My UBA Naira Mastercard now works on Amazon

Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday September 11, 2014 at 7:59:16:

Yipee! My UBA Naira Mastercard now works on Amazon and I thought I should share my experience with you guys on how it really worked.

I remember I had written a blog post on my bad experience with using a UBA Naira Mastercard on Amazon and how it was rejected. Actually, I already do some shopping on Amazon with my Zenith bank Prepaid USD card as well as Union bank's Naira Visa card but it has been hard using a Naira Mastercard on Amazon.

Well, after receiving a tip from a contributor to that blog post, I decided to give it another try and tried buy a $10 gift card. The person had suggested that I just use the card and when asked for the card currency by Amazon, I should just select it as a USD card rather than a Naira card. So, even if Amazon detects it as a Naira card, it's probably better to just change it back to a USD card so that it would work easily.

So, I tried buying a $10 Amazon gift card with my Naira Mastercard and sending it to my email address and when asked to choose a card, I chose my UBA Card which had earlier been rejected and updated the currency to USD rather than Naira. I proceeded to purchase it and it was sent immediately. I did not immediately receive a debit SMS alert on my phone but the transaction was successful and I got an email confirmation to that request. I later received an email of the gift card since I sent it to myself and later got a debit notification from UBA after about 5 minutes.

Since I also use my UBA Mastercard for Paypal Nigeria, I got a similar debit notification after the Amazon transaction and it read;
"Dear Customer, after your last international transaction, the amount you can now spend outside Nigeria is.... Your total spend so far this year is ..."

I was a bit perplexed as to why my UBA Naira Mastercard now works on Amazon and was wondering whether it's because I just changed the Card currency on Amazon to USD or because UBA has opened their Mastercard product to US companies.

Well, in order to verify if my UBA Naira Mastercard was really working unhindered whether it was in Naira or USD, I tried sending another $10 gift card to myself in order to see if it would be successful and putting the card currency as Nigerian Naira.

I tried the transaction again, changed my currency to Naira and while checking out, I noticed that the exchange rate used was at N170 which I consider to be a bit high and I wonder who is using the rate - UBA, Mastercard or Amazon? Anyway, I placed the order and soon received a confirmatory email. However, after a few minutes, I received another email from Amazon with the subject "Payment for Your Amazon Order".

In the email, Amazon was letting me know that they were having problems with the payment for my order and so they cancelled the order.

So, for now, it appears that UBA debit Naira Mastercard works on Amazon but one would have to put the card currency as USD rather than NGN for it to work. I used the card for 2 transactions and one worked while the other was declined just because of the card currency I chose.

Many Thanks to Sam for his comment.

So you can now shop with your UBA Naira Mastercard on Amazon using the tips provided above.