Mega miles (and rebates) with Lazada and Citibank Rewards

20x at Lazada with Citi Rewards

If you didn’t already know, the Citi Rewards card is currently earning 20x rewards points for spend on Lazada, which equates to 8 miles per dollar spent.

(Image from Citi website)

The promotion is good for up to 20,000 additional points (or $2,000 worth of spend). 8mpd is nothing to sneeze at – even using the 2¢ valuation of a mile, that’s equivalent to a 16% return of value. And if that wasn’t enough, why not combo it with a LiveUp membership for an additional 5% rebate?

LiveUp

Aaron’s evaluated LiveUp previously, though I’m probably a bigger fan of the membership than he is. I really only signed up for it for discounted Netflix (2 months with the free trial, and an additional 4 months when you pay $28.80 for the year – those 4 months would usually cost $55.92, so it’s an instant discount for the Netflix account alone).

Somewhere along the way, I decided to start ordering things and realised that I rather appreciate having the option to get things delivered to my doorstep for free.  The 5% rebate (capped at $50 per month) is just icing on the cake.

You should get rebates even during the free trial period, so if you think you’re gonna spend a lot, why not just sign up for free?

Shopback

Shopback does offer cashback for Lazada as well, although as with most cashback sites the terms and conditions can be rather mind-boggling. The cashback rates also vary wildly (1.5% for existing customers purchasing electronics to 11% for new customers purchasing fashion products). Keep these in mind if you do decide to go the Shopback route.

Citibank promo codes

Shopback officially excludes the use of promo codes not listed on their site, but if for whatever reason you’re not able/willing to use Shopback (e.g. purchasing from Apple official store) you could possibly make use of one of Citibank’s Lazada promo codes instead – in fact, these could very likely end up offering you greater value.

The codes for use on the Lazada app (OFFICIALCITIUP for 12% capped at $20, and EXPRESSCITIUP for $6 off with minimum spend of $30) offer greater value for smaller purchases – I usually aim to use the latter when spending around $30 for a close-to-20% discount. Their impact on bigger-ticket items is limited, though.

Citibank Star Wars spend promo

Finally, if you’re likely to spend more than $2,000 on your Citi card(s) this month, you might as well register for Citi’s The Last Jedi promo and net yourself some free plush toys or luggage. You may not be a Star Wars fan yourself, but you probably know someone you can gift them to!

Illustration

Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone had found out that Lazada was now an authorised Apple retailer and started doing some research on how much an iPhone X would cost him (an arm and a leg, clearly – but how about with those miles and cashback to stem the bleeding?). It’s about as good a place to start as another, since Singapore’s still full of Apple fans and there’s little variation in the price of new Apple products.

The lowest-priced iPhone X retails at $1,648. The OFFICIALCITI / OFFICIALCITIUP codes would discount it by $20. The $1,628 that gets charged to the card would thus earn a whopping 32,560 rewards points, or 13,024 miles.

At the same time, for a LiveUp buyer this purchase would max out the 5% rebates and earn $50 (assuming no other purchases that month) in Lazada credit to be applied to future purchase. Not quite as sweet as actual cashback, but good enough.

All in all, treating the 13,024 miles as a $260.48 value, there’s a total of $330.48 value in miles, discounts and rebates – a cool 20% of the original retail price.

Welp, I guess I own an iPhone X now. BRB, listing old phone on Carousell.

Conclusion

By making use of the Citi Rewards card to earn 8mpd before 31 Dec 2017, in conjunction with LiveUp as well as Shopback / promo codes, you can easily net more than 20% value in the form of miles, discounts and rebates.

If you really want to maximise this value you’d probably want to keep to $1,000 spend in order to fully utilise the LiveUp 5% rebate. Also, the 8mpd promo maxes out at $2,000. Multiple small purchases would also allow you to use promo codes repeatedly, which is especially rewarding if you are able to use the EXPRESSCITIUP code on purchases of $30 via the Lazada app – that would net upwards of 36% value instead.

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