Getting new users into bitcoin can be quite an obstacle. Not only do people hear all sorts of bad press from mainstream media about bitcoin, most people don’t want to deal with the risk and hassle of buying bitcoin. What if you could eliminate all of that risk and people could earn bitcoin simply for buying things that they already buy? Well, there’s a way to do that with a service called Lolli.
What Is Lolli?
Lolli is a referral program that offers “cash back” rewards for shopping at online stores that they have partnered with. Instead of getting cash back when you make a purchase, you get bitcoin back. Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Their current website slogan is “Lolli Gives You Free Bitcoin When You Shop Online.”
Why Is It Named Lolli?
When the creator of Lolli (Alex) was a kid, his dad took him and his sister to the bank. He never liked going to the bank but he always looked forward to getting a lollipop at the teller counter. He believes that Bitcoin is the bank of the future and all that’s missing is a little something sweet like Lolli.
How Does Lolli Work?
Lolli is an affiliate marketing service that has partnerships with more than 500 online retailers. When you shop with the Lolli extension, Lolli earns a commission and they share a portion of that commission with you. The best part is that they don’t only have the option to pay out in USD. Their primary means of paying their users is bitcoin.
The Lolli Extension
In order to get started with Lolli, all you have to do is download the Lolli Chrome extension. Since a recent Brave browser update has support for Chrome extensions, you can now use Lolli with the Brave browser but you need to make sure that you have cookies enabled or you may not be eligible for earning bitcoin.
As soon as you have the extension installed, you can visit any website to see if the site is a Lolli partner and how much of a percentage you are eligible to earn if you decide to make a purchase. You can also see if any exclusions apply. We noticed that you are not eligible to earn bitcoin with most services if you use a gift card to buy or use any other discount services.
The Lolli Wallet
After you have made some purchases with Lolli’s partners, you should see some small amounts of bitcoin in your wallet. The Lolli wallet shows your balance in both BTC and in USD. Your BTC balance will remain the same but your USD balance will fluctuate over time.
Earning Bitcoin With Lolli
The whole purpose of this service is to make it easy to earn bitcoin. Lolli makes it easy to earn bitcoin a couple different ways. You can earn by shopping with their partners or by referring new users to their service.
If you or someone you know is not interested in buying bitcoin, Lolli could be a great way to take The $100 Buy & HODL Challenge without having to actually buy any bitcoin.
Earning Bitcoin By Referring New Users
Not only can you earn bitcoin by shopping with Lolli’s affiliates but you can also earn $5 worth of bitcoin for each new user that you refer to their service.
All you need to do is share your unique referral code on social media or text and anyone who signs up and shops will earn $5. We’re not sure how many purchases they need to make in order for you to earn the $5 of bitcoin but we will update this post as soon as we know more.
Again, there is nothing to lose by using Lolli if you already shop with these online retailers so it’s probably a pretty easy sell to convince new users to join.
Testing Lolli With A Purchase
In order for us to write this review, first we actually used Lolli to see how well it works. We installed the extension and started looking through all of the partner stores to see if there was something that we actually needed.
It doesn’t make sense to buy something just for the sake of making a few thousand satoshis when you can just buy bitcoin if you want bitcoin that badly. The purpose of this experiment is to show others how easy it is to earn bitcoin without changing purchasing habits.
Buying Face Wash From Harry’s
After looking through their partner list, we found Harry’s, a hair, face and shower product line for men. We found a face wash that costs $7 for a single unit and $6.50 for a 2 pack. We opted to buy 2 since Harry’s offers free shipping on any orders over $10. If we don’t like the product, we won’t buy it again but we think it’s worth it for the sake of testing Lolli out.
What initially attracted us to shop at Harry’s was Lolli showed that we could earn “Up To 27%” of our purchase back in bitcoin.
We weren’t counting on that but the reward was higher than most of the other partners and we’ve heard of Harry’s and wanted to try their product anyways. Lolli was just the incentive that we needed to make the purchase.
That may show the value of utility of using Lolli for getting new exposure for your business.
About 10 minutes after we completed our purchase, we received an email from Lolli saying “You Just Earned Bitcoin With Lolli”.
After opening the email we saw that we learned .00030405 BTC which is about $1.22
We paid $13.50 + $1.04 in tax for a total spent of $14.54
Of the $13.50, we earned $1.22 of BTC which is about 9% bitcoin back on my purchase. Not the 27% that we could potentially have earned but it’s still a great way to earn more bitcoin.
Getting Paid With Lolli
There are a couple different options to get paid with Lolli. You can opt for receiving a USD payment directly to your bank account but you will incur a $0.25 processing fee or you can do the smart thing and receive payment via bitcoin but you will need to pay the miner fee.
We’re not sure if Lolli makes their payments in batched transactions so we can’t be sure how much of a miner fee it will be.
30-90 Day “Locking” Period
To prevent bad actors from trying to take advantage of the payout system, Lolli doesn’t make any payouts until after your products are no longer returnable at the retailer. This locking period may mean that you wont receive your bitcoin payments for a while but as the price of bitcoin rises over time, you might be glad that you can’t move your bitcoin yet. It’s almost like a forced HODL.
$15 Minimum Payout
The minimum payout with Lolli is $15 USD or its equivalent in bitcoin. Since we only earned about $1.22 from this experiment, it will take a while to actually see that bitcoin in our own address. Since we will definitely use Lolli again, it won’t take us long to meet the $15 payout threshold.
Concerns With Lolli
Nothing is perfect and as with all bitcoin services, we tend to be even more skeptical. That being said, we have some questions and concerns with Lolli.
Residual Commissions For Subscription Services?
A number of their partners offer subscription based services such as NotPot & CrateJoy. We’re unaware if you earn a residual bitcoin commission when you sign up for these subscription services but we will reach out to Lolli’s customer support team for some clarity.
Too Good To Be True?
While we were definitely impressed when the email came through shortly after we made our first purchase, the commission that we earned was nowhere near the “Up To 27%” but we weren’t surprised by that. Typically when a service says “Up To”, we never expect results that are that good.
We will absolutely use Lolli again in the future but we’re not sure if Lolli could perhaps be a bit more transparent with the bitcoin commissions that their users would earn before they make the purchase.
Final Thoughts
Getting Bitcoin can be hard enough all on its own but Lolli is taking the headache of earning bitcoin for buying things online that you may already be buying anyway. Not only is it a risk free way to get bitcoin for yourself, but it might be the best way to get your friends and family to get their first few dollars of bitcoin.
If you’re looking for a new service to experiment with, see if you already shop at any of Lolli’s partners and see if maybe you could be earning some extra bitcoin without really changing your purchasing habits.