Blackhawk’s Acquisition of Giftcards.com Affects Gift Card Reselling
This week has been one with many downs considering the recent changes to NW Buxx cards and the closure of most people’s Bluebird/Serve accounts to new loads. Manufactured spending has taken a hit and there is no denying that. With perhaps the easiest options to MS now a thing of the past, some of you will be moving on to other methods.
Two of the other major methods of manufacturing spend are reselling gift cards and reselling merchandise. I have written about both and continue to do both (although I am more into reselling merchandise now). I hope to write more about these topics as I know some of you will find interest in the subject matter.
Changing Perspective
Yesterday’s Bluebird/Serve news got me thinking about gift card reselling. Earlier in the week I covered the fact that Blackhawk Network (owner of GiftCardMall) was acquiring Giftcards.com. In my original coverage I talked about Visa gift cards online. Both companies sell $500 personalized Visas, so I was worried that consolidation would be a bad thing in that space. I doubt most of you will have a need for as many Visas, so perhaps that point isn’t as important now.
If you are into gift card reselling though, the news has another side effect. For someone who buys and sells gift cards there are only a few reliable companies to sell to. Cardpool is perhaps the biggest company in the space and they are owned by Blackhawk. SaveYa is the second largest (I believe) and they are owned by Giftcards.com.
Based on my understanding of the purchase, not only will we see GiftCardMall and Giftcards.com come under the same corporate umbrella, but now two of the biggest gift card resellers Cardpool and SaveYa will be as well. I believe this will be an overall negative for gift card reselling. When I heard the news the other day I had thought about this negative, but it seems much worse today in light of yesterday’s news.
Conclusion
It seems the days of casual MS may be over for some. Those who are flexible and are willing to invest the time to learn more advanced methods should be just fine. If you are a gift card reseller or are looking to get into it, this news isn’t good since there will probably be less options, but thankfully there are some stellar smaller companies that you can sell to as well.
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If Gift Card Wiki is to be trusted, Raise and Cardcash are still larger than Cardpool and Saveya combined. So I think there is still healthy competition.
Love the blog.
Good point and I had forgotten about those stats. Raise is a marketplace so it operates a bit differently (they don’t hold their own stock for most things), but Cardcash is definitely bigger!
Not sure this was worth a post, let alone midnight pillow talk with the wife.
lol…. hmmmm…. this is one subject I don’t chat about with the spouse.
Shawn, I look forward to your future posts on what may once have been more advanced strategies…. On gift card reselling, I’ve been doing it for a few months, and I’m growing quite jaundiced about the manipulation and “games” that go on…. even within “open markets” like raise. (perhaps even more so there) Right now, the gift card market seems especially FLOODED with excess supply from gc’s that recently were being widely touted (e.g., the cards on “discount” at Amazon, ebay, — even the Sears cards are hard to sell at a profit)
I’ve been waiting “patiently” …. but every time I think the oversupply starting to burn off, suddenly new sellers (consolidators?) appear to kill the gc market anew…. Reminds me of the crap I used to deal with as a stock trader in the late 1990’s … and again a decade later.
Thanks as always for your opinion.