The retailer American Eagle Outfitter has a store credit card and a Visa credit card for folks who regular shop at their stores. Obviously, these cards gives you rewards for shopping at American Eagle stores. We’ll look at these two cards right now.

Features – The American Eagle credit card allows you to earn 4% in their “extra savings rewards” for every dollar that you spend at AE, aerie, ae.com, aerie.com and 77kids.com. You will earn 1% “extra savings” for other regular purchases. New cardholders get a 15% discount for their first credit card purchase. Cardholders will also get a 20% off birthday coupon (you need to give them your email address for this). Cardholders are also invited to “savings events” four times a year.

Once you are approved for the credit card or store card, you will be enrolled in the AE Rewards program. This is where your “extra savings” rewards come into play. Earn up to a certain number of points and you qualify for certain discounts at American Eagle stores.

Fees – There is no annual fee for this card.

Verdict – The American Eagle Outfitters credit card has a nice store and visa credit card that will appeal to those who really shop their often. But for me personally, I’ve never thought it is a good idea to get a specialized store credit card because I just happen to buy things from many stores. If I were to get every store credit card that I shop at, I will need a bag to put all my credit cards! So I searched for the usual credit cards with shopping portal to see if you could also earn rebates from shopping at American Eagle Outfitters. And true enough, I found one – and it is the Discover® More(SM) Card.

For those of you who are not familiar, Discover has a shopping portal called shopdiscover.com. They have over 100 online merchant partners. When you go to AEO.com from your Discover account and shop online using your Discover Card, your purchases will be tracked and you will earn 5% rebates, which is more than the “4% rewards” that you earn with the AEO credit card. Furthermore, you do not have to use your rebates at AEO. You can redeem for cash or gift cards.

You will not find these info at Discover’s website (only cardholders can see it). So here is a screen shot what how this works.

Clicking on the American Eagle Outfitter icon takes you to a page with the fine prints and terms and conditions. Clicking on the “start shopping” button takes you to aeo.com.

Overall, I feel that you should get a card like the Discover® More(SM) Card instead rather than the American Eagle Credit Card since you can earn higher rebates and have more options to earn rebates at other retailers as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 07:31 and is filed under Credit Card Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.