The New Gift Card Churning Arbitrage Opportunity With Triple Dipping Possible Quadruple As Well

While the site, Gyft, may not be that new, it is new to me and there appears to be an arbitrage opportunity to gift card churn. You know me, I love gift card churning.

The arbitrage opportunity is obviously purchasing a gift card and reselling that has a high resale value. Easy as pie.

Enter, TopCashBack, and at the time of the screenshot, Gyft had a 2% exclusive:

Now, 2% is not much. However, Gyft helps us out in multiple ways. Did you see in the second screenshot? You could earn points with Gyft. For every purchase you make, you would be earning at least 1 point per $1 spent with each point being worth $.01

Since the 5% from Gyft using Apple Pay is limited, let’s focus our attention on using PayPal where you would earn 2% from Gyft. In total, we’re looking at 4% off purchasing a gift card. If you know your gift cards, which I won’t spell out, you know which ones to buy. Now, you want to use PayPal’s ability to use prepaid cards, and the prepaid cards that you use need to be bought with a high earning multiple to keep your cost basis down.

How I Would Execute:

For me, it’s a little on the high side: While still available, buy American Express Campus Edition cards (non reloadable ones) for $4.95 using my Citi Forward card because of the 5x bonus and pay the credit card using the neat trick that Kenny who writes with us on Saverocity under Miles4More found paying Citibank using a Visa Buxx. This will drop my average cost to 1.22 cents per mile. In order to gain any arbitrage at that rate, I would need to redeem for a premium cabin on any Star Alliance flight and transfer the Thank You points to Singapore Airline’s Krisflyer. Or I’d need to sign up for the Citi Prestige and pay for an American Airline flight to gain a .38 cents worth of arbitrage. I will do even better when I also buy PayPal MyCash cards and use the Paypal Business Debit card and that would be like buying Thank You Points at a very favorable rate of $.005 per point

The best part about all of this is the high underwear factor, you never need to leave the house as you do all of this. Gyft gift cards are all electronic and paying the Citi bill is over the phone. The only time I would need to see someone is buying the Campus Edition cards or PayPal My Cash cards.

Another Idea:

Say you’re dipping your toes into gift card churning and want to “establish” yourself. You could take a 5% earning cash back card purchasing the prepaid cards, and it would cost you $10.70 per $500 worth of gift card transactions. I’d only recommend this if you’re not a bulk seller and are trying to become one so you can negotiate better rates. This would be like having a “loss leader” in retailing. Say you transact $10,000 worth of cards it would cost you $214 in total, but now you have a .5% increase or more across the board on cards because you sell large sums of cards and they are always good. You can’t put a price on resold good gift cards. It lends credibility between you and the gift card exchange site. When you get an increase, you will be able to gift card churn profitably in the future and here’s my favorite part: previous losers for gift card churning is now break even or profitable.

So if we count all the dippings they would be:

• Portal like TopCashBack
• Gyft
• Credit Card buying prepaid card

And if you’re able to do what I can do:

• Credit Card again buying PayPal cards