13% off American Airlines, Hyatt, Lowes, and much more

GiftCertificates.com is currently offering 5% off their by-mail SuperCertificates (through November 21).  SuperCertificates can be used to buy merchant gift certificates: American Airlines, Hyatt, Lowes, Crate & Barrel, and much more.  Here’s how to stack promotions to get a total of 13% off any of these gift cards!

Start with a shopping portal

At the time of this writing, it looks like the best portal for shopping at GiftCertificates.com is uPromise:

Not everybody realizes this, but even though uPromise is advertised as a college savings program, you can withdraw cash (in the form of a check) if you’re not saving up for college.

According to the Frequent Miler Laboratory, portal cash back is earned for the purchase of SuperCertificates, but not for the use of those certificates:

Next, make use of GiftCertificates.com’s November offers:

The first listed offer, on this page, runs from November 1 to November 21, 2014.  Purchase a physical SuperCertificate worth $100 or more and receive 5% off your purchase with promo code SANTA14.

Don’t forget to apply the promo code before making the purchase!

Pay with a credit card offering 5% cash back

There are two credit card options here that I’m aware of:

1. uPromise World MasterCard: This card offers 5% cash back for all purchases made through the uPromise portal (this is in addition to the cash back offered by the portal directly).
2. Discover It: Discover’s fourth quarter 5% cash back category includes “online shopping”.  While I haven’t verified it, I’m pretty sure that purchases made at giftcertificates.com would qualify.

Example

Here’s an example of how the above steps might work for purchasing $250 worth of American Airlines gift cards ($250 is just an example amount).

1. Buy a SuperCertificate

Go through uPromise, to GiftCertificates.com and buy a $250 SuperCertificate.  After applying the promo code SANTA14, the total cost should be $238.99 (if you choose the cheapest shipping option).

Pay with the uPromise World MasterCard or a Discover card enrolled in the 4th quarter 5% bonus.

2. Use SuperCertificate

Once the SuperCertificate arrives, go to GiftCertificates.com again to use it to buy whatever gift card you want.  Note that a small shipping and handling fee will be tacked on.  In this example, I use the certificate plus $1.99 on my credit card to buy an American Airlines gift certificate:

3. Add it up

Here is how I would expect the costs and rebates to stack up:

• Total charged to credit card: $238.99 + $1.99 = $240.98
• Total credit card rebate: 5% of $240.98 = $12.05
• uPromise rebate: 5% of $237.50 = $11.88
• Total cost after rebates: $217.05
• Discount percent: ($250 – $217.05) / $250 = 13.18%

Note that smaller orders may result in less than a 13% rebate since shipping fees will be a bigger percentage of total.

An extra bonus on Friday November 28th

GiftCertificates.com has yet another November offer that might be of interest.  Purchase $250 in Merchant Gift Cards and receive a free $25 SuperCertificate.

This is pretty good since it means that you can get a total of $275 worth of gift cards for $250 (9% discount, not counting shipping charges).  Unfortunately, this deal is only available for one day: November 28th, 2014 so you’ll have to be ready to go on that day!  All of the stackable rebates shown above should also apply (e.g. go through portal and pay with a 5% back credit card).

What would make this really sweet is if one could use a SuperCertificate bought with the current 5% off promotion to buy merchant gift cards on November 28th!  I called GiftCertificates.com to ask whether these deals were stackable, but I was told no.  According to the phone rep, they don’t consider it a “purchase” if you pay with a SuperCertificate.  OK, fair enough.  Someone might want to try this, though, just in case the phone rep was wrong.

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