Amazon Pay Roulette: Everyone Wins a Gift Card, One Catch

What you actually win

The full name is “Amazon Pay Roulette — everyone gets an Amazon gift card, with a 1-in-5 chance at ¥1,000”. Amazon calls it a jizen kakuyaku-gata (事前確約型) campaign, which is their term for a draw where the result is settled the moment you spin. There is no later drawing and no announcement to wait for.

There are four tiers, and the terms state plainly that everyone gets one of them.

What you get is an Amazon gift card balance — not Amazon points, not a coupon. It is added straight to your Amazon account, and Amazon says that will happen at some point in December 2026. From there it spends like cash on Amazon.co.jp.

The catch: only Ochanoko Net shops count

This is the part worth reading twice.

The campaign page itself only says your purchase has to be at “an EC site displaying this campaign banner.” Which sites those are is spelled out on the linked terms page, in a single line.

Amazon Pay is accepted across a very wide range of Japanese sites, and most of its campaigns apply to all of them. That is exactly why this line is easy to skim past — and skimming past it is how people end up spending ¥3,000 for nothing.

The narrow scope also explains the shape of the offer: two full months, modest prizes. This is a joint promotion between Amazon Pay and one e-commerce platform provider, designed to push traffic towards small independent shops. Read the other way round, it means you don’t need a new reason to spend — you just need to move something you were already going to buy over to an Ochanoko Net shop.

If it’s the big three marketplaces you care about, we track their sales and campaigns daily: Amazon deals, Rakuten Ichiba deals and Yahoo! Shopping deals.

Three ways to find an eligible shop

Ochanoko Net is a Japanese storefront-building service that has been running since 2004; the company says more than 100,000 shops have used it over the years. It charges no commission on sales, and plans run from a free tier up to ¥13,200 a month, which is why it is popular with one-person businesses and small retailers.

The important consequence: it is not a marketplace. There is no Rakuten-style search box covering every shop, because every shop is its own website. That is the real reason “eligible shops” feel impossible to find. Three practical approaches:

• Browse the official shop showcaseOchanoko Net keeps a page at ocnk.net/site/ listing roughly 120 live shops sorted by category: food and drink, fashion, sport and outdoors, hobbies, home and interior, plants and gardening, music, antiques and collectables, car and motorbike, office supplies, computing, toys and games. Start here — it is by far the fastest route.
• Read the domainShops that never bought their own domain sit at shopname.ocnk.net. Searching a product name together with ocnk.net will usually land you on an eligible shop.
• Check the footerEvery site built on the platform carries a “Powered by おちゃのこネット” link at the bottom of the page, and most plans don’t let the shop hide it. When you’re not sure, scroll to the very bottom before anything else.

The terms at a glance

All of the above was read off Amazon’s official campaign and terms pages on 12 September 2026. Terms can change or end without notice — check the official page before you take part.

How to take part

1. Sign in on the campaign page and spinPress the “ルーレットを回す” (spin the roulette) button and your prize appears immediately — ¥1,000, ¥500, ¥100 or ¥10. That press is your entry, you get one per account, and there is no retry. Screenshot the result for your own records.
   Sign in with the Amazon account you will actually pay with. The terms tie everything to “the Amazon.co.jp account that spun the roulette.”
2. Spend ¥3,000 or more (tax included) at Ochanoko Net shops before 31 OctoberIt does not have to be one order. The terms talk about your total reaching ¥3,000 including tax, so several orders across several different shops add up. At checkout, choose Amazon Pay, sign in with your Amazon account and confirm the address and payment method it pulls across.
3. Wait for DecemberThere is nothing to claim. The credit shows up under Account & Lists → Amazon gift cards → view balance and history, and Amazon emails you when it lands.
   One deadline is easy to miss: the shop has to finish its billing by 30 November. Order a pre-order item on 31 October and shipping — and billing — may not happen in time. Aim to finish your ¥3,000 by the middle of October.

Is it worth the trouble? Let’s run the numbers

“Fourth prize is ¥10” sounds like a joke until you put numbers on it.

Amazon’s own campaign banner says 1 in 5 people win the ¥1,000 top prize, so first prize sits at 20%. The odds on second and third prize are not published, so assume the harshest case: the remaining 80% all land on the ¥10 minimum.

That is the floor. In reality second prize (¥500) and third prize (¥100) take a share of that 80%, so both the expected value and the effective rate come out higher. A typical credit card gives you 0.5–1%. Moving a purchase you were making anyway into this campaign is worth roughly ten times that.

Two other Amazon Pay offers running right now

The roulette isn’t the only thing Amazon Pay has going. The two below apply to every site that accepts Amazon Pay, which is a far wider net, and each has its own separate entry. Nothing in the terms rules out combining them with the roulette, and entering costs nothing, so the sensible move is to enter all three and then decide what to buy.

Amazon’s own sales — Prime Day and Smile SALE — work on a completely different mechanism of entry plus point multipliers. That side is covered in our Prime Day strategy guide.

The old “1% on gift card payments” trick is dead

Search for Amazon Pay in English or Japanese and you will keep hitting the same tip: pay with your Amazon gift card balance through Amazon Pay and you get 1.0% back as a Prime member, 0.5% otherwise, with no cap. It was a staple for years. It has been discontinued.

