In the last few weeks, I have received a tons of feedback about gift card churning. There is a lot of interest and requests on the basics. A big shout out to As The Joe Flies for coming up with some great questions and Kenny joking during FT4RL that he needed Circles and Arrows. So here is the Circles and Arrows Edition.
What Is A Gift Card Churn?
Gift Card Churning can mean different things to different people. Some people think of it as the act of loading and unloading the prepaid Visa or Mastercards. To me, it is the art of buying and reselling retailer gift cards.
Need To Know Terminology:
The reason why I list out a dictionary is because it helps the trade craft when you’re using the same jargon. It’s like I mentioned product changing the Citi card and the annual fee and I wasn’t using the right words with the customer service representative and there was a disconnect in understanding.
Bulk Seller – typically someone who sells north of $5,000/month of gift cards to a gift card exchange
Commission – these are the rates that said exchanges will charge for facilitating the gift card sale
Gift Cards – these cards are typically used for purchases at specific retailers in lieu of cash
Gift Card Exchanges – these are sites like Cardpool, GiftCard Zen, or Raise where they connect buyers and sellers to gift cards
Electronic Gift Card – these cards are like gift cards, but are digital versions
Merchandise Credit – these cards are typically issued to retailer’s customers when a refund or exchange occurs and a difference is owed where the customer usually does not have a receipt. These cards are typically used in store only. Merchandise credit may also be known as store credit
Portals – these are online shopping malls that receive compensation for directing a customer to a retailer with the portal paying out said customer a certain type of reward
Residual Value – the amount of money you typically receive after the gift card exchange’s commission
Retailer – vendor that has a gift card for sale
Rate Finding:
You need to study the list of gift card vendors listed on Gift Card Granny and know which retailer has the highest residual value. I wrote a post about finding the best rates, and reader CoolMoon gave better advice:
“=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)” in “A1″ cell, then “=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,2)” in “A2″ cell, everything will be updated every time you open the sheet.
Here is the code you would enter into the cell A1
=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,1)
Then in cell A2 you want to use
=ImportHtml(“http://www.giftcardgranny.com/sell-a-gift-card/”,”table”,2)
You will see results like this (this has been expanded so you see the underlying code in action)
The first line of ImportHtml grabs the table header and then the second line grabs all of the residual values.
The Gift Card Churn:
Now that you know what rates you’ll be receiving in a sortable table, find the best gift card exchange and sell! Good luck!
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