Well, this sucks. Saks Fifth Avenue has recently made a change whereby they’ve increased the minimum spending required to get free shipping for online orders from $150 to $200.
The reason that sucks when it comes to gift cards is due to the Amex Platinum card. That card comes with a $50 Saks Fifth Avenue credit that you can use twice per year – once from January to June and then again from July to December. If you have a Saks Fifth Avenue store near you (not Saks Off 5th), you can buy a $50 gift card in-store to lock in that credit. For those not near a Saks store though, one option had been to buy a $150 physical gift card.
That might not make any sense at first glance, but there’s more to it. First, it had to be a physical gift card because eGift card purchases are processed by a third party payment processor and so doesn’t trigger the statement credit from the $50 benefit. Secondly, it had to be a $150 denomination as that’s the lowest value you can add to a physical gift card.
As for why you might want to spend $150 on a gift card when you’ll only get $50 back, it’s because of the value you can get when reselling the card. Let’s say you can resell a Saks gift card at 85%. That means you’d get $127.50 back, but you’d have effectively only spent $100 after getting the $50 credit from Amex. That means you could make a $27.50 profit twice per year, or $55 total. That’s not as good as the profit you can make by buying a $50 gift card in-store, but if an online purchase is your only option due to not being near a Saks store, $55 is better than nothing.
That calculation has changed now that the minimum amount to get free shipping is now $200. You therefore have two options – order a $200 gift card with free shipping or order a $150 gift card and pay the shipping fee. Here’s how the math works out with that based on a speculative 85% resale rate:
$200 gift card with free shipping
- $200 gift card – $50 Amex credit = $150
- $200 gift card resold for 85% = $170
- Profit = $20 (or $40 if done twice per year)
$150 gift card + $9.95 shipping fee
- $150 gift card + $9.95 – $50 Amex credit = $109.95
- $150 gift card resold for 85% = $127.50
- Profit = $17.55 (or $35.10 if done twice per year)
As you can see, you’ll earn $2.45 more profit by buying a $200 gift card than a $150 gift card. The $200 option works out even better when you also take into account the points you’ll earn on the extra $40 of spend. Still, it doesn’t make up for the fact that you’d now be earning ~$15 less over the course of the year due to the lower profit.
h/t EW
Wow $200 minimum. Another option I considered before is that the SaksFirst store card and their mastercard give you free shipping and no annual fee. I think you don’t need to pay with it, since it marks your Saks login as your SaksFirst account. Otherwise the card benefits stink though. There are some datapoints that Chase 5/24 is not affected by pure store cards, meaning the non-mastercard one, but some say otherwise. Benefits: https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/c/content/saksfirst-program-terms-conditions
What about Shopprunner free shipping, Saks is supposed to offer that.
Saks Fifth Avenue is no longer available through Shoprunner.
Where do you sell your Saks gift cards?
The Card Bay https://thecardbay.com/ or Aligned Incentives https://alignedincentiv.es/
Look at the various circus hoops and time wasted to justify holding the card. This coupon book nonsense needs to end.