Complete guide to all 3(+) Zillions/Zift card designs and Just4U earning
/In Friday’s post I gave a breakdown of my experience with fixed value $100 “bonus” Zillions/Zift gift cards, which cost a flat $100 but have a $105 value that can be exchanged for egift cards, which can then be sold or used.
By necessity that was a post in real-time sharing my own experience to date. I wanted to put it up while the deal was still ongoing, and ahead of the frequent additional weekend bonus on gift card purchases at Just4U stores (Albertsons, Safeway, Acme, etc), which did indeed return on schedule last Saturday.
That urgency having passed, I want to share a more detailed look at the way these cards earn Just4U points and how they can be used. First, we must distinguish between not two, as I originally supposed, but three different subspecies of Zillions gift cards.
Fixed-value, tight variable, and loose variable Zillions cards
The three types of Zillions cards are distinguished by both the amount of money that can be loaded onto them and the merchants for which that value can be redeemed for egifts cards.
Fixed-value cards cost $100 and have $105 in value that can be redeemed at the merchants I listed last week.
What I call “tight variable” cards, can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can only be redeemed for egift cards to the merchants listed on the front of the packaging. As with Gift of Choice cards, there are a bunch of different designs of tight variable cards with different combinations of merchants.
Finally, “loose variable” cards can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can be redeemed for 176 different kinds of gifts cards (this works out to fewer than 176 merchants because some merchants are listed several times in different denominations). You can find a pdf document with all 176 options here.
Card type determines liquidation options
To determine the ultimate price you pay for the Just4U points this technique generates, you have to know how much value you get back for the card. The two most obvious ways to get value back from a card are to resell it and to use it.
This may go without saying for many readers, but you’ll always get the most value value from a card if you’re able to use it instead of the cash you’d otherwise spend for actual goods and services (discounted by the rewards you’d earn putting the purchase on a credit card). This will become relevant momentarily.
The highest resale value I found for fixed-value card options was Columbia Sportswear Company, which resold at 82% of face value on CardCash, or $86.10 for the $105 value of each card (the rate has dropped since then, a reminder that things move fast in this game).
The range of tight variable card designs has a few dozen often-overlapping categories. Nordstrom Rack was the best reselling option I found at 81.5% on CardCash. However, the options begin to get more interesting here, since several of the tight variable designs feature Amazon as a redemption. I doubt I spend much more than $100 on Amazon in a year, let alone $500, but I appreciate it’s extremely common for Americans to spend very large sums there, and using highly-bonused gift cards is a way to earn outsized rewards on those purchases, or on net make Amazon’s prices lower compared to other merchants
Finally, loose variable cards have the widest range of options (go ahead and check out that pdf now), and I was frankly astonished at the abundance. I do not find gift cards to be a particularly useful or pleasurable way to pay for things, and this is of course by design: un- and partially-redeemed gift cards are a feature, not a bug, to their issuers. What’s more, Just4U bonuses are often on the least-useful gift cards: it’s not uncommon to see every Safeway in the country advertising a bonus on Topgolf gift cards — a discount on the more-niche version of an already-niche hobby!
That’s not the case with loose variable Zillions cards. There are options that, in short, a normal person might use without changing their behavior in any way. A few that jumped out at me:
Airbnb
DoorDash
Hotels.com
Southwest
Uber
Uber Eats
If you ordinarily charge those purchases to a credit card earning, for example, 5% in rewards, then redeeming for these gift cards and using them as intended is equivalent to liquidating them at 95% — an astonishingly good deal.
The best reselling options I found among the loose variable redemption options were Staples at 83.5% and Home Depot at 84%.
Your earning rate determines your value proposition
All of the above is true completely irrespective of the promotion that was running last week. These cards are hanging on the rack all day every day, whether a promotion is running or not. What makes them worth buying is the bonus Just4U points, and yet again, the number of points earn varies by card design. Last week I collected 4 datapoints across three purchases and two promotions. Here are the results:
On Thursday I bought a fixed-value card during the week-long 10-point-per-dollar promotion. I incorrectly reported last week that I had only earned 800 points, but I later realized my error: the receipt lists two values, “Points Earned Today” and “Gift Card Points.” At first glance I assumed the latter was a subset of the former; in fact they’re additive, so I received the full 1000 points I was owed in total.
On Saturday I bought another fixed-value card and a tight variable card, and earned a total of 7,200 Just4U points, broken down into 6,000 Points Earned Today and 1,200 Gift Card Points, again for the full 12 points per dollar.
Finally, on Saturday I bought a loose variable card and earned just 5,000 points, broken down into 4,000 Points Earned Today and 1,000 Gift Card Points.
Just4U gift card promotions are confusing because of the difference between the way they’re advertised and the way they’re processed internally. Most gift cards earn 2 points per dollar all the time, so when they advertise “4X points” or “10X points” they’re really saying you’ll earn 2 or 8 additional points on top of the base points. I believe those 2 base points are the Gift Card Points reported separately on your receipt, which suggests that all three designs earn base points all the time.
What seems to be happening is that the loose variable card earned those base points and the week-long additional 8 points per dollar, but not the additional 2 points per dollar during the weekend, but I can’t be sure because I didn’t buy a loose variable card during the week.
Conclusion
From these observations we can create a simple hierarchy of the value of the cards under different circumstances:
The highest value will come from using gift cards at merchants as intended (almost) regardless of earning rate because of the vastly superior liquidation rate. Naturally this will usually be loose variable cards, but if you have upcoming purchases at merchants included on fixed-value or tight variable cards (like Amazon), then keep in mind their higher earning rate.
If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value and tight variable cards are superior when they earn 12 points per dollar and loose variable cards only earn 10, since that 20% boost swamps any potential difference in reselling rates.
If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value cards offer the best value when the 5% boost in value offsets the lower liquidation rate compared to a loose variable card. This is usually the case, but the differences can be nominal: the 84% payout for Home Depot is 4.3% higher than the 80.5% payout for Adidas (a fixed-value redemption option), a difference that is lower than the 5% boost in liquidation value, making the fixed-value card is a better option, but only fractionally: 1.55 cents per Just4U point versus 1.6 cents per point.
For most people I suspect the hassle of liquidating $105 gift cards will probably outweigh the increased value for most people most of the time: after all, even at 12 points per dollar that’s just 1,200 points per card. If you’re planning to stockpile tens or hundreds of thousands of Just4U points (I’m not, but it’s not an unreasonable thing to do if you sign up for a Freshpass subscription to keep your points from expiring), then doing so in 5,000 point increments will give you a headache one fifth of the size.
