Wal-Mart aims to make a buck from your gift card
If you received a gift card for Christmas, Wal-Mart wants to make you an offer: Trade it in for a Wal-Mart gift card… for less than face value. An estimated billion dollars worth of gift cards may go unused this year, and Wal-Mart hopes to take a chunk of that business.
The retail giant is partnering with an outfit called cardcash.com, which is already in the business of trading in slightly-used gift cards— offering a check, or PayPal, or an Amazon gift card. Here are some examples:
Some sample offers from cardcash.com, as found on the morning of Dec. 26 2014.
Card Cash then turns around and offers the cards for sale through its site— at higher prices than it pays. Target cards sell for face value, for instance. Home Depot cards go for 6 percent off. Starbucks cards go for 12.5 percent off.
Wal-Mart, in this partnership, offers slightly better terms for its cards. Here are some offers retrieved from the partnership site:
Some offers from the Wal-Mart side of cardcash.com, as found the morning of December 26, 2014.
Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst with Forrester Research, says gift cards are such a big business, it was just a matter of time before Wal-Mart got into secondary markets like this.
However, she is surprised that Wal-Mart is partnering with a company that does so much business with arch-rival Amazon. “If I were in a partnership with any company, I probably would not want them to have significant relations with my biggest competitor,” she says.
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