What Happens When Competing Second-Hand Gift Card Exchanges are Owned by the Same Company?

Blackhawk Network, parent company of Giftcardmall and a publicly traded corporation, bought out Giftcards.com.

Press Release

As Milestomemories points out, this means that the two online $500 gift card sources, Giftcardmall and Giftcards.com, are now owned by the same corporation.

Curiously, both Blackhawk and Giftcards.com own a second-hand gift card exchange. Blackhawk owns Cardpool and Giftcards.com seems to be one company, at many levels, with Saveya. Giftcards.com stopped buying second-hand gift cards – they now redirect you to complete the sale on Saveya – but they still sell discounted gift cards, and it’s pretty clear that they pool inventory with Saveya.

Was Saveya included in the sale? What happens when competing second-hand gift card exchanges are owned by the same company?

If Saveya is included, it’s possible that they’ll cooperate on the back-end, or even share merchandise with each other, some time off in the future.

The only practical application that comes to mind is not to buy from one with the intention of selling to another (you shouldn’t be doing this anyway in most cases). Cardpool will not buy from you a gift card that was sold on Cardpool, as Brett from Cardpool told us about buying from Giftcardoutlet on eBay and reselling to Cardpool.

It’s also possible that starting the Saveya company was all in preparation for the sale of Giftcards.com to Blackhawk as they wanted to buy out the regular gift cards and not the discounted ones; perhaps Saveya is a separate entity and not included in the sale.

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Russ
Russ (@guest_215471)
January 8, 2016 11:50

Unfortunately SaveYa LLC is a Delaware LLC and the owner is not shown on the DE corporations website.

Jason Wolfe is pretty smart, so there’s a good change SaveYa is separate and all the separation efforts we’ve seen over the past year were due to the fact that Omnicard was for sale.