Got an Amex GC offer — buy $300 and get $20 back, twice, which works out to 6.66% cash back.
Wondering if there's a way to combine these and liquidate them, or do I just have to spend them down slowly through organic spending? Also, does buying gift cards trigger the 1% cash back on the Platinum card, and does it count toward the welcome offer spend requirement?
If you decide to buy, first confirm the cashback posting timeline—don't cut it close to the annual fee or the sign-up bonus deadline. The key is that this spending doesn't disrupt your normal cash flow.
Buying third-party resold GCs carries a risk of being banned, so it's best to clarify that first.
The trickiest part in practice is matching the face value with the channel: a $300-for-$20 offer usually requires hitting a threshold on a single transaction or cumulative spend, so you need to get the amount exactly right when buying and not split it incorrectly. On the liquidation side, whether reselling or buying money orders, there are discounts and limits, and small gift cards of a few dozen dollars are especially troublesome to handle; accumulate too many and they tend to sit on your hands. I'd suggest trying a small amount first to run through the whole process, then deciding whether to scale up.
Looking at it from another angle, the key to this offer isn't really whether you can liquidate it—it's whether you have a steady spending channel that can naturally absorb it. If your regular organic spending already eats up a few hundred dollars in gift cards each month, there's no need to bother with liquidation at all; 6.66% is basically free money. On the flip side, if you're only buying in to cash out, the fees and discounts will eat into your returns, so the actual profit may not be as high as you'd think—and you have to factor in the time cost too.