GiftCardWiki Taught Me A Lot Starting With Transparency In An Opaque Market

GiftCardWiki Is Awesome Because…

If you go to GiftCardWiki’s Market section, you will see an aggregated amount of data for all of the exchanges, and then some that I have never heard of. I did not know that CardCash has inventory almost twice the size of the closest competitor in Cardpool. If we look at the breakdown of dollar per card, Gift Card Zen is the highest averaging at $85 per card. If you’re a bulk buyer that should be of interest to you because they may have high denominated cards that you are looking for.

I wrote about knowing the financial strength of an exchange, and the Market section will definitely help influence your decision on choosing an exchange to sell on. Why is that? Because it plays into the fact that the more inventory an exchange has, the more likely they can sell the inventory, to the users of the gift card, and be able to pay you, the seller.

For Selfish Reasons, I Wish GiftCardWiki Didn’t Have So Much Information

So if we look at Gap branded gift cards, the entire market is absolutely flooded, no thanks to the lucky folks who have access to Safeway. I’m really jealous they have such an abundant stream of a profitable gift card churn for over a month. If the exchanges haven’t lowered their rates, they will soon, trust me. Now why do I hate GiftCard Wiki’s available data? I’ll spell it out: the secret sauce is out there in the public for all to see! If you see a spike in the gift cards like the above graphic, then you know there’s a deal and someone is profiting in the arbitrage!

GCW May Face A Shutdown

I don’t know what kind of arrangements GiftCard Wiki has or doesn’t have, but based off of what I see, high powered legal teams may ask GCW to cease and desist certain operations. I don’t want to see that, but that’s how it is. We’ve seen it with AwardWallet and the airlines with the on again off again relationships. Same with Expertflyer. Here are some snippets on Raise’s Terms and Conditions.

• Taking any action that places excessive demand on our services, or imposes, or may impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our servers or other portion of our infrastructure as determined in our sole discretion.
• Aggregating any live or post-feature content or other information from the Site (whether using links or other technical means or physical records associated with purchases made through this Site) with material from other sites or on a secondary site without our express written permission.
• Deep-linking to any portion of this Site (including, without limitation, the purchase path for any voucher) without our express written permission;
• Copying, distributing, or disclosing any part of the service in any medium, including without limitation by any automated or non-automated means or methods such as “robots,” “spiders,” “readers”, etc., to gain access to our service or any parts thereof.

Cardpool and Giftcard Zen don’t have clauses in their T&C so it’s “OK” for now. We’ll see how that goes.