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I’m going to skip the requisite apology for seldom posting, and am just going to jump right in.

Over at the new gig, I came up with an idea for a giveaway. The last day of July is Systems Administrators Appreciation Day, and since a good portion of our eventual target market consists of sysadmins, we came up with a giveaway to coincide with the holiday. The idea: the first 100 sysadmins tht sign up on our site would receive a free $10 iTunes gift card on 7/31 to celebrate.

When I first got the okay to do the contest, I immediately went to the apple site and saw this:

Purchase and Redeem an iTunes Gift Card

iTunes Gift Cards are plastic cards (the size of a credit card) that work just like gift certificates in that they can be redeemed for iTunes Store purchases. You can buy an iTunes Gift Card from the iTunes Store, or you will find them in plenty of retail stores across the United States in denominations of $10, $15, $25, $30, and $50 (USD).

and

Purchase an iTunes Gift Certificate

1. In iTunes, click iTunes Store in the Source list to go to the iTunes Store homepage (if you’re not there already).
2. Click Buy iTunes Gifts under QUICK LINKS in the right column.
3. Select your delivery method by clicking the “Buy now” button in the appropriate section: Email Gift Certificates or Printable Gift Certificates.
4. In the resulting screen, enter details such as your recipient’s name, your name, a personal message, and the amount you wish to give (choose a dollar amount—from $10 USD to $50 USD—from the Amount pop-up menu). Depending on which delivery method you have chosen, you may also need to enter your recipient’s email address or mailing address. Then click Continue.

Both are valid options, but I thought I’d contact apple to find out if there was an easier way. I wanted to buy 120 of the $10 iTunes cards, and was looking for the best way to send them out. In an ideal world, I’d give Apple our credit card #, and they’d give me a spreadsheet with 120 valid $10 codes.

First I started a chat on the apple site. I explained what I was doing, and was given the following link. I clicked the link, which brings you to the online Apple store page listing iTunes gift cards. Only problem: they start at $15.

The conversation went like this:

Apple Rep: Just go here (link) and you can buy as many gift cards as you need.

Me: I don’t see any $10 cards there….only $15 and up.

Apple Rep: Yes, you have to buy $15 cards. That’s the minimum.

Me: But I need 120 $10 cards.

Apple Rep: You can’t do that there. You’ll have to buy them from within the iTunes store.

Me: So I have to make individual purchases 120 times?

Apple Rep: Yes.

Wonderful, I thought. But it was a solution, right? Sure, cutting and pasting each email address into iTunes is kind of a pain, but hey, no problem.

Wrong.

After sending out 5 codes, our credit card was declined. We called the bank, and they let us know that they hadn’t done anything to our account, and it must be something on Apple’s end. Back to the help chat.

Apple Rep: Hi, can I help you?

Me: Sure. I’m trying to buy 120 $10 iTunes gift cards and was told the only way I can do that is to buy them individually through iTunes. But after buying only 5 of them, our credit card was declined by you. Why is that?

Apple Rep: To buy that many, you’ll have to go to an Apple store and buy the cards. The iTunes store does not support bulk purchases.

Me: So let me get this straight. I want to buy 120 iTunes codes so I can send them out via email. You’re telling me that I have to go to the Apple store, buy the actual cards, scratch each of them off, read the codes, transcribe them into a spreadsheet and then send them out that way?

Apple Rep: Yes.

Me: Wow. Okay, thank you.

We call the nearest Apple store, only to find out that they don’t carry $10 cards.

I call Best Buy and find that they have 3-packs of $10 cards, and they had a LOT of them. Phew. We got them, and here’s what it looked like:

So, we avoided disaster and we were able to send out all the codes. But I just wonder: why does Apple make it so hard? I understand the idea of fraud prevention, but this is a little ridiculous.

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