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Group Gift Cards

zsimon — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:59:59 +0000

After living states away from my family for years, finding gift giving solutions for all of the birthdays and holidays has become second nature. It always used to involve and old fashioned check in the snail mail, but now we have adopted several different ways to get this done. I have passed my credit card information to my dad and he has collected all of our information for gift cards to my mom, but it still seems difficult. Recently I came across several sites online that are offering group gifting, but only one I have been able to use several times. On giftcards.com there is an option called GroupGift. One person creates the group gift then sends the link to as many people as they want and every can add as much or as little value to the gift as they choose. This was great for a recent wedding, and also used it when I ran the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for anyone who sponsored me. It gives you the ability to track the total and tells you how long you need before they cut the group gifting off and sends the gift card. Another great feature is you can add a customized gift card.

I have also started to use this GroupGift feature for Boss’ Day, where my entire office contributed to the cause to get our top leader one of the best gifts ever. It was his retirement and he had for years been saying he would like to get him a nice watch. Well we didn’t want to pick the watch for him because he has great and specific taste, but we wanted to make sure our gift went towards his goal of purchasing the beautiful new watch. We chose the image that went on the card to be artwork drawn up by one of our staff members of a cartoon character looking in a glass case of watches. It was the perfect gift to close his many years of dedication to our company.

Discover Gift Cards

zsimon — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:33:45 +0000

Discover is frequently associated with cash back and cash back is frequently is associated with savings. Discover gives customers the ability to customize a gift card with a name and personal message and allows buyers to choose any denomination from $25 – $500. The great thing about a Discover gift card is that they are accepted at so many locations and most of the people who sell them provide free standard shipping.

Discover also has a corporate gifting site that allows businesses to choose the greeting card of their choice, the design of the gift card, and then purchase them in bulk. One pitfall to the site that many businesses have spoken out online about is that if you are ordering more than 20 gift cards Discover requires that you pay with a Discover card. Most businesses do not use Discover for their corporate banking needs. A solution to this is provided by purchasing the gift cards from a manufacturer that is licensed to digitally print their own Discover cards and the only company I know of that is capable of this is GiftCards.com.

For corporate Discover rewards they have the ability for businesses to choose the types of merchants where the cards are accepted. For example, if you want to give your employee a night out on the town you could reward them with a Discover gift card that they could use at movie theaters and restaurants. What if you wanted to provide a customer a rebate to spend their gift card only at merchants you chose? This is possible with Discover. GiftCards.com calls this product SelectSpend. The flexibility given to businesses when they provide employee incentives and customer rewards using Discover is what sets Discover apart from other Associations.

Gift Cards to Gift Codes

zsimon — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:10:48 +0000

With the advent of the internet, technology that no longer requires you to swipe your credit card, you can simply wave it, and so much of consumer banking now being done online, there is no doubt a change in the air for traditional credit card and gift card payments. So if I am switching to a virtual wallet and using coupon codes, then why would I keep traditional gift cards in my real wallet, when all they do is take up real estate that is already limited?

Since I know the holidays are coming up, I am certain I will have a few family members and friends that will request gift cards which some people say is impersonal, but I often am not worried about that. My gift is from the heart and I want to get my family and friends something that is easy to ask for, easy for me to remember, and easy to use. Recently I have noticed the rise in gift codes. Website are now selling virtual gift cards by sending out a virtual gift card to an email or Facebook and then that can be used for any online property. Not only is this easier on my, but half the time, with my family, I get them gift cards for stores that are geographically nowhere near them, so I am certain they are using most of the gift card, if not all of it, online anyway.

Recently Google announced they would be licensing Visa’s payWave technology. With this we are moving even closer to removing clunky gift cards from our real wallet and placing them in our virtual wallet. This is making our lives’ easier and leads me to believe that the gift cards and credit cards of the future will be embedded in our phones and make plastic gift card and plastic credit cards seem as ancient as gift certificates.