At some point in the last few days GiftCardMall started charging $1.99 when buying physical gift cards.
I noticed this yesterday when GiftCardMall launched a promotion offering a $10 discount on $50 Happy Treats and Happy Eats gift cards. A 20% discount seemed enticing, but when adding some to my cart it added on a $1.99 shipping fee per card.
Benjy at Miles To Memories then pointed out that GiftCardMall was also charging $1.99 when buying Visa gift cards, rather than offering free shipping like they used to.
As Benjy pointed out in that post, while this isn’t an ideal state of affairs, it’s not necessarily such a bad thing. I never took advantage of the free shipping option in the past because I was concerned about the hassle involved if the cards went missing along the way. While paying for trackable shipping means you’re not getting quite as good of a deal, if you did have problems with orders that didn’t include tracking then the time spent trying to resolve the issues could be more costly.
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The main downside is for deals like the Happy one you refer to. For those smaller value cards, I would usually take the freeshipping option. But for a VGC order, which is going to be higher value, I’d spring for the paid shipping for tracking.
Any downstream effects, like with staples.com?