{"id":1155,"date":"2010-08-27T13:14:59","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T20:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1155"},"modified":"2010-08-30T20:26:12","modified_gmt":"2010-08-31T03:26:12","slug":"more-sites-enter-the-deadpool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1155","title":{"rendered":"More sites enter the deadpool"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve again updated our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/resources.html\" target=\"_blank\">gift card resources page<\/a>, which lists every gift card secondary marketplace we&#8217;ve ever seen, and a few more sites have hit the dead pool.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mercardi<\/strong>:\u00a0 They&#8217;ve closed their doors and a message on their site recommends people go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plasticjungle.com\" target=\"_blank\">Plastic Jungle<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Update:\u00a0 They may have endorsed Plastic Jungle as their successor, but that hasn&#8217;t stopped competitor <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.giftcardrescue.com\/gift-card-rescue-coupon-for-mercardi-users\/\" target=\"_blank\">GiftCardRescue.com<\/a> from offering a 5% discount to Mercardi users, or anyone who uses the code MERCARDI until Friday 9\/3.<\/p>\n<p><strong>DFWbid.com<\/strong>:\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never quite understood the penny-auction phenomenon, where people pay to bid on items by buying credits, which are lost if they don&#8217;t have the winning bid.\u00a0 To assuage the frustrations of many of their customers, most penny-auction sites started allowing people to apply credits spent on an auction to buying the item at full retail price.\u00a0 According to a Business Week <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/magazine\/content\/10_34\/b4192040657482.htm\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a>, this practice has sliced the margins considerably making it a much less profitable business, and customers otherwise have cooled to the type of marketplace as traffic at the three largest penny auction sites are down 40-60% in the first half of this year.\u00a0 It was bound to happen and I suspect customers have wizened up.\u00a0 In any event, this gift card focused penny-auction site appears to be dead.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Island of Misfit Gift Cards<\/strong>:\u00a0 AKA discount-gift-cards.info.\u00a0 One of the many sites of questionable value, it simply listed gift card auctions on Ebay.\u00a0 Apparently even their low overhead wasn&#8217;t enough to keep them in business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve again updated our gift card resources page, which lists every gift card secondary marketplace we&#8217;ve ever seen, and a few more sites have hit the dead pool. Mercardi:\u00a0 They&#8217;ve closed their doors and a message on their site recommends people go to Plastic Jungle. Update:\u00a0 They may have endorsed Plastic Jungle as their successor, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}