American Express is starting a new Paypal competition called Amex Express Checkout. The key difference is that you use your standard Amex login to checkout and don’t have a separate account for this. You can only pay with Amex cards which are in your login, not with any other credit card.
To promote the new service, they released a great offer.
The Offer
- Make a purchase at a number of merchants (see below) using Amex Express Checkout and receive a $10 statement credit.
List of retailers:
Ticketmaster
Barkbox
Ledbury
Warby Parker
Burberry
Newegg
Sabon
The Wall Street Journal
WSJ Wine
virginwines.com
laithwaiteswine.com
What’s great about this offer is that you can get the free $10 at each of the above merchants, per Amex login that you have.
Also note that Newegg sells lots of gift cards  which should work to trigger the $10 credit. You can buy a $10 Home Depot e-gift card, a $10 Burger King e-gift card or a $10 Domino’s e-gift card, for example.
The Fine Print
- Valid until 9/7/15
- “Limit one (1) $10 statement credit per American Express online account per merchant” (Simply, this means that each online login can only get one $10 credit per merchant. Some speculate that you may be able to do the offer on each card if you have multiple cards in the same login.)
- Offer only valid on orders shipped within the United States and its territories
- Consumer and Business Credit and Charge Cards are eligible for this offer
Tips
There’s a whole bunch of things that we still need to figure out here. I’ll mention here what I gather so far:
- You can get up to 2% back on your Newegg purchase by going through a portal. It’s looking good for this to work even on gift cards, although that may be excluded from the terms.
- The Newegg system apparently won’t let you purchase more than one e-gift card to the same merchant within
2448 hours. You can purchase e-gift cards to separate merchants (e.g. one to Home Depot and one to Domino’s) within the same2448-hour time period. - Each separate Amex login is eligible for this deal. You can split up all your Amex cards in separate logins to maximize the deal, but I personally won’t be doing that so as to maintain my sanity. I do have separate logins for my own cards and my authorized-user cards so I’ll be able to get the offer with each separate login.
- When you checkout (at least for the first time) the system will send you a code to verify via email. This is standard, nothing to get nervous about.
- Many people are having trouble checking out even with the code. There are two workarounds: One is to use the Newegg mobile app. The other is to begin the checkout on the Newegg system and only switch over to the Amex Checkout later in the checkout. More details on Slickdeals.
- Interestingly, the wording of the offer does not sound like you need to actually make a $10 purchase in order to trigger the $10 offer credit. It would sound like you can make a $.01 purchase and get a $10 credit. We’ll have to experiment with this one…
Our Verdict
This is really a great deal. It’s working a little differently than typical Amex Offers since there’s no registration for the offer and it’s not ‘saved’. It’s possible that Amex will pull the offer after a certain number of uses, although they don’t mention ‘limited quantity available’. We’d recommend making sure that the offer page is still showing before using the offer.
It’s also worth noting that for all the focus on Newegg, there’s definitely some opportunity here with the other merchants as well. Sure, we’ll have to find the right item to buy, but we may be able to pick up some nice stuff junk for free. This is especially true if making a $.01 purchase can trigger the credit – those other merchant may turn out better than the Newegg option…
HT: Slickdeals and thanks goes to MilesToMemories for some of the info in this post.
