Last week I wrote about an awesome promotion where Amazon is offering most customers to receive 20% off their order. The only caveat is that you must have an American Express Membership Reward earning card and you must be targeted for the promotion - most people seem to be targeted, although not everyone. While the terms of the promotion state that you’ll receive 20% off your order up to $100 off, you can take advantage of this promotion again and again – just this morning I personally was able to take advantage of it twice per Amazon account! You can also combine this promotion with a few other Amazon offers happening at the same time! This is probably the best Amazon promotions we’ve seen!
While you can no longer purchase Amazon gift cards and receive the 20% discount, you can still purchase third-party gift cards. On my account, my two orders include a $500 Nordstrom gift card and a $500 Whole Foods gift cards. Stores that I shop at anyways, so a great way to only pay $400 for $500 worth of items! Not only that, I was also able to pay with my order with an Amazon gift card that I received at a discount!
Some popular gift cards sold by Amazon include: AirBnB, GAP, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Olive Garden, Sephora, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Uber, Whole Foods, Cabela’s, L.L. Bean, Lord & Taylor, Safeway, Staples, Sur La Table, The Cheesecake Factory, etc. You can search for all merchant gift cards here.  If you want to go the gift card route, you can typically purchase gift cards in increments between $10-$200. The e-delivery gift card versions usually give you more flexibility. If you want to purchase $500 of the same gift card, just add multiple quantities to your cart. Or you can always purchase different gift cards of varying amounts at stores you shop at anyways.
While there is no set end date to this promotion (essentially Amazon states that they’ll pull it whenever they want), I would not be surprised to see the loophole of being able to take advantage of this offer multiple times end soon. Ultimately though, I do foresee the promotion in general to at least go through July 16th which is Amazon Prime Day.
Steps to take advantage:
- If you haven’t already linked your American Express card to your Amazon account, you can do that here.
- Shop at Amazon.com and add up to $500 worth of products (which must be sold and shipped by Amazon.com) to your Shopping card. Many merchant gift cards work as well as Amazon gift cards, so you can go ahead and search for merchant gift cards here.
- On the payment page, select your linked Membership Rewards earning credit card. At the bottom of the payment page you’ll see all your linked accounts where you can use points (Chase and Amex). Select your American Express Membership Rewards Points account and enter the number of points you want to use towards your purchase. Since I do not like redeeming my points at Amazon (due to the low redemption value), I entered just 1 cent which means 1 point will be applied. For the promotion to apply, the minimum amount required is only 1 point! Do not do full points as it is not a good value!
- On the checkout page, you’ll see the 1 point applied and the 20% taken off. No promotion code needed!
How many times were you able to take advantage of this offer in your account? What did you purchase?
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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Only once for me!
Only worked once. I don’t have prime.
Be careful to keep a paper trail – I did all the steps above but could not get the 20% off to show on the order summary (for $500 in SW cards, but same result for other items). I did a chat with customer service and was assured that it would appear “when shipped”. Ummm….nope. Got charged the full amount to my AmEx. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with CS yesterday, sending them screenshots of the chat and other things, including links to the offer that they said they weren’t aware of *rme*; they escalated it with no resolution; overnight someone in CS sent me an email that SW cards weren’t eligible (not true). Today I tried to return them for a refund, had to jump through hoops online and add an explanation for the reason – and within an hour got an email from a higher level CS that I was right, was due the discount, and they would refund me the $100.
Did not work for me just now with a Gold Amex Business card for $500 in Nordstrom cards using 1 point, they are from ACI Cards, but it is owned by Amazon. Maybe they just still are not sharing the love with me, they never do….
I think the points to be used are AMEX Membership Rewards points….not ACI. I used the offer and a couple of items didn’t qualify but some did.