In the hunt for miles and points, it’s not always easy to know what works and what doesn’t. For example, if you go through an online mileage portal to a merchant and buy a gift card, will you earn miles? Once you have the gift card, is there a way to use it to buy other gift cards or cash out? What if you go through a portal to use a gift card to buy merchandise? Will you earn miles from that? The answers to all of these questions depend mostly on each individual merchant, whether you buy physical or e-gift cards, and whether policies have recently changed. One thing that you cannot count on is the documented Terms & Conditions shown within each shopping portal. Often, portals will state “not valid on gift cards” regardless of whether gift card purchases in fact earn rewards.
The Frequent Miler Laboratory is a page dedicated to collecting and disseminating information about experiments in mile and point gathering. Here are some of the latest experiment results…
J. Crew double dip appears to be mostly dead
In 2012, a reader identified as matuag reported success earning points from the Ultimate Rewards mall by going through the mall to J. Crew to buy a physical gift card. The same reader did not earn points, though, when buying an e-gift card. Around the same time, others reported success earning points when using gift cards (hence, the double dip possibilities). Recently, thanks to the J. Crew Amex Sync promotion offering $25 back on a $100 purchase, many have repeated these experiments with various portals. Here are the reported results:
- Buy physical gift card through the AAdvantage eShopping portal: FAIL
- Buy physical gift card through the ShopDiscover cash back portal: SUCCESS
- Buy physical gift card through the United MileagePlusShopping portal: FAIL
- Buy physical gift card through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards Mall: FAIL
- Buy physical gift card through the EBates cash back portal: FAIL
- Buy e-gift card through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards Mall: FAIL
The strange thing here is that one reader reported success through the ShopDiscover portal. Usually (but not always) it is the case that if something works through one portal it will work through all of them. So, what’s going on here? It is possible that portal tracking of purchases made at J. Crew is simply extremely slow right now. Maybe we will get points and/or cash back eventually. At this point, though, I’m ready to throw in the towel on this one. I’m intrigued though by the ShopDiscover result. Did anyone else try ShopDiscover? What was the result? Or, did anyone else have success in other portals recently?
Miles for Amex gift cards success
Last month, both the Delta SkyMiles portal and the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan portal were offering 3 miles per dollar for buying Amex gift cards through their portal (both are currently down to 1 mile per dollar). At the time, there were many reports of people waiting in vain for miles to show up from these purchases. I speculated at the time that this was because large orders often take longer to post to portals than smaller orders. I wrote:
In my experience, it is very common for larger purchases (e.g. $500 or more) to take longer to post to mileage portals. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see these purchases take 3 weeks or so to show up in the portals.
In my case, it took over four weeks for the miles to post, but happily they finally did. Note too that some were concerned by Terms & Conditions that seemed to suggest that miles would be earned only on the purchase fee, not on the total dollar amount. I’m happy to report that miles are earned on the entire amount less shipping and purchase fees.
Upgrades
Some stores will let you use their gift cards to buy other gift cards. I call this “upgrading”. It’s extremely useful knowing which stores allow this so that when there is a special deal on that store’s gift cards you know you can jump in, buy the gift cards, and then exchange them later for cards you really want. Here are the latest gift card upgrade results…
In-store results:
- Best Buy: Many have reported success.
- GameStop: Several people have reported success.
- Meijer: I reported success using a Meijer gift card to buy a Staples gift card.
- Office depot: No dice.
- Radio Shack: I reported success using a Radio Shack gift card to buy an Amazon gift card.
- Sears: Many have reported success.
- Staples: Reports are mixed on this one too. In my experience, the cash registers allow buying gift cards with gift cards, but many cashiers are trained not to allow it.
- Walgreens: A few people reported success, but one person reported failure in using a Walgreens gift card in-store to buy other gift cards. It seems that Walgreen’s registers are not coded the same from store to store.
Online results:
It’s rare, but some stores will let you upgrade gift cards online…
- Meijer: I reported success using a Meijer gift card to buy a Gamestop gift card online.
- Staples online: Several people (including myself) have reported success using Staples’ gift cards online to buy other gift cards.
- Walmart: Several people have reported no longer being able to use Walmart gift cards online to buy Visa gift cards.
Other results
I’ve highlighted here just some of the more interesting recent lab results, but there is more! To see the latest, go to the Frequent Miler Laboratory page and click twice on the table’s date column in order to sort from most recent to oldest.
