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Applebees Deal
There’s a deal available now at Target to purchase a $50 Applebees gift card for $50 and receive a bonus $10 Target gift card free.
- At Target in-store you can get the $10 bonus gift card with the purchase of a $50 physical Applebees gift card.
- Online at target.com you can get a $10 bonus gift card with either the purchase of a $50 physical Applebees gift card or the purchase of two $25 Applebees e-gift cards.
(HT: anticlawson on Fatwallet)
There’s no quantity limit mentioned, but when purchasing online you’ll only get one $10 bonus gift card per order. Even if you order a $50 physical gift card and $50 in e-gift cards in the same order, you’ll only get one bonus gift card.
We should be able to place multiple orders and get the bonus with each one. Similarly, for in-store purchases you’ll likely have to split up each $50 card in a separate transaction in order to get the bonus card on each one.
It doesn’t say when this deal ends, I’d guess it will be available until the end of the week, probably through Saturday 4/18/15.
Factors to Consider
Good Deal?
Is this a good deal? It is if you eat at Applebees a lot. For the purposes of reselling it’s not too good since you can only resell the Applebees card for at most 76.5%, which would result in a loss.
REDcard factor
I wondered whether the REDcard will receive a 5% discount on the purchase of third party gift cards at Target. This could possibly make the deal worthwhile.
RESULT: No, when I tried it out online, the system was not giving me a 5% discount when I had my REDcard set as the payment method. I assume that in-store purchases of third-party gift cards would yield the same results.
Portal
Will you get portal points for third-party gift cards purchased at Target? I don’t know, I tried it out and I’ll report back if the portal hits for my Applebees gift card purchase.
Pay with Gift Card?
I reported a while back that when I tried buying a Visa gift card at target.com with a Target gift card and the system allowed the order initially but it got cancelled a minute later. Now I tried using a Target gift card to pay for the Applebees gift card online and the order went through fine, in fact the shipment confirmation email already came.
Thus: you can’t buy a Visa gift card with a Target gift card but you can buy a third party gift card with a Target gift card.
Liquidate Target Gift Cards
So is this deal is a good deal for gift card churners? It could be – if you have Target gift cards that you want to liquidate. Instead of selling them for 90% or their value, you can turn them into Applebees gift cards and gain slightly in the process. It may not be worth the hassle since you’ll need to do one-per-order, but it’s an option.
$400 Visa Gift Card Online
While perusing the Target website, I noticed that they now sell $400 Visa gift cards online for a purchase price of $6. We mentioned this before that they started carrying these in-store and apparently they’ve now added it to the website.
This would be an interesting option for buying Visa gift cards online (not a terrible price at $6 for a $400 card), but as we mentioned there, these cards are Bancorp cards which don’t work well with a PIN in Walmart.
As mentioned above, target.com does not apparently allow using Target gift cards to purchase Visa gift cards, so this would not help us liquidate Target gift cards.
Instore all Red cards will get the 5%
Online the Redcard debit or credit works (but the Redbird seems not to). I have the Redcard debit linked to my online account as default payment card and always see the 5% off on merchant gift cards and other stuff. Discount stays even when I switch to pay with a Target GC.
Also you can add Target GC’s to your online account and it will remember them for you, so it is a nice way to keep track of them. When they cancelled my attempts to buy a MC GC with a Target GC the GC showed up in my payment methods.
Great info here. I’ll have to check this out more.
I’ve purchased a 12-month Beats Music gift card in store and that rang up with 5% off, so maybe it only works with certain gift cards or it only works in-store.
Thanks, this confirms what weedibix (above) said that in-store gift cards purchases do get 5% off. Good to keep in mind.
Did you try a regular Redcard or the Prepaid a.k.a. Redbird? The latter doesn’t seem to show any discounts on target.com at all. We tried it with a small purchase this weekend and didn’t get the 5% off. Something seems to be wrong with the checkout system not recognizing Redbirds as Redcards or what.
It was in fact prepaid REDbird. But by me prepaid REDcard does show properly 5% discount online. (I’m not sure I’ve ever actually completed a purchase with it, but it definitely shows the discount.)
I’ve had similar issues with online purchases not getting the 5% discount (was household goods). Target has no clue what’s wrong and I’m not willing to invest more time into resolving why RB isn’t getting discounts online.
I have purchased 3rd party giftcards in Target stores (netflix, for example) and received 5% discount when using the redcard.
This is very interesting. Could make this Applebees deal a small churn possibility, though not particularly enticing.
I assume the difference is between in-store and online. (Did you ever have success online?)