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.
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