on Amazon, be aware it will be used for those too. If you only want to use the gift card balance for your Kindle books and nothing else, then disable one-click purchasing and be sure each time you go through the checkout to pay for other items to change your payment type back to your credit card. This won't affect your Kindle purchases which will continue to be paid for via the gift card balance until it runs out.

FWIW, I pretty much always keep a GC balance. . . . . if it starts to get low, I buy myself one and send it via email.  Then I redeem it and apply it to my account.  SO much better than having a bunch of small charges on my CC. . . . which I have because I frequently take advantage of special prices on books I'm interested in.

Note, though, periodicals will be charged to the CC regardless -- you can't use a GC to pay for them.

Ann in Arlington said:

FWIW, I pretty much always keep a GC balance. . . . . if it starts to get low, I buy myself one and send it via email. Then I redeem it and apply it to my account. SO much better than having a bunch of small charges on my CC.

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I do that too, $50 or $100 at a time. My wife does the bills, and she likes it a lot better going over the Amex charges that way with all the stuff we buy at Amazon.

Ann in Arlington said:

FWIW, I pretty much always keep a GC balance. . . . . if it starts to get low, I buy myself one and send it via email. Then I redeem it and apply it to my account. SO much better than having a bunch of small charges on my CC. . . . which I have because I frequently take advantage of special prices on books I'm interested in.

Note, though, periodicals will be charged to the CC regardless -- you can't use a GC to pay for them.

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The reason I don't do that is that if someone breaks into my account and charges things to it, I won't see it as clearly as I will if it shows up on my credit card.

stevene9 said:

The reason I don't do that is that if someone breaks into my account and charges things to it, I won't see it as clearly as I will if it shows up on my credit card.

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Well, every time I buy something, I get an email confirming it. So I'd find out even sooner than I'd see it on my credit card. And, I guess, I don't worry too much about my account being hacked.

Of course, you can also do as suggested earlier and turn one click off for everything but kindle books. . .which would mean that no one can buy from the account without entering the password.