Do you need gift cards, and a lot of them? If you’re planning a gifting campaign, chances are you can save money by buying wholesale gift cards. While the typical use case for buying wholesale gift cards is for resale, large-volume senders can take advantage of great prices while sourcing cards that their recipients will love.
Just as with any wholesale purchase, you can save money when you buy in bulk. In these arrangements, the buyer is agreeing to acquire a bulk sum of gift cards in return for a significant discount over retail prices. The wholesale discount is often meant for buyers creating a side hustle or small business. However, these same wholesale arrangements can be used to save money on your marketing, customer service, incentive, and employee reward programs.
If you’re not in a position to buy gift cards in bulk, the secondary market can sometimes help you secure a smaller amount of cards (though we will discuss further the lack of scalability in this approach.)
Some buyers are purchasing wholesale gift cards in order to resell them on the secondary market. Many of the cards on these sites are unwanted gift cards that consumers are selling in order to get something that suits them better. Gift card exchange sites may be like for like, work on a credit system, or be a straight purchase depending on the site and its rules.
Sometimes wholesale clubs such as BJs Wholesale Club and Sam’s Club will offer discounts close to wholesale price for their customers. These are still retail gift cards, and there are typically limits and gift card terms on those card purchases, but for consumers looking to save money and find the best buy, this can be a great way to score a discounted gift card based on availability.
Often large brand cards such Starbucks, Walmart, and Amazon gift card will offer bulk purchase options with better discounts to their corporate clients. While these arrangements may not always result in a discount, they can still improve the item cost of sending a gift card out to recipients.
Depending on the volume of digital gift card purchases you intend to make and the partnerships you are able to establish, you can potentially save as much as 15% to 25% on the face value of each card. What's more, you'll be able to avoid the activation fees that drain the spend optimization out of your campaigns.
When you're seeking wholesale gift cards for resale or discount gift cards, you can often find these on secondary markets such as Raise, Gift Card Granny, and others. The availability and discounts on these secondary market sites may vary, but often customers can find a great deal on big retailers such as Amazon, Disney gift cards, American Express cards, and visa and MasterCard debit cards.
The most obvious benefit of using wholesale gift cards for your programs is the ability to save hundreds or thousands of dollars per campaign by reducing the cost per card. Often larger companies can buy hundreds of cards at a time, creating excellent volume discounts.
The benefits of buying wholesale gift cards include:
Administering a physical gifting program is a time-consuming process. Sometimes companies start out with a small program 4 a select amount of employees or customers. At some point though, your business and your gifting program grow and physical gift cards cannot scale accordingly. Many times, buying wholesale gift cards means buying them electronically, saving you the time of sourcing and shipping a physical card.
When you use e-gift cards for your campaigns, you avoid the activation and shipping costs that bog down your budget. While these costs might seem manageable over a few employees, when multiplied over whole departments or even hundreds of employees or customers, they can become a significant leak in your budget.
When you purchase bulk gift cards for wholesale or gifting programs, you have the benefit of tracking each card that goes to a recipient. You can understand at a glance how your campaigns are performing, what types of offers interest your customers and employees most, and the entire life cycle of cards that you send to recipients.
For wholesale gift card orders, it pays to do some research and protect yourself when buying wholesale gift cards to use for your campaigns. For corporate purposes, developing brand relationships with card providers is a much safer way of administering your gifting programs. Unfortunately, secondary market outlets often suffer from fraud and identity theft issues. By dealing directly with the distributor, you can avoid issues that can cost you time and money. You can also buy e-gift cards rather than a physical gift card to avoid the manual tasks of shipping.
The best method of securing gift cards for your campaigns is to partner with a trusted gifting platform that allows you to purchase cards at the best price and deliver them easily. Buying wholesale gift cards through a platform like Runa allows you the full range of security features, as well as a host of money- and time-saving features that you can't get when trying to use a DIY discounting approach.
When researching gift card platforms, here are some features and options you'll want to be sure are included:
Administering large-scale gifting campaigns often means sending gift cards to recipients all over the world. Look for a gifting platform with robust global options for brand partners. By using a platform with an extensive catalog of choices, you will be able to delight and surprise your recipients no matter where they live in the world.
A gifting platform does not operate in a vacuum. You will want any platform you choose to have full capabilities of talking to your other vital financial systems. Look for an option with a robust API as well as several built-in integration options for the most popular finance and marketing systems.
Using a platform should make your life easier. Look for a platform that not only offers many features, but offers them in a way that is intuitive and easy to learn. Find a platform that can serve stakeholders across departments, whether it is your HR, marketing, or customer service department looking to make someone's day.
If you are just getting started with using a gifting platform to upgrade your corporate programs, you'll want to program that makes it easy to pay for and deliver your cards. Runa offers easy credit card-based transactions for smaller companies as well as more integrated solutions for enterprise users. This simplicity makes it easy for anyone at your company to build and launch a campaign in just a few minutes without getting bogged down in technical details.
If you are ready to start buying wholesale gift cards for your corporate campaigns, we make it easy to get started with our platform and build programs to engage any recipient.
Check out a demo of the Runa platform today and see how easy it can be to bring your gifting to the next level.