Well, well, well. Another Christmas or Hanukkah, another gift card to a store you’ve never heard of, would never go to, and would never step foot in unless led there at the end of a sword. Just a pretty, plastic card with unusable money locked inside of it, never to be unleashed.
Or so it seems. You have options, and like most options, they reside on the internet. There are marketplaces that’ll give you cash—not full price, but roughly 80 to 90%—for your unwanted gift cards. And 90% of something is a lot better than 100% of nothing.
And hey, people who know me and who gave me a gift card this year for Christmas, I swear I’m not writing this about your gift card. God, I’m about to get so many texts.
shut up and take my money!
GCX, a division of Raise that’s specifically for buying and selling gift cards, lets you list your gift cards for free and name your price, but it’ll charge you a flat 15% commission of the selling price once it sells. That means your sale isn’t instantaneous. It works a bit more like the Buy It Now function on eBay.
Impatient like me? CardCash skips the wait of making you list and sell your own gift cards. They’ll immediately offer you a take-it-or-leave-it price for your gift card. There’s no haggling, so it’s their price or the highway, but once you click accept the payment comes quickly. I’ve not always been happy with the price they’ve offered and chosen to accept it.
More than half of the time, though, it’s close enough to what I’d have gotten from eBay or GCX for me to just accept it for the sake of not having to waste any more time with it. CardCash charges at least 8% commission of the gift card’s selling price, but it may be higher for certain retailers. Only way to find out is to input the details.
What about ebay?
What about it? Ok, fair question. After all, eBay is the less stabby version of Craigslist, and widely trusted for its PayPal integration and buyer protections. But gift cards have proven to be high-risk, common scams for eBay in the past, and they’ve clamped down on the rules for selling them. It has to be a physical gift card, not a digital one, so that wipes out a lot of potential gift cards out there right off the bat.
Other platforms, I can’t vouch for. I’ve used CardCash, eBay, and GCX, plus a couple of others that no longer exist, and came out pleased enough. $40 in cash is a lot more useful to me than a $50 gift card to Tommy Bahama, so I’ve had no complaints. I’ve never been scammed on any of them, although I’m now knocking on all the wood I can see, since I said that.
There’s also GiftCash. You’re swimming beyond the VICE-vetted lifeguard buoys, though. I haven’t used GiftCash, so I can’t personally vouch for it.
Most visible among the complainers who’ve used these services and loudly proclaimed they’ve got a bah-humbug up their butts are those who are incensed that you won’t get full face value for a gift card.
Well, no shit. These marketplaces are all businesses, all advertise themselves as such, and if they paid you $50 for a $50 gift card and sold it to somebody else for $50, they wouldn’t earn a living. And what kind of deranged, math-challenged person would buy it secondhand for the same price as a new card?
It’s just the business model. But if you’re absolutely certain that you can’t use that gift card that’s rotting away from disuse, it’s better to get partial value for it than let an otherwise useless plastic card fossilize on your desk out of pure spite. At least, that’s the reasoning I’ve used.
The post Got a Gift Card for Christmas You Don’t Want? You’ve Got Options. appeared first on VICE.
