I have btc on Electrum mobile wallet.
I want to buy a hat using crypto from an online vendor.
Vendor accepts several crypto currencies.
It's a one time purchase.
I don't want to spent more than 20 cents in transaction fees.
I want the transaction confirmed within a couple of hours.
What are my options?
I thought of Lightning but that is still going to cost me a lot in transaction fees when opening a channel. And since this is a one time purchase, it defeats its purpose because, well, might as well just directly purchase using btc.
So...what can I do?
There is no alternative to this than to pay the fees that you are trying to avoid but if you want to forgone decentralization and privacy, then here are some options that I know you can use to purchase an item from online vendors:
Most vendors that I know used Binance pay or internal transaction to received bitcoin transaction, so I think you can ask him if he want the payment through that route, simply request for his Binance Pay ID and move your coins from spot wallet to funding and send him the bitcoin and then you can share him the transaction ID which is always an internal transaction and it cost zero fees but you have to make sure you are dealing with a legit and trust worthy vendor, if you don't trust and can't verify then don't send. Other exchanges has this features, Kucoin is there as well to use.
You can also request if the vendor accept other coins, many of them accept stable coin such as USDT, you can swap your BTC to stablecoin and utilized tron blockchain for the time being because this are the only alternatives that you can use for now and if you insist on bitcoin for such, then you have to be ready to pay the fees to get your transaction to the vendor.