A couple weeks ago we wrote The Complete Guide to Selling your Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash. Since then, I’ve seen a couple other interesting options.
Coinstar Kiosk
The Coinstar kiosks are those ubiquitous machines in many stores (Walmart, grocery stores, etc.) which allow you to throw all your spare change in, and they give you cash or a gift card for it.
It has come to my attention, that Coinstar also operates kiosks that purchase gift cards. These machines are separate from the change machines; in my local Stop & Shop they have one machine for the change and a second machine (in a different location in the store) for selling gift cards.
Here’s the process:
- Scan or swipe the gift card. (They have both a scanner and a swiper as part of the kiosk.) This may work for e-gift cards which come with a bar-code.
- They’ll give you an offer of how much they’ll pay for it.
- They’ll ask you for your driver’s license and credit card (to prevent fraud).
- They’ll give you a voucher which can be redeemed at the Customer Service of the store.
A few points:
- Only a small number of stores have the gift card kiosk. Not all stores with the coin kiosk will have the gift card kiosk. Locator
- These machines can only be found in certain states. A Coinstar rep explained to me that due to legal issues they haven’t been able to get into all states. He said that at least 25-30 states have them.
- The rep told me that these machines have been around for 2-3 years.
- Here’s the list of accepted gift cards.
Why not to use it
It all sounds nice and rosy until you get to the payout factor. A Coinstar rep told me that the payout is between 55-85%, but he couldn’t give me exact numbers. I tried out a $50 Target gift card, and they offered $37, or 74%, which is a very bad offer.
If Target gift cards are 74%, I’m not sure what could possibly be 85%. Target gift cards are from the most valuable gift cards out there, so I’m a little skeptical about the 85%.
I haven’t tried out any other gift cards, but my guess is that the payout will never be too good. It could still be useful for someone who just has a low-dollar gift card and wants to liquidate it easily, without sweating the payout too much, but I doubt it’s useful for anything beyond that.
Gift Card Rescue
I also came across another gift card reseller – GiftCardRescue.com -which we didn’t mention in our previous post. There are probably a whole lot of other resellers, our post was based on the sellers found on GiftCardGranny. The reason I found this one interesting is because judging from their Alexa rating, they seem to be a nice size company, slightly smaller than GiftCardZen. They are also more well-known due to the fact that they were featured on SharkTank back in 2010.
The biggest immediate downside is that they’re not on GiftCardGranny, which means we’ll have to head over to their site to find out how much they payout on any given gift card. I’m not sure if being on GiftCardGranny is some kind of signal of trust or if these companies pay GiftCardGranny to be featured.
Based on a few pricings that I made, it appears that they sometimes offer payout rates comparable to other resellers, but I never found them higher. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like anything too exciting.
The one interesting thing I’ve seen so far is that they offer to buy gift cards which have expiration dates, so long as it doesn’t expire within six months. No other reseller will buy gift cards with an expiration date – only eBay is good for that. Not only do they buy gift cards with expiration dates, they actually payout the same for those as for ordinary gift cards.
I’ve never had a gift card with an expiration date, but this may be a great option for that.
