Until today, it was possible to get the 5% REDcard discount on merchandise purchases on target.com when paying with a Target gift card – so long as the REDcard is saved in your Target online account. That’s no longer working.
The trick here was to buy discounted Target gift cards with a credit card, and then get 5% additional off. As an example, you might have bought Target gift cards at 10% off + used a 2% credit card to buy them + got 5% additional off for having the REDcard saved in your online account. This deal was especially huge to resellers who buy a lot from target.com.
As of today, the system prorates the 5%. So if you pay totally with Target gift cards you don’t get a REDcard discount at all. If you pay $1998 out of $2000 with a gift card, you’ll only get $.10 off, 5% of the $2 paid with the REDcard. This is the same as the in-store system which prorates the 5% discount based on how much is paid with the REDcard.
Some people had this work even when the gift card covered the entire cost. At other times some people had to leave over a few cents to pay with the REDcard in order to get it to work. Either way it was a huge deal which is now totally dead.
Now for the war stories…
For those of us who remember, around a year ago it was possible to buy gift cards on target.com using a gift card and still get the 5% discount. That died when Target.com began cancelling orders of gift cards purchased with gift cards.
In the heyday, Target.com sold eBay gift cards. I must have run $100k+ Target gift cards through target.com buying eBay gift cards. And I have no doubt there are others who did $1M+.
Back in the real good times, the Target mobile app made consolidating Target gift cards as easy as one could hope for. So even small denom cards at a good discount were fair game. I had a few Target gift cards saved permanently in my target.com account, and I’d keep reloading them with whatever discounted gift cards I found through the mobile app.
The good times. RIP.
Hat tip to Milestomemories and SlickdealsÂ
