DOING GIFT CARD SWAP AT STORES

There are many a times where you buy merchant gift cards for racking up miles or points. The problem most of the times is how to liquidate those gift cards once you have them? More often than not you would end up buying stuff which you do not need or selling your gift card at a discounted rate to recover your cost. There are couple of ways by which you can leverage better value for your gift cards:
One way of leveraging a better value is while buying you might want to check out which merchant gift cards have higher resell value. You can check the resell value at website's like GiftCardGranny to get a general idea. The other option is "Doing the Gift Card Swap".

So what is Gift Card Swap?
FrequentMiler does lot of experiment in this regard and one of the things you will see is exchanging (or in his words upgrading) your gift cards. What this means is that for example if you buy OfficeMax gift card you can then go to the store and buy another merchant gift card such as Shell gift card using OfficeMax gift card (which essentially means swapping). That means you can now use the gift card at a full value for something which you would be doing anyway, like filling up gas. The other reason you would do this is that OfficeMax gift card sells for lesser value than other merchant gift cards such as Shell on websites like GiftCardGranny so doing the gift card swap would give a better leverage in value. Of course your mileage may vary as not all OfficeMax store would allow gift card swap. One more thing you might want to note is some stores will only allow you to buy merchant gift card using "physical gift card" and not "e-gift" card. Below are some other merchant where folks have reported success in doing gift card "swap".

1. Sears - You can buy Ebay gift card at this store using your Sears gift card. 
2. Kmart - You can buy Shell, BP and bunch of other gift cards using either Kmart or Sears gift card.
3. Staples - You can use Staples gift card in store to buy Shell or other merchant gift cards.
4. Officemax - You can use your Officemax gift card to buy Shell or other merchant gift cards.

Hope this would help you liquidate your gift cards at a leveraged value.

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