Gift card marketplaces, compared
These are the sellers behind every price on CardKoala. They all do the same job — buy unwanted gift cards, check them, resell them below face value — but they differ in the ways that matter when something goes wrong: how long you're covered, and how fast the card shows up.
CardCenter
- Buyer guarantee
- 100 days
- Delivery
- Under 5 min
- Brands in stock
- 490 of 534
- Typical discount
- 8%
- Cheapest seller on
- 417 brands (80%)
Deepest discount right now: Magazine Gold at 39% off
Card Depot
- Buyer guarantee
- 100 days
- Delivery
- Instant
- Brands in stock
- 172 of 452
- Typical discount
- 10.1%
- Cheapest seller on
- 79 brands (15%)
Deepest discount right now: Boston Market at 50% off
Arbitrage Card
- Buyer guarantee
- Seller guarantee varies by listing
- Delivery
- Varies
- Brands in stock
- 105 of 122
- Typical discount
- 6.7%
- Cheapest seller on
- 22 brands (4%)
Deepest discount right now: Chuck E Cheese at 25% off
CardCookie
- Buyer guarantee
- 100 days
- Delivery
- Instant
- Brands in stock
- 7 of 12
- Typical discount
- 9.7%
- Cheapest seller on
- 5 brands (1%)
Deepest discount right now: Bass Pro Shops at 11% off
How to read this
No single marketplace wins. Right now CardCenter has the lowest price on 417 of the 523 brands in stock — which means somebody else is cheaper on the other 106. That's the whole reason to compare: the cheapest seller changes from brand to brand and from one day to the next, depending on who happens to have which cards on the shelf.
The guarantee is your safety net, so check it before the discount. Every card is verified when the marketplace buys it, but a balance can still turn out wrong later. The guarantee is the window in which the marketplace will refund or replace it. The longest here is CardCenter's, at 100 days. Whatever the window, the habit that protects you is the same: load the card into your account or spend it the day it arrives.
“Typical discount” is an average across everything they have in stock, so a seller that carries a lot of restaurant cards will look more generous than one that mostly stocks big-box retailers. Use it to get a feel for the seller, not to pick one — for that, look at the brand you actually want.
New to all this? How discounted gift cards work walks through the whole thing, including what can go wrong and what to do about it.