Supercharge Points & Miles with Gift Card Reselling – QCGC.IO
Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast | Justin Vacula
Justin Vacula hosts Taylor from QCGC (qcgc.io) to show how gift card reselling can help you earn more credit card points, miles, and cashback beyond everyday spending. By buying gift cards during promotions and reselling them through QCGC, keep the rewards while scaling your credit card spending.
Recorded February 6, 2026, this episode covers QCGC’s newly launched portal (live since December 2025) that replaces the old spreadsheet system.
Taylor walks through the platform’s deals section (profit, end dates, sources, remaining capacity, payout rates, and timeframes), the rates page that consolidates brands and denominations (including anywhere sources), and customizable deal alerts (with SMS planned). They also discuss entering payment details for ACH payouts and enabling optional two-factor authentication (2FA).
The episode includes a practical deal-math walkthrough using a Lowe’s promotion example, including grocery rewards, plus guidance on profitability thresholds and choosing the best credit cards. Cards mentioned include Hilton Surpass, Amex Gold (with caution), MGM Iconic, and Citi Strata Premier.
Taylor explains QCGC’s approach to trust and risk management (start small, build reputation, and learn the process), as well as the end-to-end workflow: reserve capacity, buy in-store or online, submit card numbers and PINs, and monitor payouts. They also recommend keeping physical gift cards for up to a year as a best practice.
Chapters / Timestamps:
00:00 Intro: Travel with Points & Miles (Hurdy Gurdy Theme)
00:32 Meet Taylor & QCGC: Supercharging Rewards with Gift Card Reselling
01:57 Gift Card Reselling 101: How Deals & Payouts Work
04:31 Inside the New QCGC Portal: Deals Page, Alerts & Personalization
06:14 Rates Page, Popular Brands & Converting Multi-Brand Gift Cards
08:37 Payout Timing, ACH Deposits & Stacking Bank Account Bonuses
09:30 De-Risking & Bank Scrutiny: Amex and Safer Buying Habits
13:15 More Portal Features: SMS Alerts, Payment Info, 2FA & Feature Requests
15:09 How to Join QCGC + Community: Onboarding, Telegram/WhatsApp Support
17:02 Break + Announcements: Socials, Meetups, FTU, and CardPointers
21:20 Deal Math in Action: Lowe’s Promo, Gas Points, Staples & Profit Thresholds
26:06 Best Cards to Use: Grocery Multipliers, Hilton Surpass, Citi Strata & More
27:44 Real-World Friction: Store Limits, Cashiers Making Up Rules & Target Promos
29:39 Listener Q&A: Trust, Reputation, Starting Small & QCGC’s Track Record
32:55 Step-by-Step Submissions: Reserving Capacity, Uploading Cards, CSV Bulk Entry
34:52 Avoiding Mistakes: Card Number/PIN Formats, Balance Checks & Keep Cards 1 Year
37:04 Wrap-Up: Why Buying Groups Help + Final Thoughts & Outro
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Rough Transcript:
Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures tales to be told, make and save money, the world will unfold.
Fight the war on happiness. Pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold.
You’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast. I’m your host, Justin Vacula Here to help you make money, save money, and travel the world, at next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. Today’s episode features Taylor from QCGC, a gift card reselling platform. Supercharge your credit card rewards beyond everyday spending.
Learn how to capitalize on gift card promotions, buying discounted gift cards or gift [00:01:00] cards with rebates in order to ramp up credit card points and miles. On with today’s episode recorded, February 6th, 2026. Welcome back to the show, Taylor. We chatted before and now we’re back to today to talk about your newly designed website and portal.
Glad to be here. It’s been a while you’ve been in the gift card reselling space and points and miles for a while. Yeah. You’ve had lots of spreadsheets and different ways for people to reserve gift cards that they want to buy, submit gift cards, and you got a lot of feedback of, Hey, can you have some kind of portal or website and now it’s here.
Yeah. The spreadsheet system we used it for a long time, but it obviously was not optimal. We had received lots of feedback from people saying that it was tedious and annoying and, yeah, not ideal.
We finally managed to launch our portal on December 30th. So we’ve had it live for a little over a month at this point, which has been really great.
