The Amazon purchases that earn nothing

The rewards program terms are explicit, and they are worth reading in full rather than paraphrased:

not earned on purchases from merchants using Amazon Pay, on purchases at international Amazon retail sites, or on purchases made directly with travel suppliers including airlines, hotels, car rentals and cruises (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-12).

Three carve-outs, and all three catch purchases that feel exactly like Amazon purchases. That is why this is the least-known and most-encountered thing in the terms.

This is the exclusion most likely to affect you and the least likely to be noticed.

Amazon Pay lets other retailers accept payment using your Amazon account credentials. You arrive at a small independent shop, click a button that says Amazon Pay, sign in with your Amazon login, and the order completes. Everything about the experience says Amazon.

For rewards purposes it is not an Amazon purchase. The merchant is the shop, not Amazon, and Chase excludes it from the bonus rate explicitly. The purchase earns 1% back (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11) like any other retail spending.

There is no way to tell from your statement afterwards, either — which means the symptom is simply a purchase that earned less than you expected, with no obvious cause. That lands it on the missing points page as a recurring mystery with a mundane answer.

Chase’s bonus category names specific merchants: Amazon.com, Audible.com, Whole Foods Market and Chase Travel, with an eligible Prime membership (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11). The international Amazon sites are not among them and are excluded by name.

The practical cases are travel and cross-border shopping. Order from Amazon.co.uk while you are in London and you earn the base rate. Buy something from Amazon.ca that is not available in the U.S. and the same applies.

Worth pairing with a fact from the other direction: no foreign transaction fees (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11). So an international Amazon order costs you nothing extra in fees and simply earns less. That is a mild disappointment rather than a penalty, and it is covered alongside the other travel behavior on the foreign transaction fees page.

Chase Travel is one of the four merchants in the 5% category. Chase then excludes purchases made directly with travel suppliers — airlines, hotels, car rental companies and cruise lines — from the bonus rate.

So the same $1,200 flight earns $60 through Chase Travel with an eligible Prime membership, and $12 booked on the airline’s own site. A five-fold difference that turns on which website you used.

Whether the Chase Travel route is actually better depends on price and flexibility as much as rewards, and we are not going to tell you to book somewhere just for points. But it is worth knowing the gap exists before you assume travel is a 5% category on this card. More on that, and on what the points are worth when redeemed for travel, on using Amazon points for travel.

The three above earn a reduced rate. This next group earns nothing, because Chase does not treat them as purchases in the first place:

balance transfers, cash advances and cash-like transactions including travelers checks, foreign currency, money orders, wire transfers and cryptocurrency do not count as purchases and earn no points (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-12).

Three practical notes. A cash advance is expensive as well as unrewarded — different rate, different terms, often no grace period. Foreign currency purchased as currency is cash-like, which is not the same as an ordinary purchase made abroad in a foreign currency. And cryptocurrency purchases are named explicitly, so a crypto buy on a credit card is a cash-like transaction rather than a rewarded purchase.

These also behave differently at authorization, which is one of the reasons a working card can be declined on a specific transaction — see why a Prime Visa gets declined.

A page of exclusions gives a gloomier impression than the terms deserve, so here is the inclusion that surprises people the other way. Chase’s eligible-purchase wording covers eligible purchases at Amazon.com including digital downloads and Amazon.com Gift Cards (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-12).

Digital downloads are in. Kindle books, digital music, app purchases — all eligible Amazon purchases at the bonus rate, which is covered on do Kindle books and digital purchases earn points. Amazon.com Gift Cards are named too, which has its own oddity, discussed on gift card balance vs rewards balance.

And two more inclusions worth knowing: purchases made by you or an authorized user of the card account earn points (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-12), and points are earned on purchases of products and services, minus returns or refunds (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-12) — the second of which is the reason returns reduce a balance, covered on returns, refunds and your points.