I Have A Love Hate Relationship With Cardpool

When I first started to resell gift cards in late 2012, I began with Cardpool. Then went to Plastic Jungle then back to Cardpool after the Plastic Jungle closure. I just want to say that I want to love Cardpool, but they do so much that makes me dislike them so much.

What I Love

• Great rates
• Top notch execution
• Excellent backend system
• Next day payments
• Free shipping

These are all pretty self explanatory. The way they handle the business for me to sell gift cards and to be paid is phenomenal.

What I Hate

• Awful website
• Inflexible
• Awful website
• Lack of a partner
• Awful website
• Can never reach anyone on the phone
• Awful website

Did I mention I hate their website? After I learned from wasting 6 hours on the website and their crappy system of a website for a large order added some more time and frustration.

What Is Up With Cardpool?

I am a big fan of trying to streamline processes to simplify and save money. I calculated I cost Cardpool at least $300 in postage and that number was not going to decrease. $300 in postage at $.69 and $.705 is a lot of individual orders. If we look at the Business Advantage checking account as a reference (in case you didn’t know, you could earn up to a $2000 bonus if you sign up) and there is a transaction limit per month before fees are assessed.

Transaction limits and fees (counted across the two included Business Advantage checking accounts only):

• Transactions –
  • No excess transaction fee for the first 500 transactions (items deposited, checks paid and other debits); $0.45 per transaction after 500

After 500 transactions, $.45 will be assessed. Granted, I don’t know what bank Cardpool uses and I’m certain they’ve negotiated this fee down, but if I am creating individual orders, not only are they paying for postage, but it is eating up the transaction limit. This is costing them more money in the long run. Behind the scenes, they also hired ADP to do the processing. If ADP is charging per transaction, that will eat more into their bottom line. Does Cardpool listen? Absolutely not.

I said to them, I have a 100% solid track record of gift cards and how about a compromise? I asked if I could roll up all sales into one big transaction and I will pay for the shipping in exchange for a select few vendors for a higher rate. They gave me a quick no.

If Cardpool Budged

If Cardpool entertained the idea, I would have done a few things on my side to make the process to about a minute an order including the time to enter the gift cards into a spreadsheet and I would have been a happy camper. Instead, and I am happy this happened, I asked CardCash if I could join their bulk program and we negotiated some rates even higher than Cardpool. CardCash’s site isn’t great either in terms of bulk selling, but we worked out a solution where I am extremely happy and this is without doing anything. It’s the little things like this that make life easier, you can get to that thousand dollar gig.