For listeners who don’t know, can you give a [00:02:00] basic pitch for gift card reselling? What is it and why people should do it? Yeah, so gift card reselling is just one way to accumulate more cash back and points and miles than your everyday organic spend. The general idea being you are purchasing something with your credit card and then you are finding a way to get that money back and then pay the card off and keep the points. With gift card reselling in particular, normally what we look for are gift card promotions either from physical retailers, so there’s lots of different grocery chains in the US that will do gift card promotions or also online retailers as well.
My gift cards plus for example, or PayPal digital gifts. We look for promos where those gift cards are offered at a discounted rate that’s profitable for us to buy them at. And then we’ll send out notifications to our group of members and they’ll go and buy the cards and sell them to us, and then [00:03:00] we pay them back and they pay off their cards and keep all points.
Typically it would be something like a major brand if gift card would be 10% off and you’re buying it back for 89%, 90%, or maybe more. In some situations, people can stack getting category bonuses at certain stores on credit cards, be working toward a signup bonus. The profit, I would think is mostly in the credit card rewards.
Yeah, that’s correct. Normally, it’s around the same price that the person paid it can be occasionally, slightly less than that or even slightly more. And that’s just based on supply and demand. So if there’s a lot of saturation in the market for a specific gift card brand and it’s 10% off at some promo we’ve been able to buy it at 89%, but if that person is getting 2% on their credit card or even more when you factor in category bonuses, so maybe three x or four x points, then obviously it still [00:04:00] makes sense for them to do that. And then even sometimes there are opportunities where if a brand is really hot, so if it has really high resale value and or there’s a lot of scarcity it’s hard to get a lot of, then those are normally the times when we see the ability for us to actually offer commissions on top of whatever that promo.
Discount rate is so yeah, it might be a 10% off card, but we’re able to buy it at eight or 9% off, and then you’ve got some profit in addition to your cash back and points from your card. We’re recording in February of 2026. It’s typically the slower season for gift card deals.
Promotions in stores usually heats up in the fourth quarter of the year with Christmas, Thanksgiving, black Friday. But there’s still a lot of potential in store and with your site. It’s at QCGC.IO You have a tab for deals. People can look on the site and see what’s going on. You have the profit, [00:05:00] the end date of the certain deals, so we don’t have to be hunting different websites and flyers.
You’re calling attention to the deals that make sense. Yeah, that’s correct. People can go into the deal section within our portal and see all the deals that are active. And we also send out email notifications for any deals that we post. You’re able to get notified as soon as we post the deal, so you don’t miss anything.
But you can also configure and personalize the notification setting so that you only get notified about deals that interest you. If you don’t wanna receive deal notifications about some specific retailer or grocery chain that’s regional, that’s not near where you live, you could turn it off.
Or if you only want to do online deals, you could turn off all the in-store, in-store ones and do it that way as well. Going back to the deals section here, it is really nice ’cause it shows you the source where you’re buying the gift cards from, how much capacity is remaining, and like you said the end dates of how much longer you have to actually participate in the deal.
You can [00:06:00] actually click into each deal and then see all of the specific details and in particular the gift card options that are offered for that deal including the cost for each one and the brand, the denomination, the cost, and how much we’re paying out, as well as the payout timeframe.
I also see a rates page. People can submit cards even if there’s not a deal listed on the site, right? The rates page is compiling all of the different gift card options that are being offered across all of the active deals. If you go on the rates page, that just gives you an easy way to see in one view, one consolidated table, all of the different gift card brands and denominations that we are taking and the rates we’re paying for them. And then over on the right side on that rightmost column is where you can click to actually see what deal it’s a part of, and then you can go directly to that deal and reserve the capacity.
We do have certain brands that we will take just on an ongoing basis and sometimes there [00:07:00] aren’t even active deals for those brands or denominations. It’s just a deal where the source is called anywhere as opposed to some specific store.
I’m seeing Amazon gift cards. Those are usually popular and high value, probably in the low to mid 90%. And these might pop up from time to time as they’re often convertible gift cards. Gift cards you can convert to other gift cards. Particularly with online redemptions, we’ve seen the zillions or Zift gift cards.
