The ever-popular American Express Shop Small promotion is back for another round, with offers available on both the mainline American Express cards and Scotiabank-issued American Express cards.
If you have a Scotiabank-issued American Express credit card, you can register and earn a $10 credit upon spending $30 (all figures in CAD) at Shop Small merchants up to five times, for a total of up to $50 in statement credits.
As a reminder, Amex-issued American Express cardholders may register their card and then earn a $5 statement credit upon spending $10 with a participating Shop Small merchant, up to five times in total on each eligible card, for a total of up to $25 in statement credits.
Scotiabank Amex Shop Small: Earn Up to $50 in Statement Credits
The Shop Small promotion has just landed for Scotiabank-issued American Express cards, and it’s even more generous than the ongoing Shop Small offer available for Amex-issued Amex cards.
The American Express Shop Small promotion is available at designated physical storefronts across Canada, as well as participating online small businesses nationwide.
If you have a Scotiabank-issued Amex card, head to the dedicated landing page and look for the Shop Small logo.
From there, click “Register your Card”, and proceed through the steps.
Once you’ve registered, you can earn up to $50 in statement credits, structured as “Spend $30, Get $10”, up to five times.
Importantly, there’s a limit of just 10,000 registrations for this offer, so it’s worth loading up the offer on your card(s) as soon as possible before it fills up.
You have until December 31, 2023, to earn up to $50 in statement credits, which leaves plenty of time to get up to 33% back on up to five transactions at Shop Small merchants.
Amex Shop Small: Earn Up to $25 in Statement Credits
As a reminder, there’s an ongoing Shop Small offer available for Amex-issued Amex cards.
For Amex-issued Amex cards, you can earn up to $25 in statement credits with the ongoing Shop Small promotion, which is structured as “Spend $10, Get $5”, up to five times.
To register for Shop Small, sign in to your American Express account, and scroll down to the Amex Offers section.
If your card has the Shop Small offer available, simply click “Register your Card”, and you’re all set.
Once you’ve registered, you can take advantage of the “Spend $10, Get $5” offer up to five times at any participating Shop Small retailer in Canada, for a total of up to $25 in statement credits.
There’s a limit of 15,000 registrations for this offer, so it’s worth registering your cards as soon as possible before it fills up.
If you have the offer loaded on your card(s), you have until November 30, 2023, to earn up to 50% off five transactions at Shop Small merchants.
How Does Amex Shop Small Work?
Once you’ve loaded up the Shop Small offer, you can use the Amex Shop Small Map to look up the participating retailers by filtering for the “Shop Small” icon.
You’ll find a list of participating locations in your city, which are all marked with a blue dot or location marker.
You can also browse a list of Shop Small retailers, which includes in-store and online locations. There are quite a few registered charities on this list, so if you have any spare credits by the end of November, you could consider making a $10 donation to these charities and benefiting from both a $5 statement credit and a tax receipt.
The Shop Small promotion is intended to reward you for shopping five separate times at five different Shop Small retailers. To that end, the terms for the Amex-issued cards state:
To be eligible for a $5 (CAD) statement credit, a qualifying purchase of at least $10 (CAD) in a single transaction, after taxes, must be charged to your registered Card at up to 5 different participating locations in Canada, during the offer period and subsequently posted to your account. A qualifying purchase of at least $10 (CAD) in a single transaction that is made directly at a different participating business or different location of the same participating business will qualify for one $5 (CAD) statement credit, up to a total of 5 statement credits or a maximum of $25 (CAD) in statement credits per registered Card during the offer period. One or more purchases made directly at the same business location or the same online business will only be eligible to qualify for one $5 (CAD) statement credit.
And the terms for the Scotiabank-issued Amex cards state:
A qualifying purchase of at least $30 (CAD) in a single transaction that is made directly at a different participating business or different location of the same participating business will qualify for one $10 (CAD) statement credit, up to a total of 5 statement credits or a maximum of $50 (CAD) in statement credits per registered Card during the offer period. One or more purchases made directly at the same participating business location or the same participating online business will only be eligible to qualify for one $10 (CAD) statement credit.
Therefore, you’ll most likely need to shop with five separate Shop Small merchants to get the full $25 or $50 in statement credits, respectively.
However, if you or your household members hold multiple Amex-issued American Express or Scotiabank-issued Amex cards and have registered all of them, you could always split up a larger transaction into multiple payments on separate cards, thus triggering one of the five $5–10 credits for each card used.
