Sears is running a generous promotion to give a free $20 Sears award card for each $100 in Sears gift card purchases. The offer is ongoing until December 22; while it wasn’t showing for a few days, it’s now showing again on the sears.com home page.
Sears: $20 Credit with $100 Gift Card Purchase + 16% Off with Portal/Discover!
The eAwards are now coming through and they are much better than expected.
- No expiration
- Coming through for multiple orders
- Coming through as one card
No Expiration
The biggest news is that the eAward cards state explicitly that they do not expire. I used the ordinary Sears gift card balance checker and it pulled up the correct balance of the eAward card. It appears that these are ordinary gift cards in every way.
That’s huge for two reasons: 1) they can be used whenever, 2) they should even be able to be sold, 3) we’ll be able to use multiple cards in one transaction (you can use up to 15 gift cards per purchase).
Update: Many are reporting that newer eAwards are coming with a January-31 expiration date.
Multiple Orders – One Card
In the original post, we noted that there is no stated limit as to how many of these eAward cards you can get. This has now been proven true and multiple separate $100 orders are triggering $20 for each one.
Not only that, all the e-cards come as one card. I did two $100 orders and I received a single $40 e-card. A reader did ten and received as single $200 e-card.
What Works?
Do e-gift cards work?
Yes
Do physical gift cards work?
I don’t have personal experience, but I assume so. Note that physical gift cards won’t trigger the 5% Discover category bonus.
Do gift card reloads work?
Unknown. Update: Reloads are working as well
I purchased two $100 Sears e-gift cards on December 8th and also did one $50 reload on December 9th. Thus far, I received a $40 eAward card for the two e-gift cards and I’ll give reloads a tentative ‘no’. It’s still possible that I’ll get another $10 eAward for the $50 reload tomorrow and I’ll definitely update this with that info or with anyone else’s experience on this.
Which Card to Use
- Use Discover, as noted above.
- Use a BofA card if you have a targeted Bank Amerideals offer for 10% off at Sears.
- Use Citi Dividend. Readers report that last year it earned 5% on Sears purchases.
- Use ATT for 3x.
Final Thoughts
Let’s hope Sears is too lazy to create a special eAward card and they’ll continue to issue ordinary gift cards as the eAward cards. Essentially, we’ll be able to buy Sears gift cards at a 16.6% discount, before even starting with the credit card and portal. Really an amazing deal!
Now the question is if we should hold out for a better portal bonus (and hope it doesn’t get pulled before the end-date) or just do this now with Ebates or Shopathome, as noted in the previous post. I’m optimistic that it will remain until the end-date.
Thanks to readers Darren, Spgbus, and  Danny for contributing to this post
