Of Gift Card Churning & eBay Gift Card Sales

Discounted Gift Card on eBay

There’s recently been lots of gift card sales on eBay. Part of this has to do with the fact that there are now four official gift card sellers on eBay: GiftCardMall, Paypal Digital Gifts, Cardency and SVMGiftCards. Until very recently, there was just GiftCardMall. Then Paypal Digital Gifts came around sometime in the past year or two, and more recently Cardency and SVMGiftCards came onto the scene.

I’m loving the fact that there’s more gift card sellers since that creates more discounted gift card opportunities between the various sellers. That’s probably why we’ve been seeing so many sales recently. Particularly the addition of Paypal Digital Gifts has been great, and hopefully the other two new sellers will get bigger and have more to offer as well.

The discounted gift cards on eBay are so common that I’m now confident enough to stockpile hundreds of dollars worth of eBay gift cards which were purchased at a discount, since I’m sure that within a month I’ll be able to use them up on gift card purchases which can be resold at a break-even or at a profit. After stacking the resale value, portal cashback, eBay Bucks and credit card points, eBay has become a potential churn-machine.

My friend ChasingThePoints recently discovered a way to be able to detect which gift cards can currently be purchased at a discount on eBay using some technical know-how which is beyond me (at least, beyond the 10 minutes that I spent trying to implement it). I’m unsure if I’m a technical ignoramus, meaning that the average person is able to follow his method, or I’m average and only techies can figure it out. In any case, if you can implement it go for it, but for now I’m still sticking with Slickdeals to let me know about the latest discounted gift card opportunities.

The e-Gift Card Conundrum

One issue that comes up when gift card churning is that lots of times the gift card deal is for an e-gift card which is much harder to resell than physical gift cards. Usually, you can sell e-gift cards to CardPool or CardCash for 5% less than the regular payout, but this sometimes negates the value of the churn.

I recently tried becoming a bulk seller with GiftCardZen since they take electronic gift cards from bulk sellers and they offer the same payout as for physical gift cards, but they denied me since I don’t do enough volume for them. There are still other options, such as Raise and GiftCards.com, but each has its own set of difficulties.

Potential Solution

My current workaround which I use occasionally is to try to use the e-gift card to buy a physical gift card from the retailer. For example, if I got a discounted $25 Walmart e-gift card on Gyft, I’ll go to walmart.com and buy a $25 physical Walmart gift card and pay for it with the $25 Walmart e-gift card. I can then sell the physical gift card for full resale value.

Here’s a list of the few merchants that allow this that I’m aware of:

  • Walmart As mentioned they allow this and are very easy to deal with.
  • Target They recently started allowing this. It’s slightly more complicated, however, since they actually charge a shipping fee for physical gift cards. The workaround here is to have a REDcard saved in your target.com account and then it gets shipped free. For example, you can buy a $25 physical gift card and pay for it fully with a $25 e-gift card.
  • Starbucks I believe it’s possible to transfer gift card balances, so you’d be able to transfer the balance of an e-gift card onto a physical gift card. If you don’t have one, you can buy a $5 physical gift card at Starbucks.
  • Macy’s Reportedly the system allows it, but one person says that their order got cancelled when they tried to do it. I don’t yet have personal experience with Macy’s.
  • Staples Used to allow this (at least the system did) but they’re now hard-coded not to allow it.
  • Kmart I saw on FrequentMiler that their system doesn’t allow it. Probably Sears would be the same.

If anyone has experience with any merchants who allow buying a gift card with a gift card, please comment below to help out fellow gift card churners.

Note that we’re not looking for schemes of upgrading gift cards by purchasing a higher-valued card. FrequentMiler’s Laboratory is a great resource for that purpose; be sure to head over there with your experiences so as to keep it up to date. We’re looking particularly for revenue-neutral gift card swaps, where you can use a merchant’s e-gift card to buy a physical version or  you can combine multiple gift cards onto one card.

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gary
gary (@guest_140256)
June 30, 2015 10:25

Question about your recent newsletter of 6/30/15 you mention

“It may be possible to take this a step further and purchase $500 Visa electronic gift cards from giftcards.com with no fee at all using the above method. You may then be able to use these e-gift cards for things like paying off your Citi bill”

Can you explain how someone that gets the card can pay their citi bill?

Hanny
Hanny (@guest_106482)
April 19, 2015 20:13

I’m new with gift card churn. On the article you mentioned that with $25 walmart physical gift card you would be able to sell at full value. Who would buy a gift card at full face value from third party re-sellers?

Tom C
Tom C (@guest_98167)
April 2, 2015 23:05

Sears’ official policy is that you can’t buy a gift card with a gift card. However, it is not hard coded and enforcement varies from store to store and cashier to cashier.

You can buy many types of gift cards at Sears with a physical or egift card.

Gunnie
Gunnie (@guest_97928)
April 2, 2015 11:14

I was able to combine 16 Macy’s e-gift cards from Raise that were below $20 into four Macy’s e-gift card orders. I would enter up to five of my below $20 Macy’s e-gift cards and then charge my credit card for either five or ten cents to have the orders go through. I was then able to sell these newly created Macy’s e-gift cards which were $20+ to giftcards.com. Certainly not the most efficient way to sell an e-gift card.

Stvr
Stvr (@guest_97907)
April 2, 2015 10:25

how about giftcards.com banning me after one sale? I don’t think they like ebay sale chasers

KP
KP (@guest_98082)
April 2, 2015 18:34

yeah same question, what do you mean they banned you!!! Regarding, “they don’t think they like ebay sale chasers”, I doubt that’s true. When I was interviewed by their specialist to review my bulk seller application, I told her that I buy discount gift cards whenever I can from retailers or their authorized sellers and I plan to sell them to you. She said that sounds good and approved me. Although their $3500 limit is not too much even for bulk sell.

I think they would love ebay sale chasers, they bring genuine, non-fraudulent gift cards for their business.

stvr
stvr (@guest_98855)
April 4, 2015 04:38

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

I bought 4 $25 Gap gift cards at Safeway. My only other sale in the last year has been $200 of Sears (a couple weeks ago).

When I tried to sell the Gap, it kept erroring out. I called giftcards.com to ask why, and they wrote back:

“Thanks for reaching out to us. Our Compliance team has reviewed your request to remove the block from your account and determined that the block will not be removed. We are not able to accept orders from you going forward. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Thanks.
Thanks for your continued support!!”

I asked them if this was a joke. Surely they couldn’t be banning a low-volume, very average seller. They wrote back:

“Hello stvr, The emailed information unfortunately is not a joke. We take the security of our internet shopping to the highest degree of reviewing information. If you have received the previous email informing the information will not be unblocked it will not be removed. We appreciate your interest in our GiftCards.com website and wish you the best in finding an alternative website for your gift carding needs. Thank you again for finding an interest in our website GiftCards.com!
Thanks for your continued support!! “

lcqq
lcqq (@guest_97900)
April 2, 2015 10:08

u may buy something with egift card. then go to store and make a return. they will give you a physical gift card.