The Business Gold Rewards Card from American Express OPEN

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The New Business Gold Rewards Card from American Express OPENThe Business Gold Rewards Card® from American Express OPEN is an upscale-oriented charge card for small businesses where you must pay off the balance each month, but you get the famous AMEX perks like purchase price protection, extended product return protection, and AMEX extended warranty. Here are the highlights:

  • The annual fee is $0 for the first year of card membership, and $175 thereafter. This way you can try out the card for a year for free. Get unlimited Additional Gold Cards for an additional annual fee of $50 but this fee is also waived for the first year.
  • Triple points on airfare. What makes this card different is that you can now earn triple points on airfare as well as double points on advertising, shipping, and gas purchases on the first $100,000 of eligible purchases in each category each calendar year. Everything else earns 1 point per dollar spent.
  • OPEN small business network gives you access to savings at partners like Fedex shipping and OfficeMax supplies.
  • Terms and restrictions apply

Welcome bonus offer not available to applicants who have had a Business Gold Rewards or any other Business Gold, Green or Platinum Card® account within the last 12 months.

Business Credit Card Eligibility

Many people aren’t aware of the fact that they can apply for business credit cards, even if they are not a corporation or LLC. Why? Because any individual can be a small business as well. The business type is called a sole proprietorship. Perhaps you sell items on eBay, Craiglist, or Etsy. Maybe you do some freelancing and/or consulting. If you earned more than $600 from a single client, you probably got a 1099-MISC tax form and filled out a Schedule C. Boom! You have business income, you’re paying self-employment taxes (meaning you’re an employer), and you’re a sole proprietorship. This is the simplest business entity, but it is fully legit and recognized by the IRS. On a business credit card application, you should use your own legal name as the business name, and your Social Security Number as the Tax ID.

Specifically, this card will require you to personally guarantee that you’ll pay them back what you charge on the card, which means they’ll check your personal credit score like any other consumer card. However, the card itself is a business card so it won’t show up on your personal credit report, so it won’t change things like your credit limits, average account age, or credit utilization ratio.

Meeting Minimum Spend Requirements

I acknowledge that the spending requirement amounts to a little over $1.500 per month, which can be tough. Here are some tips readers have suggested. You can try to buy AMEX gift cards to help spread out the purchases over time, buy gas or grocery or Costco gift cards, prepay utility bills or insurance premiums, use the personal version of Amazon Webpay to pay others or send money to family/spouse/friends with no fee ($1,000 per month max), load money on American Express Serve with no fee ($25 bonus, $100 max load per day, $250/500 month max), and I’ve even bought some Forever postage stamps to put me over the top.

As usual, compare this card with other current $500+ credit card bonuses that you can also apply for.

  • Business Gold Rewards Card® from American Express OPEN application link
My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

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Comments

  1. infamousdx says

    This is pretty much a different version of the Premier Rewards gold card. If you spend more on advertising & shipping vs groceries, this one is for you. If not, the PR Gold card is more beneficial.

  2. Is there any benefit to having these over a personal credit card, given that you pay an annual fee? I’ve read you can get much higher credit limits on these if you do in fact have a full fledged business?

  3. You can get some pretty high limits, but it can depend on your spending patterns. Otherwise, you may need to send in asset statements to justify higher limits.

    The primary benefit for me is that I use business cards to keep personal and business expenses separate for tax and accounting purposes. There also may be some consumer chargeback or fraud protections that are not legally required on business cards. However, AmEx charge cards usually provide those type of protections and then some. Of course, they also usually charge an annual fee past the first year.

  4. Jonathan,

    I wouldn’t qualify for this offer based on what you said but even if I did I wouldn’t apply for 2 reasons. $10k is way too much to spend in 5 months. The 2nd reason is that this reward is basically only paying 5% ($500 off of $10k in purchases). The Chase Sapphire gave almost 17% ($500 off of $3k in purchases). This Amex offer doesn’t seem like that great of a deal unless I am missing something.

  5. You’d also get an extra 10,000 points for the 10k in spending, on top of the 50,000 bonus points. But yes, I would agree the Chase Sapphire $500 offer is better if you don’t have that card already, which is why I linked to the other offers available. In addition, one isn’t limited to one card or the other, you could always apply for both, and either offer might end early as well.

    https://www.mymoneyblog.com/get-free-100-bonuses-from-credit-card-promotions/

  6. I just received an invitation for another Gold AMEX card, $500 in gift card after spending $1,000 in first 3 months, how nice!

  7. Please note that small biz cards are NOT covered by the CARD Act aka “Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure” Act.

  8. @Ack – Good point, but many times the individual issuer meets or exceed the requirements of the CARD act on their own. I’ve never had a problem with an AmEx dispute, half the time they don’t even bother to open a claim investigation and just refund me the money on the spot.

  9. It looks like the Starwood Preferred Guest promotion may have expired. I clicked on the link to that card and the 10k points upfront is still there but there is no mention of the 15k points after you spend $5k.

  10. “Welcome bonus offer not available to applicants who have had a Business Gold Rewards or any other Business Gold, Green or Platinum Card® account within the last 12 months.”

    Would I not be eligible for this if I already have a regular AMEX Biz Platinum card?

  11. You say the card requires you to pay off the balance each month. Well, what if you don’t? What happens? And if the answer is they charge you interest on the balance you are carrying over, then how is that different from any other card that doesn’t require you to pay off the balance every month?

  12. I seem to recall this card being offered with 75K points numerous time throughout the year, but always for one day only. Dont you think its better to hold out for that offer, seeing how it comes out every 2 months or so??

  13. @bluecat – If you can catch such an offer, definitely go for it.

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