Update 12/28/22: Reposting for 2022 holiday season; originally posted in 2019
If you got a gift card for the holidays which you don’t need or can’t use, there are various places which will pay you cash or similar to buy those gift cards from you. The two basic options are either selling the card to Cardcash.com or selling it yourself on Raise.com.
More valuable gift cards like Walmart or Target might net you like 85-90% of the face value of the card, while gift cards to restaurants and the like will net you more like 60-80% of the value. If you can’t make use of the gift card, it’s easy money. With Cardcash, you’ll get an instant offer while with Raise.com you’ll name your own price and wait for it to sell.
Many years ago, we wrote The Complete Guide to Selling your Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash comparing various options, many of which are no longer available. It’s interesting to see the market evolve.
Cardcash also has various sub-domains where can get exchange for a different gift card instead of getting cash payment, and spruce up your returns a bit (Amazon, eBay, Hotels.com, CVS). You can also exchange gift cards for United miles. See List of Options to Exchange an Unwanted Gift Card for Another.
Another option might be to try donating the gift card to charity. You might even be able to get a tax write-off based on the full amount of the gift card. (Increasingly, people have been taking the standard deduction and this won’t matter.)
You can also try asking around on Facebook or wherever and seeing if any of your friends frequent that store/restaurant and ask them to buy the gift card from you.
Old time readers will know that we used to post about gift card reselling deals where it was possible to buy gift cards on various gift card deals with the sole intention of reselling them for a profit or as a way of racking up credit card spend. Over time, the volume of gift card sellers (along with more merchant awareness – I’m looking at you, eBay) made it more and more difficult to profit on these.
Many people still buy and sell gift cards profitably, but you’ll need to have great rates for it to make sense, and you’ll usually need some insider connections to scale up and find the best deals which can turn a profit. There are lots of private ‘clubs’ dedicated to buying and selling gift cards, but not much in the public sphere. It’s also more commonly profitable for those willing to go into stores, rack up fuel points, etc, rather than just do an easy online flip, as it used to be back in the day.
Regardless, if you have a gift card which is gathering dust, you can use these options to pull out some value from the unused cards.
Related:
- The Complete Guide to Selling your Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash
- Gift Card Reselling in 2018 and Beyond
- Another Gift Card Reseller Goes Under Water
- Cardpool Gift Card Exchange Changes Ownership; Share your Recent Experiences
- List of Options to Exchange an Unwanted Gift Card for Another
Does anyone know where I can sell an American Airlines gift card? Cardcash is no longer buying. Someone below had mentioned Raise, but they’re also not listed there.
did you find anywhere?
Bill
Still no :(.
I have the same problem. Sold them to CardCash and then Raise for years, both now not selling. I don’t have any use for mine. Surely somebody here knows where we can sell them?
have same question as well….were you able to find a place to sell or exchange?
No. Looks like they were recently sold on raise so maybe they’ll do that again soon. If not I guess AA allows 8 certs per ticket so maybe keep them.
Sadly, you cannot use them to pay taxes on FF tickets. I recently booked tickets on BA through the AA site and had to pay over $500 in taxes (Heathrow charges ridiculous security fees) and could not use my AA gift card. And BofA did not count it as an incidental expense, and they typically do for FF ticket taxes. So it was a lose-lose situation for me.
I think hotelsdotcom takes them as well.
They do, in exchange for their own at this site. https://hotels.cardcash.com/. Sadly, not accepting American Airlines cards.
I’ve reached my limit with Raise so I have been using card cash a lot lately. I’ve used them 5 times since July 18th this year. My only hiccup I had with them was when there was only option to mail in gift card. When you mail a gift card it goes to a P.O Box and they decide when they feel like picking it up. I notified them several days later saying the tracking said it was ready for pickup, and they quickly paid out the next day. I felt like I had to nudge them to do so. Otherwise, selling using e-gift option online and getting payment usually takes from a few hours to a day or two at most.
Anyone know if The Plastic Merchant is still around?
jk jk
CardCash said one of my cards was not good so they deducted it from my payout, this was some years ago. That card was lumped in with others I bought directly from American Airlines and a batch and the only person to access them was me before they were listed. CardCash would not do any followup or listen to my position. I haven’t used them since and now use Raise.
You might be mindful of how much you’re selling as the new rules are $600 of sales to trigger a 1099. If you don’t mind dealing with those or not. That will be back in effect for 2023 unless congress acts, which I doubt they will.
I bought a bunch of gift cards using an Amex offer or a Chase offer. When I sold them to Cardcash, they rejected a couple of them. It turned that the merchant hadn’t activated them. I called the merchant, got it straightened out, and sold them to Cardcash with no more problems.
I want to get rid of some physical airbnb gcs , but none of these sites seem to take them. does anyone know an option which works for airbnb physical cards?
How much discount are you offering? I may be willing to take them off of your hands for the right discount
I am interested also.
For a way that will net you more money for each gift card (it’ll be slow unless it’s popular ones), you can also visit /r/giftcardexchange on reddit. Keep in mind that it is p2p so just be careful of getting scammed but with common sense, you should be fine.
I don’t understand why anyone uses this subreddit. I looked through about 30 listings and pretty much all were selling for 80c on the dollar, which is the same price or worse than one can get on a legitimate sell site like giftcards.com, with much less chance of being scammed.
I can’t speak to selling but I’ve had good experiences buying gift cards from Cardcash.
Now a problem with CardCash.com. Initially it worked, selling to them at their fixed rate and them ACHing to my bank account. But then when I tried again I got “Order has been declined.” apparently (false-alarmingly) tripping some fraud algorithm. I checked the card balances and they were fine. When I try again, then when I enter the gift card numbers it says “This card is ineligible for sale at this time.” as if the specific cards have been somehow flagged. So what now? Can they be sold later or is the flag permanent?
I already feel like the sucker selling them a card at 13% discount that they turn around and sell at at 1% discount. That would be okay if it would be a quick, convenient, reliable method to cash out unwanted giftcards (albeit still with the risk of being scammed by buyers). But now I see that you can’t actually even count on being able to sell your unwanted gift cards through these channels at all. So maybe I just have to spend them organically after all, even though I can’t see anything to spend it on.
This gets back to, when considering a credit card that gives MRP or TYP, if you not a jetsetter then it’s really difficult to cash out the points (URP are easy). Turning the points into gift cards and selling them (if you realize you won’t get to use them organically) seemed like a reasonable option, but now I’m not so sure, so these points are worth much less than one cent.
Does anyone know the answer. If CardCash.com says “This card is ineligible for sale at this time.” can that exact card still possibly be sold later, or is it permanently flagged never to be sold to CardCash.com?
Sooo what’s up with Raise.com? If you try listing a card, it just stays pending forever. The site doesn’t really seem usable, as you can’t actually list anything to sell it.
They make you wait 30 days at pending, after which you can list for sale.
Travel related gift cards stay pending for 45 days…
The email says: “Your gift card is pending approval.
Thanks for listing your card on Raise! Most cards are approved within 24 hours, but some may take longer due to restrictions set by the brand. You will receive an email when your gift card is live on the marketplace, and we will contact you if any additional information is needed.”
You would think if it were going to be much longer, then they would simply say so. If they say 1 day when they know it’s 30-45 days, that doesn’t seem like trustworthy behavior.