In the last few weeks, there have been a giant flood of cheap gift cards. The secondary markets are flooded from entrants like you and I. A few weeks ago I posted about an Exxon deal. I declared that it was an easy money maker. It’s unfortunate I don’t have a screen shot of Exxon listed on Giftcard Granny, but I took one today:
Almost everyone were buying it at 92%, but now it’s from the mid 80%’s to some and one at 92% because of the huge supply hitting the exchanges. For whatever reason, Giftcard Granny hasn’t updated Cardpool. Here’s my bulk rate:
And here’s Cardpool if you were trying to sell without logging in to see that they’re buying it less than that from everyone else.
Now we mix in the deal in the last few weeks from Staples two times. Once that I wrote about for administrative assistants day and Chuck covered on Doctor of Credit and the news that Money Metagame broke out with Safeway on Gap family gift cards.
Here’s a screenshot I compiled at the end of April for Gap:
Here’s a screen shot from today and if we look at SaveYa who previously was the best exchange to sell on has dropped the rate 5%:
With these awesome deals every week, you might think I’ll wait until I stop buying and sell all at once, I don’t recommend it due to the unprecedented sales from vendors all over the place and the exchanges will reduce the rates, even for good brands like Exxon. Fortunately, if you are a bulk seller all of the exchanges will give you advanced notice of a rate change so you won’t be caught flat footed. But if you’re not, sell, sell, sell!
If you’re not part of the bulk sales, these decreases in the rates will be effective immediately, so sell as fast as you can.
Just a heads up that SaveYa does NOT alert bulk sellers before changing rates. They actually move pretty frequently which has burned me a couple times, but I usually try to leave a % or two buffer on each card I’m buying to mitigate the possible changing rates.
Good article, it’s definitely good advice to sell cards as soon as you get them, especially if it was a highly publicized deal. There have been several instances selling on Raise where the latest ebay deal flooded the market a day or so after I received mine in the mail.
Thanks Noah – it doesn’t sound like SaveYa is quite there compared to all of the other exchanges
You know what this means right? BUY GIFT CARDS WHILE THEY’RE ON SALE!!!ELEVEN
That too! Can’t miss out on a lucrative deal
Recently I noticed some irregularities with giftcardgranny and now I wonder if they are having too many technical issues. For small reseller, it may not be much issue. But for someone selling more than couple of hundred dollars this may be a huge issue. You are right about Exxon which burned me as well, I still have them, I was thinking to use them for personal use but when my local Exxon was keeping price high compared to Kroger (earlier they were matching price with Kroger), I decided to resell those cards and you can see now, I cant resell to Cardpool with a profit. So may be I will just now use it or sell to Cardcash (I have only 1 experience with them). But I recently had personal experience with Saveya. As per granny for Macy’s resell, Giftcardzen had 77% and Saveya had 76% last week one day. Since I had Physical Cards anyways, I was about to sell it to Giftcardzen as selling at 1% more would yield me $12 for my $1200 macy’s Cards. But somehow I went to Saveya just to check, and to my utter surprise it showed 81%. I thought it was a glitch and since I was in my office and all cards were at home, I decided to go home and check at night time. After 12 hours around 10 PM when I checked GG, it was still showing 76% for Saveya. So I thought may be it was glitch earlier in morning but nonetheless, I still logged in to Saveya.com the rate was still 81%. So I sold all $1200 cards to them. I got the confirmation of payment as per 81% too. Obviously they realized it may be next morning when I was already done with $1200 which were 35 cards to be exact. Then they reduced rate back to 76%. But I guess, if I had relied only on Giftcardgranny, I would have never made this extra $50 odd profit…! I guess, you should advise your readers to check their preferred one or two resellers rather than relying on giftcardgranny in case they are selling a more than couple of hundred $ in giftcards.