Master List of Discount Gift Card Retailers
This link-packed ebook is intended for people looking for the best-kept secrets on the web for buying bulk Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and other national brand gift cards at the highest discounts — accounting for speed, quality, volume and risk.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
1. Buy gift cards on marketplaces
2. Buy gift cards with bitcoin
3. Fill out online surveys for gift cards
4. Buy directly with people online
5. Buy directly from people offline
6. Arbitrage gift cards on Amazon
7. Swap other gift cards for Amazon
8. Buy gift cards from retail stores
9. Earn gift cards for online work
10. Daily deals websites
Bonus Knowledge
Executive Summary
This article covers some of the many ways to buy discount gift cards. We focus a lot of attention on Amazon gift cards since they are the largest retailer in the world and has the 2nd most gift cards in circulation. We have either purchased or researched in depth most of the sites on this list to come up with some conclusions about the fastest, safest and cheapest places to buy discount gift cards. Please remember, there is no one best place to find gift cards, the goal is to give you options.
The lowest-risk gift cards with the lowest discounts are directly from that brand and at grocery stores and other retail locations (CVS, Safeway, Walgreens, etc). You will also find these 0% offers from 3rd party e-code generators like eGifter and BitPay. You can usually buy instantly and they are guaranteed forever.
Slightly higher risk are the old-school secondhand gift card exchanges like CardCash, CardPool, Raise and others. They offer very small savings up to 5% off the top brands. You can pay with a credit card and they guarantee the card for up to a full year so you can gift them as gifts much easily.
The highest discounted gift cards are on peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplaces with users from many different countries, like Paxful and LocalBitcoins. This also comes with the most risk and the highest amount of work. These platforms have lower regulation and majority of the trades are conducted in non-USD currency.
Finally, there is an emerging category of crypto gift card exchanges that also use bitcoin to offer the same discounts as peer-to-peer marketplaces, but they have more advanced protections in place for buyers and sellers. Sites like Redeeem and Purse.io fall into this category because they can offer larger discounts on gift cards and other products but they use technology to cut out the negotiating. Cards are guaranteed for minutes, hours or days here, so this isn’t the best for gifting.
Your savings (and profit margins) will depend largely on your risk tolerance, length of time you are willing to get paid, country where you are located, capital available, ability to buy alternative forms of currency (like bitcoin), the ability/willingness to ship physical products, overall time commitment, and many other factors.
1. Buy gift cards on marketplaces
Redeeem. Save 15% or more on bulk Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy gift cards with auction-style pricing buying with bitcoin. They have great support and great reviews.
CardPool. Save 3–5% on hundreds of brands, including Best Buy, Target, iTunes and Lowe’s. They send the card directly to your email inbox or via USPS in 3–7 days.
CardCash. Gift card marketplace that buys unwanted gift cards for less than their value and resells them at a discount to savvy shoppers across the country. Save 3–5% on hundreds of brands, very similar to CardPool.
Gift Card Granny. This is a nice resource because they link to the sites that have the best deals, unfortunately they don’t index many of the bulk discount sites.
Raise. One of the biggest in terms of volume. Discounted gift cards to hundreds of national brands such as Target, Southwest, Uber, Home Depot, etc. However, discounts are minimal here, ranging from 0–3%.
CardCookie. A great site with great potential — currently offering 5–10% discounts but not very high volume yet. Keep them bookmarked.
2. Buy gift cards with bitcoin
Redeeem. Redeeem is a great option for buying Amazon gift cards at 20% discount or higher using bitcoin. Unlike Paxful or LocalBitcoins, they manually validate and guarantee every gift card sold on the platform and have an easier buying experience. But you will have to trade during market hours (they are only open 8 hours a day).
BitPay. Raised over $72 million from investors,
they’re the largest bitcoin payment processor. Download the app to buy Amazon e-codes fast at 0% discount.
Paxful. With 300+ currencies to trade, Paxful’s peer-to-peer platform with millions of users in Africa offers likely the best discounts for gift cards, but there are a lot of scammers (and yelling) so be careful. You may find yourself with a lot of stolen/invalid cards and trade disputes with money at risk.
LocalBitcoins. LocalBitcoins lets you buy and sell bitcoin in over 248 countries. Like Paxful, this comes with high risk and high reward. Every trade starts with a listing, similar to Craigslist, and the platform is strictly peer-to-peer.
Purse. Save 10% or more on Amazon when you pay with bitcoin, or dropship products (including gift cards) to people to earn bitcoin.
CardBazaar. An online secondhand gift card marketplace where you can buy and sell unwanted gift cards for cash or bitcoin.
Bidali. A bitcoin payment processor that competes with BitPay and offers full-priced e-codes from Amazon and other retailers.
eGifter. One of the best way to buy eGift cards quickly for friends, family and yourself without hassle. Choose from hundreds of top national brands. You can personalize your gift with an animated greeting card, photo or video greeting.
3. Fill out online surveys for gift cards
Survey Junkie. offers a massive inventory of paid surveys.
Each survey is assigned a point value (most between 100–200 points)
and estimated completion time. Once you accrue 1,000 points
(around $10) you can cash out with a gift card.
Beer Money on Reddit. This a Reddit group dedicated to making some cash on the side. Don’t know much about it.
PointClub Surveys. You can earn points for completing paid online surveys. When you have enough points, you can redeem them for cash or the gift card of your choice. Gift cards can either be digital or real cards sent to you. It’s that easy!
OpinionOutpost. You can earn cash and rewards for the time you spend taking online surveys with points you can redeem for cash or gift vouchers to popular brands.