Those tend to be a pain because after a certain amount you get throttled and you can’t convert more unless you go to different locations with different phones or devices but Amazon happens to be that popular brand and sometimes converting from the zillions gift cards, people can use those perhaps and generate the Amazon gift cards.
Yeah, Amazon is definitely one of the most popular brands and some of the other ones, as are, best Buy target, home Depot. I think those are like maybe the big three or big three, [00:08:00] or at least Best Buy and Home Depot, I’d say, at least for us, are like the big two the top that are top two that are really the most popular.
Obviously it depends on time of year as well. ’cause for example, in Q4, Kohl’s was our number one selling brand. Kohl’s was huge. There’s a lot of demand for that. The zillions cards and there’s also the Happy cards and other similar ones too, where sometimes the discounts on them with the promotions can be profitable and can be pretty advantageous.
But then you have to go through the tedious process of converting them to the target, brand that you actually wanna have so you can sell. You have a payment timeframe on each of the cards and the deals typically around 20 days, maybe sometimes faster than that. People enter their bank information.
You pay through ACH and from my experience, this is often triggered Bank account bonuses. Sign up for a new checking account, have a direct deposit, a certain amount, get a bonus, 300, $400. [00:09:00] Another argument for the gift card reselling. Yeah, you can definitely stack bank bonuses with this too for any of those that require ACH deposits.
So that’s definitely a way a good way to get extra value out of this. If you have a new card and you’re doing a signup bonus and it’s with a bank that doesn’t view gift card purchases when doing a sign up bonus with too much scrutiny, and then you can also stack a bank bonus on top of this.
Double whammy right there. Obviously that’s a pretty good additional strategy. And on the scrutiny side, can you talk to people about de-risking? Surely they’re not going to go into a certain grocery store with a brand new credit card and buy something like $2,000 in gift cards at the even $2,000 amount.
The scrutiny that different banks, put on gift card purchases, especially with signup bonuses, at least in my experience. Seems like it. I feel like there’s been rules of thumb, but at the same time things can change and you might actually know or have [00:10:00] more UpToDate information than I do personally since I don’t actually go any and buy gift cards myself anymore.
He just sits at home. He doesn’t go anywhere. Yeah. I some travel to South America though. Oh yeah. I definitely like doing that, I’m interested to hear again, what you think about this and the things you’ve heard recently.
I feel like I’ve heard over the years conflicting things from different people regarding Amex and gift card purchases with signup bonuses. I’ve heard a lot of people say no, do not do that. And then I’ve heard people say oh yeah, it’s fine. Or I don’t remember if they were talking about after you hit the signup bonus.
I don’t remember if those things have changed or if it’s always been the same with Amex. Yes, with the new card, I would try to keep the purchases smaller, keep ’em different amounts, vary the merchants. Not shove it in their faces. Yeah. Maybe do something like $298.43.
Tell a cashier I’d like to split this transaction on different credit cards, so that way it doesn’t look as gift cardy, let’s say. At least for the in person. The online could be trickier [00:11:00] because maybe they’re larger amounts and maybe you’d have to do separate orders, smaller orders on these newer cards, and not from somewhere like gift cards.com, MasterCard gift card.com, and so on.
I know the other thing with Amex that a lot of people tend to talk about is the fact that they get the L three data. At least with the grocery stores. That’s level three data for Yeah. Listeners. Can you explain that? Sure. Yeah. With level three, it just means that they see, they receive more details on what was actually purchased.
The grocery chain the merchant in this case passes along more data so they can actually see the products that you bought, meaning they could see that you bought gift cards. Now whether they’re gonna shut you down or not might be on a case by case basis, but probably if you wanna be safe, you might wanna avoid that.
Now, in terms of other banks in general, like you mentioned very briefly the idea of, not having the [00:12:00] transaction amount be $2,000 even. something that people have done a lot with this is buy a gift card and then you buy a banana or whatever and makes it $2,000 and 47 cents or something random like that.
They might, the banks might have, caught onto that at this point, after so long, so much time of people doing it. I feel like if you have groceries to buy anyway. Then maybe just go and buy one or two gift cards for whatever promo’s going on at that grocery store, and then also buy your groceries and then have it be an even more random and odd number and make it look more organic and especially when working on a signup bonus.
