How To Turn an Unwanted Visa Gift Card Into Amazon Gold
I hate to waste money on ANYTHING! Being a self-proclaimed coupon nerd, this is probably pretty obvious to most of my loyal readers by now.
So when I stumbled upon an old Visa gift card in my desk drawer recently, which was about to expire (GASP!), it was clearly time to put my frugal skillz to work and figure out an easy way to get my money off the card. The original balance was $25 and I knew I only had a few bucks left on the card.
Luckily I discovered that Amazon will let you buy an Amazon gift card by using an unwanted Visa gift card as your form of payment. Then you can simply spend the Amazon gift card whenever you’d like as they don’t expire.
Step 1: Activate the Visa Gift Card for Online Use
1 – Go to the gift card company’s website. (Usually listed on the back of the gift card)
2 – Follow the steps to “Check your balance and access your account”.
3 – Once in your gift card account, follow the steps to “Shop Online”. Usually as simple as adding your zip code to the card/account.
Step 2: Add your Visa Gift Card to Amazon Wallet
1 – Simply log-in to “Your Account” on Amazon.com.
2 – On your account page, click on “Payment Option”which will take you to your “Amazon Wallet”, then click on “Add a Credit or Debit Card”.
3 – Next, just add your Visa gift card to your Amazon account like you would with any debit or credit card.
Note: This should also work on any gift card with a MasterCard, American Express, or Discover logo on it.
Step 3: Get an Amazon Gift Card Delivered to Yourself
1 – First of all, you’ll want to know the exact remaining balance on your Visa gift card. If you’re not sure what it is, just call the number on the back and they’ll tell you.
2 – Next, visit the eGift Card page on Amazon.com. You’ll want to use an eGift Card as they offer e-mail delivery.
3 – Under “Amount”, pick “Set my own” and enter the amount remaining on your Visa gift card.
4 – Enter your own e-mail address as the “Recipient E-Mail” and choose “Now” as your delivery date.
5 – Once you reach the checkout page, simply select your Visa gift card as your form of payment.
6 – Once finalized, your Amazon gift card will show up in your e-mail inbox within a couple hours.
Shop on Amazon and Redeem your New Gift Card
This step is fairly self-explanatory.
Just shop on Amazon like you normally would and when you reach the payment page, simply apply your new gift card to your purchase and you’re golden.
Scenarios When This Tip Works Best:
1 – If you have a Visa gift card with a small balance on it, and you’re not sure when you’ll ever use it, this tip is for you.
Especially since many Visa gift cards have an expiration date on them. Get them turned into Amazon cash and use them up before they expire.
2 – Also, if you have a significant amount on a Visa gift card, let’s say $125, and you want to buy a new $600 HDTV from Amazon, this tip will also be beneficial.
This is because Amazon does NOT let you split transactions on 2 different cards. But they do let you use a Amazon gift card in conjunction with a regular credit card.
Happy savings.
By Kyle James
Photo credit to frankleleon.
I started Rather-Be-Shopping.com in 2000 and have become a consumer expert and advocate writing about out-of-the-box ways to save at stores like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Costco to name a few. I’ve been featured on FOX News, Good Morning America, and the NY Times talking about my savings tips. (Learn more)
Is there any way to use an Amazon gift card to pay for Amazon Prime? Because VISA gift cards do not allow recurring payments, they are declined by Amazon Prime, even when they only charge $1 to make sure the card is active. Is there any other way to go about this? Are there any kinds of VISA gift cards that do allow recurring transactions?
If you have an empty gift card associated with your account, you can actually just “reload” that card using the same method! It worked for me – I was able to do it twice to add 2 different cards. Easy Peasy!
I tried doing this, exactly as you said, but every time I try to place the order for the card to be emailed to me it gets cancelled. Any reason that you know of for this?
Just happened to me too. I was trying three AmEx gift cards. I had to call American Express to solve the problem. Amazon treated each card like a normal credit card and levied a reverseable $1.00 charge to validate each account. After that, the balance on each card was $1 less, so all three cards were declined due to insufficient funds! If this happens to you, call the American Express number on the back of the card. Explain what happened. The person helping me reversed all the $1.00 charges and temporarily added a $1.00 balance to each card. Then, while I was still on the phone, I reloaded with all three gift cards. It worked! She then removed the extra $1 balance, bringing the cards down to $0 balance. Problem solved… but it shouldn’t have been this hard!
There’s no need to do the deliver to yourself anymore:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/gc/balance
Just go to the above page and click on “Reload Your Balance”. Instead.
Great tip, thanks Dennis.
didn’t work for me with a Visa I got as a gift.
Grace, you my need to register the Visa gift card with a zip code first. With my Vanilla gift card, I had to register it on the Vanilla Gift website with a billing zip code to be able to use it on Amazon. Look on the back of the card for a website to register it with.
