How to Keep Your Gift Cards From Going to Waste

If you received $20 cash tucked in a greeting card, you would immediately put the money in your wallet and possibly even spend it the next time you went to the store, says Shelley Hunter, founder of Gift Card Girlfriend, a digital destination that provides insights and tips into the gift card industry. Not doing the same with gift cards is a key reason they tend to be forgotten. 

The more accessible and visible a gift card is, the more likely it is that it’ll be used. And saving it for the “right” occasion might not be doing you any favors, either. “The longer you hold on to a card, the higher the likelihood you’ll lose it or forget to use it,” Hunter says. “The card either sits indefinitely or disappears in some way.” 

You use a portion of a gift card and are left with a single-digit balance you can’t quite put toward much else. Sound familiar? 

Most retailers don’t allow consolidation of balances, so the easiest way to work around that is to simply tell the cashier in a store that you have several gift cards to use, Hunter says. “Although you can use multiple Visa or other bank-issued gift cards in stores in a single transaction, you can typically only use one per transaction when shopping online.” 

The workaround there is to use a bank-issued card to purchase a store gift card, she adds. “When the store gift card arrives, you can combine that card with a second bank-issued gift card to complete an online purchase. Though not convenient, that is one way to combine the balances of bank-issued gift cards for use online—without actually combining the balances into a single gift card.”

According to the RGCA, some retailers will also enable shoppers to load physical gift cards and e-gift balances onto their apps or onto registered accounts often associated with rewards programs. They say that most major mobile wallets will allow for gift card loads onto consumers’ accounts as well. 

So what happens if you lose a gift card? If you registered it with the gift card company, it may make it easier to track down the number—otherwise, you may have to do a little digging around. If you purchased the gift card digitally, look through your email for a receipt or transaction details, which could include the card number. If you received it as a gift, you may have to track down the giver of the card, per Hunter’s advice, and see whether they retained any record of the transaction. 

“Typically, gift cards do not expire, and with the right information provided, most companies offering gift cards can help ‘recover’ a forgotten number, but not always,” Dunckelmann says. 

If a nonpromotional gift card expires but there are still funds on the card, contact the card’s issuer to check the balance and see whether you can get a replacement, Hunter says. “If you don’t have the physical gift card or the e-gift card, you will likely have to provide proof of ownership with a purchase receipt.”

If you find yourself on the receiving end of a gift card you’re unlikely to use, Hunter suggests repurposing it immediately via a donation, regifting, or using it to buy a present for someone else. “Though not what the gift giver intended, it’s better to transfer the value of the gift card to someone else than to toss the value entirely,” she says. 

If you choose to resell your gift card, do so with caution and be wary of third-party services. Due to an uptick of fraudulence in the gift card reseller industry, Hunter advises consumers to avoid trading their cards for cash, unless it’s with a trusted source. Or give it to a nonprofit organization, because they are always looking for donated gift cards that can be auctioned off at fundraisers or used to buy supplies.