Many (if not most) retailers who sell gift cards don’t give you back the cash on your unused portion.

So if you got a $50 gift card from Grandma to spend at say, Amazon, and you bought a book for $39.95, you’d have $10.05 left over. Which isn’t enough to buy really anything else once shipping’s added unless you spend more money, so it’s pretty common that it goes unspent. And you’re left thinking, what a waste!

One clever US website at www.giftcardonor.com allows you to select from a long list of American retailers, enter the amount/s owing (if you have a few not-fully-used gift cards), the state you live in and voila! You see a list of potential charities that you can donate the remaining money to.

But best of ALL, you can buy the gift cards there too - at a discount! Again, there’s a big list of well-known retailers that make available gift cards (perhaps they were left over from a promotion or have much shorter expiry dates, for example). So, I selected one of my favourites, Williams-Sonoma - and it was 15% off. These cheap gift cards range from 1-2% to 40% off the value remaining on the gift cards which means most of them have strange, not-rounded off amounts - like one I saw with a value of $US293.25 selling for $US249.26. 

Like eBay, you can also sell your unwanted or partially used gift cards and receive cash for them, but this website is the first one I’ve seen that you can actually donate the proceeds to charity.

Tags: bargain-hunting, charity, gift cards, online gift shopping, social cause gift

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:17 am and is filed under gifts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.