I keep wondering why people buy Amazon/Netflix Gift cards. Great, you converted 50$ into 50$ that can only be used on Amazon, and people may end up not using at all. This is also financing with negative interest rate.
1) Hitting minimum spend requirements for a credit card bonus or discount (e.g. 10% statement credit at [Store of the Week] with a max credit of $10 or something).
2) I have a Target credit card and almost everything in Target, including gift cards, is discounted by 5% if I pay for it with Target's credit card. That makes my Hulu subscription or Nintendo Switch digital purchases 5% cheaper in the absence of anything else.
According to the FDIC, 6.5% of American households lacked a bank account at all in 2017.[1]
Amazon gift cards can be purchased without a fee most of the time, and with less friction in the store then actually dealing with the service desk in the store that does ReadyLink.
If I receive one for some reason, I've learned to go straight to my computer and load it into my Amazon account.
Amazon cards are pretty popular when companies have small dollar giveaways of various sort.
More generally, in a lot of circles in the US at least, giving cash as a gift is often seen as a bit crass. So, if you really don't know what to buy a person, a gift card is seen as an at least minimally thoughtful gift that lets the recipient choose what they want. Amazon admittedly tends to fail the minimally thoughtful test but that's the story with gift cards generally.
If it wasn’t for that I would just pay Netflix directly.
- loading an account family members have access to, without linking to the main credit card.
- loading foreign accounts, where small transactions are painful with most cards.