Speeding through checkout with Walmart discounted gift cards

We've been buying discounted gift cards from Cardpool and here's how we're making checkout a bit faster …

I'm a regular customer of discounted gift card sites. We do our best to buy and use them safely, and it takes a decent chunk out of our Walmart trips. (Nothing to retire on, but a decent chunk nonetheless.)

Cardpool sells what it calls “printable electronic gift cards” for Walmart and a number of other businesses. These are good deals for a number of reasons:

They are sent by email, often instantly. I've bought printable electronic gift cards before I go to Walmart. The time between going to the site and having a printout I can take is about four minutes.
There's no risk of having them stolen from the mailbox. “Nuff said.
They can be used both online and at physical stores. This is a lot of flexibility.
If I know about how much I'm going to spend, I can get really close to that amount with multiple cards.

How to overcome a slight hiccup at checkout

First off, I'll say that I've been very pleased with how Cardpool has handled our orders. No issues whatsoever, and the cards (both physical and electronic) arrive quickly. I'll certainly continue.

The last few times we've used their printable electronic gift cards at our local Walmart, though, it seems to have stumped the cashier, and maybe the front manager. At first, it seemed that scanning the cards over the glass window didn't work as well as using the hand scanner. That would have been easy enough, but it was more than that.

These are the instructions that are given for the cashier on the printable electronic gift card:

Total the order
Select “Shopping Card”
Scan the barcode on this page

What has ended up happening a number of times is that the cashier follows these instructions — which appear reasonable, right? — and quickly finds himself or herself in the process of trying to sell us a gift card, which is not what any of us want (including the people standing behind us waiting).

The case-cracker!!!

Finally tonight, my wife went over to customer service to figure out where the problem with this process was. (The line of customers was getting bigger, so she just paid with our credit card tonight.) They ended up calling a few people to figure it out, but eventually they found that there was a tacit step:

Total order
Select “Credit”
Select “Shopping Card”
Scan the barcode on this page

It's the “select ‘credit'” part that indicates a payment is coming. And, apparently, the system treats a gift card like a credit card at some level.

Perhaps sometime after these instructions were written, Walmart had upgraded its checkout software and changed the process the cashier sees. The instructions on the sheet are now out of sync, and there's some confusion.

It could be also that this doesn't happen everywhere, and the instructions work just fine at other Walmarts.

But if you use these kinds of discounted gift cards, and if it's a regular challenge at checkout, maybe this will fix things: Tell the cashier to select “credit” first.