point fu

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: don't buy anything overpriced only buy things I actually need and would buy otherwise don't buy things that spoil or expire don't buy things that are time-consuming or difficult to use If you're a fre...

The blogs have been abuzz about a targeted 20% promo from Amazon and American Express. I set my Amex as my default credit card in Amazon and then checked my Amazon account with this link to see if I was targeted, and I was! I'm not a huge fan of Amazon because I find the whole experience so baffling unless you're a hardcore Amazon user. You can't even buy some things unless you're Prime, and still others you can't because they're Prime Pantry , or "this is only available as an add-on product". Furthermore, I hate how confusing it is to tell who's actually shipping your order to you and I've had terrible luck getting Amazon to fix purchases that go wrong from outside vendors on their site. End rant .  Because this promo ONLY applies if you spend some number of Amex points on your purchase AND if the product is "Sold By Amazon", I was dreading scouring their site trying to find something I needed that met the criter...

UPDATE 3/2018: JetBlue has effectively ended this program I'm not a huge Amazon customer mostly because I try to buy as much as I can from the amazing Essex Market near my house. It's a slice of old school New York that's still hanging on and I want it to be around forever. But there are lots of times when I need something they don't carry, and since I have zero loyalty to the dozen local Walgreens I could walk to, I'll buy online. One of the nice parts of buying online is that you can use shopping portals to get airline points from your purchases on top of whatever points your credit card gives you for the purchase. The EV Reward website lets you comparison shop which portal is offering the highest bonus for a given merchant. It may seem small, but it adds up – last year I earned 50,000+ points with shopping portal bonuses. EV Reward results for Macy's (click to enlarge)   Unfortunately Amazon.com basically never partners with any of these portals...