4. Buy directly with people online
Reddit. Reddit is used by a ton of gift card traders, but you have to be familiar with the platform and have some karma on there before using it seriously. Otherwise,
your listings will just get filtered out by their algorithms. If you go in there moving quickly without reading their rules carefully you will likely get banned.
5. Buy directly from people offline
Craigslist. As you probably know, you can get anything on Craigslist. But like Paxful and LocalBitcoins, it requires a lot of negotiating and there are scammers galore. The only deals worth doing are small volume with trusted local partners.
Facebook Marketplace. Although this wouldn’t be my first choice due to the randomness, there are a lot of gift cards on Facebook Marketplace — a growing platform.
eBay. Older than time itself, eBay earns millions of dollars a day
in gift card volume. They are fairly warm to buying and
selling physical gift cards but they are cracking down on e-codes.
The downsides here are shipping costs and eBay/PayPal
fees which add up to over 10%. There are also a lot of international buyers on eBay taking advantage of currency exchanges, which inflates prices of gift cards above their face value. It’s an expensive place to find gift cards — but always there.
6. Arbitrage gift cards on Amazon
Amazon is unique in a lot of ways. One way in particular is that they let you
buy other brands of physical gift cards with your Amazon credit balance — such as Nordstrom, Southwest, Nike, Starbucks, Google Play, iTunes, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Sephora, Hotels.com and dozens more.
This opens the door for people to buy gift cards on Amazon and then sell them to CardCash, CardPool, Raise, Paxful, Reddit, LocalBitcoins, Redeeem, etc. The risk, believe it or not, is that Amazon loves shutting down people’s accounts with gift card balances frozen inside. So don’t let your balances get too high and try to mimic normal behavior that doesn’t make you look like a
large dropshipping business (e.g. ship to yourself, buy other products too, have a real phone number and billing address on file, etc). There are also hard quantity limits on how many gift cards you can buy for each SKU on Amazon.
Your profit margin will depend on how you get Amazon credits, your ability to keep your Amazon accounts in good health, and the rate at which you sell your cards to gift card marketplaces (some let you choose your own rate, others have fixed rates), and the speed and method you want to get paid (check, ACH, bitcoin, PayPal, etc).
7. Swap other gift cards for Amazon
CardCash Amazon Exchange. This is a cool resource that CardCash built alongside Amazon to allow customers to swap out other national brands for Amazon e-codes for a small fee. The rates are comparable to what they have on the main CardCash website and the e-codes are delivered within 24 hours. It’s a cool way to jump from one brand to another if you want Amazon gift cards in particular and have another.
8. Buy gift cards from retail stores
Retail Stores. There are hundreds of physical retail store locations where you can buy physical gift cards in person (the link points to Amazon retail locations). You pay full retail price but it’s fast, safe and reliable — and you can earn 3–5%
cash back with certain credit cards like Amazon Prime card.
9. Earn gift cards for online work
Mechanical Turks. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs. This will require a lot of work, but you can get paid in Amazon gift cards.
Swagbucks. You can redeem a Amazon Gift Cards by using the Swagbucks you earn through playing, searching, discovering, answering, watching or shopping on websites that are trying to sell you things. Not very profitable but can be fun.
10. Daily deals websites
Groupon. Although not as popular as when it first launched in 2009, Groupon is still used by millions of people to get discounts on stores, experiences and even gift cards like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy. There is also a gift certificate category that has similar offers (sorry, we couldn’t find anything similar on Living Social).
Amazon Daily Deals. Amazon has daily deals on many categories of products as high as 20% discount. On some occasions they will slash prices on gift cards.
Amazon Treasure Truck. Amazon has a Treasure Truck that they drive around many of their Whole Foods locations they use to promote Amazon Video shows and offer 10% discount deals on food, clothing and tech.
Gift Cards.me. Simple app, good reviews, worth a try. The discounts aren’t very spectacular, but they claim to have fast gift card delivery.
Nimble Commerce. Not sure how long they’ll be around, but worth a shot.
Bonus Knowledge
On the back of your gift cards, check all the stores where that brand is accepted. For example, gift cards for Gap also work at Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta and Piper Lime. Walmart gift cards work at Sam’s Club, Amazon gift cards work at Whole Foods, and Albertsons gift cards work at Safeway, Vons and a dozen other grocery store chains in the same family. Make sure you know these sister-store policies before you buy a brand.
One limitation you may find with many stores like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy is that they have per-product purchase limits. Obviously you can create new accounts or ask friends and family to buy products for you, but some products have gift cards under many different SKU numbers — like a Christmas and Birthday version. There are also limits set for each of these individual items, not the gift card category as a whole.
Finally, based on the U.S. government regulations, the maximum amount of gift cards that can be purchased in a 24 hour period by a single person $10,000. So please keep this in mind when you are out there shopping.
Good luck, be honest, and happy trading!
Bonus Resources
- Buy bitcoins at lowest fee:
- https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-buy-Bitcoin-at-the-lowest-fees
- Best bitcoin exchanges:
- https://www.bestbitcoinexchange.io/
- Buy Amazon vouchers using bitcoin:
- https://blog.bitrefill.com/its-here-buy-amazon-vouchers-with-bitcoin
- How to buy amazon gift cards using bitcoin:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners
- Learn more about dropshipping:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/dropship
- Buy Amazon gift cards with BitPay:
- https://www.redeeem.com/pages/bitpay
- Kraken bitcoin verification tiers:
- https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/201352206
Use Bitcoin to Get 25% Discounted Gift Cards with Redeeem.com
- Sign up on Redeeem.com
- Deposit bitcoin in your wallet
- Buy discounted gift cards
Download the new Redeeem chrome extension to quickly see gift card offers!
