Amazon has quietly removed the ability to check the balance of an Amazon gift card online.
This had long been the case for Amazon gift cards until March 2016 when they added a ‘Check’ button next the the ‘Apply to your Balance’ button. Today, they removed that option. 🙁
Certainly makes life more difficult, especially for resellers. Might still be possible to balance check by contacting support, but there isn’t any automated option available any longer.
My company has a corporate amzn acct. Our acct manager told us it’s temporary and the functionality will be back. They took it offline for some kind of testing or troubleshooting and have been getting tons of slack from clients. No ETA, but I’m inclined to believe him
That is great news, thanks for sharing!
josef
Not Temporary. Here in December, this feature is still not available. If you wish to double-check an Amazon GC (that we bought) before sending to someone…to assure it isn’t blank (some people have experienced getting 0-balance cards)… you cannot. WTH?
Ya, late december and still nothing!
This makes me so angry…I won’t be purchasing a gift card again
Lol, your manager has no clue & making up stories for you…its not available over a year & a half later and its not coming back. Amazon does not care out you clients “slack”…
FYI I was able to check the balance of a gift card through Amazon chat today at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html however your mileage may vary! The automated chat choices don’t help so I selected “It’s something else” until an actual agent came into the chat. (Also if it’s a gift card you bought yourself from Amazon, you should be able to find it in My Orders to see the value.)
Still not working.
If it was a real technical issue then they would have fixed it buy now.
Just spent 45 minutes on a call to the Philippines about this problem. While waiting I found this page. Amazon customer still knew nothing about this. But then she checked higher up and they told her the only way to know balance is to apply it to your balance. I don’t really want to do that. She did say I can always call them for amounts. 866-216-1072.
It appears today (May 19). Just click Gift Cards on the top menu bar.
Where do you see it? May 29.
Join the discussion…
Wonder if people were brute forcing check balance on fake accounts and redeeming to real
Sign of time I guess.
I shudder to think when Amazon will be the only game in town and they can do whatever they want.
At that point they will be broken up by the govt, just like all the other bullying monopolies before them.
The US government hasn’t broken up ‘monopolies’ in quite a few years, and that’s certainly not going to change under the current administration.
If this is intentional it super stupid, it will create tons of work for them.
Could be due to brute force GC discovery, though you’d think that Amazon would have the computer science capabilities to come up with a solution
Like a captcha? Sure hope they invent that soon 😉
I think they want to combat resellers, whatever that means. In general, I find amazon’s customer service pretty lacking.
A large Amazon seller recently said Amazon is just one huge math equation and nobody there really knows what’s going on.
Yeah, I noticed this yesterday and thought my account was glitching. Sad to see that this is the new norm! 🙁
This has to be a glitch.
I saw this yesterday when trying to apply a balance but wanted to check it first. A little bit annoying.
Doc the password for the PPP doesnt work! Tried it all morning and it just doesnt work… 🙁
Hmm, try incognito
tried incognito as well, it didn’t work. thats frustrating honestly doc. i understand u have reasons for having an occasional special post with password. but its irritating if the password doesnt work.
opened the link and entered password u shared in email multiple times.
Bummer 🙁 It’s working for most, I don’t know why it’s not working for you.
I have to say…it didn’t work for me either. Tried it several times.
Didn’t work for me either.
Same here.
Same here as well. Strange.
and I thought I was the only one…
As I commented on the original thread, I had the same problem until I guessed/realized I was inadvertently copying the ” ” symbols in addition to the actual pw characters. On third try, with a bit more copying precision (or so I’m guessing), it worked.
(suggestion for the future Doc — see if you can have a way to copy/type in the password — so that the characters being inserted are either visible — or can be made visible)
Worked by using Incognito mode on desktop. Doesnt work on mobile or regular browser without incognito. that is strange :S
what is ppp?
What? This is weird, seriously.
I’ve just “checked” and applied Amazon gc online like 3 min. ago. It was from the Bitmo promotion. And I saw this posting and go back to my amazon account. But there is no balance check button. I 100% sure that I did balance check first to see if the gc has $100 on it. Now, I don’t see it there. Someone tell me I am sane.
Today people stopped seeing it, but I was still seeing it for a few hours. Probably cookied into the browser for a bit until it clears.