If the signup bonus is something like 3000, $4,000 in spending, there isn’t a super rush. You can space those transactions out, make some smaller transactions. I think that people can get in trouble if they’re trying to rush and just getting done when they have three months. There’s no need to finish it in two or three weeks.
But the gift cards can be an additional thing. Maybe you get [00:13:00] 50% or 60% of the way there and then you have the gift cards to help you bridge the gap might also be a safe way to approach it and to think about it. Yes. Supplementing the spend that you’re already doing, having a plan to hit the signup bonus.
All good. Talk to us a little bit more about your portal. What are some other features potential buyers or even existing buyers should find interesting. Yeah. The portal is only a month old so we’re still working through adding a lot of new things, but we are doing that at a pretty good speed.
We already talked about the notification settings, and one thing that we’re starting to work on for the notification settings is in addition to email notifications we are also planning to add SMS so that people can get notified via text message as well.
I feel like that would be helpful for some group members and I’ve actually had that requested by multiple people, so we’re working on that. That should be cool once we have that [00:14:00] ready. You have the payment info tab. Yep. It allows you to enter bank name, account number, routing number, and other details.
I think this is nice that you could just do it on the site rather than having to message you or one of your assistants. Yep. And update as desired for different bank bonuses, direct deposit bonuses, and so on. Yeah, that’s correct. It makes it, pretty easy to just do it yourself instead of having to communicate with us.
You have the two factor authentication tap for additional security on your login and your account. Yep. We do have that as well, for people who want to enable that and add more security to their account. Obviously we recommend that everybody do that, but it’s up to each individual.
Even though internally we already have a lot of ideas of things that we wanna add to the portal, I’m always open to, and I try to always welcome new ideas from, existing group members or even people who do gift card reselling and are not in our group currently.
For anyone listening to this, if you have any ideas of [00:15:00] things we can add or Hey, it would be so cool if you guys did, dot. Please reach out and let us know. And Justin, even if you have anything that think of definitely let me know as well.
And how do people get started? You have your website, QCGC.IO, they see your site, they want to join. How does the joining and the process work? Yep, so they can go on our website. They can read more about QCGC on the homepage if they want before they sign up. But we have the sign up button.
Just immediately available when you go to the homepage. You click that and then that takes you to the portal subdomain where you can create an account or sign up if you already have one. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to do. And from there you have community, you have a WhatsApp group?
Yeah, so we have both the WhatsApp group QCGC was started in April of 2020, so we’re coming up on six years of it existing. The WhatsApp group was the very first thing that I did with it. WhatsApp groups only lets you have, I think it’s like up [00:16:00] to 256 members.
It’s full, been full at this point. The other thing we have is our telegram group which I think the limit on telegram groups is like 200,000 members. I doubt we’ll ever reach that. But when you sign up, you get an automated welcome email, sent to you, which includes a few different things, including a link to our onboarding course, which is helpful to get started.
But it also includes the links to both of our Telegram channels. So there’s the Deals channel, which is where we send out the deals, in addition to sending them out via email and then also the group chat where you can go in there and chat with other members . If you have any questions about anything or the best cards to use or how to de-risk your spending and things like that, or if this is your first time hearing about QCGC.
If this is a new thing for you and you feel hesitant about it, you can go in there, in the group chat and ask other people what their experience has been and see what they have to say about their time [00:17:00] participating in our group. Very good. We’ll take a break for some announcements and come back, talk about gift card reselling and the math of a particular deal, because of course, America loves math.
For more content between shows, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and x. Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content, including travel videos, podcast clips and posts. Find more information including select episode transcripts at HurdyGurdyTravel.com.
Visit Meetup.com/PhillyMilesAndPoints to RSVP for monthly Greater Philadelphia Travel Credit Miles and Points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The next meetups in 2026 are February 22nd and March 22nd. Find a link in the show notes. And Taylor, you attended one of the meetups, you gave a presentation.
We had about 20 people for that one That was really well [00:18:00] attended. I remember I was doing a tour of the whole United States, going to all these different conferences and meetups.
