As an author here, I also used to buy various items (100+ at this moment) using directly my author earnings. So you can call me a customer too.
Today I wanted to buy a 6$ HTML signature (I know, today I only want this one and 6$ is not much) and to my surprise, I can’t buy it directly from my author earnings.
It seems I first have to deposit minimum 20$ as credit from my author earnings to be able to buy something.
So now, the author earnings and the credit are separated. Different things.
This is very disappointing and I doubt I will buy anything from now on.
Too bad. I am sure many authors were buying items for their projects, I have doubts this earnings/credits system is good.
And I have not seen an official announcement about this, is there one?
LATER EDIT: Stupid me, I just saw the checkbox "Add $x from my earnings to credit for this purchase. " Topic can be closed, I apologies for this.