Earlier this week, in Greg’s post about throwing in the towel on buying groups, he mentioned in passing buying 3rd party gift cards at Amazon using Amazon Gift Card money. A day later, Doctor of Credit reports that Amazon made a change to its system and it no longer allows buying 3rd party gift cards with Amazon gift cards.
Previously, it was not possible to buy Amazon gift cards or Visa gift cards with your Amazon Gift Card balance, but the new change here is that you can no longer select your existing Amazon balance to buy 3rd party gift cards (like Best Buy, Starbucks, etc). I imagine this may have been a popular path to ultimately earning 5x on grocery purchases for some by first purchasing an Amazon gift card at an office supply store (earning 5x because of the category bonus) and then using the Amazon gift card to buy an Albertsons / Safeway / Vons / etc gift card on Amazon. Unfortunately, that’s now dead.
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I do too and just got off the phone with a, “supervisor” rude as they where I am not sure. But they explained it that this is to avoid, “piracy/money laundering” Funny how the terms and conditions do not clearly spell this out. I don’t recall a notification from Amazon either spelling out the reason for this change. Yet another reason to boycott Amazon.
Wow, I buy my in game currency’s through amazon and this really hurts.
I normally get Amazon cards for xmas gifts from aunts / uncles. I like to buy Xbox cards and then buy apex legends coins. Not really life altering for me. But it does suck. Now I have Amazon cards and I don’t want or even need anything. They just want to move physical merchandise from warehouses. Gift cards especially digital codes don’t take up space
Wild they’re doing this. This literally throws some peoples lives in the trash. Some people have to completely change what they were doing to get along now. Then there’s the people that are just mad as hell about this because it’s just flat out stupid.
Are you sure that you mean “literally“?
I HATE THIS! i use Amazon gift cards to buy robux on Roblox with so much cards I can have so much robux
Sucks, I was using my balance to buy cards for fast food, particularly Subway.
Message or call amazon CS for the complaint. Also email jeff@amazon.com
not so sure if that works anymore as I think he is in outer space who knows maybe emails go that far….
I hate they did this! I used the balance to purchase grocery gift cards to save money. They’re super lame for this.
Surprisingly the Policy was last updated on July 18th, 2021 stating “Limitations. Your Amazon.com Balance cannot be used to purchase other Gift Cards, prepaid open loop cards, or certain third-party gift cards.”
Note: Only certain third-party gift cards.
They made this change and the policy online has not been updated.
They actually supposed to ban this years ago, how somehow they never fixed this issue until now, it is very disappointing they banned it tho.
Hate this change. I have used my rewards Amazon gift cards to buy third party all the time. Now I can’t. Hope this reaches Amazon and they reverse it.. Otherwise, no reason to buy Amazon gift cards. Very unhappy with the change.
Ughhhhhh Aroura I agree !!! I am so mad they did this stupid change and if they dont fix it I’m done buying amazon cards. This pissed me off so bad.
Stupid bloggers! They are why we can’t have nice things.
While this specific thing may have been of limited utility to a lot of people, I wonder if this is a signal that gift cards will soon also be excluded from “Save xx% when using credit card points” promotions. I know those promotions are a different thing, but it seems possible.
The survey community sites and various receipt apps reward you with Amazon gift cards that I was able to redeem for other brand gift cards. I don’t buy that much on Amazon itself. Disappointing that the option is gone.
Same here, I enjoyed using my survey earnings for food delivery e-gift cards to get free lunch/dinner. I guess there isn’t much incentive to get amazon gift cards anymore
Oh look, another shopping post that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the travel industry. Post this on SlickDeals, not Boarding Area.
I thought it was there for methods to accumulate points with a finite amount of money
Feel free to scroll past deals that aren’t applicable to you. As mentioned in the post, Greg wrote just a few days ago about Buying Groups (a way to “Earn Miles without flying”, which is the tagline of this site) and explicitly mentioned buying 3rd party gift cards with Amazon gift cards. It made sense to post this as an update to that if nothing else. But generally speaking, we (at Frequent Miler) do heavily focus on ways to earn miles without flying (or maximize rewards in general on both the earning and redemption sides) so that you can travel in luxury and comfort. While we cover some major developments, this site is far less focused on general “travel industry” news than others. Different strokes for different folks.
I beg to differ. Many of us who are interested in traveling at a discount use gift cards as a temporary measure to earn very valuable hotel stays and airline flights.
I can say that I have “earned” millions of miles and points despite my frugal spending on real goods.
Over the last 20 years or so I have traveled first or business class all over the world for a cost of economy class or less and paid for precious little hotel stays.
Gift cards have been a major factor in this.
Oh look, another poster who thinks they own the sites they read.
Not every post is of interest to me. That’s true for virtually every blog. I have developed this skill called “reading comprehension“ that allows me to analyze the subject of a post, and most of the time I manage to skip posts that aren’t relevant to me personally.
Lmao rite. God some people are so slow.
This is an advanced travel topic beyond the comprehension of filthy casuals.
Technically you could use this hack fo earn miles through the shopping portals. You could buy the store gift card from Amazon and then use the portal at the store for miles.
It DOES have to do with the travel industry as you could previously buy Uber gift cards with your Amazon balance. Just sayin’
Yup, and there are a lot of deals to buy discounted Amazon gift cards. You could take advantage of these offers to build a gift card balance at, say, a 20% discount. You could apply that balance to travel purchases when they became necessary. Like say you (like me) are an occasional user of airbnb. A multi-night airbnb stay can be expensive and you’d like to book it at a discount, but you’re reluctant to buy airbnb gift cards for some unknown future need. Instead, you could hold Amazon gift cards, and convert them to merchants like airbnb when you actually needed them. This valuable flexibility is now gone.
This sucks. I was using Amazon GC I earned through various receipt scanning apps to by Amtrak e-gift cards from Amazon.