I have written about these deals in the past and another three just popped up that I will be taking advantage of.
You will need one of these cards to take advantage of these offers (although it might appear on any Amex so check yours!):
- 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 $250 in gift cards at Best Buy, a $40 gift card to California Pizza Kitchen at your local CPK, spend $75+ at Walmart.com
- Automatically get a $25 credit for the Best Buy purchase, $10 for the CPK purchase, and $15 for the Walmart.com
- 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 Best Buy, California Pizza Kitchen and Walmart.com 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.
2. Buy $250 in gift cards (or purchases) at Best Buy, a $40 gift California Pizza Kitchen in store, and $75 in purchases at Walmart.com.
For Best Buy, you will need to go into store if you want to get the $200 Visa Gift cards, or if you actually need some electronics you can buy them online. The Best Buy closest to me only has Visa Gift Cards (variable load from 25-$200 with a $5.95 fee), iTunes and Best Buy Gift cards, although I know some places have Amazon.com GCs and others. I bought a $200 Visa GC and a $50 Best Buy gift card. Note this needs to be $250+ all in one purchase, not separate purchases.
For California Pizza kitchen you will need to physically go into a location near you on their participating locations list and buy a $40 gift card.
For Walmart.com, just go to their web site (after checking what cashback you want to get from Cashbackholic.com ) and pick your stuff you want. As long as the total is over $75, it should qualify.
Since I have the SPG Business Amex, I will get 315 SPG points ($365 for the purchases – $50 in credits) for these purchases.
3. Automatically get a $25 credit for the Best Buy purchase, $10 for the CPK purchase, and $15 for the Walmart.com 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 Best Buy then you can simply use that gift card. 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 $45 for the $50 Best Buy gift card. A $40 gift card at CPK is only selling for $28 so I wouldn’t do that offer unless you actually wanted to eat there.
Conclusion
This certainly isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but they can’t all be 264,000 points at once :). Little deals like these help to offset the annual fees that you pay for the Amex cards.