There are a couple of grocery chains – Kroger and Giant Eagle – which sell third party gift cards online. There has – historically – been a key difference between them. Kroger’s online gift card offering was run by Blackhawk Network (owner of GiftCards.com and GiftCardMall) and payments were processed by BHN which means that they didn’t code as grocery purchases.
Giant Eagle was the opposite. They ran their online gift card portal and processed payments for the cards themselves. That meant transactions processed as grocery store purchases which meant you could pay with a card that offered bonused spend in that category to earn more points.
Possible Silver Lining
That’s obviously disappointing news, but there might be a couple of silver linings in all of this. First, earning grocery store bonused spend was nice, but it was hard to come by because Giant Eagle often wouldn’t allow you to place an online order. Other times they’d cut you off after one, while other people could buy several gift cards with no issues.
Now that it’s being run by Blackhawk Network, there’ll hopefully be far less capriciousness in being able to get orders placed (and fulfilled) which should make it easier to take advantage of any gift card sales available online. (h/t reader thirtyfive)
Possible Silver Lining 2 RIP x2
There aren’t many places where you can buy $500 Best Buy gift cards online, but Giant Eagle was one of them. That was nice as it meant you could order from the comfort of your couch and have it code as a grocery purchase, but as mentioned earlier it could be an issue getting an order fulfilled.
Now that Blackhawk Network is processing payments it’ll hopefully be easier to get orders through, but that comes at the cost of no longer having it code as groceries.
Ugh. Within 30 minutes of posting this, BHN pulled down Best Buy gift cards from Giant Eagle’s website. I doubt it’s because of me writing anything and more because they probably got slammed by orders from people taking advantage of the fact that orders would finally go through. It might end up returning, but I’m not overly confident that’ll be the case.
Possible Non-Silver Lining
There could end up being a downside to this though. GiftCards.com and GiftCardMall reduced the amount of cashback/rewards you can earn through shopping portals to $2,000 of spend per month via each site earlier this year. More specifically, here are the terms listed for GiftCardMall on TopCashback:
If an individual consumer spends more than $2K in a month, the additional purchase amounts will be declined for cash back.
If Blackhawk Network links your online profiles by name and address, buying gift cards from Giant Eagle online might count against that $2,000 limit which would mean you couldn’t earn as much through shopping portals for direct purchases from GiftCards.com and/or GiftCardMall.
That’s pure speculation at this point. This Giant Eagle/Blackhawk Network change only came in within the last 12 hours, so there’s simply no knowing right now whether shopping portal earnings will be affected by gift card orders from Giant Eagle online. If you have any data points in the future, please let us know in the comments below.
RIP. Is there any other website one can buy gc (bestbuy or other brands) that code as grocery?
Not that I’m aware of.