The Tool:
I can’t take any credit for finding this tool that I gave a quick glimpse. All credit goes to Andrew Wise founder of Life, Tailored. He and I met up for some coffee last year to discuss points and miles and he mentioned it to me. When I tried it, it was a little buggy and laggy and dismissed it. I’m not sure what came about for me to try it again, but it works like the videos. However, it’s still a little buggy because it is in beta, but it looks very promising and better than when I first tried it. I actually can’t wait for the tool to go live because I have plenty of ideas. Without further ado, the tool is “Kimono Labs.”
Kimono Labs is a tool that scrapes websites of the first level of data, at least that’s as far as I can get it to work. It doesn’t scrape deeper data like on a second page. I’d be more than happy to stand corrected if this is the case. Would save me a lot of work.
From then to now, I didn’t have many ideas for Kimono Labs, but now that the wheels have turned with a successful “project” I have more ideas coming out of Kimono. I’ll leave it as that for now and will talk more about it in a few upcoming posts.
The Data:
I set up the Application Program Interface (API) to download hourly and originally did the “Big 3” gift card vendors on eBay and have added svmgiftcards (Thanks Noah). I am only using these vendors because they offer “Buy It Now” prices and not the auction prices which makes it far more difficult to ascertain if it’s a deal or not. Below are the links to the API that you can use:
All four are currently configured to run every hour, however, the spreadsheet to view all the data is a manual run.
Here is the link to my Google Drive Spreadsheets. I suggest you creating your own account on Kimono Labs, clone my API’s linked above, then connect Google Drive into Kimono Labs so you’ll have the spreadsheet at your disposal.
How To Use:
The above screenshot is what I posted on Friday and it is all the gift cards listed on Paypal Digital Gifts, and by looking at the Price column, if it is a fixed price and not a price range, you can see if the gift card is on sale or not. If it’s questionable like the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, you could click on the eBay link to confirm. Otherwise, all the cards tell you the percentage discount.
This will be especially helpful on the days there are the 2x up to 5x bonus on the eBay Bucks.
Happy Deal Finding
Now that you’re empowered with finding a deal on eBay, you can find the deals yourself without waiting it to be posted by someone on a deal forum or any blogger. For me, this will be useful to find a deal without waiting for an eBay email telling me what gift card is on sale because I rarely check those “deal” emails. I will read their emails telling me what multiplier for the eBay Bucks offer.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong, I am new to this, but how exactly do I resell these? No matter what card I put into giftcard.com to sell I get “Not eligible to be a gift code.”
Did you mean giftcards.com? I haven’t sold anything on giftcards.com – have you tried any other exchange to try and sell your gift cards? If you’re new to this, try Cardpool + TopCashBack for an additional 4%
I haven’t tried any other exchanges yet, since giftcards.com doesn’t charge 5% for using electronic submission. Since, atm, I am overseas my options are pretty limited. Electronic submission is about the best method I’ve found so far, and since I’m not looking for anything massive it should be ok for me.
@KP Thanks, I guess I’ll go through the whole list today and see which ones work and which ones don’t. Do you know if they change which are acceptable, or is it set in stone?
As far as I know, they recently changed couple of the retailers as “not to accept online” which they were accepting online earlier. But since I never sold those retailers’ cards, I found out from someone else.
Yes you can check it out even before buying if they accept it online or not. That way you won’t get stuck up with any cards.
Giftcards.com won’t accept all the cards online, some of them you have to sell as a card.
“Not eligible to be a gift code.”- This is used when the card you are trying to sell can’t be sell as e-gc and need a physical card for that.
You can sell Sears, Bloomingdales, Macys etc as a gift code.
I really appreciate these APIs and have been using them a lot. I think there may be something wrong with the GiftCardMall one though. Today there is a special $100 ebay gift card for $95. I don’t see that the API is finding it. What’s very odd is that when I click on the source link and goto eBay, the $95 special listing is there. But it doesn’t seem to be scraping it. I thought I should let you know.
What’s wrong with the SVM API? There’s this hot special of $100 Exxon GC for $90 and it only shows 2 entries on my Google spreadsheet – not including this one. Also as mentioned above the GCM doesn’t seem to be on top of things either. Really thought this approach would work but right now it seems Slickdeals or Doctor of Credit and the like can’t be beaten when it comes to hot and presumably short-lived deals.
@frekwentflier @JB I will check the issue and let you know soon, thanks for pointing it out!
Is your Google Drive spreadsheet still updating? I had tried copying your APIs a few weeks ago but the APIs seem to have broken in kimonolabs and they kept sending emails about how the API was broken and if I needed help fixing it…never had time to do it. I just checked your Google Drive spreadsheet linked above and it appears to have the old GC information (like the $10 Chevron promo card).
I’m trying to find a good GC to buy for the 5x promotion and the spreadsheet would be really helpful. Thanks!! 🙂
Can you fix the “SVMGiftCards” link to Kimono Labs? The link is invalid. Thanks!
SVMGiftCards doesn’t list gift cards all the time so Kimono Labs stops running after a few days of no data. As soon as they start their monetized version, I should have a better method of grabbing data that won’t fail.