A Guide to Gift Cards Online

You’ll find many offers when you search for gift cards online, and you might be wondering where to begin. Certainly you can find a way to spend less this holiday shopping season, but you might be surprised by some of the pitfalls surrounding the gift card method – and some of the ways you can make the best of it. Let’s consider how you should go about using them, and where to go to find the best deals.

How They Can Work Against You

Retailers tend to flood the market with gift cards, and it’s for a good reason: research shows that people tend to spend more than they intended when they enter a store with a gift card. You want to use up the whole card, but it can be very difficult to find the items you’re looking for without going a little over. So the stores are almost guaranteed that the recipient of your gift card will be spending more than you gave them. Statistically speaking, they’re earning interest on all the cards they sell.

What that means for you as a gift-giver is that the person you who gets the card from you may well have to shoulder extra expenses to use it the way they want to – which in turn means that, practically speaking, it’s costing them money.

There’s also the more obvious danger of sending a gift card to someone who has no use for the products sold by the retailer you’ve chosen, leaving them (and you) in the awkward position of getting zero bang for your buck – while allowing the retailers to widen their profit margins.

How They Can Work For You

There are some good methods to find the kinds of gift cards that can genuinely improve your holiday shopping season, so take heart. Many retailers offer fairly generous gift card discounts, along the lines of buy three and getting a fourth free. That can help offset some of the potential fallout from giving out cards that are improperly used. More to the point, it can help you in the here and now.

If you know you’ll be spending a certain amount in a single store this year, just buy the gift cards in advance, get the free one, do your shopping, and pay with the gift cards at checkout. It can be a handy way of saving some money over the holiday season.

Finding gift cards online is a bit more difficult, but it can still work. Try secondhand resellers of unused gift cards like PlasticJungle.com, GiftCards.com and GiftCardsAgain.com. They buy gift cards from consumers who’d like to get rid of them and resell them to you at a discounted price – sometimes up to 30% off. Those kinds of savings can add up if you’re shopping for many people.

Conclusion

You can find gift cards online that will work for your needs, but be wary of some of the potential dangers of getting the wrong card for the wrong person at the wrong price. Do your Google homework, and you can come out ahead.