FYI to those who’ve decided to start depositing gift cards to their Amazon account - Amex and Visa gift cards have an “online transaction” fee when used for an online purchase. I think it’s around $1.
So if you have a $50 gift card you can deposit $49. If you try to deposit $50 the transaction fails for insufficient funds, and the card issuer might even still charge the $1 fee.
I had some kind of goofy runaround like that with an Amex gift card. I think they gave me back the $1 after a few days but of course I couldn’t access it b/c they’d charge a $1 fee to use it online, and I couldn’t be bothered to use it in person anywhere.
That’s really interesting, as we have not run into this issue with any of the Vanilla branded Visas that have been given to my kids. Over Christmas, they received eight of these between them, and we were able to transfer the entire $50 each time. I wonder if there is a difference between brands? I’ll definitely be interested to see if we encounter it using a non-Vanilla card.
Glad to hear it’s not every card. It’s bitten me twice and took some digging through the fine print to figure out why transactions didn’t go through. I get these cards infrequently enough that I guess I forget each time.
In the most recent case of Amex and Amazon last year, I remember now the transaction seemed to go through, but Amazon never actually gave me the credit. Then a few days later told me the transaction was denied. It was fortunate I hadn’t tossed the gift card and still had it around to redo it for $2 less.