Buying Gift Vouchers at a Discount

December 2, 2007 – 11:38 am

Did you know that you can buy gift vouchers and pay less for them than they’re actually worth? It’s true! If you go to the right places, then you can. Sometimes this means buying them in larger quantities but sometimes it doesn’t, and either way, if you know you’re going to be spending that amount in that shop, then it’s worth it to save some money.

A good example of this, is The virgin credit card members shop – obviously you have to be a virgin credit card holder to take advantage of this one, but if you are, then you can buy a variety of gift vouchers for less than their face value, like £5 boots voucher would cost you £4.75 or a £10 Argos voucher would cost you £9.50 – Ideal if you want these as a gift for someone!

Sometimes Ebay can be a good place to buy and sell gift vouchers, you don’t always get a fantastic deal, but sometimes you do. I bought £100 of boots vouchers on there for £89 a few months ago, saving myself a whopping 11% on my shopping. However, I’ve also paid face value for gift vouchers on there, which may seem silly, but I was happy to do it as the shop didn’t take paypal, and the ebay seller did, and I had money in paypal which I preferred to use rather than having to draw on my bank account. Full list of gift vouchers on sale on Ebay

The Love to reward site is another place where you can get a decent discount, but this IS somewhere that you will need to buy in bulk in order to do so. For orders placed in Nov/Dec 2007 they’re offering discounts from 2% for orders of £500-999 up to 6.5% if you were ordering £50,000 or upwards. Now I know most of us aren’t likely to be wanting to spend THAT much, but bearing in mind how many shops accept love2shop vouchers (Boots, Woolworths, HMV, River Island, WHSmith, Homebase, Bhs, Comet, Iceland, Dolcis, JJB, New Look and Waterstone’s, amongst others), you could always look at getting together with a few friends and placing an order to save you all a little money. For example, if you had 10 people who all wanted £100 worth each, you could get a 4% discount for buying £1000 worth, and you’d get free delivery as well (this is on any order over £250).

Another way to get a discount on gift vouchers, is to buy them from the shop’s website and use a money off coupon code when you order. You need to check the small print as some places won’t let you use a code when buying gift vouchers, but some will, and then you can save the gift vouchers to use when you want to and still get the discount.

You could even be very cheeky and contact a store and ask them if they’d be willing to offer you a discount for buying a large amount of gift vouchers. Many will do this for corporate clients, and so might well be willing to offer you this if you ask. Lets face it, there’s no harm done by asking, and if you don’t ask then you definitely won’t get!

Don’t forget as well, that if you get given gift vouchers at Christmas or something, and they’re for a shop that you’re not really keen on, then you could always try selling them on ebay so that you’d have money which could be spent oooh, anywhere instead!

By Vialdana