How To Transfer An Amazon Gift Card Balance

There are a few relatively common reasons why you might want to transfer an Amazon gift card balance. Maybe someone else was signed in to Amazon, so you've accidentally put your gift card on their account. Maybe you have more than one account, and applied the credit to the wrong one.

Whatever your specific scenario, you now find yourself in the predicament of needing to move those funds to a different account. Is that possible? Or are you restricted in what you can do once you've redeemed your gift card?

Let's find out.

Can You Transfer An Amazon Gift Card Balance To Another Account?

We'll start with Amazon's gift card terms and conditions, which are as exciting to read as you'd expect. In terms of their list of restrictions and prohibited activities, the key point is that you may not:

Transfer a gift card to another account once the claim code has been redeemed

This seems pretty conclusive. As far as Amazon is concerned, once the gift card code has been redeemed, those funds are effectively locked to that account. And they make it pretty clear that there is no formal process for transferring funds from one account to another.

The moral of the story then, is to check and double-check that you are using the correct account whenever you go to redeem a gift card.

And to be fair to Amazon, this makes a lot of sense. It would probably be quite administratively complex to transfer gift card balances from one account to another. It may even need to be done manually in some situations, which would be inefficient, and costly.

And that's before you start getting into grey areas around transferring full gift card balances, or partial gift card balances, or even bouncing balances around through multiple accounts. And while this final point may sound glib, gift cards are actually a popular way of laundering money. So Amazon will need to exercise a degree of caution when it comes to managing gift card balances. It isn't just being mean.

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So Is There Anything You Can Do?

Credit: Amazon

In all honesty, not really. You could potentially contact Amazon customer services, and throw yourself upon their mercy. Maybe, and we emphasise that in this case maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting, they can do something to help as a one-off. But don't count on it.

A few suggestions are bouncing around the internet suggesting ways you can circumvent Amazon's terms and conditions. For instance, some suggest using the gift card balance to buy another gift card. But again, Amazon's terms and conditions also state that you can't use a gift card to buy a gift card.

One possible workaround that applies to Amazon Prime account holders, is to share your Amazon Prime account via Amazon Household. This allows accounts to share certain benefits, including payment methods. Obviously, this solution won't be appropriate for everyone. But it may help a few of you.