Maximizing the Sears.com Offer from Amex for 20% Discount or Profit

$10 off $50 at Sears

Amex released an offer today to get $10 back on a $50 sears.com purchase through year’s end.

The best way to maximize this is by purchasing a $50 Sears e-gift cards or gift card reloads online. That way, when you come to make a Sears purchase of, say, $300, you’ll be able to get the 20% discount on the entire amount.

Physical gift card purchases won’t work for this offer, as discussed below.

Purchase Sears e-gift cards and reloads here, just remember to go through the portal first.

You can still get this deal added to your Amex card by tweeting #AmexSears from a registered Twitter account or by adding it in your Amex login.

Use a Shopping Portal

In the past, portals almost always worked for Sears gift card/e-gift/reload purchases, but I haven’t heard recent data points. Note, the terms on most portals exclude gift card purchases so if it doesn’t work automatically you won’t be able to file a claim for the missing cashback.

Today only, Topcashback is offering 10% back on Sears purchases. (Here’s my referral link if you plan on signing up.) Other portals range from 1% to 7% cash back or up to 3 miles per dollar.

Gift Card Reselling

This Amex Offer is a bit profitable for its resale value; Sears gift cards can currently be resold for up to 84%. The profit is small, but once you add the portal into the equation it might be worth it for some.

If the 10% from Topcashback comes through, for example, it would add $5 profit per card. All told, you’ll net $7 + 40 Amex points per card assuming an 84% sale price.

Reload Instead

Whether you want the gift card for actual use or for resale, the Reload option is much better than the e-gift option since you’ll have a single card with a high value instead of juggling multiple gift cards.

Even if you want to resell the Sears gift card, it might be easier to resell a single card with a high value, rather than inputting multiple cards. Certainly, if you have a merchandise-reseller who wants to buy the gift card from you directly, they’ll be more likely to buy a large denomination card.

Buy a single $50 e-gift card. When that comes through proceed to add a $50 load to the gift card with each registered Amex card. The highest denomination Sears gift card is $500, and I assume that they system won’t allow you to load it beyond that.

There is a limit of 15 Sears gift cards which can be used per online checkout.

My Experience

Updated

Since Topcashback is offering 10% today, I went through that portal. First I ordered a $50 e-gift and the instant confirmation email came right away from Amex.

Around an hour later, Sears sent me an email indicating that my order was in review and they might need to call me. I hastened to make sure my ringer was on, but then 15 minutes later they automatically sent the e-gift without contacting me. My hopes are that small $50 purchases will process quickly, but it’s likely that after placing multiple orders back-to-back they might call you to review. These calls are standard with high-dollar Sears gift card purchases.

My second order was for a $50 reload on a Sears gift card and, again, I got the instant email from Amex. I used Amex Checkout to pay since I find it easier than typing in the card number; we’ve discussed in the past that Amex Checkout works to trigger Amex Offer deals.

Interestingly, the reload order I didn’t get an email confirmation from Sears for almost 12 hours. The Amex confirmation did come instantly.

I proceeded to placed a third order of a $50 order for a Sears physical gift card. It didn’t seem likely that physical gift cards will work since Sears physical gift cards are processed by Kmart which isn’t part of this deal, but since the terms don’t exclude physical gift cards I decided to test it out. (There have been crazier cases where the Amex terms played out in unlikely scenarios.) The purchase came through as Kmart, and it did NOT trigger the email confirmation. So there you have it: only e-gift cards and reloads will trigger this offer credit.

Going Forward

My plan is to wait a bit before doing this offer since last year in early December, Sears released a deal to get a $10 bonus card with $50 gift card purchase. If such an offer comes out again, it will be extremely lucrative when combined with the Amex deal. More likely is that they wouldn’t make such an offer since it would be overly generous, but I don’t mind waiting to find out.

The other thing to think about is the portal payout rate; currently it’s at 10% with Topcashback which, historically, is very competitive. Still, I’m going to hold off for now on most of my cards.

Final Thoughts

This is a pretty good deal for a lot of people as it can appeal to those who want it for actual use or for reselling. If not for the portal I wouldn’t bother with this since I plan on reselling the gift cards, but I’m optimistic about the portal working so I’ll give it a go.

I’ll update this post if the portal cashback comes through and when the offer credit posts and when my reload posts. Also check out these 14 things to know about Amex Offers.

UPDATE: My experience with Topcashback is that e-gift cards and physical gift cards tracked at 0% (no payout), but reloads tracked and paid out. Oddly, they aren’t showing the correct of 10%; instead it’s showing 6%. Hopefully, it will get uplifted eventually.

Update #2: Reloads have stopped tracking with portals since December 13.