BS Tip, Visa Gift Card is more valuable than Amazon, Amazon has product limitations, I want to get rid of my Amazon gift card and get Visa Gift Card.
I think you missed the point. If gift cards are about to expire or have small amounts on them, buying amazon gift cards makes sense because then you can use on more of a variety of purchases. This is because amazon and many other online retailers will not let you split transactions between two different credit cards.
Example, you have $100 gift card (MasterCard or visa) and item you are buying is $100.99. in this instance you would not be able to use your card because of the $0.99 overage. Amazon gift card would be best option.
Example, you have $5 on 3 different cards and you want an item that is $15 on Amazon. You cannot use 3 different cards for same transaction, so therefore amazon gift card would be best option.
Hope this helps you understand why this is not “BS”.
Does this method still work? I have some simongiftcard 5 backs with $25 ea on them. They are registered online.
Yep, should still work!
Wow! I NEVER would have thought of this.
What name do you use for the “cardholder name”?
I put in “gift card recipient”. once the additional amount was applied to my amazon balance (it took a few minutes), I went back in and deleted the card from my list of credit cards on amazon. hope this helps!
thank you this was very helpful!!
This just revolutionized my LIFE. THANK YOU. Being a teacher, I’ve gotten visa gift cards as gifts for YEARS now and I’ve have like 20 of them with about $4 left and I thought they would all go to waste, but I just loaded them all into my amazon wallet. Thank you thank you thank you.
Awesome, so glad it has helped!
Question, where is the gift card number located on the card
Oh so by “discovered” you mean you ripped off every other blog that “discovered” this before you?
So under your logic every other blog that’s written about this also “ripped” it off from someone? If you know who originally discovered this I’d be more than happy to credit them. This has been floating around Reddit forums and social media for quite some time. I actually was first told about it from a friend who’s a BIG Amazon shopper.
It worked!!! Piece of cake. I had a $150 Visa Debit Gift Card that I used. Once I got it changed into an Amazon Gift Card I was able to apply it to a piece of luggage that I wanted. It will arrive in two days. Thank you so much!!!
Thank you for this tip! It worked perfectly. Great for the person (like me!) who gets prepaid gift cards occasionally and wants to use them on Amazon for purchases over the amount of the card.
Hi Everyone, Can someone tell me if this method would work with Onevanilla Visa Giftcard on amazon? I really need to use it to purchase Amazon gift card reload balance, before it expires. Waiting for a reply.
I cannot get this to work. I have two visa debit award cards I received from my employer that I wanted to transfer to Amazon. my employer’s name is on the card, they are $50 each. I activated both cards and assigned a pin to both. I’ve tried a dozen times to get them into Amazon, both as an Amazon balance reload and purchasing an Amazon gift card. when I enter the card info, I’ve tried my employer’s name on the card and my own, for the address I’ve tried my employer’s and my own, the transaction is always declined by the bank. it’s impossible to talk to a live person at the gift card company, the cards expire this month and I really wanted to just move the balance over to Amazon. I’ve used the balance amount and lower amounts. the cards were used by prepay-usa.com, employers buy them in quantities to give to employees, has employers name on card and “award” in the top right. visa debit. worthless. I’ve loaded other gift card balances ok but not these two. they are non reloadable. I can’t tell where the glitch is, address is the only thing I can think of but I used the address on the card’s online billing statement which is my employer’s San Jose office, I am unable to change this info. why does Amazon need a billing address for me to load the card? if I were to go to a store and make a purchase, they would only have me enter my pin. I think that’s where the problem lies.
I got it to work, the prepaid card provider needed to “refresh”the account so I could personalize the card with my address, email, etc. maybe cause the card sat unused for so long. even doing so, I still couldn’t use to get a gift card from Amazon. something about you can’t use a gift card to buy a gift card??? I had to load to pay pal and then use egifter.com (great service btw) to use my pay pal to purchase the Amazon gift card, and THEN I could use it to reload to my balance. the nightmare is over. careful when purchasing prepaid visa cards, I’ve never had this kind of experience with one before.
not one person here could tell you the most important detail: what do you put for the card holders name!?
They don’t care about the name, just put the generic phrase printed in the left corner, the system only looks at the data needed to complete the transaction.
This wouldn’t work for me either (kept declining), but I purchased an amazon gift card with my visa gift card on http://www.giftcardmall.com. It actually worked! I’d much rather receive cash than one of these stupid cards any day of the week, but glad I was able to figure it out.
This worked great for me! Only step missing is that you need to first activate the visa gift card for online use:
1) go to the gift card company website (listed on the back of the gift card)
2) Follow the steps to “Check your balance and access your account”
3) once in your gift card account, follow the steps to “Shop Online”
This step is usually just adding your zip code to the card/account.
Thanks for including this step!