Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Last week we posted a number of new Amex Offers including Lowe’s Spend $50, Get $10 Back.
Hopefully you jumped on that deal right away. After seeing this Quick Deal (published by Shawn), I logged into Amex and used the multi-browser trick (details here) to load the offer to all 21 of my family’s Amex cards.
Hopefully you also followed the advice I laid out in the post “Holiday giving and getting: Prepare now,” where I described ways to increase the number of Amex cards you have that are eligible for Amex Offers.
I’m not sure, but my guess is that this offer is no longer available if you haven’t already loaded it to your account.
For those who were able to load the offer, here are my thoughts about how best to use it…
Offer Details
- Spend $50 or more in one or more transactions by 12/31/2016 and get $10 back (statement credit)
- Not valid for e-gift card purchases
- Valid at any participating location in the US.
The offer doesn’t specifically say that it is valid online at Lowes.com, but I tested out a $50 by-mail gift card offer and received the expected email “Great news! You just used your Amex Offer“. That makes it very likely that online orders are fine, but doesn’t necessarily prove it (see comments).
Buying Lowe’s Stuff
If your goal is to buy stuff from Lowe’s, you can maximize this deal as follows:
- Click through the current best portal for Lowes (found here). At the time of this writing, TopCashBack is offering 6% cash back.
- Buy a $50 physical by-mail gift card (do NOT buy an e-gift card!)
- Pay with an Amex card enrolled in this offer.
- Repeat each step above for each enrolled Amex card.
At minimum, the above steps will give you 20% off Lowe’s Gift Cards. Hopefully you’ll also earn portal cash back. Unfortunately the Frequent Miler Laboratory does not have recent reports of whether or not this works. I’m currently testing this and will edit this post once I have results.
UPDATE: TopCashBack shows cash back pending from this purchase. While it is possible that the cash back won’t actually post, it is a very good sign that it shows pending.
If the portal works and you earn 6% cash back, then you’ll have bought these cards for 26% off. Pretty good!
Once you have the gift cards in hand, refer to our old post “Extreme savings at Lowes,” for details of how to save a lot more. Some of the techniques may be out of date, but I’ll do my best to update that post as readers give feedback about what works and what doesn’t.
Buying stuff elsewhere via 3rd party gift cards
If you’re not interested in extreme savings at Lowe’s, consider instead that Lowe’s sells a huge variety of gift cards in-store. You can easily save 20% off these gift cards, as follows:
- Bring all of your enrolled Amex cards to Lowe’s
- Pick out gift cards with values adding up to $50 x the number of Amex cards you enrolled. For example, if you have four cards enrolled in the Lowe’s offer, then you can get 20% off of $200 worth of gift cards.
- When checking out, tell the cashier that you want to “split tender” and pay $50 with one card, $50 with another, etc.
Here are examples of gift cards you can buy:
Department store gift cards:
Grocery, Travel, Pets, Crafts, and more:
Restaurants:
Amazon, movies, music, more:
If you go with Amazon, don’t forget that you can stack these 20% savings with the new option to earn 3X points per dollar from JetBlue!
17% off anything
Lowe’s sells several types of Visa and MasterCard gift cards that can be used almost anywhere:
Fees for $200 Visa gift cards hover around 3%. With 20% back (by splitting tender across multiple Amex cards), you’ll still clear roughly a 17% discount! And, don’t forget that the Five Back Visa gift card offers the ability to earn additional rebates when using the card! See: Five Back Visa Gift Card. A new way to earn 5X and save money?
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
I was at Loes on Thursday Dec 8
Cashier said I couldn’t buy gift cards with credit card
Only debit or cash!
You really got a bad cashier.
[…] Extreme Stacking the Lowe’s Amex Offer: 20% off Amazon, Delta, Disney, StubHub, and more. – How to take advantage of the recently released Amex Offer at Lowe’s. […]
Dumb question: But I don’t see an option to buy 3rd party gift cards online at Lowes.com. Can someone please help me? Am I missing anything?
Just bring your Amex cards in-store and buy the gift cards there. The online options are only for buying Lowes merchandise
Thanx Greg
Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy 3rd party GCs with a Lowe’s GC?
Unfortunately, no, you can’t
Just wanted to let you know that I tried using three cards with the cashier (mine and two authorized users). I was asked for ID and the cashier would not let me use the cards that did not match my name. I was told that any GC purchases over $100 would require ID. I don’t know if this is a line of BS, but that’s my experience at least.
That happened to me recently at Sams Club too. Just depends upon the cashier.
Can a Lowes.com physical by-mail GC transaction be split among 4 Amex cards similar to what can be done in store?
If not, there is a trade-off of (for me….7 amex offers) having 7 total $50 GCs vs 1 $200 and 1 $150. Since I actually want to use these to purchase supplies at Lowe’s it would be much easier to have the larger denominations (and I think Lowes limits a purchase to 4 GCs).
I don’t think so
subscribe
Re Mike’s comment above, Anywhere Style (and Grocery) cards bought from OfficeMax/Office Depot in the deals of recent weeks worked just fine to unload at Walmart in Houston area anyway. I must have unloaded at least 25 of them into MO’s. Only the Fuel Anywhere cards can’t be unloaded at the Walmart desk where you buy MO’s (or load BB, if you still have one.) I never bought the Movie Anywhere cards.
Not exactly sure how you can earn 3x jet blue points as you’re shopping at lowes
Buy amazon gc at lowes with discount, use amazing gc and earn JetBlue points via new partnership
No issue buying Disney giftcards at all today. Got notifications from Amex for all of them.
I tried to purchase a $200 variable VGC a few months ago with the last Amex’s Lowes offer. However, the cashier was not able to complete the purchase indicating the product code couldn’t be located in their system.
Has anyone tried that with the current offer? Last week I bought 2x$100 fixed amount VGC instead as there was a long line and I didn’t want to hold people up.
@Sheila – I used the offer to buy the Dine and Grocery Everywhere cards (variable visa $20-$200 cards) and worked with no problems.
Can someone tell me please, the offer says it “excludes corporate gift cards”, does that mean I can’t get the $10 off if I buy Lowe’s gift cards? Thanks much.
I believe this references Amex corporate account holders and employee cards.
I had read back in August that the Style Anywhere cards did not work at Walmart. Has that changed?
I hadn’t heard that. I’ve updated the post.
I have unloaded thousands of dollars worth of Style Anywhere VGC’s at Walmart on multiple occasions without a problem.
They also sell the amazon echo and dot on the website if you wanted to go that way
Great suggestion
Had two past experiences buying gift cards online from other retailers and getting the “thanks for using your offer” email – only to have the retailer name change and add a .com when the charge went from pending to posted – and I did not receive my offer money back. That email is a good sign, but it isn’t a guarantee.
Yikes. Good to know. I’ll update the post accordingly.