Selling Underutilized Gift Cards

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Have you ever received a gift card that you did not want to use or could not use? Perhaps you wished to receive cash instead. Well you can by converting your gcs (gift cards) via a reseller portal.

I have a couple of Macy’s gift cards that could be better used by other folks and we would rather spend on travel than on clothes, so it was a win-win situation.

My workflow is as follows:

  1. Assemble gcs
  2. Perform due diligence on resale options (list it or immediately sell it to a reseller)
  3. Determine best portal for resale
  4. Determine market prices
  5. Sell it

I have 4 Macy’s gcs of various denominations and my first place to research is doctorofcredit.com. They have great reviews and user feedback on a variety of finance-hacking deals and websites, including gift card resale portals.

The two general options are to list your gift card for sale and wait for someone to buy it (like eBay) or selling your gift card instantly to a reseller. Using the former option you must wait and compete among other sellers, but get about 10% higher value than the latter.

Giftcard Granny provides a good breakdown of the options and market price for your gc.

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My priority is ease of resale (e-code, instant payment) so I wanted to go with Giftcard Zen, but they are not currently accepting Macy’s gcs, likely due to oversupply.

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So I checked out Cardpool and found the resale value to be around 75% of face value. This isn’t a good deal, but this actually changes based on supply/demand over time.

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Since I’m not in a hurry to sell the gcs. I decided to wait a week and see how the prices fluctuate. I suspect that the holiday season left the market in a gc glut, so I need to wait a while for the inventory to sell-through.

Hopefully in my next post, the market would be more favorable to the seller. What has been your experience reselling gift cards?

1 thought on “Selling Underutilized Gift Cards

  1. Pingback: Update on selling unwanted gift cards – Travel With Ivan

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