Introduction
Well that escalated quickly… on Thursday night, I realized I still had the Amex $25 off $100 Staples on a couple of my AMEX cards. I went to go buy some eBay gift cards from Staples and saw this:
That was a little bit too much rich for my blood so I slept on it. In the morning, sure enough, all of the eBay electronic gift cards have been removed from the Staples site. When you search, you get this. Don’t ask me why Red Robin shows up when I search for ‘Ebay gift card’ on Staples.
And in your order history, you’ll see that it has been discontinued:
So why has all this been happening of late? Disclaimer – this is my own conspiracy theory – A certain retailer didn’t like their gift card volume and looked into what card people were using to buy these gift cards. Noticed it was WF and told WF, “WTF WF?!?” WF then sends out a warning letter to HH’s and tells them to cut that shit out! In the meantime, eBay, desperate for top line revenue, stopped their stupid $5K of GC per x months limit and opened a floodgate of gift card usage. They then get flooded with gift card usage and wanted to slow people down. Told Target.com to remove eBay GC’s. Told Gyft to lower their eBay GC’s to $25. Told Staples to stop selling eBay eGC’s. I’m sure another avenue will fall victim soon too. As a result of the WF and Target/eBay death, now the 3rd party GC exchanges will see fewer sellers to them, thus buyers will see less inventory of Ebay/Target GC discounts (as well as some other merchant GCs too.) This is the mother of all MS snowballs and it may not have gotten to the bottom of the hill yet…
You could use Staples gift cards to buy eBay gift cards and then use those to buy Staples gift cards and on and on… They didn’t want that loop to happen anymore. No its not simple but it is/was possible.
Yeah I know that’s possible but YMMV and really hard to scale.
Any thoughts on the Chicago Hamilton presale?
Scored some for Vday this morning.
I noticed Target gift cards are no longer sold on ebay either from one of the big companies. I just load up with the kroger 4x fuel points…hopefully grocers are not the next ax to fall!
I doubt it Mark since I’m sure that’s a good source for legit customers.
It’s got to be tough work for CC banksters these days. You have to plan for so many avenues of arbitrage and gaming with every promo.
What does WF have to do with this? I’m pretty sure they just finally woke up when they crunched the #s and noticed people were making money off of them.
I don’t think WF had anything to do with this directly, but WF HH’ers were also doing the Target/Ebay merrygoround, which would end up with a lot of eBay GC’s, which were then used in a way that Ebay didn’t like.