Amazon Pay’s own programme page states that the programme ended at 23:59 on 28 February 2026, covering orders placed between 15 January 2025 and that date. It had already been narrowed once before that, from every site accepting Amazon Pay down to only stores enrolled in the “Amazon Pay banner programme.”

Plenty of guides still present it as current, so don’t build your ¥3,000 around topping up a gift card balance and paying from it. That layer no longer pays anything.

Paying with Amazon Pay, and what to do with the credit

If you have ever tried to buy from a small Japanese shop, you know the routine: create an account, then type your address into a form that wants the prefecture, city, chome and banchi in separate boxes, in Japanese. Amazon Pay skips all of it. It hands the shop the address and payment details already sitting in your Amazon account, so there is no new account, no new password, and no address form.

Three payment methods are available through it: credit and debit cards, your Amazon gift card balance, and Paidy (あと払い, pay-later). Paidy works without a card — name, email address and mobile number are enough — and you settle everything by the 10th of the following month at a convenience store, by bank transfer or by direct debit.

One thing to be clear about: because you are buying outside Amazon.co.jp, Amazon points are generally not awarded. What you earn is whatever your linked card gives you, plus campaign credit like this one.

As for the gift card balance itself, three rules cover almost everything:

This isn’t the only route to Amazon gift card credit either. The MUFG debit card × Apple Pay PASMO top-up pays out in gift cards on lighter conditions. And if what you really want is to turn points into groceries, the 20th of every month at Welcia — “Wel-katsu”, effectively 33% off — or a Yahoo! Shopping gift certificate top-up bonus often converts better.

Squeezing a second layer out of the same ¥3,000

You’re spending the money either way, so you may as well collect everything attached to it.

• Check whether the shop is listed on a point siteClick through from a Japanese point site and you earn cashback on top of whatever the shop and Amazon Pay are running — the three don’t cancel each other out. Small Ochanoko Net shops often aren’t listed, but checking takes half a minute. New to all this? Start with our beginner’s guide to point sites.
• The same offer pays differently on different sitesWe measured this and were surprised by how far it swings: for one brokerage account, site A paid 24,000P while site B paid 22,000pt — and for the same broker’s iDeCo account the ranking flipped. So compare across sites rather than trusting one. We run a free comparison tool for exactly this, Pointnavi. We genuinely don’t mind if our own listing isn’t the highest — the point is that you don’t leave money behind. There’s a full walkthrough of Pointnavi if you want one.
• Not signed up to a point site yet? There’s a joining bonusMoppy has the largest catalogue of offers; Hapitas has a “shopping guarantee” that lets you file a claim when cashback fails to track. Both are covered in our Moppy referral code guide and Hapitas referral code guide.
• You can automate the deal-hunting partWe also run a site that pulls Amazon, Rakuten and Yahoo! price drops and campaigns into one place, so you don’t have to check three marketplaces a day: the Mottoku guide.

Frequently asked questions

Q. What happens if I spin but never buy anything?

Nothing at all, and it costs you nothing. The terms note that if no purchase of ¥3,000 or more including tax is confirmed during the campaign period, no gift card is issued. Spinning purely to see what you get carries no downside.

Q. I bought something first and spun afterwards. Does it count?

No. The terms state that entry must come first and that only usage after entry qualifies. Spin, then shop.

Q. Does the ¥3,000 have to be a single order?

No. The wording is about your total reaching ¥3,000 including tax, so multiple orders count, and so do orders placed at different Ochanoko Net shops.

Q. Does spending at Demae-can or Furusato Choice count?

Not for the roulette. That one is limited to EC sites operated on Ochanoko Net. Both of those do accept Amazon Pay, though, so they do qualify for the first-time 20% offer and the 2% programme. The three campaigns have different scopes, which is exactly where people get confused.

Q. I have two Amazon accounts. Can I spin twice?

Officially, no. The terms say one spin per account. They also list “any other unlawful or improper conduct, or anything Amazon deems contrary to the purpose or terms of the campaign” as grounds for exclusion, and Amazon reserves the right to hold or refuse transactions and to bill you for the value of the prize. A few hundred yen is not worth putting your account at risk.

Q. Can I take part with a brand-new Amazon account?

No. Transactions from Amazon accounts opened within the previous 30 days are excluded. The same restriction applies to the first-time 20% offer.

Q. What if I cancel or return something afterwards?

That amount is deducted from your qualifying total. If the remainder falls below ¥3,000 including tax, you no longer qualify. Cancelled transactions don’t count towards your usage record either.

Q. When does the gift card arrive, and where do I check?

After the campaign closes, during December 2026, credited directly to your gift card balance, with an email to confirm it. Note that the shop must complete its billing by 23:59 on 30 November 2026, pre-orders included. If your account has been closed by the time of payout, nothing is issued.

Q. Can I re-spin the wheel?

No. “Settled in advance” means the amount is locked the instant you spin, and you only get one spin per account.

Q. Do I earn Amazon points by paying with Amazon Pay?

Generally not, because the purchase happens outside Amazon.co.jp. What you earn is your linked card’s own rewards plus campaign credit like this.

Six ways people miss out

Every referral code and sign-up offer we track lives on one page: the referral code list.