It has been a bit of a bumpy road for me doing gift card reselling / arbitrage. Back in August of 2015, I talked about my first forays in gift card reselling. It didn’t go well – I actually bought some gift cards from one exchange hoping to sell to another one and pocket the difference in rates, but I ended up getting store merch credit which has (still) proven to be difficult to liquidate.
In Q4 of 2015 and periodically over the early part of 2016 I would buy good deals on gift cards, primarily 20% off Gap / Old Navy cards. It took awhile to sell all my cards due to a flooded market, but I ended up with just under $1000 in profit
(READ MORE: Reselling $18,030 in gift cards – was it worth it?)
Crazy gift card deals going on this week
I’ve been told by others in the industry that Q4 typically has some pretty good gift card deals and that has certainly proven true so far in 2016. On Saturday, with the conjunction of a flash sale at Sams Club, some great Amex Offers and a few other gift card deals, I ended up with over $900 in gift card reselling profit from JUST that one day.
I wrote earlier this week about the great gift card deals that are continuing to go on this week at Kroger and Staples, and I took advantage yesterday with 2 stops at Staples (one of them even still had $100 Itunes cards left on the rack!). Yesterday I mentioned that there were even more gift card deals at Kroger that were just released
Today: eBay discounted gift card deals
Today I learned via Miles to Memories that eBay has several discounted gift cards that I’ll be taking advantage of
- Southwest Airlines $220 gift card for $200 (limit 5, from PPDG)
- Cabela’s $50 card for $40 (limit 5, from SVM)
- $50 Children’s Place for $40 (PPDG)
- $50 Lord and Taylor for $40 (PPDG)
- $100 Barnes and Noble gift card for $90 (SVM)
Paypal Digital Gifts (but not SVM) typically code as office supply store for Chase Ink Plus purposes, but I don’t know if my Chase Ink card can handle the stress of all these office supply store deals! Good thing I’ve got my Amex $20 off Staples offer to mix up my card spend, but it’s too bad I’m over Chase 5/24 and therefore can’t get the 80,000 point bonus on the new Chase Ink Preferred card 🙁
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I took advantage of the Staples AMEX offer too and ordered some Old Navy e-gift cards. I thought it said those would be delivered within 1 to 2 biz days but now I see expected delivery is Nov. 29.?! Is that normal or is that just a default ETA for physical cards? Just hate waiting around while the buy prices for those cards could go down.
I’ve noticed a lot of times that Staples has a ship date that is not really in touch with reality – I’d expect those to actually be shipped sooner than that
I do a lot of buying and reselling of merchandise — I’ve only dabbled in a few hundo in GCs here and there for resale and the same few hundo here and there for liquidating through MOs/Square/Purchasing Merch. But can I ask, is there a reason you’re looking for $100 iTunes cards? I understand that the most recent Staples Amex Offer is $20 back on $100. However, I believe that offer is online-only….and why wouldn’t buy all $300 VCGs? It’s a straight $11 profit per card. Let’s say the liquidation cost is another buck – it still beats the resale on any other GCs I can see, doesn’t it? I only have 6 Amex cards, but I was thinking $1800 in VGCs. Why is that a bad idea?
$100 itunes cards are on sale for $85. Similar to gap $100 cards that are on sale for $80. I can resell those for about cost, so my profit is $20 per amex offer. Visa cards are okay too if you don’t have a place to sell those GCs
With regards to Staples $20 off $100 offer, why wouldn’t $100 VGC be the best deal for spending minimum and getting full offer? I see others mention the $200 or $300 VGC, what makes this a better choice? Thanks for any insight!!
IMO the Gap and Itunes GCs are better deals because they are discounted and I can buy them and resell them at near cost, which is better than the Visa GCs. With regards to $100 vs. $200 or $300, I think people usually get the higher value ones because the extra URs outweigh the extra $1 activation cost
I need a primer on how to get started selling gift cards. Can anyone help an interested newbie?
Cheryl – just wrote a post about How to get started in gift card reselling