I’m always of the mindset that it’s a good idea to get your miles and points from a variety of sources. Â While credit card signup bonuses are currently my most lucrative avenue of earning points (and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future), I think it’s a good idea to diversify
(SEE ALSO: How I got 1,000,000 points…. and you can TOO)
With advents such as the Chase 5/24 rule (if it exists), and other exclusions that limit credit card signup bonuses, I’ve done some work with manufacturing spending (basically buying gift cards and redeeming for MOs which still works in my area), as well as product reselling and gift card reselling / arbitrage
The basic idea of gift card arbitrage is you find a gift card on sale, you buy it, and then sell it at a higher percentage.  Adding in things like credit card points, cashback from portals, eBay bucks and other things can help make these deals profitable.  The trick of course, is to find these deals 🙂
I’ve predominantly sold these on Raise, which is one of the gift card exchanges, though I have used some of the other exchanges as well (though thankfully not Gift Card Rescue)
Another way to sell gift cards?
Over on the Points With a Crew Slack channel, we have been talking about gift card selling in #giftcardselling. Â There has been some talk about a new site / exchange to resell gift cards. Â He asked that I not share his site publicly on the blog yet as they are still in somewhat of an open beta, but I think that this just goes to show the power of networking – many of the good deals are not shared publicly.
I have sold a few gift cards at this new site, but it’s still too soon that I have not been paid yet (should be in the next week or two), so those cards and card amounts are not included in the totals
Breaking down the gift card totals
I finally updated my gift card totals from the past few months. Â I don’t claim to be a “power seller” but thought I would share my experiences. Â Most of the volume from these come from a deal late last year in-store at Kroger with 20% off Gap and Old Navy cards. Â As you might imagine, the market got flooded pretty fast on those. Â Instead of just lowering my prices, I held on to a good chunk of my cards and recently have been able to sell them on Raise at near face value
- Total gift card face value:Â $18,030.00 ($15,225 of these were Gap / Old Navy cards)
- Purchase price:Â $14,540.00
- Average discount:Â 19.4% (again most of these were 20% off Gap cards)
- Sell amount (on Raise):Â $17,271.73
- Payout (after Raise commission):Â $15,472.42
- Total profit:Â $932.42
- Profit percentage:Â 6.41%
I have not sold all of my gift cards (because I keep buying more!) but rather than keep putting this post off, I thought I’d at least share what I’ve got! Â I should point out that this is the straight sell price, so it doesn’t count any credit card points or portal cashback. Â I generally would recommend not counting on either of those things when making a purchase decision (which does make it a bit harder to find deals). Â But in this case we’re probably looking at at least 20K in miles and points and maybe $100 in cashback (a lot of these deals were in-store or at Staples, which usually doesn’t track portal cashback on gift cards in my experience)
Have you done any gift card reselling / arbitrage? Â Any tips or tricks you’d like to share?
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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 have to start doing this!
welcome to 2014
Filing for taxes on these will suck
It’s not too bad since my total profit is not very high
What was your estimated time cost?
It depends. Most of these were an in-store deal at Kroger, and my time for those is higher (but so is the profit). Online only deals, like the ones I posted earlier this morning regarding the 8x eBay bucks take much less time
I’m just wondering if you could ball park the amount of time you spent to make this profit. Thanks!
+1. It’d be really useful to have a ballpark estimate of how much time it takes to sell $14 K in gift cards. I wonder how much time it took to earn the $932 and 20K points. That’d be a key consideration for me in determining if it was “worth it” (as your title suggests you are addressing).
How do you ship your gift cards? I get nervous sending cards via regular mail.
Most of the time you can send them to one of the exchanges with just the codes. I’ve only had to ship a very small number (< 5%) of the cards I've bought.
Have you had any chargebacks or issues with buyers claiming invalid gift cards?
I know some folks have run into that – it has not been a problem with me personally.
are you kidding me? u spent all that money and effort although in the end you are not out any money but still 15k to make 20k miles you can hardly fly cross country with that!!! that’s not worth the time imho
Do you think it’s possible/worth it to try and sell them yourself directly, maybe through this site? I’m just wondering if cutting out the middle man via a platform like this might increase your profit. At the same, maybe it would be a lot more work and not worth the extra time/hassle.
That seems like it has a lot of potential pitfalls without a lot of extra profit
If it took like less than 24 hours total work it might be worth it. This is assuming you made 1200$ profit. But I can tell from you knowing how to do this, and the quality of your blog, you could easily find a job making more than $50 an hour.
No, not worth it to me. Too much work for only 20k miles. Not to mention the hassles of dealing with dead gift cards.
Yes, welcome to 2014. But the problems start when all the gc resellers decide they have enough inventory and dramatically lower purchase prices. Suddenly those gcs you bought at 20% discount can only be resold at 30%…
Definitely. I ran into that with Gap gift cards but ended up selling them for a profit but I had to hold on to them for a few months. You’ll see the same thing now due to the recent 20% sale on Gap cards at Staples last week
hi, does raise accept used gift cards that we buy from other exchanges? thanks.