One of the great features of American Express cards is the ongoing promotions they run through the course of the year. If you participate and take advantage of these promotions, in many instances, you could easily recoup the cost of the annual fee on your card, plus some.

SHOP SMALL

Shop Small is arguably one the most lucrative promotions offered by American Express, where card-members can receive up to half the cost of their purchase back in statement credits. The promotion is now LIVE and runs until 30th November.

How does this work

It’s really easy, to start off, you are required to save the ‘Shop Small’ offer on your card. You can do this either by logging into your American Express account or on your Amex smartphone app.

Once this is done, just go about using the registered card for your everyday purchase as you normally would. Every time you spend $20 or more at a participating ‘Shop Small’ business, you will receive $10 back in the form of statement credit.

Spend $20 or more at participating business and get $10 back

You can redeem the offer up to 5 times per registered card. Besides the usual brick and mortar stores, for the first time ever, there are numerous online businesses also participating in the promotion.

Quite clearly, the best return is had when you spend exactly $20 on the card, as the $10 back translates into a 50% saving. Although you can avail the offer up to 5 times for a total savings of $50, you can only redeem it once per participating business. So make sure you spread out the spends over a number of businesses.

This year, the participation is limited to just 118,000 cards which I expect to be snapped-up in quick time, so make sure you register without delay..

Definition of Small Shop

It’s worth pointing out that not every business is a small shop. For instance, purchases made at Coles, Woolworths, BP etc are not qualifying spends as these are not exactly small shops (fair enough).

To be considered a Small Shop, businesses must meet the following conditions:

• The business must be classified as a ‘Small Business’ by American Express for the purpose of Shop Small.
• The business must be classified as a ‘Warmly Welcoming’ business which means that they accept American Express Cards either with no surcharge or apply an equal surcharge to all cards.
• They should have processed at least one American Express transaction before 30 September 2019.
• They are not operating in industries that are deemed not eligible for Shop Small.

Beyond these, there is also a requirement that the total annual sales of the business should be no greater than $1.3 million. This information isn’t publicly available and I had to actually call American Express’ merchant service line to obtain it.

For more information on this, make sure you check out this FAQ published by American Express.

To simplify this further and to make it easier for card-members to identify the participating ‘Small Shop’ business, American Express have also published a map on their website, which you can check out over here.

In Conclusion

I love Shop Small and am really looking forward to making full use of it. Back in the day, American Express were running this promotion twice a year, although since last year, it only comes around annually, usually in November. Sometimes, you are also able to register for these offers by manually entering your card details through a generic link, although I was unable to locate one for the ‘Shop Small’ campaign. I will update the post with the link if Amex were to make it publicly available.

It’s great that even additional card members can take advantage of this promotion. As most American Express cards come with up to 4 additional cards at no extra cost, this means that someone maximising the promotion can save up to $250 per card-type ($50 on primary card and another $200 on additional cards). For those with more than 1 type of American Express card, the savings can be several hundreds dollars per year, which makes this promotion soooooooooo valuable.

If you do not presently have an American Express card but are interested in getting one, check out this link to read my review of some of their cards, including a couple of $0 annual fee cards.

Do you plan to take advantage of Shop Small promotion? Leave a comment below.