Last year we told you that Amazon was experimenting with their Chase Amazon card and offering 5% cash back on all Amazon.com purchases. It looks like they’ve decided to roll out this feature to their Amazon Store Card. It’s important to remember that this card can only be used for Amazon purchases, it cannot be used at any other stores.
5% Cash Back On All Amazon Purchases
There are a couple of important things to note about this 5% cash back:
- This benefit is only available on the Amazon Prime Store Card. To get upgraded to this card simply follow these steps:
- If you’re already a prime member simply go to www.amazon.com/storecard and click upgrade now.
- If you’re not already a prime member, simply sign up and your card will be upgrade to the Amazon Prime Store Card
- Eligible Amazon Prime Members may include, in Amazon’s sole discretion: Amazon Prime (excluding invited guests of an Amazon Prime account), Amazon Prime Fresh, Amazon Mom, Amazon Student and trial memberships of Amazon Prime
- 5% cash back is received in the form of a statement credit
- This 5% cash back cannot be combined with any financing offers (you’ll be able to select which benefit you’d prefer if both are available to you). You can choose this during check out, if you don’t make a choice you’ll go to the default option and you’ll automatically go to the default option if you use 1-click check out. The default options will be:
- If you signed up before March 16th, 2015: Financing offer
- If you signed up on or after March 16th, 2015: 5% offer
- You can change your default by logging in to ww.amazon.com/storecard, select the radio button and then your desired option
- Amazon reserves the right to discontinue or alter the terms of this benefit at any time and may replace the “5% back” statement credit benefit with a “5% back” rewards benefit that may be redeemed on Amazon.com as early as 2016
About The Card
I doubt many of you will be familiar with this card, so I thought I’d explain some benefits to you:
- No annual fee
- Sign up bonus of $10 upon approval
- Card is issued by Synchrony Bank. It’s not possible to get the shopping cart trick to work for this product (so applying will result in a hard pull). Synchrony exclusively pulls TransUnion from my experience (and what I’ve seen in the credit pull database)
- Promotional financing is available (have to pick between this and the 5% statement credit back):
- 6 months special financing on any purchase totaling $149 or more
- 12 months special financing on any purchase totaling $599 or more
- 24 months special financing on select Amazon-sold items
- 12 equal monthly payments on select amazon-sold items
- 24 equal monthly payments on select amazon-sold items
Our Thoughts
The deal breaker for me is the fact that there is really no sign up bonus. I usually don’t care about TransUnion pulls, but I’ve been racking up a few of them applying for whacky cards that I wanted to know more about for the blog. It’s actually already possible to get 5% cash back year round on bookstores as well. Amazon.com codes as a bookstore, so all you need to do is purchase Amazon.com giftcards using a credit card that earns 5% cash back or more at bookstores (like the Sallie Mae from Barclaycard which also earns 5% cash back at grocery stores and at gas stations).
The other way you can get 5% cash back or more for Amazon.com purchases is by purchasing gift cards at other stores. Amazon is one of the most common gift cards, so have a look at the full list of cards that earn 5%+ cash back and then find a matching store that sells Amazon gift cards.
The one positive to this is that it should mean Chase & Discover will have to step up their game on their 5% rotating category cards (Chase Freedom & Discover it) as a lot of people find value in 5% cash back on Amazon purchases for the 4th quarter.
The only thing to keep in mind is that it looks like Amazon/Synchrony are ready to change this from 5% cash back to 5% store credit at the drop of a hat, which shouldn’t be an issue for most people but it’s something to keep in mind.
I found this update while doing research for another post which will be live tomorrow. What are your thoughts on this new offering from Amazon? Will you use a TransUnion pull applying for it? Let me know in the comments.