I counted at one point, I believe I went to 17 different events that year. And some were big conferences and some were, smaller local meetups. That was fun. Yeah. We had standing, standing room.
We have the private room in the community center upstairs. Yep. You can get whatever food you want downstairs, Chinese food, sushi, flatbread, salad bar, so no one can complain. Oh, I don’t like Mexican food. I’m not gonna go to the meetup here. You get to pick your own and, yeah. Good community people. Yep. Yeah, it was great.
Another community of people, frequent Traveler University I’ll be speaking at and helping organize their conference in Irving, Texas near the DFW airport. Join me from May 1st through the third 2026 at the Nylo Las Colinas Hotel by Hilton for social events and educational sessions.
Ticket sales are live $220 for FTU members and [00:19:00] $269 for non-members. You can grab an annual FTU membership for online courses, seminars, member perks, event discounts, and more. Use my affiliate link in the show notes for membership and conference tickets to help support the podcast. And you’ve been at a lot of these bigger events too.
I’ve been to see the ones that come to mind. Obviously Chicago Seminars is probably the most well-known one. I’ve also been to some events that were put on by Award Travel 101. The Travel on Points crew, so Derek Dye and all them.
We met in Pittsburgh. There was a Travel on Points meetup out there, so that was pretty nice too. Yeah, and I’m actually going to the Travel on Points Meetup in Phoenix at the end of this month. It’s the 27th through March 1st.
I’m excited to go to one of their meetups again. Finally, with the announcements, I’m a proud affiliate with CardPointers. If you have multiple credit cards like me, of course the answer to everything is more [00:20:00] credit cards. The CardPointers app and browser extensions automatically activate bank offers and know which card to use for maximum rewards card pointer saves me time and money.
Use my link CardPointers.com/HurdyGurdyTravel for discount on annual and lifetime plans to help support the podcast. CardPointers, especially helpful for gift card reselling as it activates a lot of offers that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. Yeah, CardPointers is great. You talked about activating the different Amex offers and not only Amex offers.
Chase offers as well, bank of America, Citi, et cetera. Otherwise without card pointers, typically you’re able to do one single offer on one card, as opposed to being able to scale it up and do it across, multiple cards. That’s definitely a big benefit that they offer.
I’ve seen some discounts in store up to around $50. A lot of them will be smaller, but everything adds up. If it’s something you were going to purchase anyway, you get a surprise email. Congratulations. You’ve used your Amex offer, your [00:21:00] Chase offer and so on. Extra money. Pretty easy. Yeah, I actually got done recently using my Dell offer, so I already got that checked off the list for this, first half of the year.
Oh, yeah. It’ll show you the many benefits as well, the quarterly, the monthly, and other statement credits and offers on credit cards. Yep. We’ll return to conversation about gift card reselling and the QC GC platform found at QC gc dot io. We’ll talk about particulars of a deal and some math to go along with it.
Recently there was a promotion for Lowe’s gift cards at a grocery store. I had done this was purchasing the Lowe’s with a 10 times points promotion in store. This would be good for 10% in groceries or 20% in gas. I use these gas points. I’ll wait for my gas tank to get low. I’ll fill the gas tank [00:22:00] and get the maximum value out of the gas fills.
In this case, I was purchasing a $500 Lowe’s gift card, and I’d get paid back $440. In a way it’s a $60 loss, but if I’m getting back a rebate in the form of $50 in groceries or $100 in gas. I’m also getting credit card rewards. This turned out to be a profitable deal and a good opportunity to get a lot of credit card spending in.
The math definitely makes sense on deals like that. I’ve seen a different promo for Lowe’s online as well. Where you could get Lowe’s at 10% off not in a grocery store, so you’re not getting the additional points that you could use for groceries or for gas.
But if you, for example, don’t live in the area where that particular grocery chain is, or you just don’t really feel like going out, leaving the house and buying a physical card, there’s always opportunities to do online spend as well. Each person has [00:23:00] their preference
and how they want to do things. And some people do both. They they go do the in-store deals and get additional grocery points or gas points, and then also do the online ones too. Certainly both for me, and I’ll try to make my trips efficient. As we’re recording today, February 6th, there is a current deal at Staples
for MasterCard gift cards. I can hit several grocery stores and several Staples locations, so I can definitely get a lot, and then I’m saving money on gas using the grocery rewards to pay for it. A really good exchange, especially when the promos are better.
