Update 03/11/20: If you’ve been buying $100 Wine.com gift cards, be sure to check the Amex cards you bought them on as there are reports that Wine.com is arbitrarily cancelling gift cards after they’ve sent them out and refunding your credit cards.
The email they originally send you notifying that the cards have been shipped also contains the gift card’s redemption code, so some people will have been sending those on to the ultimate recipients of the gift cards before the physical cards arrived.
Similar to some gift card brands like iTunes, GameStop, Amazon, etc., you can’t verify the balance of Wine.com gift cards without redeeming them. If you’ve bought a Wine.com gift card for someone else, it’s therefore not possible to check whether or not the gift card still has a balance. That has the potential for embarrassment seeing as Wine.com so far doesn’t appear to have bothered notifying anyone that they have (or will be) cancelling the gift cards. Instead, they’re just zeroing out the gift cards and refunding your credit card(s).
I bought a couple earlier this week and both orders were fulfilled shortly afterwards. I then received a phone call from Wine.com a couple of days ago to verify my two orders and for them to check the billing address and my relationship to one of the cardholders (we bought one with one of my Amex cards and one with one of my wife’s). That seemed to satisfy them, but it makes me glad I took that phone call as I almost ignored it seeing as it was a random California phone number (415-248-4416).
This is really crappy behavior by Wine.com though. Sending out gift cards, then cancelling them and not letting your customers know that you’ve done that is an awful way to deal with this, especially because they don’t provide a way for customers to check if the gift cards still have a balance on them. I’d therefore be very wary about buying gift cards from this deal and in the future if that’s how they’re going to act.
The Deal
- Spend $100 on Wine.com & get $30 back with targeted Amex Offer.
Key Terms
- Expires June 30, 2020.
- Valid online only.
Tips & Ideas
Wine.com sells eGift cards and it seems like they process payments for the cards themselves. You should therefore be able to buy a $100 Wine.com gift card to lock in the 30% savings.
I doubt it’ll track, but be sure to click through from a shopping portal just in case gift card purchases do track – here are the current rates.
My wife and I only received this on our Amex business cards, so it might not show up if you only have personal Amex cards.
[…] Hat tip to GC Galore […]
Thanks for the tip, I got this on my AmEx Gold! Any suggestions for a good place to sell this? Raise says they are only taking Wine.com gift cards from “select sellers”.
There’d be some private groups buying these, but I’m not aware of any places buying them that are open to all.
[…] time there was a Wine.com Amex Offer, they processed gift card orders, sent out the gift cards and then arbitrarily canceled some of the gift cards without letting you know that they’d done this. They did at least automatically refund credit […]