Good morning everyone, I hope your Wednesday is off to a great start. 2 weeks ago, I sold a few Panera Bread gift cards to SaveYa and I wanted to share my positive experience selling to SaveYa. The first thing I did was look on Gift Card Granny’s sell prices for Panera Bread gift cards. Let me explain that I love Panera Bread but there are no restaurants near me in San Francisco. Plus, I bought these gift cards several months ago at a discount, so I don’t mind selling them for a big discount.
Anyway, since I am a small time gift card reseller (1-2 gift cards per month, I’m no bulk discount gift card reseller), I asked my friends on Twitter which gift card reseller I should use: SaveYa or Gift Card Rescue? The response was overwhelming. Everyone had a terrible experience with Gift Card Rescue and strongly recommended SaveYa. I’m sold!
Here is a timeline of everything from beginning to end (check in hand). I submitted my sell order at 10pm on 5/18, so let’s say the start date was 5/19 when I sent the 3 Panera Bread gift cards to SaveYa via USPS First Class Mail. At the time, SaveYa was offering to buy my Panera Bread gift cards for 80.01% of face value.
Here are all 3 confirmation emails from SaveYa. Since I could only receive payment via check, not PayPal, the disclaimer at the bottom of the email says “Delivery is typically 7-10 business days after receipt and processing.”
On Monday 5/23, I received an email from SaveYa that they received 2 of my Panera Bread gift cards and were sending out a check for $124.01. That sounded great, but what happened to my third Panera Bread gift card? I shipped all 3 Panera Bread gift cards together in the same padded envelope with a rubber band around all 3 gift cards.
Luckily, without any intervention by myself, I received another email the following day on 5/24 that they received my third Panera Bread gift card and were sending out a check for $40.01.
Yesterday, on 5/31, I received both checks for $124.01 and $40.01. The checks have different dates on them, so they were probably sent out or processed on different days.
Given that I am in San Francisco and SaveYa is in Pittsburgh, PA (boo Pittsburgh Penguins, go San Jose Sharks!), sending a small padded envelope across the country and getting 2 letters in return within 2 weeks is very impressive. If you live closer to Pennsylvania, your turnaround time should be even faster. As a recap, here are the dates:
- 5/19 – I sent out all 3 Panera Bread gift cards via USPS First Class Mail
- 5/23 – I received the first SaveYa email for 2 Panera Bread gift cards
- 5/24 – I received the second SaveYa email for 1 Panera Bread gift cards
- 5/31 – I received 2 checks from SaveYa ($124.01 and $40.01)
I still prefer to sell gift cards via Raise since I can sell most gift cards electronically, but if Raise is not accepting electronic gift cards, I will definitely use SaveYa. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!
Saveya is horrible to deal with. I have sold them thousands worth of legitimate gift cards obtained directly from retailers. They banned me as a bulk seller for NO REASON, and when I pressed for a reason, they gave me some generic response. Also, customer service sucks and most of the time you will have to talk to someone from another country with limited English skills. Good luck with that.
Thank you for sharing Alice, I’m sorry to hear that SaveYa banned you as a bulk seller.
Ditto the negative review for Gift Card Rescue. Horrible service, if you can get any at all. Took 2 months of unanswered phone calls (not even a message machine, just endless ringing!), emails and a check they supposedly sent went missing in the mail before I finally got paid. Since they are so prominent (amazingly) among the top gift card buyers I don’t think there’s much risk that you’ll get ripped off, but if you deal with them just don’t plan on a SaveYa-type 2-week turnaround. Plan on more of a 2-month ordeal of lots of unanswered phone calls and slow email responses as to what the heck is going on with your cards. I won’t even consider using them again regardless of how much more they may be offering than the other guys. Not worth it. /rant off/
Thank you for sharing your experience. I wrote about another gift card reseller with terrible service call Card Snagger: http://travelwithgrant.com/2014/02/24/psa-dont-buy-or-sell-gift-cards-to-from-card-snagger/
It’s good that we support the good gift card resellers and let the others go out of business before they can mess with more consumers.
SaveYa has been dependable with the sales I’ve made to them and one I have no problem dealing with. Looks like you can find bad experiences with nearly every one of these gift card buyers but after my experience with Gift Card Rescue I found that, by far, they have the most negative reviews of all. But to be fair, I’m sure even with them, some have had no problem at all dealing with them.
If I was an unscrupulous gift card reseller, I would make sure the first 1-2 transaction went through really fast for each customer and then take 1-2 months to pay out for the 3+ transaction. So far, I’ve had good experience buying from Raise and Gift Card Zen.
Grant, you went through Topcashback before selling on SaveYa, right? It would net you another 2%. http://www.topcashback.com/saveya/
Dang, I totally forgot to look at cash back portals. Where were you 2 weeks ago with that info?? I will remember next time :)
I wish that I could get this to work… I have been talking with the top cashback people for weeks because nothing will ever track when it comes to save ya. I have a 100% tracking rate with Raise and a 0% with Save Ya.
Hmm, that’s odd. Maybe the SaveYa affiliate links are the problem.
Grant, is tracking included with USPS first class mail? If not, are you concerned with gift cards being lost in mail?
I printed a USPS First Class Mail shipping label that comes with delivery confirmation (aka tracking). I took a pic of the gift card codes in case they got lost in the mail.
Grant- I am not sure why you are not considering abc gift cards. They are quick, professional and also have options to enter gc codes online for some merchants. Usually they are about 0.5-1% less than saveya but they have fantastic service. I would bite that little loss knowing that things will flow thru safely.
Thanks for the recommendation, Ash. Next time I’m in the market to sell gift cards, I will consider ABC Gift Cards :)
Yet another horror story about GCR….
http://milestomemories.boardingarea.com/gift-card-rescue-bankrupt/
Oh joy, this should be a good read. Thanks for sharing Tyler.
I have had a terrible experience with saveya.com as well. I have been using them for several months. I purchase large amounts of gift cards off their website. 3 weeks ago, my saveya account got frozen for no reason. I called them several times and they will not unfreeze it. They said is was due to fraud protection. But I am the owner of this account, and the credit cards I tried to use. They have banned any credit cards from my home address from being used on their website. ALL FOR NO REASON. Now I cant even use their website at all and I am pissed. I spend around $5,000 a month on saveya, now I spend 0. I guess they must enjoy losing business. They should spend more time on the people who are actually committing fraud rather than the ones who arent!
That makes no sense as a business to punish those power users who spend the most money on their site. Now that SaveYa won’t let you buy anything, what is your go to gift card reseller?
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