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How To Gift Card Churn Like A Pro – Finding The Best Rate




Yesterday’s post covered what I think is the best practice for mailing out your gift cards using USPS. For any gift card churner out there, Gift Card Granny is an excellent resource for newbies and experts alike. It lists out all of the public rates that you can sell your gift cards.

The companies they list are: Giftcards.com, Gift Card Zen, ABC Gift Cards, Cardpool, Junkcard, and Monster Gift Card.

gc_granny_sites

 

 

Of the listed ones, I have only sold on Gift Card Zen and Cardpool. Remember, for your first $1000 in transactions TopCashBack will pay out 4% when you partner with Cardpool.

The biggest downside to Gift Card Granny is their inability to provide a sortable table.

How To Build The Table:

First, you need Google Chrome, then I highly encourage you read this article and download the Scraper extension for Google Chrome.

Once installed, you right click the website and the menu will display “Scrape Similar”

gc_granny_initial_scrape

Depending on your initial click your results that you see won’t be the same, but that is OK.

Once you have that box you want to now change the field that is highlighted with //tr[9]/td to this:

//div[2]/div/div[3]/table/tbody/tr

And hit the “Scrape” button

Now you will see this:

gc_granny_initial_scrape2

 

We are almost there, right now the scrape is still leaving it in one column. To fix that you need to change the XPath.

gc_granny_xpath

You need to add all of the rows with this code:

./td
./td[2]
./td[3]
./td[4]
./td[5]
./td[6]
./td[7]




And change the name column that corresponds to the columns found on Gift Card Granny:

Vendor
GiftCards.com
Gift Card Zen
ABC Gift Cards
Cardpool
Junkcard
Monster Gift Card

 When completed, it will look like this:

Gift Card

 

After you have successful scrape, click on the “Export to Google Docs…” button. Now you have the download of all the public rates and you can find the best deal. With this, you are now empowered to search through the sell by rate instead of by vendor. Because of this, you can play around with the math to find out how to take action on gift card churning and to see if a vendor really is a deal.

 

 

25 comments… add one
  • Great post! How often do you have to run this to stay updated? Trying to get my head around the time involved and how often. Thanks!

    Reply
    • I don’t run the report too often any more because I have a handful of gift cards I’ve memorized and look. But when I was relying on the downloads, I was running the pulls weekly.

      Reply
  • that’s way too complicated. Just create a new google spreadsheet and type “=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)” in “A1” cell, then “=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,2)” in “A2” cell, everything will be updated every time you open the sheet.

    Reply
    • Am I missing something, I opened a new Google Sheet just like you said but I copied this in A1 it gives me a parse error:

      =ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)

      I tried again with the the quotes at start and end but still no luck.

      Reply
      • For some reason there was something wrong with the quote sign (“) while copy & paste text in your blog comments. Just copy the formula and paste to google sheet, then edit the formula by removing these four quotes and manually type them back.

        Reply
        • Awesome, works great now. Appreciate it!

          Reply
        • Thanks from me as well!

          Reply
    • I tried your method and just got ERROR in those two cells.

      Reply
    • Thanks CoolMoon for the nice code and helping out in the comments! Very easy using this method!

      Reply
  • Coolmoon, any idea why CardCash/ABC is off? The sheet is working just like you showed us but I’ve tried each day this week and that’s the only one of the sites the %’s have been off each time. Example mine has shown 90% for Target on multiple days this week including today yet they are at 88%

    Reply
    • @Devon – maybe it’s GCGranny’s fault, they added “SaveYa” (which is a rebranding of giftcards.com)

      I just checked and CardCash/ABC is lined up @ 90%

      Reply
      • Thanks for looking at it. I’m not sure I follow. My Google sheet updated with the SaveYa column but how does that effect CardCash/ABC being off by 2%?

        Reply
        • My guess – the underlying HTML code to set up the table might have thrown off the Cardcash column when GCGranny inserted SaveYa

          Reply
  • CollMoon, what would the formula be for generating a table for buy? I tried changing you formula to “buy-a-gift-card”, but that didn’t work

    Reply
    • @Jessica, this should do it. I tried it out on 2 sites:

      =IMPORTHTML(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/store/abercrombie-and-fitch/”,”table”,1)

      Replace the website that I have listed, it must be surrounded with quotation marks. I did a Home Depot, but it didn’t work, I think it’s because it’s 4k records. All the other sites that worked had about 10% of that

      I like your idea you have, finding a great deal on the buy side!

      Reply
      • Thanks, I’ll give that a shot. What I had in mind was a bit of arbitrage 😉

        Reply
  • Useful tool if you can get it to work.

    But how do you get Google Sheets to sort the data? All it wants to do is sort alphabetically rather than high to low and vice versa. Changing format to numbers (vs percentages) doesn’t work either.

    Reply
    • If the sort isn’t working, try copying and pasting all of the cells and paste as values, then sort by the Giftcard Exchange name

      Reply
  • Does this still work as shown in Coolmoon’s post? Is what he’s described below all this is necessary, or is there something else to make it work?

    “that’s way too complicated. Just create a new google spreadsheet and type “=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)” in “A1″ cell, then “=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,2)” in “A2″ cell, everything will be updated every time you open the sheet”

    Reply
    • It does, the code that you can use to copy and paste can be found in this post: https://wp.me/p4eiav-1rs

      Quoted from the post:

      Here is the code you would enter into the cell A1

      =ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)

      Then in cell A2 you want to use

      =ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,2)

      Reply
  • Great! That makes it super clear!

    Thanks!

    Reply

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