The Offer
- Spend $250 at Bloomingdale’s or bloomingdales.com and receive a $50 statement credit.
This offer is TARGETED. I found it on most of my accounts, but not all.
Bloomingdale’s sells $250 gift cards and they can be resold for around 82% of their value. Additionally, according to FrequentMiler’s Laboratory, ExtraBux will pay out on gift card purchases. They are currently offering 9% for Bloomingdale’s purchases.
[UPDATE 3/8/15: Based on my experiences and that of others, it appears that ExtraBux no longer pays out on Bloomingdale gift cards.]
One small catch: Bloomingdale’s charges a $5 fee for physical gift cards, which will eat into the profitability of this deal. E-gift cards don’t come with a fee, but they’re harder to liquidate. If you have a physical Bloomingdale’s nearby, you could buy the gift card in-store, but you’ll lose out on the portal cashback.
The math:
- Buy the $250 gift card for $255. Get the Amex credit. Total spent is $205.
- Resell it for $210 (82%). Profit $5.
- Get another $22-$23 back from the portal.
- Get 255 free credit card points.
- If everything goes well, you’ll profit around $30 per registered Amex card.
A few notes:
- I haven’t tested yet to see if the Amex credit will hit with a gift card order. From the T&C it sounds like it will, since it only excludes gift card orders. In previous offers, even e-gift cards triggered the credit.
- In the Laboratory it’s noted that mileage portals did NOT payout for gift cards. Thus, there is some risk that the portal payout may not work, even for ExtraBux or a different cashback portal.
- There’s no reports on whether e-gift cards will trigger portal payout.
- Gift cards are excluded from ExtraBux T&C, so you won’t be able to file a claim if it doesn’t track properly.
The Fine Print
- Valid in-store or online
- Valid until 3/30/15
Our Verdict
I think I’m in for this offer. I’ll definitely start this slow and make sure the Amex credits are hitting and the portal is tracking. If it does, I’ll place orders on the rest of my cards as well.
Let us know if you found this offer in your Amex account.
See these posts to learn more about Amex Offers:
- How To Sign Up For Multiple American Express Sync Offers
- OffersBot Review – Free Tool To Automatically Enroll In American Express Sync Offers
- How Does American Express Decide Who Receives What AmEx Sync Offer?
- AmEx Offers: An Introduction & Profitable Examples
I just went through the whole process of selling 2 of the $250 gc that I bought for this deal to GiftCards.com and received the message “You have exceeded $300.00 worth of card sales in 30 days.” This is outrageous as it not only wasted my time but the system didn’t even confirm whether the transaction went through or not (I’m assuming that it didn’t). Has anyone else had this issue?
Hi, I have just bought a physical Bloomingdale’s gift card for $250 using my Amex credit card. I intend to resell the card to giftcards.com as it offers the highest value (82.5%). As this is my first attempt at gift card churning, I would be grateful if anyone can let me know whether they use first class mail with insurance or with tracking when they mail their gift cards to giftcards.com. Thanks.
Giftcards.com usually accepts gift codes online, so you’d be able to just submit it that way.
Can anyone confirm that they got the credit? I am thinking of going to a Bloomingdale’s store to buy a card and then resell it. Will this work? Thanks.
Sure, I bought a $250 gift card online for $255 and I got a $50 credit. In-store would work as well, though I don’t have personal experience with it.
I don’t see any major gain, however, in buying it since when you resell it you may not make any money. (I did it because I thought I’d get portal cashback, which didn’t end up happening.)
Thanks, Chuck. I guess I will drop by a Bloomingdale’s store to get one and then resell it. Can I check whether the statement credit is also given to an authorized user with the same Amex card number?
Another thing is that there is currently an Amex card offer for Kate Spade where if you spend $200 or more, you will get $50 back. Has anyone bought a gift card from Kate Spade and then got the credit?
I’ve never heard of Kate Spade but I wouldn’t recommend doing that deal. It appears that you would only get about $150 for it so it would be a loss.
Disregard what I wrote. I was doing my calculation on $250. For a $200 gift card you would only get $120 back making it a $30 loss.
Are there any other portals that might offer cash back since ExtraBux isn’t working?
I won’t be trying any others, since they’re usually all the same.
If you want to try something else, it would be logical to try a milage portal, such as Southwest, United, etc. Or to try a credit card portal, like ShopDiscover, since these portals could run differently.
Let us know if you do.
It’s been 13 days since buying a physical GC using extrabux and unfortunately no cashback has posted.
Just ordered an eGC using Discover Deals and sold to Giftcards.com. Not optimistic on the cashback, but at least I don’t have to pay the $5 fee for physical GCs.
You were able to sell to giftcards.com. Somebody above said they wouldn’t except E-gcs because of no pin.
The egift code has 19 digits. Use the first 15 for the GC number and the last 4 digits as PIN.
Thank You for pointing out this trick. Now I am back to the boat… 🙂
I’m with you on this. It’s over a week for me, and I haven’t seen any cashback. Probably they stopped paying out on gift cards.
Can anyone confirm if E-Gift Card works for this time? I can sell E-Codes to Giftcards.com. So if E-GC works, I am in even without portal payout. Will wait to get some confirmation about E-GC
Anyone?
I did the physical and got an instant email. If I try the e-gc, I’ll let you know.
Giftcards.com won’t accept E-gift card for Bloomingdales, even though they are showing you can enter codes. Since Bloomingdales E-Gift Cards doesn’t have PIN, when you go little further, Giftcards.com shows error that this card is not eligible for E-codes. So its not possible to sell to them and ABC giftcard/Card Cash pays much less for E-Gift cards, so its better to stick to Physical Cards for this deal.
Thanks for pointing out.
I stuck to physical gc for those reasons and because I didn’t know if the portal would payout for e-gc. But so far we haven’t gotten any confirmation of portal payout working for gc.
The scratch off digits on the physical GC aren’t labeled PIN as well. Bloomingdales balance check doesn’t ask for a PIN. The scratch off digits are just appended to the gift card number to get the balance. So you could selling the egift code by just using the last 4 digits as the “PIN”.
Thanks. I don’t have an e-gc to try out.
I had the offer on 2 of my 3 Amex cards. I probably won’t bother with this if you guys don’t confirm the portal cash back works.
I’ll let you know if I learn something. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.
Where are you guys reselling? Giftcardgranny?
Yup, that’s where I usually check. If it’s only a small difference (e.g 0.5-1%) I’ll generally sell to the sites I have a better relationship with.
Thanks, William.
Got the offer on 3 cards. Ordered one $250 (+$5 fee) using extrabux, but nothing has posted yet. Still waiting if extrabux would post before ordering two more. The $50 Amex cashback should post soon since it’s already listed i n the “Savings” section of my Amex Offers.
Thanks for confirming the Amex credit part. If you can keep us updated on the extrabux part, I’d really appreciate it. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but I was just about to.
Same here ordered on 2/15. Just checked on ExtraBux site and on Bloomingdale is says”*Cash back is not available for Gift Cards, or for orders placed using a Gift Card.”. I don’t remember seeing that when I ordered. Not tracked and doesn’t look good.
I noted in the post that it’s excluded from the terms, that’s been there since 2/15 at least.
I also haven’t seen anything yet, but my order is from the 17th maybe. Still hoping. I’ll update if I get anything pending.
1 out of 10 accounts. May decide to skip this since it wont scale for me and probably wont be worth the time.
Yeah, for one it may not be worth it.