No More 4-Hour Wait on eBay Gift Cards

Ebay gift cards no longer requires a 4-hour wait from purchase time until use, apparently. Previously, they often required a 4-hour wait from the time of purchase until it could be used.

The big news earlier this week was that eBay no longer limits us to $5k in gift cards per rolling 6-months. A reader pointed out that he didn’t have to wait 4-hours to use an eBay gift card. I checked out the terms again, and it’s clear that they changed this as well. Previous versions read (found here):

Invalid or unidentifiable Gift Card numbers will not be redeemed. Allow up to four (4) hours from time of purchase for PayPal’s systems to recognize and accept the Gift Card.

The current version says:

Invalid or unidentifiable Gift Card numbers will not be redeemed.

Sounds like, going forward, we’ll be able to use eBay gift card immediately. We’ll add this change to the original post.

Find Hidden eBay Gift Cards

Unrelated PSA: There were a few conversations on Twitter recently about finding unused balances on eBay gift cards. This is due to the strange way eBay uses up gift cards (they don’t use them in the order you input them), which makes many people mix up the used and unused cards.

To check if you have any partially used eBay gift cards, check this link (login required). Most of us who checked found some cards we weren’t aware of. For me, it was two $5 balances I wasn’t aware of. Unclear if this link will work for new gift cards, since the recent change, but it certainly works for all previous cards and it’s worth checking out.

We wrote more about this, with some circles and arrows as well, in the post, eBay Gift Cards and their Limits. Check out this travelwithgrant post for even more options with circles and arrows, although some of those may have changed.