Sometimes higher value brands like Best Buy or Home Depots we’ve mentioned, but I’ll do the deal if it makes sense, if I can make it above cost. Of course, not losing money. But even on breakeven deals, it can still make sense because you’re getting the credit card rewards in addition. If you’re getting 10% off selling the cards for 90%, for example, you’re still getting that three x four x, five [00:24:00] x or that progress towards a signup bonus or a high spend goal.
Yep, exactly. I’m also curious for you, Justin, do you personally have a minimum threshold for profitability on deals that helps you determine whether to participate in one or not? Oh, that’s a really good question. Generally, I don’t like the below cost deals. If it’s going to be something like 10% off and then I were to sell it back at 88%, then it gets a bit dicey.
If I’m losing 2% now, it could be getting 2% back in credit card rewards, but then is it really worth the time, especially if I have to go in store, if I’m making a detour? It really depends on the deal. Preferably it’s at least break even or maybe 1% below cost before figuring in credit card rewards. It’s gonna be a decision for listeners to think about which deals they will do.
I certainly don’t do every deal, and we’ll just have to be selective about the ones that I pick. [00:25:00] Yeah. And the one that you mentioned where it was Lowe’s at that grocery store, and I think you said it was 10 x grocery points. Is that correct? 10% back in groceries or 20% back in gas. I see. Okay.
You basically are just using it for gas to make it worth your while, I’m assuming? Yes. Definitely more value on the gas, but then there’s only so much gas you can pump. Yeah. So at some point I end up cashing out for grocery rewards and in this case the math seems to work better on the using the points side.
Because you’re spending $500 to get that Lowe’s gift card, and then you’re getting that four x five x depending on which credit card you’re using. If you were to buy the groceries, paying cash money, you wouldn’t be getting all those credit card rewards. In a way, you’re saving even more on groceries when you’re using the grocery points.
Yeah, and I’m guessing that, in addition to getting those grocery points or the gas points from that promotion, you’re probably, maximizing the credit card [00:26:00] rewards and not just using a generic 2% card, using one that’s getting you three x or four x points or something like that.
Yes. At the beginning of the year, the Hilton surpasses are quite interesting, spending 15,000 on the Hilton surpass to get a free night certificate in addition to all the Hilton points earned along the way. And if you go beyond that, you can do 30,000 spend on the Hilton surpass in a calendar year later, upgrade to an Aspire credit card activating another
hilton certificate, or if you want to go for the real high score, you can do 60,000 spend on a surpass upgrade to an aspire later in the year and get two additional certificates. A lot of possibility with that Hilton surpass. Then you have cards like Amex Gold, although perhaps proceed with caution, and that’s only 25,000 in a year.
If you’re hitting these deals really hard, you can definitely space it out. Rather than pushing too hard and getting points clawed back. A lot of other grocery earning cards, of course, the MGM [00:27:00] iconic credit card, you’re earning 2% back in comps or free play and getting progress toward MGM status, which is very valuable.
I’m gonna be taking a cruise out of China thanks to benefit of MGM status. Nice. Yeah. And another card I wanted to throw in the mix there and ask you about too is the Citi strata premier. I’m curious if you use that at all for grocery spending with credit card deals since it gets three x on grocery.
That’s a good one. And people like transferring those points to American Airlines or for the more cash back inclined? It’s my understanding, you could just cash out as a statement Credit. 3% cash back at grocery. Not bad at all. Yep. Yeah definitely a good option. It’s a little bit of math, but of course America loves math, finding these deals, seeing what works, seeing what’s in your area.
What you can do at the stores. Sometimes, of course, cashiers making up rules. This is particular at Dollar General where [00:28:00] they’ll advertise these gift card deals. They’ll sell $500 gift cards and they’ll say things like, oh the daily limit that you can get is 100 or, oh, it’s cash only. It’s a store policy.
