$15 Money Maker: 10% Off Target Giftcards Up To $300

Contents

1 The Offer
2 The Fine Print
3 Our Verdict

The Offer

Target is offering 10% on up to $300 in target gift card purchases for Black Friday

The Fine Print

Valid from 6am–noon CT at Target.com, November 28th

Our Verdict

The discount is automatically applied to your cart when you go to check out. You’ll need to purchase one $200 card and one $100 card. There are no card fees or shipping fees for purchasing these giftcards. Here is what my cart looks like when I check out:

Here is how to make this deal profitable:

Purchase $300 in target gift cards for $270 using a cash back card that earns at least 2% (-$270 for the gift cards and +$5.4 in cash back) Update: Reader Rich kindly pointed out that this should earn 5% cash back if you use the Discover it as it should code as online shopping. You’d earn $13.5 cash back if you used this method.
Sell the gift cards to Giftcards.com for 90.5% of their face value (+$271.5)

In total you’d spend $270 and receive $276.9 back for a small profit of $6.9 (if you used the Discover it you’d earn $15 profit). I personally don’t think this is worth the effort when using a 2% cash back card, although it is definitely worth doing with the Discover it if it codes as a 5% cash back trasnaction. If you’re meeting a minimum spend requirement then it might be worth the trouble as well.

According to the Frequent Miler laboratory if you purchase a physical giftcard through a shopping portal you will not receive cashback/points. But if you use a giftcard to purchase merchandise then you will receive the cashback/points. This is a bit of a bummer, but if you actually want to make some purchases at Target then you can use this to make your money go further (shop at home earns 5% cash back, you can also get 4 Amtrak points or AA miles per $1).

My plan is to try to purchase the gift cards through a portal in the hopes that it’ll track, I don’t have much confidence but it’s worth a shot. I’ll then just keep the gift cards for regular purchases I’d normally make at Target, if I still find them unused after Christmas then I’ll resell them. I’m confident that the resell value on Target gift cards will hold.

I personally think that the $15 GAP gift card money maker we posted about earlier today is a better deal.

HT to points, miles & martinis