Gyft Giving You Problems? Here’s How To Fix it

Today’s post is in alphabetical order @chucksth, @esthery, @made_by_hugo, and @mileswhip all asked me simultaneously about Gyft’s verification process.  I’ve written about Gyft a few times and how lucrative they were to the gift card reselling machine like the triple dip. Since then, Gyft tightened up and things weren’t so rosy like no payouts with Gyft points if you clicked from a portal.

Now if you were a first time customer with Gyft, they rightfully stopped payments until they verified you. It was around $1000 that triggered the verification for me where they asked for my driver’s license.

That was easy, I emailed them my driver’s license and the next day I was ready to rock and roll. After the discovery of multiple dips I did this method:

• Buy American Express Gift Card from a portal
• Buy Gyft gift card through a portal, paying with American Express gift card
• Buy gift card that I really wanted to resell using the Gyft gift card with a portal

I followed through with this dip and I had to be verified again. Reverified and everything processed. Did the same method, and they asked me for verification I was like come on!? But I did it any way and said, this is too much work.

Then in May I had the #20kChallenge and tried to buy more gift cards from Gyft using my shiny American Express Business Platinum card and I had to be verified yet again. I sent Gyft a “nastygram” about having been verified three times already and there was no way I was going to do it for a fourth time.

The very nice customer service agent came back and said:

We’ve cleared up the issues with your account. You will need to use a payment method in your own name. Please feel free to try your purchase again.

And then the other day, I purchased more gift cards and it went through without a hitch. It was a time sensitive deal and there were better cards I could have used, but I didn’t want to risk another verification process so I dropped the charges into the AMEX Platinum.

Verifications On Gyft

I don’t have a screenshot of the verification process, but if someone has one, I’d love to be able to include it. Anyway, there are many settings behind the scenes that Gyft can set up. For instance they can do the following to cause a customer to verify:

• Change of payment types
• Crossing a predefined purchase threshold

I’m guilty of both points. At the time, I didn’t know swapping out all the cards for American Express Gift cards on PayPal was causing an issue even with a $500 purchase. It was frustrating to say the least.

How Do I Know?

At the #ResellingDO as well as privately I’ve mentioned leveraging my bulk rates to help folks sell their gift cards for a higher rate. I did not want to build a platform to store a driver’s license like many gift card exchanges so I looked for a cloud based solution. I found one. The same one Gyft uses.

Enter: Netverify by Jumio

Netverify can accept all kinds of identification to upload. All you need to do is take a picture of it and Netverify will take care of the rest. What makes this platform neat is that the business owner sets the criterion for a verification process. It’s a pretty awesome solution. If you’re a user of Netverify, you could hold the ID pictures on your own database or have Netverify host it for a certain retention period before it gets deleted. Depending on volume, more verifications the cheaper it is, but the price I was quoted for was $2/verification. Not bad for peace of mind and 0 development costs.

Stop The Verification Process

Your best bet is to stop changing payment methods after you are verified. If you must change the payment methods and get asked to be verified again, a quick email to Gyft’s support will clear the issue up. I’m sure they don’t want to spend money unnecessarily to verify someone over and over and over especially since it’ll eat into their bottom line.