Staples Visa Gift Cards Online at Negative Cost
Yesterday I covered a great new negative cost Mastercard deal in stores at Safeway, Vons and a few other grocery chains. Well, if going into a store is too much for you, I have an amazing deal to tell you about. Right now Staples is selling $300 Visa gift cards online for less than face value.
The Deal
Update: It seems the cards are now out of stock.
Receive a $10 instant discount on $300 Visa gift cards purchased online.
Key Terms
- Valid through 12/28/2015
- Limit 2 discounts per person/transaction (Staples has been known to shut down accounts for abusing coupons and placing multiple orders. It is possible to purchase in separate orders, but there is some risk.)
Analysis
The discount is taken off instantly, so all you need to do is add 1 or 2 of the cards to your cart and you will see either $10 or $20 taken off. These cards normally cost $308.95 per $300, so with the discount the price per card is dropped to $298.95.
If you have a Chase Ink card then the deal is even better. Each $300 card purchased should generate 1,495 Ultimate Rewards points. These cards are issued by Metabank and should load easily to Bluebird/Serve at Walmart and Serve elsewhere. The pin is the last four digits of the card number.
Amex Offer
About a month ago there briefly was an Amex Offer that could be loaded to accounts on the American Express website. If you were able to load that $20 off $100 offer, you could use it to purchase these cards without a fee and make ~$21 per transaction. My only worry with that is there are sometimes delays on shipping these online orders out. If Staples doesn’t charge your card until after January 1, then you may not receive the credit.
Conclusion
This is an amazing deal considering the 5X earning ability, the ease of liquidating the cards and the fact that you can purchase them online. For those reasons I don’t expect that this deal will make it through the day. If you are interested, I would suggest purchasing cards sooner rather than later. I know I already have. Happy shopping!
HT: FatWallet
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Although I was able to purchase them, Staples later cancelled my order, claiming they were out of stock. But no worries. Waiting for the next deal.
Thank you for the heads-up.
Shawn, well, admit I’m writing with bunch of sour grapes on the brain. Yet I think we can document here that your other column over at frequent miler (quick deals) is actually not the place to monitor/go to so that we “never miss a deal.”
Fact of the matter is, you posted this news here two hours before you got around to sending out the email alert to your post “over there.” By then, it was already dead. (and thus rendering your promo, “never miss a deal” …. empty)
Adding insult to the injury, you then include this dead post as the banner headline for your m2m email last night…. at 8:05 p.m. (ten hours after the deal is dead) proclaiming:
“Hot! $300 Visa Gift Cards + 5X UR for $298.95! Act Fast, This Probably Won’t Last Long!”
Yet you of course knew the deal was already dead when you put it in the mailing…. Why? Needed click bait? What balderdash.
and yes, breeds precisely this sour grapes cynicism about you.
Hi Escot,
For the record, the Frequent Miler Quick Deal was published at 10:38am Eastern time. The Miles to Memories post was published over 15 minutes later. Unfortunately we don’t have control over how fast the email goes out for a Quick Deal. Once the post is published, the email system grabs it from the RSS feed on the Frequent Miler site and sends out an email. This automated process can take from 5-45 minutes and has nothing to do with us. I personally received the Quick Deal email 40 minutes after this deal was published and the deal was still alive at that time. I have never heard of a 2 hour delay, so I wonder if it was held up by the email system you are using. Either way, I apologize for the delay and we hope to be able to find a system that gets the emails out faster.
As for the newsletter headline, the Miles to Memories daily newsletter is sent out everyday at 8PM Eastern time and it always pulls the title from the most recent post. Yesterday I only had one post so it pulled that title from the Staples deal and I apologize for that. To accuse me of putting clickbait out there is wrong though. The newsletter goes out everyday at the same time and the title is automatically pulled from the latest post every single day. I didn’t change anything to get a clickbait title for newsletter readers.
I do apologize you didn’t see the deal on time, however you can subscribe directly to the Quick Deals RSS feed if you would like to see the posts quicker. As soon as one of those posts is published an automated system brings it to your mailbox, however it isn’t instant unfortunately. Thanks for your suggestions and I am sorry that you missed the deal.
I see that you said these are Metabank cards so should easily load to Bluebird/Serve. I just tried this week at 2 different Walmarts to load Bluebird with Visa gift card and it denied it both at the kiosk and the cashier. However, I looked on the back and mine are U.S. Bank; could that possibly be the problem? I also tried to do Bill Pay and Money orders and still, denied. What other options do I have for liquidating my gift cards? thanks!
Are they Visa cards? I have never had problems with U.S. Bank Visas, however Mastercards are a little trickier. You can find more information about the U.S. Bank card here. http://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/visa-gift-card-pins-and-example-uses/
Also try calling and resetting the pin manually. Sometimes that has helped in the past.
Since they are out online, is this online only? Do they have it instore as well?
Unfortunately this was online only. The highest denomination they sell in-store is $200 and those are not on sale as of now.
wonder what the purpose for the offer that lasted only about 2 hrs.?
My guess is they had allotted a certain number of cards to the promotion or they have a certain number of cards they can sell per certain time period. During similar promotions in the past the cards have gone out of stock for 1-2 weeks and then returned at full price.
West Coast curse strikes again. Just woke up and they’re already out of stock online. Boo.
OOS already!
Out of stock.
Awesome! I just got 2.
Boom. 5X points and no trip to the store. Awesome. Scaleable.
scaleable? How the hell so? I hope they shut you down.
Can we do multiple transactions or will that be flagged with the same shipping address and such?
You can but there is a risk of it being flagged and your account being shutdown. Staples used to be aggressive with shutting down accounts, however I haven’t heard many reports lately of them doing it. It is definitely still a risk though.
I had been aggressive with some of their iPad deals over the last few months and they have shut down my online account completely (without telling me). Basically what happens is that you place orders, get an order confirmation screen, but no email confirmation, and the order doesn’t show up in your “My Orders.”
I called their customer service today and they told me that my account has a note that “customer needs to place orders in store.”
Use me as your cautionary tale when it comes to “scaling” on Staples.
Yes, a Staples account order ban is ruthless. It’s usually permanent, takes you off the coupon mailing list, and stops orders from that address. At least they let you place orders in store. Some people are banned from any orders for “abuse.”
Thanks for sharing your experience.
WOOT!