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Citi has recently added card-linked shopping offers. A reader reached out alerting us of this a few weeks ago, but at the time Greg had the offers and neither Stephen nor I had them on our accounts. That is still the case today, but Citi has even sent an email to Greg alerting him of the offers, so it does appear that they are intending a larger roll-out even though some card members don’t yet have access.
The Deal
- Citi has added card-linked shopping offers on some cards / for some cardholders. These are card-linked offers that should stack with other savings methods.
- Direct link to log in and check your offers
Quick Thoughts
As noted at the top, this has been out for several weeks already, but we had held off on reporting it figuring that a larger roll-out would be coming. Perhaps Citi has just decided to target certain groups of customers for offers, but it’s worth logging in to see if you have any that are of use for you. Upon first glance, Greg didn’t find any particularly notable offers, but as always things like this can be a good deal if you already intend to spend money at one of the included merchants. Since these offers are card-linked, they should stack with shopping portals as well.
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Over the past few days i’ve spent a few hours on the phone with Citi customer service reps and tech support reps on both the business card side and personal card side.
Here are a few notes from those calls: some of the reps had not even heard of citi merchant offers. The system is working fine, no glitches preventing us from getting offers. The marketing department decides who gets them just the same like at amex. No one could tell me if more spending on citi cards would help me get offers. One seemingly knowledgeable rep said “the program has only been rolled out to a very select few”. I spend almost zero on my citi cards so that could be my problem. In my home i have four AA plat cards and one double cash. None of them even has the “merchant offers” link when i click rewards & offers > offers for you. IF you are targeted, this is where you will see a way to click through to the merchant offers. There is a direct link which will take you to the merchant offers page for your account if you log in first but it will just say “error: we are having trouble loading your offers. please try again later. Here you can see what the error screen looks like. If you log into your account then click this link, it will take you to the citi merchant offers page for your account – which if you are lucky will have offers and if you are not so lucky, just the error page like me on all my accounts.
Another thing i learned from talking to the reps is that they dont know which types of cards will eventually receive offers and more specifically, no one could tell me if AA cards would be receiving offers. However, i noticed something interesting when loading the direct link to merchant offers. For a brief moment before it throws the error it will display a screen which shows info for merchant offers. Information like “your earnings to date” “enrolled” offers, “redeemed” offers. I get this screen on all my AA cards and my double cash card so i am optimistic that at some point i will begin to receive merchant offers so i can play along on the AA status board game.
I don’t suspect there are any back doors into these offers so the many of us without Citi merchant offers are relegated to trying to find other card linked offers to stack with simplymiles and the AA shopping portal so more of us can play the game. Many of the deals make no sense for us without the citi merchant offer portion of the stack. My focus for now will be to put as much spend as possible on my double cash and see if that helps. If anyone has a double cash and spends alot but does NOT have any merchant offers, these would be valuable datapoints.
Any DP on getting targeted? 3 cards, no offers
I’ve got a lot of useful offers on multiple cards:
Bestbuy $50 off $200 4 times
BP $10 off $20 4 times
30% off Uber up to $20 2 times
I was able to add it to more than one card (Premier, Dividend and Rewards+). Is the offer limited to just one card?
100 offers on my Premier card (none on my Double Cash or Rewards+ cards). Three are meaningful to me. 6% back on Pad Thai I or Mellow Mushroom (dining) purchases (up to $2,000 pend – or $120 back – for each). 3% back on Jos. A. Bank online purchases (no limit of spend). All are good for 45 days or more. Not bad.
Error: We are having trouble loading your offers. Please try again later.
Still get this message every time on all my accounts.
“Error: We are having trouble loading your offers. Please try again later.”