Something I’ve been noticing more and more over the past year in the gift card selling arena is the risk of delaying your purchases.
Many, many recent Amex Offers have been okay deals for reselling purposes (if you have the right relationships), and were excellent opportunities when adding the portal into the mix.
Yet lots of them died in middle of the Amex offer period, usually due to a change in the portal tracking. [There’s also the fact that the market gets flooded as more people do this, but that’s a different story…]
As more people get into gift card reselling – partially due to MS getting harder and partially do to GC selling going more mainstream – merchants see the influx of gift card orders and somehow track down the portal angle as well.
In some cases they might figure out the portal aspect from blogs; more often, they likely see inflows and outflows numbers and close the portal payout on gift cards.
The Sears Deal
A case in point is the current Sears Amex Offer which offers $10 off $50 at Sears, including Sears e-gift and gift card reload purchases. We wrote about maximizing the deal and many noted in the comments there that while e-gift purchases have not been working to track with the portal, reloads have have been tracking.
At some point between December 8 and 13 the portal died, as reported by readers, friends, and the FM Lab.
Now, that’s not a guarantee that all portals died, but it’s likely that Sears changed something on their end to track reloads at $0 cashback, and this will affect most/all portals.
In the original post, we mentioned the idea of holding off on doing the reloads since last year Sears released a gift card deal in the beginning of December where we got a $10 bonus card for each $50 gift card purchases or reload.
You snooze you lose!
That bonus gift card deal never materialized (and likely won’t materialize), and now the portal is dead. I don’t have think it was a bad idea to wait – it’s quite surprising to me how fast they changed this – but it brings home the message of the ever-changing landscape in the gift card buying/reselling world.
You can still make a few percent on this Sears Amex Offer – the best rate showing on GCW is 84% right now – but obviously the profit margins are less than half due to the loss of the portal and might not be worth it.
As an aside, the Sears offer is still available for signup by tweeting #amexsears or finding the offer in your login.
