Apparently, the gift card industry doesn’t think it is making enough profits. (article) I think most gift card users would disagree. However, one thing is clear, open-loop general-purpose Visa and Mastercard type gift cards are the most profitable segment of the industry.
Archive for the ‘Trends & Statistics’ Category
Not sure why I never thought to do this before. The results for the search term “gift card” in Google are very telling. Six of the top 10 results are for open-loop gift cards, you know, the kind that come with all the fees, are hard to spend all the way to zero, and are […]
The Tower Group holiday gift card sales preliminary stats are in (article): $61 billion in gift card sales for the fourth quarter 08 as compared with $70 billion last year. That is going to be a little more than the 5% drop they had earlier predicted for full year 2008. The most intesting tidbit from […]
According to a recent report from TowerGroup, 27 percent of gift cards bought this year will not be used and $6.4 billion of the expected $88.4 billion in gift cards sold this year wil not be redeemed (about 7%). That is lower than the usual figure of ten percent thrown around for breakage. With 27 […]
I constantly monitor all kinds of news and blogs for information and articles related to gift cards. These days, a healthy majority of articles are negative and are related to the riskiness of gift cards because of bankruptcies, how much gift cards sales will drop this holiday season, and how gift cards in general are […]
While there are a lot of players in the gift card resale market, most of them are bit players; you can tell by the number of listings for cards they have on their site. One site that appears to be one of the smallish players is MonsterGiftCard.com. I wouldn’t mention them, except they put out […]
A survey report released recently predicts that the overall spend on gift cards this holiday season will decrease by 5%, that people will be using their gift cards less on frivolous stuff and more on necessities (so far this is all pretty obvious), and that open-loop gift cards (or what they call prepaid bank cards) will […]
Searching Google Trends for the words “gift card” tells us what we probably already know: Gift cards are REALLY poplular during the holidays!
For the first time in many years, gift card sales are expected to be lower this year. (article)
When you type in a domain name, like www.giftcardadvodate.org, the internet’s domain name system does a translation from that name to the actual address (like 192.168.1.23) that identifies the machine the website can be found on. The ZONE files are the files that the top level of the domain name system uses to start the […]
Google News Archive (historical news archives) has a great feature that shows a timline with the frequency a search term shows up in articles. Searching on “gift card” gives the following timeline. This is a pretty good representation of the rise of gift cards. This timeline has gift cards on the scene way before I […]
Searching Google News today for stories on gift cards, what I noticed is that almost all the stories I found that contained the term “gift card” are about companies that are giving out gift cards as rewards and such. Clearly, gift cards are becoming a way of life.
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