American Express cards, even though they almost all have an annual fee provide value way beyond the fee cost and this offer is a great example. I personally have two Amex cards, the Business SPG Amex and the Premier Rewards Gold Business Amex and took advantage of these offers on both of them.
American Express has been running a series of promotions called Sync that give you special offers for syncing your American Express card to your Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. I wrote about how I made $100 during a previous promotion with Dell a few months back. This offer isn’t quite as good, but it is still free $$ and miles so it was worth my time. The offers are $25 back on a purchase of $100 or more at Costco.com and $10 back on a purchase of $25 or more at California Pizza Kitchen. This offer also doesn’t require you to connect your social networking to your account which will be important for some.
You will need one of these cards to take advantage of these offers:
- Starwood Preferred Guest Amex
- Starwood Preferred Guest Business Amex
- Amex Premier Rewards Gold
- Amex Business Gold Rewards
- Amex Platinum Card
- Amex Business Platinum Card
The basics
- Register online at Americanexpress.com for both promotions for all of your cards
- Buy $100 Gift Card at Costco.com (must be a member) and $25 gift California Pizza Kitchen in store
- Automatically get a $25 credit for the Costco.com purchase and $10 for the CPK purchase
- Liquidate the giftcards by using them or Cardpool
The Details
1. Register online at americanexpress.com for both promotions for all of your cards
Go to americanexpress.com and log onto your online account. On the bottom there will be a box labeled My offers that looks like this.
There will be a number of available offers, but the ones from Costco.com and California Pizza Kitchen are the ones I am focusing on today.
Click on the Get offer button next to it and a screen that looks like this will pop up. Click on Add to Card.
Once you have added both offers, repeat the process for any other Amex cards you have.
2. Buy $100 Gift Card at Costco.com (must be a member) and $25 gift California Pizza Kitchen in store
Now log onto Costco.com and select the item from the list on the left that says Gift Cards, Tickets, and Floral and choose the cash cards and gift certificates option. Add a $100 gift card to your cart and then check out, using your Amex card for payment. Repeat this process with any other Amex cards you have.
For California Pizza kitchen you will need to physically go into a location near you on their participating locations list and buy a $25 gift card. Make multiple purchases if you have multiple Amex like I do.
Since I have the SPG Business Amex and the Business Gold Rewards Amex, I will get 90 SPG points and 90 Member Rewards Points ($125 for the purchases – $35 in credits) for these purchases.
3. Automatically get a $25 credit for the Costco.com purchase and $10 for the CPK purchase.
Almost immediately after you make the purchase, you will get an email from American Express thanking you for your purchase at the merchant, although it did take up to an hour for one of my purchases.
4. Liquidate the giftcards by using them or sell at Cardpool
If you have purchases planned at Costco (and I know $100 is pretty easy for me to spend there once you try a free sample or two) then you can simply use those gift cards. The same goes for the CPK gift cards if you like the food at California Pizza Kitchen.
If you want to get your cash back, it is still a money maker to sell the gift cards at Cardpool. As of today, you can get $88 for the $100 Costco gift card and $17.50 for the CPK gift card. So if you just wanted to sell them and move on, you would make $105.50 for $90 in expense. Don’t forget that you get 90 miles or points from your purchase too!
Conclusion
This certainly isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but they can’t all be 264,000 points at once 😉. Especially if you have multiple Amex cards like I do, you can do several of them at one time and multiply your earnings. And little deals like these help to offset the annual fees that you pay for the Amex cards.
