I can count on my fingers all the bad experiences I have had with gift card churning.
- I bought a ‘gift card’ and turned out to be merchandise credit, and was tough to sell
- Cardpool and ABC Gift Cards wouldn’t accept my gift cards
- The trick here is to not scratch off the PIN to the gift card
- A check was lost in the mail, someone opened it, and mailed it to me – this actually caused me to review all my paper checks to ensure I received all payments
Not bad, right?
While I was away, I became intimate with my third bad experience.
I am almost 100% sure I made sure to mail out all of my gift cards before I went away to Asia. When I return, I would have a pile of checks waiting for me to be deposited.
One of the days, I received an email from Cardpool stating that it has been over a week and they still did not receive the $75 gift card I mailed in.
After returning, I checked my records and did not document the gift card number.
Fortunately, I purchased it from my usual vendor who has great record keeping and he checked the gift card was still good so I used the lost gift card and ordered another gift card.
My best advice, have a good record keeping of the gift card number and PIN.
This brings up a dilemma I now face when churning gift cards. I mentioned above not to scratch the PIN off and you’ll have a higher success of gift card acceptance. If your gift cards are lost in the mail, you don’t have the PIN to recover.