If you happen to overburden your cashier or waiter during the process of splitting up a large bill, remember to leave a generous tip (perhaps using yet another American Express card from your pack)!
Conclusion
American Express Shop Small has returned yet again, allowing you to earn up to $25 in statement credits when shopping with one of your Amex-issued American Express cards, and up to $50 in statement credits with your Scotiabank-issued Amex cards.
This is an easy opportunity to earn $25–50 back when getting coffee and ice cream, and you can scale these earnings with other cardholders in your household.
Go forth and register all the eligible American Express cards you can get your hands on – and then get spending!
I have the Amex PP, Aeroplan reserve, Business Aeroplan, Personal Bonvoy card and it only showed up on my Business Aeroplan card. Better one than none.
I am in the same situation too. I have 3 Amex Cards and only one of them have the offer. The last time I had more than 1 card having this offer at the same time was at least 2 years ago. I believe Amex has gotten “Smart” about this, even separating Amex’s cards and Scotiabank’s Amex cards’ offer period for this “Shop Small” campaign.
Manual registration doesn’t always work. If you have the Amex Reserve charge card that used to be a Charter Member Amex Aero plat card, then when you try to register it manually you get the following message:
“Our records show that you’ve already enrolled for this offer. We limit the number of times that a Cardmember can enroll for each offer.“
Is there a list of charities that provide the tax receipts and accepts Amex?
Ya…
$50 statement credit isn’t really moving the needle here. Incredibly disappointing!!!
Once you stack it across multiple cards, it becomes several hundred dollars.
Hi Ricky,
Is it possible to get this credit and also the 10x bonus points on the other offer at the same time? Thanks!
Yes, absolutely!
Anyone know what the difference is on the map between the blue circle dots and the blue teardrop map markers?
Have anyone found registered Charities eligible for Small Shop that provide Tax Receipts for small donation, such as 10$ ?
Wouldn’t splitting the bill into multiple transactions cost these retailers more fees? Considering how many of them are struggling during Covid I just think this isn’t a good thing to encourage. Amex gets their fees regardless but the retailer will end up paying more out of pocket on this transaction.
My understanding is that Amex interchange fees are a pure percentage of the transaction with no flat component, so it’d all be the same. Not 100% on this though so someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
My business accept Amex too, we got charge by %, as shown on our monthly merchant invoice. Ricky is correct.
I would be cautious of buying small retailer gift cards as the retailer could close up shop – leaving you with no recourse.
The offer didn’t show up on any of my cards, but it did for my wife. I tried calling customer service, but they couldn’t help. I ended up using the manual registration for my platinum card, and now it shows up under offers registered to the card.
The only offers for my biz gold are Dell and Panago, so I’ll have to manually register that card too.
Glad to hear the manual registration worked.
"you could always split up a larger transaction into multiple $10 payments on separate cards, thus triggering one of the 10 $5 credits for each card used", if the store permit it…
Must be a different location each time though 🙂
A smile and a bit of small talk goes a long way.
oh how i wish I lived in a walking city like Toronto. Could spend a day just hitting up different food places. Though I guess mississauga isnt that far from downtown
Love this offer! Though I tend to shop in the same stores over and again. Spending at different stores can be quite challenging I hope it’s not strictly enforced.
Can the subsidiary card holder register for the small shop promotion too? Would you get up to $50 credit for the primary and another $50 credit for the secondary card.holder?
The terms don’t say anything about this, but it’s worth a go!
Any info on online purchases?
Going by track history AMEX offers/spend categories tend not to play well when masked behind a third party processor like Shopify (or heck if the payment is processed elsewhere like Uber Eats Amsterdam vs San Francisco). They seem to say that online purchases at eligible merchants will count towards it but most of them use something like Shopify for online transactions (for gift card for example)…
This is quite true in my experience, so I think it’s best to go with purchasing at a physical in-store location to be on the safe side.
I didn’t get any offer in my offers page but I manually entered all 5 of my cards. Fingers crossed that it will work. Thanks Ricky as always!
thanks for this Ricky — btw, it is my experience that I will get statement credits for shopping at certain places that aren’t on the Shop Small map. Have you found that as well?
I haven’t experienced this, although it may happen randomly. In any case, sticking with the merchants on the Shop Small map would be the safest bet to unlock the credits ‚Ä쬆anything else would be a bonus.