News & Information Blog

In the last two months we've done almost 400 transactions for a total value of over $15,000 that people have gotten off of their gift cards and transferred to PayPal. Only $2,999,985,000 to go. :)

The CashFromCards service works with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover gift cards. This class of gift cards are also called open-loop gift cards, Visa-type gift cards, or prepaid debit gift cards.

If you've read our Gift Card FAQ, you know why gift cards are so hard to use. The prepaid debit gift card industry has been saying for years now that they are working to improve the usability of their products, such as making it easier for merchants to accept a split tender (so you can use the last few buck on your gift card and pay the rest of your total in cash) and allowing merchants to look up your gift card balance, but I have yet to see any such improvements become available.

I don't know whether the lack of solutions in intentional or these are just difficult problems to solve, but the bottom line is that the difficulties using up all the value of prepaid debit gift cards fuels immense profits for the card issuers and robs consumers of a lot of money that they are entitled to.

You can help fight this problem by helping to spread the word about this and other services that help gift card holders get the most out of their gift cards; tell your friends about available services, leave comments on blogs that discuss the problems with gift cards, post a link to our site on your web page, or tell us what you think about our service. If you give a prepaid debit gift card as a gift, include a note with the card about our service so the recipient will know what to do when they have only a few bucks left on it. If you work in the media, write a story on ours or other gift card services.

We appreciate your help.

People often ask me if the service will work with their Nordstrom, or some other "closed-loop" or store gift card. Unfortunately, those type of cards are aptly called "closed" because they can only be used with the stores that issued them; they aren't general-purpose debit cards.

The good news is that open-loop gift cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover branded gift cards), for which this service is designed, are the fastest growing and now most desired type of gift card sold, so you will be more likely to get the kind of card for which there is a simple way to use up your entire balance.

When I started using prepaid Visa gift cards a few years ago, I quickly became annoyed with how hard they were to use up completely. If they even knew what a Visa gift card was and how to process it, very few merchants wanted to take one in combination with some other form of payment (split tender) and even fewer of them would allow me to charge something if the total was less than $10. And quite frankly, I got tired of carrying all the cards around in my wallet with sticky notes on them with the remaining value. My cards eventually got eaten up by the dormancy / maintenance / account / whatever fees.

Then one day I read about gift card "breakage," which is the amount of money on gift cards that never gets used. The amount then estimated for 2007, almost $10 Billion, was simply staggering and I realized that I must not be alone in my frustration. Out of this, the idea for CashFromCards.com was born. I wanted to provide a tool for other people to get as much value out of their gift cards as possible. By being transferring your gift card balance to your PayPal account, you can easily use the money that is rightfully yours.

Other services that allow buying, selling, or trading with gift cards typically don't handle prepaid debit type gift cards, have minimum value requirements (such as $25) if they do work with these cards, take a much larger chunk of your value (typically 20-30%), and all involve a transaction that must be completed by snail mail. We are the only service that allows you to get the value off of your prepaid debit gift card instantly.

We hope you find this service useful. Please let us know what you think about our service and how we might improve it.