Best Buy Gift Cards No Longer Work on Other Gift Cards
We received 2 separate reports from our Facebook Reselling group that Best Buy gift cards no longer work towards the purchase of other 3rd party gift cards or other Best Buy gift cards.
This reduces the value of Best Buy gift cards and the Best Buy gift card sales I love so much :(.
Details
Yesterday it was reported by one of our members that a Best Buy employee informed him the system would be updated today and that they would be hard coded against cycling gift cards. I was hopeful that it was a misinformed employee or maybe only one location.
Today we received another confirmation that the registers were hard coded today.
Why this Matters
For most people this won’t matter. But, for those of us who used discounted Best Buy gift cards to purchase 3rd party gift cards for resale or sourcing, or Visa gift cards to liquidate, we are taking a hit.
It also means those limited time use gift codes that are sent out with gift card sales must be used on merchandise. They can no longer be used on a new Best Buy gift card to extend the life of the expiring certs either.
Lastly, this probably means that you can no longer cash out Best Buy rewards certificates towards gift cards either. You will need to spend them on merchandise.
Conclusion
This is a negative change for anyone who uses Best Buy as an avenue to rack up credit card points for free or at a profit. This isn’t all that shocking since more and more retailers have gone this route but it is sad none the less.
How does this change your buying habits at Best Buy, if at all?
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I was able to convert the one time use codes from cashstar deals into bestbuy GC.
Also..I hear the rewards certs still work on 3rd party but haven’t confirmed for myself yet.
I have heard about the codes working on BB gift cards, same with rewards certs. I had not heard they work on third party though.
My location hard coded against reward certs -> BB GCs but worked fine with ExxonMobil GCs.
Didn’t try getting VGCs.
Excellent – thanks for the DP
I was able to unload best buy gift cards and reward certs yeaterday for shell and exxon cards. May not have hit everywhere or everywhere yet?
Interesting – you are giving me a little bit of hope 🙂
Has anyone ever thought that these blogs alert vendors to loopholes in their merchandising? Then again, how does one disseminate these loopholes without blowing the whole deal??? How else would these merchandisers be made aware of the circumvention?? Definitely a Catch 22!
This has been ongoing for a long time I doubt this is news to them. I am sure they get reports of what the gift cards are being used for and I am sure they have seen this happening for some time. They were in such financial straits (may still be?) they probably didn’t care.
I find this very interesting, since the terms on the best buy website still say “excluding prepaid open loop cards and some third-party gift cards.” If this indeed turns out to be true, I think we should all complain like we did when ebay changed their terms overnight. I have no problem with them changing the rules for the future, but they should give a grace period and warning before changing the rules.
It may be worth a try. I doubt there will be as much backlash as eBay just because less people used this avenue but I agree that there should have been some warning if the terms didn’t already exclude GCs