Thanks to Personal Finance Digest for exhaustively documenting about Best Buy’s rewards program and helping me plug-in the gaps, it occurred to me that with the right amount of effort Best Buy will pay you to shop with them!
See these posts for additional background:
Reminder: Double points on ALL purchases at Best Buy on Sunday, December 8
Best Buy cuts elite benefits! Perhaps a free BusinessWeek subscription would ease the sting?
HOT DEAL: How I’m getting 10% back at Best Buy this weekend
The Guide:
You need register for the program at My Best Buy.
The earning chart can be seen here:
What Needs To Be Done:
Buy $1500 in Best Buy gift cards online through a portal that offers at least 5% back and pay with your US Bank Cash+ with the Electronics category or Best Buy card. You now earned approximately 1500 Best Buy points and 10% cash back or equivalent. Your option now could be to sell the gift card on one of the gift card exchange sites for 90% of its value according to Gift Card Granny
I just registered an am starting with 0 points and the future calculations look like:
- Spend $1500 and receive 1500 points for being a basic member
- Spend $2000 while elite and receive 2200 points for being elite
- Now eliteplus from spending a total of $3500
By Quarter 3 as the max is $2000 per quarter of a category with the Cash+, I will be an eliteplus member I expect to have accumulated 4325 Best Buy points. At the end of the year I expect to earn a total of 9325 Best Buy points, an extra $25 from US Bank when I redeem $100.
The Keys To Success:
- Best Buy needs to offer points on purchasing gift cards
- Online portal needs to credit the cash back.
Currently, Best Buy is awarding points for purchasing gift cards.
Final Thoughts:
I will be taking advantage of this manufactured spend opportunity as there will be a return of at least 2% with minimal effort and can be done all in the comfort of your own home. This is the type of manufactured spend that I like the most, a little thinking for creative points and little effort. If American Express brings back Best Buy as part of the Sync offers, this makes the job even easier.
What portal are you using for cashback? I purchased 2 32gb SD cards from best buy back in November through upromise, was to get 90 cents cashback in total. It is almost May and no cashback, and those reimbursement credits have dropped off. Is there some portal that will actually give the cashback, and give cashback in a timely manner?
Used Shopdiscover, paid with Cash+, got cashback from Discover in 3 days
Does ShopDiscover award cash back for purchases of gift cards from bestbuy.com?
It does
Thanks, that’s great to know — could serve to be a decent replacement for the loss of ShopKick at Best Buy… (If only they would still accept a gift card as payment toward a Visa GC.) One thing I do know is that you only earn the base amout My Best Buy points on purchases of Best Buy gift cards (no Elite or Elite Plus multiplier.) What I really need is a good way to cash out Amazon gift cards!
So you got actual cash, and not just a pending cashback?
If so, I will have to get a discover card…
How do you “exchange” BB gcs for Wholefood gcs? Use BB gcs in store to buy WF gcs? Is that hit or miss or do they typically allow that?
Sorry, I need to fix that – it was a route of BB gc -> AMZN -> WFM but that doesn’t work.
The post was a research in progress + pending UPromise cash back and I left the article as is since January.
I can tell you that if a few ppl take you up on your offer of selling BBY GCs online that .89 -.90 rate will drop back to the .82-.84 range. So be careful. GC prices are rock solid only for a few items (walmart kroger and gas stations – all for specific reasons). Just a cautionary tale for those who are gonna dive in to this.
Yup! Agreed, Neiman Marcus gift cards hasn’t been the same since the AMEX Sync Offer