American Express and Amazon have a partnership known as ‘Shop with Points’. This allows you to redeem your Membership Rewards (MR) points towards your Amazon purchases – which on a general basis you should never do as it offers pretty poor value for your points.
For example, the value advertised on the Amazon site is 1,000 MR gets you £4.50 off your purchase. That means you are achieving £0.45p per point. Redeeming via one of Amex’s airline or hotel partners should help you get much closer to 1p per point. But I digress.
Back in December, Amazon and Amex launched a promotion to offer £15 off purchases of £25 or more when you pay with points. This offer was due to expire a few days ago but has now been extended until 31st October 2017 or once 33,333 customers have redeemed the code. However, they said that when the promotion launched too and given how popular Amazon codes and offers tend to be, I would be highly surprised to hear that they hadn’t already surpassed that number.
This promotion is open to all American Express Gold and Platinum cardholders.
HOW IT WORKS
Although presumably this offer is meant to entice you into wasting large amounts of MR points, the key here is that you are able to circumvent this by choosing to use as few MR points to part pay for your purchase as the system will allow – in this case just 2 points!
Here’s how the deal looks in practice:
- You must first enroll your Gold/Platinum card and link your MR rewards account at this page here.
- This offer will only work with goods sold by Amazon directly and not via third parties (this excludes digital content).
- Add £25+ of eligible items to your basket.
- You must select your enrolled Amex card to pay.
- After doing so you will see your available MR points balance and the second of three options that says: ‘Choose a different amount’. Type £0.01. This will use just 2 MR points towards your purchase while still allowing you to access the deal.
- Add promo code: AMEX16SWP
- After clicking ‘Use this payment method’ you should see the £15 discount applied to your account.
Note: This promotion is only available on Amazon accounts that were active before 20th December 2016 so unfortunately you cannot create a new account just to take advantage of this deal. It also does not work on gift cards.
Verdict
This an excellent deal and a good opportunity for some free ‘credit’ on Amazon. You may also have access to a number of different Gold/Platinum cards as well as various Amazon accounts via family, friends or colleagues – you could do very nicely out of this indeed.
The homepage for this offer is here
If you don’t yet have a Gold or Platinum card, you can read my full review of the Gold card here and the link to apply for the card can be found here. The link to apply for the Platinum card is here, with a full review hopefully coming up in the next few weeks.