Buying gift cards for discounted prices is the ultimate money-saving hack. We reveal how to get more for your cash when shopping for vouchers.
Credit: ViDI Studio, By Stick, Jozsef Bagota – Shutterstock
While gift cards are usually bought as presents for others, you'll probably feel tempted to buy them for yourself when you see how much money you can save.
Maybe you're planning to spend £20 somewhere? If you find a £20 gift card for the reduced price of £15, you'll save 25% with minimal effort.
Combine the below tips with the top ways to get free Amazon vouchers to massively reduce your shopping costs.
How to buy cheap gift cards
Try these tips to get the best gift card offers:
-
Get up to 25% off gift cards at CDKeys
We've seen some incredible gift card deals at CDKeys.
While writing this guide, we saw a £20 Candy Crush gift card on sale for £14.99 – a 25% saving!
But Candy Crush is far from the only option. We've also seen CDKeys sell discounted gift cards for PlayStation Plus, Xbox, iTunes, Netflix and more.
Not all the vouchers on the site have as much as 25% off the full price. Some are discounted by just one or two pounds. However, if there's a store you're already planning to buy from and you find a reduced voucher, any money you save will help.
Buying CDKeys gift cards is one of many ways to save money on Netflix. -
Buy gift cards via cashback sites
If you're not yet getting cashback, your next gift card purchase is the perfect time to start.
By shopping via sites like TopCashback and Quidco, you'll get money back on your spending.
Say you've found a £10 gift card you want to get. Before buying it, check cashback sites to look for deals. If that £10 gift card can be bought with 5% cashback, it will effectively cost you £9.50 once you've received the money back.
TopCashback even has a gift card shop called TopGiftCards with up to 16% cashback up for grabs!
-
Bid for cheap gift cards on eBay
Credit: Ascannio – Shutterstock
Is there a particular gift card you're looking for? See if there are any cheap ones for sale on eBay.
For example, while writing this guide, we saw a John Lewis gift card worth £25 that had recently sold on eBay for £20.
Check the listing carefully before buying any gift cards. Some vouchers on sale are actually used, so take your time to read the full description. Also, look at the seller's reviews from other buyers in case any of them ring alarm bells.
If anything's unclear from the listing – for example, the gift card's expiry date – contact the seller for clarification.
For more info, including what vouchers can and can't be sold on the site, read eBay's policy.
-
Check Tesco gift card sales
Tesco has a dedicated website for e-gift cards: tescogiftcards.com.
Usually on this site, gift cards are sold at full price. But the real hack with this is to wait until they run a sale.
We've previously seen them offering as much as 20% off.
Keep an eye on our site and follow us on social media to avoid missing gift card sales. When we become aware of them, we'll share updates here:
-
Get up to 15% off e-vouchers if you work in healthcare
Are you a healthcare or medical student, or an NHS employee? Join Health Service Discounts.
With this scheme, you can get discounts, vouchers and even cashback at a huge range of stores.
In the 'Gifting' section of their website, we've seen discounts for top voucher sites like Buyagift (20% off at the time of writing), Virgin Experience Days (18% off) and Red Letter Days (15% off).
-
Use student discount
For this tip, we need to add a disclaimer: unfortunately, not all sites let you use student discount on gift cards. The T&Cs should say if purchases like gift cards are excluded from the offer.
However, if you're looking for gift vouchers from sites like the ones we mentioned in the last point (Buyagift, Virgin Experience Days and Red Letter Days), these all offer student discount.
So if you're not eligible for Health Service Discounts, you could still save money on vouchers as a student.
-
Bookmark our deals page
We may be a tiny bit biased, but we'd suggest always checking our deals page before buying gift cards (or anything, for that matter!).
Like the example we mentioned earlier about Tesco gift card sales, that's exactly the kind of thing you'll hear about from our deals team.
Other examples include the chance to win vouchers in prize draws, along with deals to get free e-cards.
New deals are posted daily, so bookmark the page to keep up with the top offers.
Try these paid survey sites to earn gift vouchers.
source https://www.savethestudent.org/save-money/7-ways-to-buy-discounted-gift-cards.html