Lots of us use small $.50 Amazon reloads as a way of meeting transaction requirements for various credit or debit cards. Three separate readers report being recently blocked by Amazon from doing excessive small $.50 reloads. System simply block the reload from going through.
One good thing is that these readers have not experienced an account freeze, just a block. I’ve had my Amazon account frozen in the past, and it’s not fun. Hopefully, that won’t be an issue here.
It’s yet unclear if doing reloads of higher amounts will help, e.g. maybe multiple reloads of $1-2 are fine. Another option is to buy $1 Amazon gift cards instead, unclear if the sensitivity is there too. (Reloads have a $.50 minimum while e-gift cards have a $1 minimum.)
Lots of people use Amazon reloads for things like the Amex Everyday Preferred requires 30 transactions per month to get the increased rewards rate, or various other credit and debit cards that have transaction requirements. This Amazon crack down will certainly make those more difficult. Check out our post How To Meet Minimum Debit & Credit Transaction Requirements for additional suggestions, including things like using the self-checkout at the grocery to break up your purchase or pumping small amounts of gas in separate transactions.
Reader Gadget gives another tip: by removing all cards from your Amazon account and adding them back in will reset your account and allow additional loads (removing a single card and adding it back does not work). Of course we don’t yet know the long term viability of this idea.
I don’t use this much (instead I make many small payments on utility bills that allow it), but recently when I did go to do a (not tiny) Amazon reload it says
“Sorry, content is not available.”
so you cannot reload in any amount (e.g. when I clicked on $100 it still did not work). I tried two browsers.
It could be user dependent, but as I said, I haven’t done bunches of small reloads on Amazon for a few years.
This is a problem if you want to do one of those deals where you use at least one credit card point to get a discount, and you want to pay the rest with Amazon balance which you buy with a different credit card to get better cash back.
Currently, the minimum Balance Reload amount is 50 cents. If Amazon wanted to “crackdown” on 50-cent reloads, why wouldn’t they simply increase the minimum?
Today, I successfully completed eight 50-cent Balance Reloads with the same Wells Fargo debit card. The 9th attempt failed with an Amazon message advising me that I need to “Revise Payment Method.” This suggests to me not a “crackdown” on small reload amounts, but a crackdown on too many transaction attempts in too short a time period with the same card or too many transaction attempts for the same dollar amount in too short a time period with the same card.
This strikes me as REALLY insightful. Almost certainly, the people reporting the “crackdown” were the sort of people who would submit a long series of reloads in rapid fire (e.g. 10 reloads in under five minutes, all with the same card). So concluding that the problem is 50 cents is unwarranted. Where it would be warranted is if we had several people conducting an experiment that explicitly involved 50 cent reloads each separated by over an hour.
As Brach mentions, a more plausible explanation is that they have software that runs in the background that looks at whether the exact same dollar amount is being attempted over and over. This would prevent merchants from inadvertently duplicating transactions, etc.
I love using Amazon’s small reload feature to meet debit card requirements for banks (etc.) but my own style is to make sure each transaction is for a different amount. My approach is to make them for 51, 52, 53, 54, … cents. That way it’s easy to track how many transactions I have made, it ensures that it’s for more than the bare minimum of 50 cents, and each transaction looks different — which I am guessing would help on both Amazon’s end and the bank’s end. I also don’t do more than 5 reloads a day and separate each by a couple minutes.
No wonder i couldn’t reload anymore. I always leave small amount on Vgc when buying MO because they somtimes ID at $999 then i would go home and drain the rest into my amazon.
Hi,
Thanks in advance for any help input here
For a couple of months now my amazon giftcard purchases haven’t been consistent on how they are appearing on my bank statement. As a result of this, I have missed out on my required number of debit transactions to earn rewards.
The ones that count toward my rewards look like this:
DC Amazon.com*MN9S8 Amzn.com/billWA Ref:876185 Auth:587796 PurchDate:06-01-2019
The ones that are not counting look like this:
POS 0601 1149 587904 AMAZON.COM*MN4YV SEATTLE WA
Yet I am using the same debit card for all the transactions, and I have it set in amazon to process as debit. I am making all of the transactions in the same day, yet I seem to have no control over how they appear on my bank statement.
Has anyone else noticed this in the past couple of months, and also know how to get them all to go through as the “DC” transactions (as shown in my first example?)
I contacted Amazon to see if they had the reason why but they didn’t provide one.
Much obliged!
Never done amazon reload before until today. Just did 8 x $0.50 reload on my Orion FCU debit card no problems at all.
Haven’t done any small reloads for a few months. Just did 5 $.50 in a row no issues.
I did about 3 50c reloads per day for a few days with no issues.
I rarely do reloads on my Amazon account. I haven’t done any in nearly 2 years. But I just tried and I couldn’t do any small amount reloads on any of my credit cards…50 cents, 99 cents, 1.00, 1-and-change. No small amount worked.
However, I was able to successfully do 50 cent reloads on all my credit cards using my spouse’s Amazon account.
FWIW I just did my 68 monthly .50 transactions all in a row on my account with no issue. Hoping that this doesn’t get shut down in the future.