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American Express Shop Small truly signals the beginning of the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas shopping and socialising just feels even more fun somehow when you’re effectively only paying half price for a lot of it!

For those of you not already familiar with ‘Shop Small’, it’s an annual promotion run by American Express that gives cardholders a £5.00 statement credit back whenever they spend £10.00 or more at a participating business.

You can only get one credit back per card per merchant, but if you have a few Amex cards (and most people reading this probably do) and are prepared to hop around a bit, you can save a small fortune on festive drinks and stocking fillers alone.

This year, Shop Small is is running between 3rd-18th December (inclusive), which is just about perfect as far as I’m concerned because it includes the last full weekend before Christmas.

If you have American Express cards actually issued by American Express (eg. BA, SPG, Gold/Plat, Nectar etc) then you can register them for the promotion simply by logging into your account, clicking on “offers” and then “save to card”.

For American Express cards issued by other lenders (eg. MBNA’s Virgin Flying Club cards), you need to head to this sign up page and register your card/s there.

If the rules are the same as previous years, supplementary cards count as separate cards for the promotion if they are issued directly by American Express (BA, Gold etc), but supplementary cards issued by other lenders won’t be eligible. The terms state that TSB Bank cards are excluded from the offer entirely.

For the super-organised amongst you who want to start planning your bargain hunting routes / pub-crawls straightaway, the (infamous) Shop Small Map is back, and actually seems to be slightly less annoying than I remember. Do note though that there’s still over a month to go, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some businesses are added to the map and others removed before the promotion actually begins.

Conclusion

Saving a few fivers might not sound that exciting, but with a bit of planning you can do a lot better than that. I also quite enjoy the ‘game’ element of planning the best way to make the most of Shop Small.

Shop Small gets you to take a look at places you might not otherwise even know existed, and a pub/bar/restaurant crawl with a few good friends/family also ‘playing’ along can be a really fun and (relatively) inexpensive way to catch-up during the runup to Christmas.

Terms

• One £5 statement credit will be rewarded, per merchant, for every £10 spent in a single transaction.
• Offer excludes purchases made on finance and the purchase of gift cards and vouchers.
• Services offered by a participating merchant are not expressly endorsed or recommended by American Express.
• Offer excludes TSB Bank Cards.
• Offer only applies to spend made in Great British Pound (GBP) on the Card to which the offer is saved, including an American Express Card loaded into a mobile payment wallet.
• Offer does not apply to spend on other Cards you might hold and is not valid for transactions made using Payment Aggregators including, but not limited to, PayPal.
• An awarded credit may be reversed if qualifying transaction is refunded or cancelled.
• Credit should appear on your billing statement within 5 days from qualifying spend but may take up to 90 days from 18 December 2016.