Last updated on March 30th, 2013 at 09:57 pm
Today’s reader question comes from Sara in Chicago, IL. Sara writes: Can you shop through the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall, use gift cards, and still receive Ultimate Rewards Points? What about other portals?
This is a great question with many potential answers, depending on where you shop and how you shop. The simple answer is that it depends on both the portal you use, the merchant you purchase from, and the type of payment used.
For example, I bought an iPad over the holidays from the Apple online store. The price, with taxes and other considerations was around $550. If I were to purchase this in person at the store, I would earn a modest $.01 per dollar spent or around 550 points in total.
I knew there had to be a better way to earn points, so I went to the Ultimate Rewards mall to see if they had bonus points for Apple store purchases, and sure enough there was an offer of 1 additional point per dollar spent running on the Apple Store (this is a common value for the Apple Store. Occasionally this may go higher, but very rarely).
That made the purchase decision easy. I would buy the iPad from the Apple Store to get the extra points, but I also wanted to experiment with earning even more points, so I got creative.
I had a $500 Vanilla Visa Debit card that I had already earned 2,500 points purchasing from office Depot, so I used that as part of the transaction by using two forms of payment at the Apple Store.
The first $500 was on the debit card and the remaining ~$50 went on my Chase Sapphire Preferred Card.
I wasn’t sure whether Chase would pay out all of the bonus points, some of them, or none of them, so I wanted to experiment with a purchase that was fairly small to see what would happen.
On my next statement billing with Chase, I noticed that my Ultimate Rewards mall purchase earned me a credit of 499 points for my trouble.
Of all the amounts that could be credited, I’m surprised it was $499, since the debit card payment was for $500. With that said, this is a lot better than only getting the points for what I spent on the Sapphire Preferred card.
It appears that at least with the Apple store, only the first form of payment receives the bonus points. This is likely due to the way Apple sends information back to Chase after a successful transaction.
It doesn’t get much better than earning 2,500 UR points + a 499 point bonus + 50 points for standard Chase Sapphire Preferred spend on this purchase. Instead of getting a pedestrian 550 points for the iPad, I earned 3,049 points without really trying too hard.
Every Mall and Merchant System is Different
The thing to understand here is that the rewarding of bonus miles is that it’s a two way street of technology between the mall provider and the merchant. They are required to report back transactions to Chase, but everyone does it a little differently based on how their shopping cart functions. So that means that sometimes you will get credit for purchases using gift cards, and others will give no extra points.
While I am becoming more well versed in how the Gift Card game works, I would say that the best authority that I have found on the topic of gift cards is the Frequent Miler. Give his archives a good perusing and plan to learn a lot!
