<i>Like most high-schoolers, Benoit gets gift cards for birthdays and holidays and puts most of them to use. But, if it's a bookstore, it'll just waste away in her wallet.</i><p>This makes me cry.
> If you accept the offer, just mail in your card and within a few days, cardpool.com will mail you a check.<p>I wonder how they deal with gift cards bought with stolen credit cards? If the gift card gets cancelled by the retailer after Cardpool verifies it and sends the cheque, they're out the money.<p>This could be an easy way to liquidate the balance on a card.
I have experimented with this and found that unloading gift cards at a good price is easy via eBay or "contextual ads" or search engine ads. But, there really isn't an opportunity to establish a competitive advantage on the sell side. Competitors will bid up these channels and, importantly, people can figure out how to Google "buy gift cards" once you present this idea to them.<p>This business is really about finding a way to get people to sell you gift cards way below face value. But however much PR or advertising you do, most people will just Google "sell gift cards." And, again, you will just be doing work for whomever (of the n existing competitors) ranks highest in the SERPs.<p>So if that is the plan, you are really just trying to build another SERP merchant, but have the added complication of having to deal with fraud when sourcing your product (and I don't think fraudsters need to be super clever to walk away with a lot of their money).<p>Hopefully they have a better plan.