Some friction on the ground at times. Yeah. I remember there was a gift card promotion at Target, and I believe it’s this one that they do, several times a year where you buy a $100 Apple gift card and you get a $10 Target gift card for free of the bonus.
And obviously in, in those situations the cards are not being offered at a discount. You’re buying ’em at face value and just getting a bonus, but then you can sell both of those cards to QCGC, for example and get paid back for both and be somewhere around, pretty close to the price you paid.
I remember participating in that deal and driving around to, a few different target locations in my area. And what you’re talking about, just now is exactly what happened. The people working at each store, whether [00:29:00] it was an employee or an actual manager, would say different things in terms of what the limit was for the gift cards in the promos.
One would say you can only buy four. And the other one’s you can only buy two. And another one’s you can only buy 10. I don’t think any of these is the actual limit. ’cause it’s all different based on, the location.
And in that case, I don’t think there actually was any limit either hard coded or otherwise, they were making stuff up.
I typically suggest people to not fight with employees or managers too much unless there’s something written that says Hey, there’s no limit or The limit is X and they say it’s Y. You would just wanna have discretion in instances like that.
We have some listener questions. One benefit for podcast listeners, you can subscribe to my page, subscribe star.com. Search Hurdy Gurdy Travel. One of the tiers is asking podcast guests and me your questions. We have one listener, Michael Trager of Travel Zork and [00:30:00] Zork Fest. He says, once you submit and have given them everything and including the gift cards, how are you able to feel secure in getting paid?
Is it all based on trust of the company and their reputational integrity? If you’re doing any kind of reselling, whether it’s gift cards or physical merchandise and electronics, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with, you’re trusting that company to pay you back.
I would say for anyone that’s getting started in general with this, or just getting started with any, particular buying group, start small, don’t just jump in and do a ton of volume.
I also think that reputation and length of time that a company in this space has been operating is key as well. You wanna avoid dealing with anyone who’s not, just like widely recognized as being a legitimate option. In terms of QCGC, we’re coming up on six years of being around, but if you’re, somewhat hesitant, sign up, [00:31:00] just lurk around for a little bit. Go look in the portal, see how everything works.
You can go in there and say, Hey I’m new. I wanna do this, I feel hesitant or whatever you wanna say and ask for people’s feedback on, what their experience has been participating in our group. A lot of them have also met me at conferences and things like that they have personal relationships with me too.
That’s what I would suggest is asking other people what they think and seeing what the overall reputation is for the company you’re gonna work with, and then starting out slow and scaling up gradually. I’ve been selling to you for several years and we had times where the Best Buy market was incredibly strong.
Definitely submitting a lot of gift cards, thousands of dollars in Best Buy when there’d be some really great promotions or the rates on the cards were very high. One period, I remember Best Buy was even around the 99% range. If you were to even do the lowest form of just using a 2% [00:32:00] cashback card and no promotion, it was above cost after the credit card rewards.
But often when there were grocery rewards in play, gas in play, other kind of rebates or incentives, it was pretty wild. It’s been a good history and certainly you’ve evolved. It’s not just you. You have a team of people. If you were to unfortunately get hit by a bus a lot of other people would be able to pick up and do the work too.
Yeah, that’s correct. At this point, including myself, there’s 11 people on the team. It’s definitely not just a one man show where everything’s relying upon me. Which is great because that means I can stress a little bit less about everything though than I have knowing that I have a lot of things delegated to the team and go on those South America trips once again.
Yep. I’m in Argentina right now. I got here on Saturday and I realized that this is the 13th time I have traveled here. My Las Vegas count is pretty high too. And with the submissions, it was part of the listener questions.
Can you talk about how the submission [00:33:00] process works? We went past that a little bit in the beginning. If you’re to get a gift card from a store, are they mailing in the card? What are they doing to submit the details? First you would figure out which deal you wanna participate in and determine if it’s financially worthwhile. Click into the deal within our portal. Reserve capacity.
You would say, all right, I’m gonna reserve one gift card for this deal, or two or three or four, however many you are planning to purchase and then send to us. You would reserve the capacity and then there’s a specific section in the portal within your account that’s called reservations.
