Back in late December CardCash opened a new site, the premise was simple: exchange unwanted gift cards for Walmart gift cards. After doing some research I found that consumers were usually better off selling their unwanted gift cards to one of the other exchanges and then buying discounted Walmart gift cards with the proceeds.
The new venture got a lot of press given that it was holiday season and that it was a pretty major partner in Walmart. Unfortunately the site didn’t get off to a good start, the majority of comments on my original post are complaints that the website sucks and that people hadn’t received their Walmart gift cards as promised.
It looks things have gone from bad to worse and the new website has now been shut down.
I can think of two possible reasons as to why the site was shut down:
- Walmart were receiving too much negative press. When CardCash approached Walmart, I imagine they said something along the lines of “We want to purchase a lot of Walmart gift cards from you in bulk for a discounted price. In exchange we get to use your brand to help advertise the site”. If the service customers were receiving was really as bad as some are saying, it’s easy to see why Walmart would have wanted to kill that relationship. This is especially true if their own customer service agents were having to deal with CardCash complaints.
- It was only intended to be open for the post holiday rush. Gift card resellers do a lot of their purchasing of stock straight after big gift giving holidays like Christmas. Naturally people get a lot of gift cards they don’t want or can’t use. It’s possible that CardCash wanted to cash in on this by offering this new option, but that it didn’t make sense to keep it open long term (possibly due to any deal they signed with Walmart requiring monthly minimums or similar).
Personally I think option one is a lot more likely, but at the end of the day it’s purely speculation. It’ll be interesting to see if the service comes back next holiday period or they sign up another partner instead in the short term.
