What I bought with the Amazon Amex 20% discount

Amazon brought back their promotion where you get 20% off if you use Amex points during checkout. Since pay-with-points is a bad deal, most people are simply using one single Amex point to pay 1¢ of their order and then reaping 20% off their whole order. Details from the July promotion are here, but the short story is that for this November offer, Amazon and iTunes gift cards are now excluded, so I need a different strategy.

First off, I needed to follow the steps to see if I was targeted for this offer – and luckily I was. Basically what I'm looking for is a brain-dead way to quickly dump $500 worth of items into my Amazon cart that will end up only costing me $400 with the 20% off promo. But in choosing what to get, here's some food for thought:

1. don't buy anything overpriced
2. only buy things I actually need and would buy otherwise
3. don't buy things that spoil or expire
4. don't buy things that are time-consuming or difficult to use

If you're a frequent Whole Foods shopper, buying their gift cards from Amazon is a no-brainer. The only irritating thing is that the maximum denomination is $100 so there's a bit of juggling to do there. 

If you've got a trip coming up, you can buy AirBnB cards, but do know that they aren't valid for stays longer than 28 days. We've booked and paid for nearly all of our 2019 travel, so my fear is that I'd forget I bought them before I had a chance to use them.

Uber gift cards turned out to be a complete pain in the rear to use when you have the Amex Platinum credit, so I'm not looking to deal with that again.

A Netflix gift card might be a good idea, but it's included with T-mobile service so I don't really need it, but that might be a good option for others.

I thought about getting a Hotels.com gift card for our Hong Kong or Taipei hotel, but several of the Amazon reviewers complained the cards only worked for higher-end properties on their site, plus I don't know if Hotels.com's prices are even competitive. Since I'm not much of a Whole Foods shopper, I decided to risk it and give this option a try. Long story short: Hotels.com had a competitive price for the exact hotel we wanted to stay at in Taipei, the Hotels.com e-mail gift card arrived instantly from Amazon, and it worked just fine during my Hotels.com checkout. (One thing I noticed is that the gift card doesn't work at all with the "pay at hotel" option). I also created a Hotels.com account during checkout because I've heard that their "11th night free" loyalty program is legit and low-BS (UPDATE 8/2019: they added some B.S.)

I also had a couple of friends who wanted to use the promo but weren't targeted, so another thing you can do is buy stuff for friends with the discount and they can Apple Pay/Venmo/etc the money to you. They get a big discount, you get some points for charging it on your card... everyone wins.

As I mentioned back in July, the big problem with just straight-up buying items from Amazon is their byzantine service categories, so a completely random (to my eyes, at least) smattering of actual goods on their site are eligible for the discount. Given rule #4 above, I don't want to spend two hours in front of a computer randomly plopping things into my cart and then removing them once I realize they aren't eligible.

That said, this Tide refill pack is actually a good deal, as are these trash bags, and both are eligible. So are these air filters.