The Deal
- Buy variable load Visa gift cards from Simon Mall via a site powered by GiftCardMall.
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- $3.95 purchase fee for variable load Visa gift cards.
Tips & Ideas
File this under something I’d missed for the past year or two. As you might know, Simon Mall has a bulk buying program where you can buy $1,000 Visa gift cards online. If you’re still able to liquidate those easily, that can be useful because the cards come with a $3.95 activation fee and Simon often provides coupon codes to take up to 40% off purchase and shipping fees.
One of the problems with buying Visa gift cards from Simon Mall is that American Express doesn’t award points/miles/cashback for those purchases on any of their cards. This partnership that Simon has with GiftCardMall can therefore be useful if you want to manufacture spend on Amex cards because payments will be processed by GiftCardMall rather than Simon and so should be eligible for earning points.
Something important to note with this Simon/GiftCardMall partnership is that it’s not possible to buy $1,000 Visa gift cards – the highest denomination is $500. The purchase fee is only $3.95 though which is pretty good ($500 Visa gift cards in grocery stores have a $5.95 fee), while shipping via standard mail is only $0.50 per card. That doesn’t have tracking though, so it might be safer to choose the $6.99 option for trackable mail which is a flat fee charged for up to ten $500 cards.
What’s interesting is that GiftCards.com and GiftCardMall (both owned by Blackhawk Network) stopped selling $500 Visa gift cards on their own websites last year. You can therefore only buy Visa gift cards in a maximum of $250 denominations directly with them, whereas buying them via this Simon Mall partnership means you can double the denomination available and decrease the purchase fee for each card.
Depending on how many cards you plan to buy and what kind of shipping you want, there might be other GiftCardMall partnerships which work out better. Both Office Depot/OfficeMax and USPS have GiftCardMall/GiftCards.com partnerships; in both cases they sell variable load Visa gift cards with a $5.95 purchase fee. While that’s $2 more expensive per card than via Simon Mall’s partnership, Office Depot/OfficeMax and USPS both offer free trackable shipping. If you want trackable shipping and you’re only buying one to three $500 Visa gift cards at a time, you’re better off going with Office Depot/OfficeMax or USPS. If you’re buying four or more $500 Visa gift cards in the same transaction, you’ll be better off buying from Simon Mall as the lower purchase fees will more than offset the $6.99 trackable shipping option.
This partnership is on a subdomain of GiftCardMall’s website rather than on Simon’s website. When clicking through to GiftCardMall from a shopping portal and then copying and pasting the Office Depot/OfficeMax/GiftCardMall URL in the address bar, my purchase didn’t track on the portal. I suspect the same would be true with the Simon/GiftCardMall site, but it doesn’t do any harm clicking through from a portal first and then copying and pasting the Simon URL just in case your purchase does track.
This partnership could also prove to be useful if you have a credit card which you know earns a bonus on purchases from GiftCardMall.
So the BOA cash rewards online purchases? I really do not recall if this worked in the past.
The business version does, I imagine the personal one too.