How discounted gift cards work

The short version: people end up with gift cards they don't want, sell them for cash, and a marketplace resells them to you for less than they're worth. You pay $92, you get $100 to spend. CardKoala doesn't sell anything — we watch 4 of those marketplaces around the clock and show you who has the best price right now, across 633 stores and restaurants. The rest of this page is the long version, including the parts other sites skip: what can go wrong, and how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

Where the cards come from

Think about the last gift card you got for a store you never shop at. Maybe it's still in a drawer. You're in good company — surveys keep finding that roughly half of American adults are sitting on at least one unused gift card, and a lot of that money quietly never gets spent.

Some people would rather have the cash, even if it's a bit less than the card is worth. So they sell it. A gift card marketplace will typically pay anywhere from about 70 to 90 cents on the dollar — more for brands that resell in a day, less for ones that sit. The marketplace checks that the balance is real, adds its margin, and lists the card for sale.

That's the whole supply chain. Here's what it looks like for a single $100 home-improvement card:

• Someone gets it as a gift, doesn't need it, and sells it to a marketplace for about $86.
• The marketplace verifies the balance and lists it at $94.
• You buy it for $94 and spend $100 at the store. You're $6 ahead, the seller got cash for something they'd never have used, and the marketplace kept $8 for doing the work.

Cards also reach marketplaces in less obvious ways: store credit from returns, corporate rewards and incentive programs, and businesses offloading bulk purchases. It all ends up in the same place, priced the same way.

Why every store has a different discount

It comes down to one thing: how many people want that card versus how many are trying to get rid of it.

Everybody can use a big-box or grocery card, so they sell instantly and the discount is thin — often just 1 to 4 percent. Restaurant, clothing, spa and entertainment cards are the opposite: they're popular gifts, but the person who receives one often doesn't live near that restaurant or like that store. More unwanted cards, fewer eager buyers, bigger discount. Double digits are normal, and 15 to 25 percent isn't rare.

You can see it in our own numbers. Right now the average beauty & wellness card on CardKoala is 11.5% off, while the average retail & shopping card is 5.7% off. Same marketplaces, same day — the only difference is supply and demand.

This is why a raw percentage can fool you. Five percent off a warehouse club is a genuinely great find. Five percent off a steakhouse chain is a slow week. It's the reason every brand page here compares today's price to that brand's own history, not to some universal idea of a good deal.

Why the same card costs more on one site than another

Each marketplace can only sell the cards it happens to have. If one site bought a batch of a brand last week and needs to move them, it'll price lower. If another has two left, it won't. Nobody is coordinating — so on any given day the same $100 card might be $91 in one place and $95 in another.

A three- or four-point gap is common, and it isn't consistent: the cheapest seller for one brand is often the most expensive for the next. You can see who's winning today on our marketplace comparison. Checking four or five sites by hand every time you shop is tedious, which is exactly why this site exists.

How to read a CardKoala page

Every brand has one page, and everything on it is there to answer one question: should I buy this, here, today?

The seller table

Every marketplace that carries the brand, best discount first. Next to each you'll see how long its buyer guarantee runs and how fast it delivers, because the cheapest option isn't automatically the right one. Sellers that are out of stock are tucked behind a “show unavailable” link — we keep them so you know we checked, not so they get in your way. The ranking is never for sale; it is sorted by discount, full stop.

The savings calculator

Right under the table. Type what you're planning to spend and it turns the percentage into dollars. “6% off” is easy to shrug at. “$18 off the $300 you were about to spend anyway” is not.

The buy-or-wait call

This is the part we're proudest of, and we'd rather tell you exactly how it works than ask you to trust a colored badge. We record each brand's best available discount every hour and keep a year of it. Then:

• Buy — today's discount is within 0.5 of a point of the best we've seen in 12 months, or it beats three-quarters of the days in the past year. This is about as good as it gets for this brand.
• Good price — at or above the brand's 12-month average. Nothing special, nothing wrong.
• Fair — within a point below average. Fine if you need it today; waiting might gain you a point or two.
• Wait — clearly below what this brand usually goes for. If you're not in a hurry, set an alert and let the price come to you.
• Tracking — we have fewer than 14 days of history for this brand, so we don't have an opinion yet and we won't pretend to. You'll see this a lot on newly added brands.

The history chart

Every price we've recorded for the brand, with its average drawn as a dashed line. Hover or drag across it to see the discount on any date. Prices move in steps, not slopes — a discount holds until the marketplace reprices — so that's how we draw it. There's a plain table version underneath if you'd rather read numbers.

Discount by card value

The discount often changes with the size of the card. Sometimes bigger cards are cheaper per dollar, sometimes it's the small ones. This table shows each amount we've seen a price for, so you can pick the one that actually matches what you're buying.

