Stacking big savings at Gap/Banana Republic today

Earlier today, Dan’s Deals reported stacking coupon codes at Gap and Banana Republic where you can save close to half off the retail prices across the board. You can further stack another extra bit of savings on top if you have a Gap or Banana Republic credit card, but if you don’t have that card you can use techniques from our Instant Gift Card Deals resource page to nearly match that. Finally, although these codes are not found on the airline shopping portal sites, a report from our Laboratory from late last year indicates getting airline portal miles despite having used a store coupon code, so I think it’s possible that you might be able to stack this with the last-minute holiday shopping bonuses that we reported this morning.

The Deals

Gap Codes

• 50% off with a Gap credit card using promo code: CHEERS
• 45% off with any other payment method using promo code: MERRY
• Stack another 10% off with promo code: STYLE

Banana Republic Codes

• 40% off using promo code: BRMONDAY
• 10% off using promo code: STYLE
• 10% off with a Gap credit card using promo code: BRCARD

Stacking without the credit card

If you have a GAP/Banana Republic credit card, you will save the most by stacking the above codes and then attempting a stack with a shopping portal. But even if you don’t have the credit card, you can do pretty well by stacking with Instant Gift Card Deals. As an example, here’s a jacket I saw on Banana Republic:

As you can see, it’s $228. I added it to my cart and applied coupon code BRMONDAY for 40% off. I then added code STYLE for an additional 10% off. That brought my cart total down to $123.12.

While clothes might need to be returned if they don’t fit, I’m not concerned about extended warranty protection from my credit card on a clothing purchase – so I’m open to paying with a gift card. On the secondary gift card market, I could buy second-hand gift cards from Cardpool at 8% off.

However, in my personal experience, Cardpool takes forever to deliver egift cards — it’s rarely instant for me. Furthermore, they don’t have eGift cards in the denominations I’d need — I would have to either underbuy or overbuy, and neither scenario excites me. However, peeking at our previously-mentioned Instant Gift Card Deals resource page, I saw that Seashells sells Banana Republic gift cards with a nice chunk of cash back:

As you can see, Seashells offers 9% cash back on Banana Republic gift cards. That’s just shy of the 10% discount I would get by paying with the Banana Republic/Gap credit card. It’s also better than the second-hand gift card sites and I can buy exactly the amount I need and receive the gift card instantly — all adding up to a win in my book.

That brings the net cost of the coat down to $112.04. That seems like it isn’t too bad. Furthermore, the $123.12 purchase gets me pretty close to many of this week’s last-minute portal bonuses. For example, if I spend $150 total, I can earn 500 bonus American Airlines miles. The spend from this jacket gets me most of the way there as I’ll have spent $123.12 through the portal.

And that’s on top of the 4x miles per dollar they are offering today.

The catch on that is that the portal terms state the following:

Not eligible on purchases made with coupon or discount codes that are not found on this site

The promo codes above are not found on the AAdvantage eShopping website (nor any of the other shopping portals I checked). If they enforce that term, you wouldn’t earn any miles on the purchase. However, we do have one report from last year of a reader who shopped through the American Airlines portal and used Banana Republic coupon codes and still earned the miles. Of course, it’s possible that whatever Banana Republic coupons used in that instance were found on the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping site — I can’t say for sure. So I wouldn’t purchase from GAP or Banana Republic expecting these miles, but I’d rather be pretty happy if and when they post — stacking some easy miles on top of a decent sale.

Bottom line

I don’t closely track GAP and Banana Republic prices, so I’m not sure whether the prices were increased today or if better coupons come around from time to time, but the stacking coupons combined with an easy discounted gift card looked like a pretty good opportunity to pay a lot less than retail price. If you’re shopping for some clothes on Green  Monday, it’s worth seeing what you can stack.

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