Trade Your Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash

June 9, 2007 By Matthew Paulson

I’ve never really understood the concepts of gift cards and gift certificates. You’re trading perfectly good cash which can be used literally anywhere to buy goods and services for something which allows you to buy goods and services at one or maybe two places. Cash never expires, but gift cards decrease in value if you don’t use them for an extended period of time. When you use a gift card, you’ll always end up with some random amount of change on it that you’ll never end up using. It boggles the mind why anyone would consciously trade perfectly good money for a gift card for someone else. I’d just take the money!

Even though we would prefer cash, we’ll always get gift cards for Christmas, birthdays, holidays, graduation, weddings, and the like. Sometimes we’ll get gift-cards to places that we would never shop at to begin with. Instead of just taking your gift card and using the credit on it to buy something you don’t really need or want, consider converting your unwanted gift-cards into cash!

You can do this in a few different ways. Throwing your gift-card on eBay is a great way to accomplish this task. You can usually get fairly close to the retail value of the card, usually between 75-90% of the card’s actual value out of it. You’ll have to pay eBay fees though, which will decrease the amount of money that you get back.

Another viable option is a new website called Giftcardbuyback.com. You can sell them back a gift-card for 70-75% of what the face value of the card is. The actual percentage you get back depends on the store that the gift card is to. You might end up a bit ahead by throwing your card on eBay, but with Giftcardbuyback.com, the transaction is very streamlined and you won’t have to pay any fees that eBay would charge you.

There are a few other sites which will offer to buy back gift cards, such as PlasticJungle.com and Swapagift.com, but GiftCardBuyBack.com has consistently offered some of the best rates in terms of the percentage of money that you’ll get back from your gift card.

If you’re a savvy consumer, you can also use these services to your advantage. Usually they mark up the price of the used gift-card by 10-15%, and you can then buy a card that someone else sold them. They’re making a nice profit, but you can still get gift-cards for 80-90% of their face value, or even lower for some specialty stores. It won’t make you rich or anything, but it’s just the same as getting a 15% discount from your favorite store, and who wouldn’t want that?