The Amazon credit card gives you 3% rewards. You could be getting 5%. Nice try, Amazon.com, but we’ve got you beat. We don’t want to say that the Amazon Visa doesn’t have good rewards. It does. It’s just that, according to our analysis, there are at least 26 other rewards credit cards based on our comparison tool.
Update January 3, 2012: The Chase Freedom now gives 5% cash back at Amazon.com through March 31st.
Most notably, the Amazon Visa falls short in comparison to the Chase Freedom, which gives 1) a higher rewards rate and 2) rewards in more categories. The Chase Amazon gives 3 points per $1 spent at the vast online marketplace, plus 2 points per $1 spent on gas, restaurants and drugstores. Which is nice. But the Chase Freedom gives five percent cash back on bonus categories that change every quarter, up to $1,500/quarter. Those bonus categories are tied to the season, and can range from airfare, gas and hotels in the summer to movies, restaurants and charity in the winter. Plus, the Chase Freedom gives $200 cash back as a signup bonus, while the Amazon Visa only gives a $30 gift card. Do the math on that one.
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The Quick Facts on the Amazon Credit Card:
Pros: Great, easy-to-redeem rewards
The card earns Chase Flexible Rewards Points, which beats the pants off Citi ThankYou Points and Bank of America WorldPoints, mainly because you can redeem a very low number of points for cash – 2,500 points gets you a $25 check. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Cons: It’s not as pretty as 26 other girls in the room
Much like with dating, the best credit cards are the ones that spend the least on advertising. So don’t jump at the first 2% offer you see. 5% back is the new standard, whether it be on gas (PenFed Platinum), on restaurants (Citi Forward), or on a number of categories (Chase Freedom). The AmEx Blue Cash Preferred even gives 6% back on supermarkets. So play the field!
Let’s take a hypothetical cases and see how the Amazon.com card stacks up using our rewards credit card tool.
Say you spend $2,000 per month on your Amazon credit card, with $200 per month going to restaurants, $200 to drugstores, and $200 on gas. On top of that, say you spent $1,000 that year at Amazon.com. If you assume credit card signing bonuses are split over 2 years, the Amazon card would average $347 per year in rewards, putting the card squarely in the middle of the pack.
If you’re set on getting a Visa card, you’d earn $420 (that’s over 20% more!) with the Chase Freedom. Let’s say you max out your bonus categories every month (that’s $300/year in rewards), spend $2,000 on top of that ($20) and spread the $200 cash back bonus over 2 years. That’s an average of $420 a year in rewards.
If you’re okay with the limited coverage of an American Express, you’d be better off getting an American Express Blue Cash Preferred card. That one gives a whopping 6% back on groceries, 3% on gas and department stores, and 1% elsewhere. I’m assuming that, like any nutrient-consuming human, you spend more on food than you do at Amazon.com. You’re getting 2x rewards on a much more important spending category. It does have a $75 annual fee, but that’s offset by a $100 cashback bonus.
| Amazon Credit Card | American Express Blue Cash Preferred | ||||||||
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| Signing Promo | |||||||||
| 4,000 Amazon.com Rewards Bonus | 100 Cash Bonus after spending $500 - in the first 60 days | ||||||||
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| Annual fee | |||||||||
| $0 | $75 | ||||||||
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