This may be painfully obvious after the fact, but I had a hard time finding any information on this subject myself when searching online! How do you get rid of those small and pesky gift card balances when trying to spend at online retailers?
For some reason I tend to receive prepaid Visa and Mastercard gift cards all the time, which are great since you can spend them on anything. But not so great is when you spend them and get stuck with small balances remaining that you can’t easily spend.
I love to use these gift cards online, but a lot of retailers’ websites wouldn’t allow multiple cards to be applied to a single purchase. For example a Visa Gift Card and then your regular credit card to pay for the remaining balance that the gift card doesn’t cover. Sometimes the orders would even get cancelled because of a bad checkout or payment system.
So unless you were purchasing something with a price less than your random gift card balance (and this takes low-cost add-on items out of the equation on Amazon) you are out of luck!
Or are you?
Convert your small gift card balances to Amazon $$$
Amazon digital gift cards are great because you can purchase them in any denomination. What does that mean? You can simply apply the full balance remaining on your Visa/MC gift card towards an Amazon card. The credit will be applied to your Amazon gift card balance, and Voila! Now you can spend your gift card ‘pocket change’ on almost anything you like and at reasonable prices.
And with the Amazon gift card, you can use your balance in combination with your credit card, or choose when to apply the funds to a purchase.
Should be obvious, right? But I know for a fact there are people sitting on old gift cards they couldn’t spend. So hopefully this article serves as a quick tip for those looking to cash in those annoying cards with tiny balances or even avoid the absurdity of bringing a bunch of random cards to annoy a cashier in an actual store!
Ahh great idea! I never have that problem though, I don’t get gifted Visa or mastercard gift cards very often. Thanks for the tip.
I use this same hack as I have one place that I keep getting $5 visa gift cards for. I just use them to reload my amazon balance since I know I’ll be using that anyway.
Amazon reloads are awesome, right!? I get a lot of the $5 cards as well, I wonder if we’re getting the same ones? https://familymoneysaver.ca/how-to-get-cheap-cereal/