Over the past few months, many people were having problems with depleted eBay gift cards which shouldn’t have been depleted.
Many people on Slickdeals are now seeing that the balances have been put back onto the gift cards. Apparently, as eBay rectified the problem, they issued an automatic refund for those who were affected.
It’s not a silver bullet for every eBay gift card problem, but worth checking to see if your balances are back
eBay Gift Card Balance Checker
A lot of the problems had to do with promo codes which weren’t properly applied. Instead the funds were pulled from the gift cards. (There may have been other issues that got fixed now too.) The troubles probably had to do with the revamp that eBay made in their gift cards systems.
Also check out the 29 Things to Know about eBay and Paypal for more useful info.
Check Old Gift Card Balances
We’ve mentioned this before, but we’ll mention it again since it benefits so many people:
There’s a Paypal link which you can use to check all eBay gift card balances up until March 2016. One one page you’ll be able to see if there’s any balance left on any partially used eBay gift card from the beginning of time until March 2016.
Here’s the magical Paypal link (requires login)
There’s almost not a person I know who checked the link and didn’t find at least some small eBay balance there that they didn’t know about, so if you never checked it since March, it’s worth doing so.
View Comments (14)
Seems like enough of us bugged Ebay about this problem. My BBB case got solved a few days earlier than this post. I've been prodding Ebay for a long 3-4 months to get a stupid refund. Told them they need to do their GCs like Amazon, hopefully they will get there.
This new balance checker also seems like a really really bad idea. No captcha and no pin. Seems really vulnerable to brute force attack
Nice found 70 bucks. I remember the balance suddenly disappearing; thought maybe I had used it and not realized.
Many of my card numbers are oddly saying "Oops, we can't find a gift card with that number. Please check your 13-digit code and try again." despite knowing they are valid numbers
Yeah, I've noticed that too.
So is there no easy way to check all your post-March ebay gift card balances?
This is an absurdly annoying problem, especially if you manage more than one ebay account. I make purchases for both myself and my wife, and ebay "assigns" the remaining balances to that specific account (is this even legal for them to do?). Sometimes I have to use my paypal account to make purchases in my wife's ebay account because paypal decides it doesn't like my wife using her own paypal account. I find myself typing and retyping my ebay gift card numbers into both our accounts to make sure I've actually drained the balances. It's crazy.
Hi Chuck,
Thanks so much for the link. Recovered over $46.
Chuck,
I have a lot showing, all depleted though. I have to go back through my records soon and file cases or whatever since I'm pretty sure I have a number of them that were drained incorrectly. In all cases used once to buy gift cards of one kind or another, should have only partially drained the eBay GC, but emptied it instead. No promo codes used on any of these.
Yeah, if your funds weren't refunded now, you'll have to file a claim.
Are the problems with gc bought directly/issued from ebay.com? how about ebay gc bought at stores? or is it across everything?
I don't know exactly what the pattern is, but many people have had issues in the past few months of depleted cards. I think a lot of them had to do with using promo codes which eBay didn't process properly.
Lol same here - 0/69
But I did learn something new -wasn't aware I could even check that
Over 70 of them and all depleted. But thanks for posting.
Sorry to be the combo breaker but all my gcs show as depleted.
The paypal link is useful for checking all the old gcs in one place.