How to buy Amazon Gift Cards at 5%-33% discount?

Given the ever-increasing acceptability of the AmazonPay wallet, it is becoming a go-to wallet for many. Amazon wallet can be used with a wide range of merchant payments and use cases, including bill payments, insurance payments, travel booking, food orders etc apart from paying for Amazon purchases. I prefer to load my Amazon wallet using Amazon Gift Cards because it allows me to circumvent the 0 reward points on many credit cards for wallet load and also the fact that Amazon Gift Cards are available at a discount. Since insurance premiums for me are one of my major expenses on AmazonPay, I always lookout for ways to buy Amazon gift cards at a discount.

In this post, I have listed a few ways where you can buy Amazon gift cards or Amazon GVs at a discount ranging from 1.5%-33%.

HDFC SmartBuy – 5-33% discount on Amazon Gift Cards

Amazon gift cards bought on HDFC SmartBuy come at a discount ranging from 5%-33%. The discount depends on the card you own. For HDFC Infinia and HDFC Diners Black, you get reward points equivalent to 33% of the purchase. For all other HDFC cards, you get 5% cashback.  In case you don’t own an HDFC credit card, you can still get a 5% discount, by loading money in the Payzapp wallet and pay using the virtual PayZapp card.

The drawback here is one can only buy Amazon gift cards worth 5000 in a month. However, the discount is big enough to give it a miss. Every month without fail I buy an Amazon gift card worth 5000 from the SmartBuy website.

As mentioned, even if you don’t have an HDFC credit card, you can still get a 5% discount by loading your Payzapp wallet. If you own a credit card that gives reward points on wallet load (eg Citibank) your reward rate will be higher than 5%.

Axis Gfytr Portal – 2-5% discount

Axis Bank like HDFC SmartBuy has a separate portal for buying gift cards at discount (link). You can buy Amazon gift cards at a 2-5% discount depending on the Axis card variant. Axis Bank has excluded the popular entry-level credit cards Axis Ace, Axis Flipkart and Axis Freecharge credit cards from this offer. Only the Axis cards that give reward points in form of Edge Reward points are eligible.

Since I don’t have an Axis credit card that gives Edge Reward points, I haven’t used this. But, what I came to know is Axis allows Amazon GVs worth 10000 per month. Additionally, the T&Cs mention that there is no upper limit on points. Thus, you can purchase numerous other vouchers along with Amazon vouchers and get 5x/10x reward points.

 Amex Reward Multiplier – 0.8-3.5% discount on Amazon Gift Card

Amex Reward Multiplier has recently started offering 2x-5x reward points on Amex credit cards for gift card purchases thru this link. Depending on the card variant one can earn reward points anywhere between 1-3.25% of the purchase value. While the reward rate may appear low, it may go up depending on where you use the Amex reward points. I have considered value at around 25-35p that one gets on statement credit.

Further, Amex comes up with regular offers where it gives a higher reward rate on the Reward Multiplier. For e.g. the recent Independence Day offer where it gave 15 points for 100 spent on all reward multiplier purchases.

Under Reward Multiplier, you can earn a max of 25000 bonus points. Translating into Amazon Gift Card worth lakhs before you hit the max bonus points’ cap.

If you hold Amex MRCC, you can combine the 2x reward multiplier offer with 4*1500 transactions offer for 1000 reward points and monthly spend of 20000 for additional 1000 reward points to buy Amazon Gift cards. Resulting in 2800 reward points on spend of 20k. This gives a reward rate of 3.5% on MRCC, considering that reward points are redeemed for a statement credit. However, if redeemed for Taj vouchers (from 24k catalogue) reward rate would be at 8% on MRCC alone.

I typically use my Amex credit cards for insurance payment by loading my Amazon wallet. However, now that Amex is offering 2-5x reward points on gift cards purchase, I buy Amazon gift cards equivalent to premium payment from the Reward Multiplier website and then pay premium thru AmazonPay wallet.

RedGirraffe

RedGirraffe that has a very efficient rent payment platform has now started offering gift cards including Amazon Gift Cards at discounted value. The way this works is, once you pay rent using RedGirraffe, it credits certain points in your account. These points then can be used to buy Amazon gift cards at a 1.5% discount.

Here the final discount could be higher than 1.5% depending on the credit card you use to make the payment. As you would earn reward points/cashback on your credit card + 1.5% from RedGirraffe.

InsurePays

InsurePays is a new startup that offers reward points on paying insurance premiums. The broad logic is similar to RedGirraffe. You pay insurance premium thru InsurePays, you get reward points and then use these reward points to buy gift cards at a lower rate, including Amazon gift cards. Currently, it is offering a 1.25% discount on Amazon GVs for me. A friend of mine gets a 2% discount on the app. So there is a variable discount rate for users in the app.

Here too, the final discount rate will be higher than 1.25-2% offered by InsurePays depending on the credit card used.

Are these discounts only applicable on Amazon Gift Cards?

No. These portals or websites offer gift cards from many brands. For eg., Flipkart,Croma, BigBasket, Grofers, BigBazaar etc. In fact, the discounts on these brands are often higher than that offered on Amazon Gift Card. Therefore, if you have a purchase planned say on Croma, you can very well buy Croma Gift Cards from these websites at a discount and get an additional discount on the purchase.

How do you buy Amazon Gift Cards? Any other way to buy Amazon GVs at a discount? Do let me know by posting in the comment section below.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash