Special gift cards are a range of merchant category and retailer-specific gift cards produced by 545490 Pty Ltd. For information about buying gift cards on the Special website, see this article.
Types of Special gift cards
Special gift cards are available in two varieties: retailer-specific cards that only work at one brand and merchant category cards that should work at any business with a merchant category code that corresponds to the theme of the gift card.
For example, a Special JB Hi-Fi gift card can only be used at JB Hi-Fi whilst a Special Film Buff gift card should work at any cinema in Australia.
Both types of Special gift cards are essentially prepaid Mastercard gift cards set to only work at certain businesses or merchant categories. This means that a Special gift card for a particular business will often work differently to that same business’ own gift cards.
For example, despite both having a similar appearance, a Special JB Hi-Fi gift card does not function the same way as a regular JB Hi-Fi gift card. When paying with a normal JB Hi-Fi gift card you would select the gift card option, whereas with a Special gift card you would enter it in the credit/debit card field if paying online or tap your phone if paying in-store.
The downside of this approach is that when paying online you can usually only ever use one Special gift card at a time as it’s rare for online merchants to allow you to pay using multiple credit/debit cards.
However, the benefit is that you can often use Special’s version of a retailer gift card to pay for things that might not be allowed when paying with a regular gift card (e.g. buying another gift card).
Unlike other merchant category gift card companies, Special are very coy about which MCCs their cards support. So far the only one to have been officially acknowledged is the Supermarket Slayer gift card which they say supports ‘5411: Grocery Stores, Supermarkets’.
You can check the Merchant Database for a list of places where certain Special merchant category gift cards have been tested and found to work.
Promotions
Special once ran public discounts but these days their promotions are limited to to certain bank and credit card programmes (e.g. 10% cashback for NAB, Up, CommBank, American Express etc cardholders).