Reader participation
The key to making the Laboratory valuable is the regular flow of information contributed by readers. So, please contribute your results by commenting on that page! I do my best to update the Lab table regularly, but sometimes you’ll find the most recent info in the comments themselves. A good way to stay up to date all the time is to subscribe to the comments section. Simply type “subscribe” as your comment and check the box “Notify me of follow-up comments by email.”
01/20/2014, Failed – Using Amazon gift card to purchase other gift card – Amazon.com (this was working)
Does anyone remember if their J Crew gift cards were processed right away? I’d like to order some online and want to be sure the payment posts by tomorrow. If not, I’ll head over and buy some in person, since the portals don’t seem to be paying anyway. But I’d rather order them online (oh the perils of procrastination).
I think that the e-gift card I ordered did get processed within an hour or so. I’m not 100% sure that I’m remembering that correctly though!
Just tried it (buying an egift card) and it was charged by jcrew right away and I got the email from Amex thanking me for using an enrolled card within 5 minutes. procrastinators rejoice!
Can I buy Home Depot or Lowe’s e-gift cards from Staples.com, and then upgrade them at those stores for gas cards? The local Staples is all out of Shell cards.
No. Neither HD nor Lowes will let you buy gift cards with gift cards
I noticed that 1800flowers.com sells gift cards which are resellable at Cardpool at a 60% discount (must be physical). If you purchase a $50 gift card with your sync’d Amex and Plink you get $15 Amex credit and $3.50 in Plink credits (no $60 increment is available) and can resell for $30. Going through TopCashBack to Cardpool gets another $2 back so you’re $0.50 in the money.
The reason this is worthwhile is the portals are offering 30 or 35 miles/dollar on 1800flowers purchases. I purchased through the Delta Skymiles portal and can confirm the miles posted.
Nice!
Hey FM,
Radio shack just shot out a memo disallowing radio shack gc purchase on amazon gcs. Well that was reported on SD.
I am having the same problem as Dave. No portal bonus points have posted yet. I am assuming they should have by now…ideas?
You can combine Meijer and Best Buy for this churn:
1. Buy meijer gift cards online, at least $5k gets 3% discount automatically. This is in addition to your CC bennies and AA portal (1x, must buy another item to get miles for GCs)
2. Goto meijer store to buy best buy GCs with meijer GCs
3. Goto bestbuy and buy prepaid visas (3% fee) with best buy GCs
4. liquidate
The 3% meijer GC discount combined with 3% visa fee means you break even before taking into account portal and CC bennies.
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Sorry…I meant physical gift cards. Not e-gift cards! Hope it helps with your lab!
Thanks Kyle. That is helpful data. Can you double check the Walmart finding regarding the Visa gift card? I’m surprised (but happy to hear) that it worked!
I purchased 3 seperate $100 J. Crew GCs using Shop Discover and i didnt get cashback on any of them. I did it 2 days before the Amex Promo ended so maybe the stopped GCs by that time or i was just unlucky.
@Grant – How do you get your photo on the post? I’d like to do that!
Hi Kyle, the image is called a Gravatar and you can do create one too. Here is a step-by-step guide here: http://travelwithgrant.com/how-to-guides/create-gravatar/
It makes is really easy to find your comment on WordPress blogs.
I appreciate the lab results! I was just about to go for 2 x $100 J Crew deals through the AA portal with my American Express cards, but you’ve saved me the time.
I don’t know if you have these results in your lab, but in December 2013 the following worked:
AAMall – Coach actual gift card purchase
AAMall – Neiman Marcus actual gift card purchase
AAMall – Wal-Mart Visa gift card purchase
United Mall – Coach actual gift card purchase
Chase UR Mall – West Elm actual gift card purchase
Thanks Kyle. When you say “actual” gift card, do you mean physical gift card vs. e-gift card?
Any way to register for the Discover shopping mall without having a discover CC?
https://www.discovercard.com/cardmembersvcs/registration/reg/goto?forwardName=reghome
I don’t think so. You really need to have a Discover account.
ShopDiscover definitely works for physical GCs from Jcrew. I received $105 last month.
Thanks Brian. When was your most recent successful purchase made? I’m wondering if ShopDiscover is different or if JCrew stopped paying out for gift cards recently
I bought 10 GCs just before Christmas with the sync deals on my 10 amexs. ShopDiscover had 10% cash back. Each resulted in an email 5-7 days later confirming the cash back. I got another Amex in January. I synced it and got another gc. Shop Discover is back down to 5% so I received just $5. All $105 earned was. Paid out when my Discover statement closed Jan 25.
As another data point for JCrew, I used the Chase UR portal to buy physical gift cards (using my Amex’s for the recent sync deal). I did not get the points, but that’s okay given I received $200 in gift cards for $150.