Where to Buy Discounted Gift Cards

Both live offers read as 20% off: pay $50, get $60 of value. Neither works that way. The Cheesecake Factory bonus cannot be spent until September 8, dies on September 30, and cannot be combined with any other discount or offer. IHOP's cannot be redeemed on the day it is issued, expires October 13, and is limited to one card per party, per table, per visit. That last clause is the expensive one. Earn five IHOP bonus cards and you need five separate visits before October 13 to see the money. You have paid full price today for a restricted coupon you might not spend. If you were going to eat there anyway and you can name the visit, take it. Otherwise it is a discount on paper only. ^{6 7}

The resale marketplaces are the answer most articles give, and on the numbers we could read they are the weaker one. CardCash's own front page, read on 2026-09-01, advertised its featured brands in a band running from about 1% to about 13% off, restaurants strongest. On the same day Sam's Club listed a $30 Cold Stone card for $20.79 and a $50 Outback card for $39.98. The club prices are several times the resale discount on comparable dining brands. The resale market's real advantage is not the size of the discount, it is that you can buy one card for one brand without paying a membership fee. ^{1 3 4}

Raise built the category and still turns up first for it. What it sells today is different. Its home page leads with Shop, Pay and Earn, and describes earning cash rewards instantly on every purchase. On its all-brands page every tile we examined was labelled with an amount earned back rather than an amount off, Sephora at 5% back among them, and a search of that page turned up no percent-off language at all. That is a rewards programme, not a discount market. The distinction matters at checkout: with a discounted card you pay less today, and with a rewards programme you pay full price today and are credited afterwards, on the issuer's terms. ⁵

A resale card can arrive already drained, and CardCash is unusually direct about why. It names the two causes itself: the card was bought with a stolen credit card and later cancelled by the issuer, or the original owner spent the balance after selling it. Its answer is a 45-day guarantee of the ordered amount and a full refund on a discrepancy reported inside that window, plus two instructions: check the balance before you go to the store, and use the full balance within 45 days. The trap is in its own bold warning. Checking the balance and finding it fine does not extend anything. On day 46 a card that drains is your loss. Treat a resale gift card as perishable. ³

Everything above is about saving a few percent. This part is about losing the whole amount. The FTC's position is blunt: only scammers will tell you to buy a gift card and give them the numbers off the back, and no real business or government agency will ever tell you to buy a gift card to pay them. The tactics it lists are consistent, and the tell is who started the conversation. Someone contacts you, says it is urgent, names the card to buy and the store to buy it at, then asks for the number and PIN. The FTC also gives the step people skip: keep the card and the store receipt, because that is what you use to report the scam to the card company and ask for your money back. ⁸

We list cashback only where we can pay it and prove the rate. Here we can do neither, on every row. Costco, CardCash and Raise are not partners of ours at all. Sam's Club is a partner, on a network that works, but it has no page on this site for us to send you to, so no rate is claimed for it. That leaves a page with four rows and no money link on it, ranked purely on what each one costs you.

A warehouse club, if you have a membership. Sam's Club listed a $30 Cold Stone card at $20.79 and a $50 Outback card at $39.98 on 2026-09-01, and Costco's restaurant listings were mostly $100 of value for $79.99, inside the 20% to 25% band it claims. Resale sites are the fallback when you want one brand and no membership. ^{1 2}

When a brand you already eat at is running a bonus offer, and only then. Two are live: The Cheesecake Factory through September 7 and IHOP through September 13, both giving a $10 bonus card per $50 spent. Club prices, by contrast, carry no end date and no reason to rush. ^{1 2 6 7}

We found none. A search of CardCash's own homepage, guarantee and FAQ pages turned up no promo-code offer, and Raise presents rewards rather than discounts. Do not spend time hunting for one; the saving is in the price of the card itself. ^{3 4 5}

They carry a specific risk, and the sellers say so. CardCash names both failure modes, a card bought with a stolen credit card and later cancelled, or an original owner who spends the balance after selling. Its cover is 45 days from purchase, full refund on a discrepancy reported in time. After that the loss is yours, so spend the card quickly. ³

We cannot tell you, and be wary of anyone who can. The Blue Cash Preferred page promises 6% back on eligible purchases at U.S. supermarkets, up to $6,000 a year, then 1%. It does not say whether a gift card bought at a supermarket is an eligible purchase, and we found no statement either way. Ask your issuer first. ⁹