Then you would be able to go in that after you have made a reservation and see that reservation in there, then you would go and purchase the gift card. If it’s an in-store deal, you would need to physically go there. Buy the gift card, bring it back home. If it’s an online deal, you’re just gonna go onto whatever website is offering that .
They would typically email it to you and then you would within your [00:34:00] reservation click this button that says Submit gift cards. Type in the gift card number in the PIN. You can do this with a single gift card.
You can type in card number. If you have a bunch of gift cards there’s also a bulk entry option and a CSV upload option, so you can paste ’em all in this one big text field if you already have them in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Or same thing if you wanna do CSV upload. At that point you have uploaded the gift cards. Then you can go back and see all the gift cards that you’ve uploaded in the gift cards section, as well as your upcoming payouts. And you have to make sure that you submit or upload your banking information in order to receive those payouts.
Once you’ve done that, then you just wait for the payout and you get paid via ACH. Okay, sounds good. Some of the cards can be tricky, trying to find the correct codes, the correct pins, and you have information on the site about [00:35:00] what those strings are or where to find the details on the cards?
Yeah, we have our onboarding course which covers pretty much everything in terms of how the whole process works and how to do it from start to finish. I remember the Cabela’s gift cards would be really tricky. They would have multiple strings. There would be letters and numbers at the top.
Yeah. Yeah. Some codes in the middle, some at the bottom. What is going on? Yeah. We also have as part of our portal, it knows what to expect for the gift card numbers for each brand. Meaning it knows if the gift card number is supposed to be 19 digits or 16 digits, and if the PIN is supposed to be four digits, or if there even is a PIN or not, or if it can be alpha numerical or if it needs to be only digits. It won’t let you submit the gift card number if it doesn’t match up with the format that those gift cards come in.
Maybe that helps a little bit too. It definitely helps for us on the back end, just to avoid, gift card numbers where there’s too many digits. But it can also be a [00:36:00] little helpful potentially for people who are submitting the cards and if this is their first time.
And of course, as a buyer, keep your physical gift cards for at least a year. You can possibly typo a gift card, and you’re responsible for having that information should there be a typo or some discrepancy? Yeah, that is correct. You need to make sure you hold onto the physical gift card for up to a year.
We’re gonna try to reduce the required timeframe at some point, because I’ve seen that happening just in the rest of the market in general. If you submitted a gift card and later on it comes back as invalid,
then, we’d have to go back to you and say, Hey, we need you to, fix this card if it’s a typo, if there’s something off with the number. Our team internally balance checks all the cards that we receive before we go and sell them. There are still gonna be situations where a customer comes back to us every once in a while and reports a card as being invalid or [00:37:00] having some kind of issue, but we try to avoid that upfront as much as we can.
And you’re selling these to different end users. Rather than us on a site like Raise, that’s going to charge a big seller fee, you’re selling in bulk. You’re able to do this. It’s saving us the time of trying to find the buyers. Saving us the listing fees. And you have relationships with people who are heavy resellers.
Yeah. That is correct. We save, suppliers the hassle of having to go and sell on, raise slash gcx or wherever, or just having to go and find a buyer, wherever that may be. The fact that you have a guaranteed payout rate and payout timeframe for the specific gift card and, brand and denomination that you bought just makes life easier.
I have heard stories of people who heard about gift card reselling, were super excited about it and just went and bought some random gift card. And then we’re like, okay, now how do I sell this?
That’s, not the way [00:38:00] to do it. You wanna know exactly which gift card brand and denomination, ’cause that’s important too you’re buying and who you’re gonna sell it to, what price they’re paying. If it makes sense financially with your credit card rewards and how long it’s gonna take to be paid back.
As we come to a close, anything else you’d like to add? We wanna make this portal as amazing as we possibly can, and we wanna make sure that it offers maximum value to the suppliers and the users who are gonna be using it.
We welcome any ideas of how we can improve it, either in the short term or in the future. Don’t be afraid to, give us crazy, unrealistic sounding ideas to make you the perfect gift card reselling platform.
That’s qc gc.io, people finding all your information through your website. Yep, that’s correct. Thank you for coming on today. Cool, man. Thank you very much.
I appreciate it and I had a good time.
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