Judy, careful with gold on eBay - they're raising FVF again soon:
http://pages.ebay.com/sellerinformat...pdate2011.html
so gold will be overprised, at least extra $50 for 1Oz

And, BTW - they stopped churnability of eBay gift cards, or you still have a way? Spend these cards in early April together with Ebay bucks and stay away after...

How are you churning eBay gift cards? I tried that, and they don't pay out eBay bucks for those purchases, and I don't think you can click through BigCrumbs either because eBay gift card sellers do so without FVF, correct? What am I missing?

Hi, Mike. It is great when any vendor provides a representative on FlyerTalk. I hope your company's recent exercise in buying market share turns out to be profitable in the long run. Certainly, you've made a group of people who are willing to buy gift cards comfortable with using your web site.

Others have scolded you sufficiently about saying anything in a blog that could be perceived as deceptive, and I think your company should be "rewarded" for providing a representative. So, I want to suggest two steps you could take that might enable you to sell profitably and in quantity to the FlyerTalk crowd, but only if you do both:

(a) Accept American Express gift cards for payment, and
(b) make some offer that has a total cost substantially below available AmEx gift card rebates (perhaps by selling at a high value, or, for some uses, selling only a virtual gift card).

I imagine that these two changes would facilitate the following rational use cases of interest to FlyerTalkers, which I will refer to as the "mint helper", the "Citi helper" and the "We-Don't-Accept-AmEx helper."

1. THE MINT HELPER. A typical use of this card is for someone to buy coins from the mint via a rebated AmEx gift card, now that buying dollar coins from the mint with AmEx GC's directly no longer works. Please note that I am not necessarily talking about people trying to exceed the mint's purchasing limits, just people trying to maximize their discounts. If the mint ever starts refusing these cards, you might want to allay the mint's concerns by letting them know that all giftcards.com cards have a single shipping address per social security number. If Visa or MasterCard networks don't like your issuing high valued virtual cards, maybe you can appease them with a slightly more thorough customer vetting process for these cards. The card will typically be depleted in a single transaction as soon as it is received, so don't plan to make much money on interest or from getting a lot of per-transaction merchant fees. The minimum order from the mint is $250, the minimum for free next day shipping is $500, and the maximum order is $1000, which many consider most convenient. So, a being able to buy a card up to $1k may be slightly more appealing.

2. THE CITI HELPER. Citi is reputed to recode all purchases from financial institutions as cash advances, which has the unfortunate and probably unintended side effect of disqualifying puchases of AmEx gift cards from earning rewards to counting toward promotional spending thresholds. Citi has been running some promotions recently that require spending of $4k or $10k. Ideally, it would be desirable to have a card that could hold up to the $5k maximum AmEx gift card order. This essentially describes your existing cards. You just need to figure out a formula that gets costs substantially below the AmEx rebates at some price point. [Edit 3/18/2011: Oops. This case doesn't require you to accept AmEx gift cards for payment.]

3. THE WE-DON'T-ACCEPT-AMEX HELPER. The reverse of the "Citi helper" this would be a potentially physical card that could be bought with an AmEx gift card for use with merchants who don't accept AmEx. Unlike the other use cases, here the card is likely to be used in a lot of little transactions, so you might expect to make some money on merchant fees and infinitesimal interest. Here a physical card may be preferable, although a virtual version might also be popular.

Although I believe that most of the opportunity for these use casees at the moment will depend on them being substantially cheaper than the rebate available for AmEx gift cards (currently 1.6%, but likely to continue to ramp down), I suspect other uses for your cards involving greasing the wheels of some other promotions of interest to FlyerTalkers will appear from time to time (for example, use an AmEx with a promotional spending threshold to buy mastercard to spend at Sam's Club).

In any case, I think it will be important for your cards to cost less as a percentage of stored value than those from your competitors that allow purchasing gift cards with a credit card, such as Simon Malls and Chase. Otherwise, it won't be rational for FlyerTalkers to buy, and FlyerTalkers are generally very calculating about most of these things, except, for what must be a common brain injury that we all share that causes us to value our time at about $0.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far.

Keeps your fees where they are. This way it will keep out the rift-raft!!!

libuser, could you please explain? It is one-time deal or a local thing?

A quick scan of cashbackholic, cashbackchart and cashbackwatch reveals the following offers for giftcards.com that might apply to Visa or MasterCard gift cards.

From cashbackholic.com:
marketamerica.com 3%
cashbackzoom.com 2% "GiftCards.com offers prepaid Visa Gift Cards and Discounted Merchant Gift Cards to hundreds of popular retailers."

From cashbackholic.com and cashbackwatch.com:
greenbackstreet.com 1.7% "Cash Back may not be awarded if an outside coupon is used."
hoopladoopla.com 2%? It looks like I have to create an account to see offer details. I suspsect the offer wil contain some language excluding Visa and MasterCard gift cards.

I have not heard of any of these sites before or created an account on any of them. So, I have no idea how likely one is to actually collect these rebates. At least one rebate site, cashbaq.com, apparently folded, leaving rebate holders in the lurch.

Also, before you create an account on one of these sites, be sure to check their referral policies to see if you can first create an account for someone else who can get referral fees. In some cases, you might even want to do this more than one level deep.

I'd like to hear how to get free CVS GCs as well!

I'm confused about the CVS thing as well. Is he using the $5 coupon to purchase the gift cards?
The coupon excludes alcohol, gift cards, lottery, money orders, prescriptions, postage stamps, pre-paid cards, and tobacco products.

I know that making many hefty purchases there over time will result in slips that give you say, $5 extra cash or stuff like that, but even if all you did was buy a lot of CVS bought visa gift cards, those would not count toward that which gets you those points/coupons.

Right, but you cannot purchase gift cards with either the Extra bucks OR the emailed coupons. So I cannot understand any tie between gift cards and CVS, since gift cards can't be purchased with any coupons there.

agreed, so the person who posted about this has to have some other thing they are doing. I know you can buy store gift cards there WITH other gift cards but I dunno how to avoid the fee... yet. Just to compensate for it elsewhere. Like by earning cash back on the GCs that I then use to BUY the ones at CVS

Yep, it looks like my last turn of gift cards did not earn Bigcrumbs cars Still, I have alot of Ebay bucks to use in April, and my Amex Gift cards that earned 5.6%. If I need nore Ebay Cards, I can got to the grocery and get the 6 Hitlon points per $.
Cheers!

JudyJFLA

this is, without doubt, the absolutely easiest way to get your account(s) shut down and your earnings forfeited. cashback portals are not the mint, turning a blind eye to things like different credit card numbers. bigcrumbs and pennyful, for example, have hired the best IT people in atlanta and india, respectively, specifically to root out these fake referrals.

this thread should be renamed: how to get everything shut down

I'm not sure what you mean by "fake." I am not suggesting creating accounts for people who don't exist or who you have not given you permission to do so on their behalf. Different sites have different rules for who can be a referrer and who can't, which is why I said "be sure to check their referral policies."