I've gotten some requests to share the FAQ that I keep referring to from this company. I have added it below:
What is [product]?[product] is a tool developed by [company] to help crowdsource the gift card supply we use for our business. Demand is quite high and we need your help buying gift cards from Amazon at discounted rates.
The Amazon Prime Store and Amazon Chase Visa cards let you purchase gift cards at a 5% discount in the form of a statement credit. However, regulations limit the amount of gift cards sold to a single person to $10,000/day.
We will buy gift cards from you at some variable discount, which will always be less than 5%, and you get to keep whatever is left. For example, with today's 4.49% discount, you get to keep 0.51% of your order.
The process works as follows:
- You buy gift cards on Amazon.com and send them directly to us. See the instructions tab for more details.
- Within 1 hour of when we receive the cards, we'll send you payment for 95.51% of the gift card value via PayPal.
- You cash out of PayPal into your bank account, pay off the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card, and repeat as soon as you have more credit available. You keep 0.51% of the total GC value purchased.
Example:
You buy 20 $500 cards for $10,000
We PayPal you $9,551
You pay off the $10,000 balance on your card
At the end of the billing period, you get a statement credit of $500, keeping $51
Rinse and repeat
Tax InformationWe are required to collect a W-9 form from every user of [product]. This is a short form strictly for "information reporting" (source) and mainly contains your address and Social Security number. We need to keep this form on file internally, but we do not send this to the IRS.
Please consult a tax professional for more information about how to properly report your earnings. An approach that we've used has been to file a Schedule C and report your total [product] reimbursements in Box 1 (Gross receipts). Report the sum of your gift card purchases minus your total cash back as Box 4 (Cost of goods sold). Boxes 5 & 7 (Gross profit/income) will then accurately reflect your income from [product]. Although some sources claim that credit card rewards are not taxable, they may be taxable when they are used for business purposes.
If you have over 200 transactions per year through PayPal, you will receive a 1099 from PayPal (source).
FAQWhat do you need gift cards for?[company] has relationships with some of the largest bulk Amazon buyers. They use gift cards to fund their orders, and so we sell them to those sellers at a discount. We typically buy our gift cards from large b2b Amazon gift card resellers (at 5%+ discount), and we use [product] to add more supply when we have particularly high demand.
I got a reimbursement, but it was for less than the amount of cards I sent.
We get a separate email for each gift card in the order. Sometimes, emails get delayed (either by Amazon or by Gmail). We wait 45 minutes for the cards to stop trickling in, and then group them into one reimbursement. Sometimes, the emails get delayed by more than that (we've seen up to 12 hours).
Please do not click "Resend" on a gift card on Amazon.com, as this will invalidate the old gift cards that we've already loaded into our system.
In rare cases, if it's been over 48 hours since you placed the order, and all of the other codes in that order say "Redeemed", you can click "Resend" on the one or two cards that haven't been sent (that you haven't gotten reimbursed for). This happens because Amazon sometimes fails to send all of the emails for that order to us, and you need to retry.
How do I know I'll be reimbursed?We understand there's a fair amount of trust involved here, so if you have any concerns feel free to reach out to us! Shoot an email to
and we can either get a call scheduled to answer any questions you have or even schedule a visit to the office in San Francisco so you can see what we're all about.[b]What are the downsides?[/b] It's a few minutes of manual effort every few days to order the gift cards, pay off the credit card, and do the accounting. We have had two isolated cases where users' Chase accounts were closed without reason and with no recourse. Although they got all their cash back issued, they are now unable to open Chase credit cards.