c c.

You will probably need to live in the Philippines, and/or have a Filipino bank account, to make much use of this service. If you fall in this category, Pouch.ph makes moving funds between bitcoin and Filipino pesos very easy. Digital financial rails in the Philippines are already quite well developed, and Pouch.ph plugs seamlessly into this network. Send bitcoin (onchain or lightning) to Pouch.ph to have it converted instantly to pesos, then forward the pesos to your bank account / eWallet / cash pick-up location in the Philippines with the usual very low local fees. The reverse also works, though not yet tested by me. This is a custodial service, they explicitly advertise that you should connect your non-custodial bitcoin wallet to Pouch.ph and do long-term fund storage there.

Seriously. I heard the CEO interviewed on a prominent Bitcoin podcast, and these people are 100% above board, with good features and services. You can deposit bitcoin both on-chain and over Lightning. Fees fall in the reasonable range of about 1% per operation. It takes a few hours to provision the US$ virtual debit card, after that it works as expected. (I am fairly new to this service, so I have used it, but not a lot.) For people who actually live in Africa, there are some additional services for locals in multiple African countries. For the rest of us, the card is the main thing. As I recall KYC was a straight-forward passport upload. Support is via chat, they do respond, and they try to be helpful. This is a great African business that deserves support!

The occasion of this review was a failed (international, so not so easy) delivery. It required some prompting and pushing on my part, but I received a reasonably timely refund. No real complaints there...
Otherwise, I have been ordering from Vitacost for years. They have a good selection of supplements and good prices. The only thing that stands between Vitacost and five stars is the vast quantity of spam e-mail they send. You probably do not want to register with your main e-mail account.

I have been a customer of this Hong Kong bank for years and I am generally satisfied, especially with the recent addition of online customer service chat. Website is complex and confusing, but security measures have evolved to become EXTREMELY secure. Gold is a first class "currency" in your account alongside about a dozen fiat currencies, but STILL no bitcoin. Fees are reasonable to cheap. Used to be anyone with a passport could walk in and open and account, but I hear that has become considerably more difficult (while still remaining possible, especially if you are not in a hurry). Perhaps the sticking points are the result of a focus on domestic clients, and while their online banking has gotten considerably strong over the years, they seem to be not particularly eager to take on and keep foreign clients. Like most banks, they work for the government, not for YOU.

I have stopped using Wirex because they have demanded that I re-do my KYC verification multiple times. This is a hassle bordering on harassment, so I have stopped using their service. Too much trouble.

The site is all in Russian, which can be gotten around by installing the Google Translate plugin in your browser, which makes everything quite readable. Customer service via e-mail is prompt, helpful, and in very good English. Many, many payment methods are supported, including bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

I have been using the coins.ph service for a quite a while now, mostly to add money to my mobile phone, occasionally for medium-sized transactions on Shopee, with which coins.ph has a nice, direct integration. I was successful in sending test transactions back and forth between coins.ph and my Filipino bank account, but have not as yet really used this capability. So far, for my purposes, coins.ph has worked reliably with zero problems. Caveat: they support only a handful of tokens, and Ethereum in particular you cannot use without incurring a huge initialization fee. BTC and BCH however work as expected.

I ran eToro through their paces, and the verdict is in: thumbs down. Do not go there, it is a waste of time. (Abridged blow-by-blow follows.) KYC seemed typical, fast, and straight-forward, really just upload a passport and a bank statement. So I sent them a wire for AU$1000 (their website gave me the impression that HQ might be in Australia). I then got an e-mail from a (very patient, very nice) local representative in the country where I live, nonetheless with bad news: the compliance $#*!s wanted me to collect a couple reference letters detailing the sources of my funds. After KYC, after I already sent them money. Of course I told them to pound sand (though I was still making an effort to be polite at this time) and return my wire. Then I got another e-mail that the return wire had failed. Now they want me to provide wire instructions for a bank where I live. I do not have a bank account where I live, but they already HAVE a bank statement and wire instructions for my primary bank in another country. Again, I tell them to pound sand and send the money to my bank. (At this point I am starting to be not polite.) I also asked their local customer representative to go around the compliance boneheads and escalate up to the customer service department, which she did. A few days later I received the wire in my bank, and a couple days after that I got an apologetic e-mail from someone else in customer service. Personally, I will never again in this lifetime do business with eToro.

At this point I have exercised most of Lazada, including a return and a customer service query re. My wallet balance, and I have difficulty find anything much to complain about, just a few quibbles. Quibbles:
* I would expect to get a discount for shopping online relative to a (for instance) supermarket purchase, but this is usually not the case
* the app works pretty reliably, but sometimes does dumb things, or lacks obvious features, that add a lot of extra clicks to getting something done

Small ticket items tend to work reliably, but out of about a half dozen large ticket purchases, exactly one went well. One attempt I made to return an item failed miserably. Customer service chat hangs up repeatedly in the middle of a conversation. Customer phone support rings once and then hangs up and pretends I did not answer the phone. Merchants (especially Mainland China merchants) do not stand by their products. If you are in the Philippines, shop on Lazada. Prices are maybe a bit higher, but everything else is better, and you will have lower blood pressure.