Sears 15X: do gift cards count?

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Today and tomorrow, the Southwest Airlines shopping portal (Rapid Rewards Shopping) is offering 15 points per dollar when shopping at Sears.  In the post “Sears 15X: Leveraging the deal” I showed a number of ways to capitalize on this promotion.  Many of my suggestions were based on buying Sears gift cards for 15X.  The question explored in this post is whether gift card purchases really count…

Terms & Conditions

In the Rapid Rewards shopping portal, the Sears Terms & Conditions are as follows:

Not eligible on Home Delivery Charges, Auto Services, PA & Installation, Master Protection Agreements, Take With, Protection Plans, Sears auctions, Landsend.com, PartsDirect, Craftsman, Kenmore or Outlet purchases. Sears Marketplace products with “Go to Site” button are not eligible. Only products with “Add to Cart” button are eligible. Great Indoors & Kmart products are eligible. Kmart.com products are eligible as a Kmart.com purchase.

In general, the above T&C mean that your purchase must be made at Sears.com, not at Kmart.com, Kenmore.com, etc.  Sears.com has links along the top that will take you to other URLs.  Don’t go to any of them:

image

The other telling part of the T&C is the part that says ‘Only products with “Add to Cart” button are eligible.’  Even though this isn’t explicit, in my experience this means that all products at Sears.com with an “add to cart” button are eligible.

There is nothing in the Terms & Conditions that would exclude gift card purchases.  And, gift cards do have “Add to cart” buttons:

image

Experience

While I don’t have experience with the Southwest portal, I have bought and used Sears gift cards through other portals many times and have almost always been successful.  The one exception was when I once bought Sears gift cards through the AAdvantage eShopping portal.  I didn’t get credit for that purchase, but since then I’ve heard from multiple people who have received miles from buying Sears gift cards through that portal.  I have also had 100% success in getting points when using gift cards at Sears.

Other Issues

If you fail to get points when buying Sears gift cards, the issue may be with a failure to properly track the purchase through the portal.  See “How to ensure your portal points” for details of what could go wrong and how to ensure success.

Wrap Up

I believe that purchases of Sears gift cards (both physical and electronic) do count as valid 15X purchases.  In order to protect yourself, make sure to keep your purchase receipts in case you need to file a missing points claim in the future.

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