It’s always tempting to ask friends and family members for gift cards around the holidays. After all, gift cards offer the opportunity to pick out the products and services you value most. But here’s the catch: It’s all too easy to receive a gift card and then forget about it. What’s more, you may receive a gift card from a retailer you don’t especially care for and let it go unused, making them a better present in theory than in practice. Fortunately, you can sell gift cards instead of letting them go to waste. However, the amount you can make selling gift cards online depends on the popularity of the card’s affiliated retailer.
To get the most value out an unwanted gift card, follow these tips:
Tips for Selling Gift Cards
Read website reviews. “There are some shady sites online, so it’s best to search for reviews,” says Prateek Agarwal, a marketer in Los Angeles who has a side gig selling gift cards in bulk on the card marketplace Raise.com. Untrustworthy sites will “sell your card and not pay you, or the buyer will drain the card and then file a chargeback,” he says. He suggests checking out GiftCardWiki.com, “which can tell you which sites offer the best rates for your gift card and what percentage they take.”
Consider selling gift cards to relatives or friends first. Before turning to a gift card exchange website, consider other ways to maximize value. “To get full cash value for their gift card, one should try selling to family and friends first,” suggests Jeremy Norris, the author of the personal finance blog WealthWishList.com. Also make sure to keep some important caveats in mind, including your location. If you live outside of the U.S., you may have trouble selling to gift card retailers based in America. GiftCash.com, for instance, won’t accept gift cards from consumers outside the U.S.
Verify that a gift card exchange website is legitimate. If you’re worried you may be giving away your gift card to a suspect website, search for reviews online — and see what the Better Business Bureau has to say about the website. It’s also a good sign if the company guarantees its transactions. Just make sure to pay attention to how long that guarantee is good for. If it’s a 45-day window, for instance, and you don’t use the gift card for two months, you would be out of luck.
Keep you card’s expiration date in mind. If your gift card has an expiration date, you may have trouble selling it to a website. Just as you wouldn’t want to have a gift card that is useless, no website wants to become saddled with a gift card that has expired.
[See: 12 Ways to Be a More Mindful Spender.]
There are a variety of websites where you can sell gift cards for cash, and the sites are generally easy to navigate. After you select a merchant and enter the amount you have on a gift card, you’ll be given a cash back offer. You can accept it or not.
Here are the top five sites to sell your unwanted gift card, rather than letting it expire:
5 Top Websites to Sell Gift Cards
CardCash.com. With CardCash, you can sell gift cards or you can trade them for a certificate to a retailer that you do want. As for the selling part, what you earn for your gift card will vary. For example, for a $25 Target card, you can expect to receive an offer for around $20. On the other hand, if you trade a gift card, you may end up receiving a gift card that’s worth up to 13.5 percent more than the card’s value that you’re trading in.
Cardpool.com. With Cardpool, you can exchange your unwanted gift cards and be paid in cash or in Amazon.com gift cards. The site only accepts cards with a value of $25 or more (with a $1,000 maximum).
If you accept Cardpool’s offer, you can either mail your card to Cardpool or sell it electronically. Once Cardpool receives your gift card, it will issue you a check within one business day. You also have the option to list your card on Cardpool’s marketplace. That means you might get paid a little more than what Cardpool offers, but you won’t get paid until a buyer makes an offer.
Norris says that he thinks Cardpool is one of the easiest of the online gift card selling and buying websites. “Cardpool has kiosks and cashier assisted locations all over the country to exchange gift cards for cash,” he says. All you have to do is go to the Cardpool website, and it has a location map that can show you where to go if you don’t want to do the exchanging electronically.
GiftCash.com. Like other sites for selling gift cards, with GiftCash you simply type in the card that you want to sell and how much it’s worth in plastic currency, then you get an offer. For instance, for a $50 gift card from Best Buy, you can expect an offer for around $45; for a $30 gift card from Home Depot, you can expect an offer for around $25.50.
CardKangaroo.com. With CardKangaroo, you can receive up to 92 percent of the card’s value. For example, for a $100 Abercrombie & Fitch gift card, you can receive an offer for around $75; for a $100 Amazon gift card, you can receive an offer for about $80.
[See: 12 Shopping Tricks to Keep You Under Budget.]
Raise.com. Unlike other sites on this list, with Raise you can set the price of how much you want to sell your gift card for. The snag? You won’t net a profit if nobody wants to buy your gift card. It’s free to list your card, and if somebody purchases it, you’ll give 15 percent commission to Raise.com. You can collect your money via direct deposit, PayPal or a check, depending on the payment option you select.
[See: 20 Financial New Year’s Resolutions for 2019.]
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How to Sell Gift Cards originally appeared on usnews.com
