Shopping portals pull American Express gift cards

I’m in the midst of wrapping up my $82,000 manufactured spending challenge and hit a brick wall today. It appears every shopping portal has pulled American Express gift cards. In addition to searching Cashbackmonitor and Cashbackholic, every major portal (cash back and otherwise) lists American Express Gift Cards but does not offer a payout. Hopefully, this is a temporary situation and we’ll see the Amex Gift Card store back on the list soon.

Cash back on American Express Gift Card

There has been a fair amount of drama surrounding American Express gift cards and shopping portals in the past. First, TopCashBack had some trouble tracking canceled transactions and members ended up getting cash back on transactions that never went through. They announced a limit on the purchase amount that would be eligible for cash back. However, by all accounts that limit was never imposed. Soon after, Barclays Rewardsboost removed American Express Giftcards from its portal altogether. Now it seems the rest have followed, hopefully temporarily.

If this really is the demise of Amex gift cards, keep in mind that you can still earn a profit by purchasing them with your Fidelity Rewards card for 2% cash back. If you’re willing to settle for travel rewards instead, you can earn 2.2% in travel rewards with the Barclay Arrival Plus card.

I’m going to keep an eye out and report back in case of a comeback. If you beat me to the punch, please leave a comment in this post letting me know. Manufactured spending is much easier when you don’t have to do it $500 at a time, so fingers crossed the Amex gift card/shopping portal pairing isn’t dead.

12 thoughts on “Shopping portals pull American Express gift cards”

      1. How about Amazon local register? Unless I missed it, you have not said anything on this so far and that is getting me worried. Is everything OK in the wacky wacky world of MS

  1. If you can still buy Amex GC’s at office supply stores at least you can get the 5X points on your Ink card… I mainly want to buy them to get 5X points on all my Costco purchases. I value points higher then cash back so the Costco Amex (which only gives you .01 cash back per $1) is pretty worthless to me.

    1. That would be awesome – unfortunately, I can’t find any Amex GC’s in decent denominations to make it worthwhile.

  2. Jerry Mandel

    I’ve looked at the shopping portals and I can buy everything cheaper locally. The miles/points I could get aren’t worth the extra portal costs.

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