Buying your first card, step by step

1. Find the store. Search at the top of any page, or browse everything.
2. Look at the call. If it says Buy or Good price, go ahead. If it says Wait and you're not in a rush, set an alert instead.
3. Click “View Offer.” That takes you to the marketplace's own page for that card. You check out there, with them. We never see your card details or your order.
4. Pick an amount close to what you'll spend. If you're buying a $180 pair of boots, a $150 or $175 card is smarter than a $250 one. You can pay the difference normally.
5. Wait for delivery. Most cards are digital and show up by email within minutes. Occasionally it takes up to a day while the marketplace runs a fraud check on the order. A few listings are physical cards sent by mail — the listing will say so.
6. The moment it arrives, check the balance on the store's official balance page (we link it from the brand page when we know it). Then either spend it or load it into your account or the store's app right away. This is the single most important step — the next section explains why.

What can go wrong, and how to stay safe

We'd be doing you a disservice if we pretended this was risk-free. It isn't. It's a used market, and the thing being sold is a string of digits. Here's the honest picture.

The real risk: the person who originally owned the card might still have the number written down. In rare cases someone sells a card and then spends it anyway, or a balance turns out lower than advertised. Marketplaces screen for this and ban sellers who try it, but no screen is perfect.

What protects you:

• The marketplace's guarantee. Every seller we list will refund or replace a card that doesn't have the balance you paid for. The windows on CardKoala currently run from 100 to 365 days depending on the marketplace. You claim from the marketplace that sold it to you — not from the store, which can't help and won't try. The guarantee for each seller is shown right in the comparison table.
• Spending it fast. A balance can't be drained once it's gone. Use the card the day you get it, or move it somewhere only you control: most big retailers let you load a gift card into your account or app, which ties the money to your login instead of to a number someone else might have. Do this and the main risk basically disappears.
• Your paper trail. Keep the order confirmation and take a screenshot of the balance when you first check it. If you ever need to make a claim, that's all the evidence you'll need.

A few rules we'd give a friend:

• Buy from marketplaces with a written guarantee. Never from a stranger on a forum, a classifieds site or social media, no matter how good the price is. There's no guarantee there, and that's where the scams live.
• Don't stockpile. Buy a card when you have a purchase in mind, not because the discount looked nice. Money sitting on a card is money outside your guarantee window.
• If a deal looks wildly better than everything else — 40% off a brand that's normally 5% — be skeptical, and read the listing on the marketplace carefully before you pay. Sometimes it's a genuine clearance. Sometimes it's a card with strings attached, like in-store only.
• If something is wrong, contact the marketplace the same day. Every one of them would rather fix it than lose a customer.

Stacking: the part most people miss

A discounted gift card is not a coupon. It's a way of paying. That distinction matters, because it means it works on top of everything else instead of replacing it.

Say you're buying a $200 pair of headphones:

• The store has a 15% sale on. Now it's $170.
• You buy $170 of that store's gift cards at 8% off. You've paid $156.40.
• You bought those gift cards with a credit card that earns 2% back. That's about another $3.

You still earn the store's loyalty points, you can still use a promo code, and the sale price still applies — because as far as the register is concerned, you just paid with a gift card. Roughly $47 off a $200 purchase, and the gift card was the easy part.

Two small catches. Some stores won't let you buy other gift cards with a gift card, and a few exclude certain items or third-party sellers on their site. And some stores cap how many gift cards you can use on a single order — usually somewhere between two and ten — so a few larger cards beat a pile of small ones.

When to buy and when to wait

Discounts drift because inventory drifts. When a marketplace is long on a brand, the price drops to move it. When it's nearly out, the price firms up or the brand disappears for a while.

There's a loose seasonal pattern too, and it follows from how the market works. After the winter holidays a lot of people sell the cards they just received, so supply jumps and discounts tend to improve through January. Right before major shopping events, more people are hunting for cards at the same time, so the best prices go quickly. None of that is guaranteed — which is why we show you each brand's actual history instead of a rule of thumb.

The practical advice: if you know you'll make a purchase in the next few weeks, check the brand page now. If it says Buy, buy. If it says Wait, set an alert for a price a point or two better than today's and get on with your life.

How price alerts work

On any brand page, tap “Create price alert,” pick a target discount (we suggest three sensible ones so you don't have to guess), and give us an email address. That's it — no account, no password.

We check every hour. The moment the brand's best discount reaches your target, you get one email. Not one a day for as long as it stays there — one. If the price later falls back and then crosses your target again, we'll tell you again. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and we don't send anything else or share your address with anyone.

Alerts also work on sold-out brands: set one and you'll hear from us when stock comes back.

How fresh our prices are

We re-check most marketplaces' headline discounts about every twenty minutes, and refresh the full price-by-amount lists roughly once a day. Each brand page tells you when its prices were last checked.

Even so, marketplace stock moves fast — a card you're looking at can sell while you're reading about it. So the price on the marketplace's own page is always the real one. If a marketplace stops showing a card, we mark it sold out rather than leave a stale price up, and if a marketplace's site changes in a way that confuses our checker, we'd rather show you nothing for it than show you something wrong.

How we make money

Some marketplaces pay us a small commission when you buy after clicking through from CardKoala. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same either way — and it's what keeps the site free and the ads light.

It does not decide what you see. Sellers are sorted by discount and nothing else. A marketplace that pays us nothing is listed exactly the same way as one that does, and if it has the better price, it's at the top. The details are in our affiliate disclosure.

Questions people ask

Still unsure about something? Ask us — we read every message.