American Express has been quite generous, and probably will continue with this generosity in the coming weeks, with their Amex Offers (or Sync Offers). These offers basically incentivize you to use your American Express card at certain retailers to earn cash back. Here are some of the great ones from the last couple of weeks:
There are a couple of ways to add the same offer to multiple Amex cards. You can add and remove your cards to your Twitter account and sync the card with the offer via Twitter (or you can setup multiple Twitter accounts, one for each card). You can also login to your Amex account and then duplicate the tabs and use each tab to sync the offer to a separate Amex card in your card. You must open tabs for each card before you start saving the offer or else the offer will disappear across the account.
Combining Gift Cards or Credit Cards
While it is nice to have all of these opportunities to save money over and again, some people wonder how it works to take advantage of this on smaller amounts. For instance, the Walmart offer is for $5 cash back on $15 spend. What if you have 6 cards you can use but you want to use this offer to buy something that costs $100?
Walmart
In the case of Walmart, you would purchase egift cards to Walmart in the amount of $15. You can use up to 4 gift cards per order, so that will help if your item is costing around $60. But, if you want to use more than that, you can actually combine those gift cards by using 4 gift cards to purchase yet another gift card! You can do that as many times as you need to, up to a total of 16 original gift cards.
If you actually had that many cards to save the offer to, you would buy 16 $15 gift cards and then use 4 at a time to combine to buy a $60 gift card. When you do that with the remaining card groups, you would have 4 gift cards totaling $240. Of that $240, you have already received $80 cash back from the Amex offer. That means you could purchase something like an iPad mini ($240) and get it for $180 out of pocket! Great way to handle that!
City Sports
I wrote earlier about the offer for City Sports and how that is a great way to purchase a GoPro Hero camera at 20% off. It is even easier with them. You purchase $100 gift cards and, when you receive them in the mail, you can then order whatever you want online and use as many gift cards as you have (confirmed by multiple City Sports agents). Again, if you had a large amount of synced Amex cards, you could buy something very expensive and receive 20% cash back on that purchase.
Blue Nile
With Christmas coming up, some people will certainly buy some things from Blue Nile (jewelry). Amex is offering $30 cash back on a purchase of $100 or more. With them, you don’t even have to buy gift cards – they will let you buy an item using multiple credit cards. You need to call them to do that (800-242-2728) but you will certainly be able to use different Amex cards together on the same purchase to trigger the offers on each card.
Other vendors may allow the same combination of credit cards as well.
These little tips should help you to maximize Amex Offers to take advantage in an easier fashion when purchasing higher ticket items.
Re: Blue Nile – not sure if the Blue Nile deal is very stackable. You have to use a coupon code “AMEX30” on checkout to earn the CB. Perhaps buying multiple gift certificates would work?