Be the First to Know About Gift Card Sales on eBay

We often write about sales taking place on eBay which allow us to purchase gift cards at a discount. It’s useful to know about these sales ahead of time. For example, you may want to purchase eBay gift cards at a discount so that you’ll be able to maximize the value of the sale by saving twice – once on the eBay gift card used for the purchase and once from the sale itself.

Is there a way to know that a gift card sale is coming up?

There often is a way to know, although it’s not that easy to find out about. Often times, people find these weird-looking listings on eBay which mention a sale on gift cards, with an added caveat: “This listing is restricted to pre-approved buyers only. Email the seller to be placed on that pre-approved list.”

Many have tried contacting the seller to ask to get onto this elusive list, and the response they always get is that the sale will soon be up for all; right not it’s unavailable for the public. The “preapproved buyers” is just a system rhetoric; there aren’t any actual preapproved buyers. The sales usually come within a week of when that ‘preapproved’ listing shows up, so if you see that listing you know that the sale will be public soon enough.

So there you have it: it’s oh, so easily know about a future eBay sale by finding these ‘preapproved’ listings. Or is it really easy? How in the world would you ever bump  into a listing like that?

There is probably a way for the technologically advanced, if they would deem it worthy of their effort to find this kind of stuff. Otherwise, you can read about these on Slickdeals and Fatwallet forums. Somehow the members of those forums will often pick up on these and post them. This can give us a heads up about future gift card sales on eBay.

I recently sent out a tweet giving a heads up about a bunch of soon-to-come gift card sales and I thought it was worthwhile to clarify once where these are coming from. We probably won’t post these deals on the site until they go live on eBay, but those interested can now have a better idea of where people get info about future sales on eBay.

(Here are a few of the links to the current upcoming sales: here, here, here, here.)

Personally, the main thing I do when I see such things is to make sure I have enough eBay gift cards to cover the purchases. If I don’t, I’ll pick up some more at a discount so as to maximize the sale when it comes.

Remember though that it’s not necessarily smart to jump on these eBay sales and purchase right away. Since eBay often releases bonus eBay Bucks offers, it may be worth waiting it out and racking up some bonus Bucks along with the purchase. We wrote more about this topic in the post: Ebay Bucks, Gift Card Deals, & Timing Your eBay Purchases.