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I’ve been mentioning gift card reseller Zeek a fair bit in the last few days. There’s a good reason for that. Not only is it a great way to get a discounted spend at the retailers featured on it, it’s also a very good value way to “pre-load” spend on your credit card, to hit a spend threshold bonus.

For example, the Amex Gold offers 22,000 bonus Membership Rewards points (convertible to 22,000 Avios and other air miles) when you spend £2,000 on it in the first 3 months of holding the card.

The obvious problem here is if you (somewhat understandably) don’t have any need to splurge £2,000 in three months. That’s where one great solution comes in – gift cards!

To hit that spend target, you can use Zeek to buy vouchers for retailers you will shop at over the next few months or so (Tesco, House of Fraser, Argos, Starbucks, Sports Direct etc). Not only will you therefore register spend on your Amex, you’ll also get a discount on the retailer.

A further discount – buy Zeek credit before your gift card

You can even buy Zeek credit at 1% discount – this is a very flexible option as it then lets you buy gift cards for whichever (discounted) retailer you want, when you’re ready to spend with them.

Another particularly good option is of course Amazon. It seems these days pretty much everyone uses Amazon at some point, and certainly an Amazon gift card gives you enormous flexibility in terms of what you can spend your credit on.

While Amazon is generally offered at a 0% discount on Zeek, it sometimes has a 1% discount, and you can of course discount it by 1% if you buy Zeek credit first, then the Amazon voucher with that Zeek credit.

The problem, however, is I seemed to be the only one to whom Amazon credit is available!

As you can see from the above, Amazon credit is definitely available to me, it’s just per the comments received, it was not available to a number of other people.

Step in Sherlock Sowerby

The mystery of the disappearing Amazon gift cards was finally solved by Craig. Craig is based outside of the UK and was having no problem at all finding the Amazon vouchers. So the Canadian Poirot (as I now like to call him) conducted some experiments, brilliantly put two and two together, and worked out that – for whatever reason – the Amazon UK gift cards only definitely appear if you access the UK Zeek website from outside the UK. Yes, that’s utterly bewildering, but true.

So, if you want to buy Amazon gift cards via Zeek, you’ll need to use a VPN and virtually base yourself outside the UK (Spain will do the trick, it seems). You can use a free VPN like Tunnelbear to do this. 

But I can’t use Amex on Zeek!

Fair point – you sort of can’t, but actually you can. Just link your Amex to a Paypal account, and then use it through Paypal.

Anything else?

Yes – sign up to Zeek via this link for £3 free credit.