E-wallet or prepaid voucher

Both put money online without giving a shop your card details, and there the similarity ends. A wallet is an account you keep; a voucher is a code you spend once. The difference decides what happens to the money you do not use, and what anyone can do about it later.

Two different products

An e-wallet holds a balance, takes top-ups from a card or a bank account, sends and receives payments, and keeps a transaction history. Opening one means identity verification, because the provider is a regulated electronic money institution, and that verification rises with the amounts you move.

A prepaid voucher is a fixed amount bought in a shop or online and redeemed with a code. There is no account behind it, no top-up, and usually no way to receive money into it. It is closer to cash in an envelope: simple, final, and worth exactly what is printed on it.

Cost, limits and leftovers

A wallet's costs are visible over time — currency conversion, withdrawal fees, sometimes inactivity charges after a year or two of silence — while the balance stays yours and can usually be moved back to a bank account.

A voucher's cost is paid once, and the real expense is the remainder. Spend part of a voucher and the rest often has to be used in one place, within an expiry window, and sometimes cannot be combined with another voucher at all. Read three things before buying: whether partial use is allowed, when the value expires, and whether any unused balance can be refunded. In several jurisdictions expiry limits are set in consumer law, but they vary widely.

Recourse and privacy

A wallet gives you a counterparty. There is an account, a history, a complaints procedure and, in regulated markets, an ombudsman scheme behind it, and payments made from a wallet can sometimes be disputed inside its own buyer protection.

A voucher gives you a receipt, and for practical purposes the same recourse as cash. If the code is redeemed by somebody else, recovery depends on the issuer's goodwill, which is why photographs of voucher codes should never leave your phone.

The privacy gap is narrower than it looks. A voucher hides your identity from the merchant, not from the shop that sold it, which recorded the card or the till transaction. Vouchers make sense for one-off payments, for gifts, and for capping what a site can ever charge you. A wallet makes sense for anything recurring, anything large, and anything you might need to argue about later.