Friday, July 31, 2015

Allen Edmonds Gift Cards and AMEX Offers for You - $10 per AMEX Card - Pajama Money

Disclaimer: I receive a referral commission for the following link(s) and I greatly appreciate supporting the site:  Top Cashback


HT - TZ via email


One of the new American Express Offers for You is for Allen Edmonds.  The offer is $50 off a $200 purchase and expires on 9/20.  Your first inclination for an AmEx offers for you is whether you can use the savings and if not, it should be whether you can sell a gift card for profit.







In this case, the answer is no, but it might still be worth it anyways.

$200 physical gift cards will trigger the congratulatory email from American Express for using a synced offer.  Therefore, it is $150 for a $200 gift card.


Currently, $200 physical gift cards can be sold via ABC Gift Cards, CardCash or Gift Card Zen for $140, that's a loss of $10.  Hear me out though.




Enter Top Cashback

The next thing to check is whether shopping portals payout for buying gift cards.  Frequent Miler Lab tells us that you will receive cashback from Top Cashback for buying a gift card.  I can confirm that personally earlier this week.

According to Cashback Monitor, Top Cashback is currently the highest payout at 10%.   Top Cashback tracked within hours of my purchase.



That's pretty exciting.  $20 cashback on a $150 purchase (after AMEX offers for you credit).


Your Haul

If you use Top Cashback and sell your gift cards through ABC Gift Cards, CardCash or Gift Card Zen with no price changes, you will earn $10 for a $150 purchase for every AmEx card you have..  You also earn 150 points in whichever card you are using.   After each purchase, I went back to Top Cashback and then on to Allen Edmonds.  Not too shabby!


Important:
If you have the offer on multiple cards in the same online log in, before you add it to any one card, open a new window in your browser for each card.  Activate them all at the same time.  Otherwise the offer will disappear from the rest of your cards in the same online account.


A Word of Caution



Gift card reselling prices are always in flux.  When big deals like these come out, you should sell as soon as possible to minimize the chance that the price being offered for your gift card lowers because of resellers.

In fact, when I first bought the gift cards, the resell rate was 74% and it has gone down to 70% so be wary.  This can happen again.

Another possible problem is that the purchases may not track properly.   You can ask for the money afterwards but that can take a long time to track.

As I mentioned yesterday, my purchases didn't track, but Top Cashback gave me the money anyways once I opened a ticket.  I would personally do one gift card at a time and wait for the tracking email before moving on the next gift card.


If you don't make the first rush of selling, you can always wait for the prices to rebound, but that might take a while with retailer like Allen Edmonds that isn't as popular as Gas gift cards.


Note - you also need to calculate the cost of shipping the cards to the reselling company.  Most of the time I use one or 2 regular stamps depending on size.  For larger orders I get tracking.