The Shell Business Credit Card Review

The Shell Small Business Card is a Shell-specific fuel card, and it can help you organize and manage your employee fleet to a tee. However, it won’t offer you rewards or a discount for your spending, so this won’t be the most lucrative card out there.

The Shell business credit card doesn’t offer any rewards for your spending. For context, almost every other business credit card will offer you some form of rewards—be it a discount, cash back, or rewards points—for every dollar you spend with them.

You won’t have to pay much to spend with the Shell business credit card, especially if you don’t carry a balance.

The Shell business credit card doesn’t come with monthly recurring fees or account setup fees.

Even better?

You also won’t have to pay for the additional cards that your employees will use. The Shell business credit card comes with free unlimited additional cards.

So, if you pay off your balance in full every month, it will be free to spend with this Shell business credit card.

• You have a large fleet for your business and want optimum control of employee spending.

• You will need a card to make purchases anywhere other than a Shell station.

Having combed through all of the logistics on the Shell business credit card, it’s time to take a step back to consider the repercussions of these logistics.

More specifically, what do these details on the Shell business credit card actually mean for your business credit card search?

Let’s first consider the most notable upsides of spending with the Shell business credit card:

The business-only liability option that the Shell business credit card offers to cardholders is one of the most unique upsides this card comes with.

In fact, the Shell business credit card is one of the very few business credit cards who offer flexible liability options.

Based on your time in business, your business’s annual revenue, and your business credit score, the Shell Citi card will offer business-only liability options to top-performing businesses.

You’ll need to have been in business at least a year and produce at least $1 million in annual revenue to access this option, but the fact that this option even exists is a huge upside to the Shell business credit card.

Additionally, the Shell business credit card offers some of the most detailed employee spending controls of any business credit card on the market.

While most business credit cards will merely allow you to set a limit on how much any given employee card can purchase, the Shell business credit card can:

• Predetermine purchase types
• Set individual limits for each employee card
• Limit which stations each employee card can make purchases at

If you’ve got a large fleet of employees that need to buy fuel on the company’s dime, keeping track of employee spending can me nightmarish. However, gaining access to the intricate controls that the Shell business credit card allows for will help you to easily systematize and oversee all spending.

While some features that the Shell business credit card boasts are good news for most business owners, others will be nearly universal drawbacks.

So, what are the most notable disadvantages to the Shell business credit card that every business owner needs to be aware of?

All of the Shell business credit card’s perks aside, it certainly comes with its fair share of imperfections.

First and most glaringly, the Shell business credit card is a gas business credit card that only works at Shell stations. This fact means that in almost no situation can a business rely solely on the Shell business credit card as its one and only business credit card. And even if a business can do so, it really shouldn’t.

Because this business card only works at Shell, any benefits it comes with will only apply to your Shell spending. And even if you and your employees do a majority of your business spending on gas, what about that other small percentage?

Overwall, the Shell business credit card works best as a supplement rather than a primary business credit card.

Even more, the rewards that you’ll access through the Shell business credit card are actually pretty modest.

The typical redeeming quality that brand-specific business cards tend to boast is high rewards rates. If you’re only able to do you spending at one store with a card, you better be earning a lot for that spending.

And the only rewards that the Shell business credit card offers—the welcome bonus of $0.10 off per gallon during your first six months—simply doesn’t cut it.

If you want to earn more for you business spending—and earn for more of your business spending—then you should move your business credit card search beyond the Shell business credit card.