Full Review

Standard store card features. The Home Shopping Network Credit Card is like nearly every other store card in the sense that it is available to people with fair credit or better and does not charge an annual fee. In other words, those aren’t unique terms worthy of praise or extra attention.

Nevertheless, the lack of an annual fee makes the HSN Card about $19.76 per year cheaper than the average credit card overall, according to WalletHub’s latest Credit Card Landscape Report. And its fair-credit requirement allows the card to be of some benefit, at least as far as cost-effective credit building is concerned. After all, there’s not much in this offer to entice people with good or excellent credit.

If you don’t know where you stand at the moment, you can check your latest credit score for free on WalletHub.

No ongoing rewards. Sure, you’ll get $10 off a single-item purchase the day you apply for the HSN Credit Card. But the fact that you won’t earn points or cash back on every purchase certainly is not standard for a store card. The best retailer-affiliated credit cards offer 5% back on all purchases, after all. And that’s in addition to a first-purchase discount of at least 10%.

As a result, the HSN Card definitely isn’t the right choice for shoppers who plan to pay for their purchases in full by the monthly due date.

Dangerous financing. Don’t mess around with the HSN Credit Card’s 0% intro APR if you have good or excellent credit. For one thing, it only lasts for up to 12 months. People with good credit can get 0% for 15 months from other offers, while those with excellent credit have options offering 0% for the first 21 months. And those superior 0% cards don’t use a dangerous feature called deferred interest, which the HSN Card unfortunately does.

Deferred interest allows a card’s regular APR to retroactively apply to your original purchase amount, as if the 0% offer never existed. And that can happen if you’re late with a monthly bill payment or you don’t repay your full balance by the end of the intro period. And while general-purpose 0% cards don’t use deferred interest, those affiliated with specific retailers typically do.

That said, things aren’t as clear cut for people with fair credit because no general-purpose 0% cards are currently available to them. If you’re in that position, the HSN Credit Card’s 0% offer could help you save money. But you have to be extremely careful to pay on time and on schedule. We recommend using a credit card calculator if you decide to take this route.

Better alternatives available. If you can manage to pay for your HSN purchases in full each month that you make one, you’ll be able to save a lot more money by using one of our editors’ best rewards credit cards instead of the HSN Credit Card.