Gift Card Denominations Matter

A while ago, I posted that Raise taught me to be a better businessman where I made an uneducated guess on buying gift cards and postulated about buying lower denomination cards to move the cards quickly.

For some background about me, I write extremely little about myself, this blog isn’t the platform for it. It’s like how my buddy MilesAbound wrote little outside of the miles and points then separated his other thoughts because he has so much knowledge to share with the world. Anyway – in my work function we talk about inventory turn over, which means how many times does the inventory the company purchases gets bought from customers among other “retail math” metrics.

Investopedia has a great definition: A ratio showing how many times a company’s inventory is sold and replaced over a period.

In supply chain, we also talk about weeks on hand. This means how much of your current inventory do you have if you don’t replenish that will sell out using the historical demand (purchases). Here’s a definition you can read about it.

Ok So What Gives?

Any good business wants to have a high Inventory Turnover, it means things are selling like hot cakes! You also want to maintain an efficient supply chain with a stable amount of weeks on hand of inventory. Too little means a stock out, and that is awful. It means you lose a customer that day, but the impact could be lifetime because they could turn to your competitor and love buying from them instead of you. Too much stock could mean you’re stretching yourself thin through buying too much inventory. If something happens, like Target shutting the spigot to resellers (they stopped selling to resellers) and the gift card market appears to be falling.

Anyway, I asked my contacts at the exchanges what the inventory turn over rate is so we can all work together, gift card churners like ourselves selling on places like Raise and the gift card exchange sites like Giftcard Zen. I asked the a redacted/paraphrased version of the question below

What are the inventory turn rate for specified gift cards for this denomination range?

Where’s The Brands?

Well, that’s part of the secret sauce. And I’m willing to share! Like all the folks that emailed me about spending $25 for $10,000 and got it in early, I told everyone before I received my AMEX Business Platinum card. There was a risk to it because they could drive down the rates, but I did it anyway. And there were a ton of emails to respond to and I won’t let that happen again this time. It was such a drain on my own personal resources that my routine still hasn’t returned to normal, and this all started 3 weeks ago.

The Deal:

So here it is, I plan to schedule the detailed post this Friday at 5 AM Eastern Time and it will be password protected.

The Directions:

• I will not respond to comments asking for the password
• If you choose to contact me through or Twitter or the Forum asking for the password, be warned I will answer when I can, and I won’t give you the password, it’ll be more hints
• I will not explicitly give you the password this time compared to the last time, I felt like I missed so many people doing a Twitter hashtag campaign
• Understand what concatenation is

In programming, you will take variables and just connect them without a space. For instance if I were to concatenate “I” “Love” “U” concatenating them will become ILoveU

The Hints:

The password is concatenated in this order do not change it, if you change the order you will get the password wrong:

• How much is 1 stamp worth that Cardpool gives you to pay for shipping? Just the 2 digit value. Don’t include the $ or the decimal point. So if the stamp was worth $.30 just keep the 30. EDIT: sometime between May 23 and writing this, Cardpool increased the postage to $.705. So the postage to avoid confusion, I’ll tell you. It’s $.69
• Big Habitat covered a new online retailer and discussed a referral link, what’s the retailer’s name? Forget the .com. So if the name was ctp.com just give me CTP in all caps
• On April 20, my buddy Personal Finance Digest took a survey from a credit card issuer and was sworn to secrecy and had to redact many things. I want the stock symbol of the company in all caps. So if it was Bank of America their stock symbol is BAC
• What’s the airline code did Trevor from Tagging Miles fly when he and his wife traveled on a mileage run to Cairo? If it was British Airways, I want BA
• On March 1, Kenny from Miles4More posted about a mix up in Mexico with Orbitz. He and his family were booked for the Mia Hotel, but Orbitz messed up and got him into an SPG property. So if the property brand was a Sheraton, I want the SPG brand name but in all capital letters so it would be SHERATON
• As The Joe Flies writes about the trips with his family, he calls his daughter “baby X.” What is X? He usually abbreviates with a period, you can lose it. For instance if he wrote Baby E. all I want is the E
• Kirsten wrote about Idaho and has some great info about the state, there’s a number of named waterfalls. What’s the number? For instance if there was 55 named waterfalls I only want the number, 55
• On May 11, The Deal Mommy wrote about the Wyndham credit card and she discussed a vacation rental and gave us an acronym. There’s a few acronyms and to avoid any confusion, it’s the one that’s there 7 times in the post, I only want the first letter from the left. So if the acronym was ABC, I only want the A

So if you get it all, here’s what the example answers for the password to the post would look like:

• Stamp: 69
• Website name: CTP
• Company ticker: BAC
• Airline: BA
• Hotel: SHERATON
• Baby Name: E
• Idaho Waterfalls: 55
• First Letter From The Left Acronym: A

The Format To The Password To Enter Into The Post Example:

69CTPBACBASHERATONE55A

So that’s the format to the password you would enter, one long “word”

In case you couldn’t tell, I had a little bit of fun to create the password since it’s rare that I password protect posts.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, but it’ll be enough for the folks that will put in the work and hopefully foils the highly intelligent robots from Google. If Google can break that, well, I’m going to take the blue pill (Matrix reference, not the ED drug)

EDIT:

It seems there’s something from the scripts blocking the bottom half of the post for some folks. I haven’t seen it where the text disappears. Hopefully you can see these 2 screenshots of the hints: