On Thursday, October 26, Amazon had a price error on a lot of gift cards. First it started out with a $25 Doordash gift card for $14. We all thought it was a really good sale. The odd thing is that the limit was 30 cards, which was odd because most gift card sales have a limit of 1 or 2. Then a few minutes later, they had a $50 Uber Eats gift card for $35 with no limit. I carted 999 of them and was staring at a $35K order. I then dropped it down to 99 cards and checked out. Anyway, for the next HOUR, more gift card sales popped up like a $200 Apple gift card for $104, Southwest cards, Nordstrom, Sephora, Starbucks, Darden, Ulta, Playstation, Starbucks, Roblox, and even Amazon branded cards like a $50 card for $25 I believe.
The next morning, people were reporting that 3rd party cards arrived with the correct denonimations (so the $104 Apple card actually had $200 on it.) However, the Amazon cards had the denomination that you paid. Then come around noonish PT, Amazon DEACTIVATED ALL THE CARDS. So if you balance checked your card in the morning, it had $200 on it but now the card was invalid. Then for the next 18 hours, we had no communication from Amazon, which was wild. I’m sure someone at Amazon decided to deactivate the cards first and then deal with customers later. I’m guessing they decided they’d rather eat the loss of a few people redeeming the cards versus the THOUSANDS of cards going out at the discounted price.
People weren’t sure whether they should cancel any unshipped orders or not. I cancelled a lot because I didn’t want to deal with the headache of trying to get refunds, but in hindsight, I should have let it play out because as soon as they did a mass deactivation, you just knew a refund was coming.
Anyway, by Saturday morning, Amazon decided to cancel all unshipped gift card orders and give people a $25 gift card to their account for the trouble. In some cases, they let the customer have 1 gift card at the glitch price. I think they had every right to not honor the price mistakes, but I still think it’s wild that they are able to deactivate cards just like that. The lesson learned here was to not have cancelled any orders and let things play out. I could have gotten more $25 consolation prizes or at least 1 card at the price glitch.
Best suggestion would have been to buy the available egift cards as mush as we can and redeem it asap with the retailers account.
10000 $ uber eats balance for 7000$ , u r set for a year or 2 of groceries .