(Update: Now Live) Raise’s Identity Crisis Continuing, Rebranding As GCX

Update 7/9/24: Raise has now officially rebranded as GCX or The Gift Card Exchange. Despite rebranding, they’ve apparently decided to continue having Raise.com as their domain name, but also using gcx.raise.com as a subdomain. I’m still unsure what they’re trying to achieve:

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: Hey, we’re this super-cool website where you can sell your unwanted gift cards or buy gift cards at a discount.

Potential customer: Cool. What’s your company called?

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: GCX, also known as The Gift Card Exchange.

Potential customer: So is your website gcx.com or TheGiftCardExchange.com?

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: Nope – it’s Raise.com

Potential customer: Why Raise.com if that’s not your name?

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: It used to be our name, but now we’re GCX or The Gift Card Exchange. We can’t quite decide which one we like more, so we’ve gone with both.

Potential customer: Then why are you still using Raise.com?

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: Because that used to be our name and website and we didn’t want to have to spend money on buying a domain name that actually matches our name. So we kept Raise.com, but you can go to gcx.raise.com if you want to because we wanted to make things a little more confusing for our customers.

Potential customer: I know of Raise and had bought from there before. You used to guarantee the gift cards you sell for a year after purchase. This rebranding hasn’t affected that right?

GCX/The Gift Card Exchange ad marketing team: Well…….

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Update 4/17/24: Raise sent out an email today giving a little extra context about their rebranding. They’ve confirmed that they’re going to be called The Gift Card Exchange. I’ve also been advised that this change will relate to Raise the website; I’m not sure if the Raise Marketplace app (rather than Raise the app formerly known as Slide) will also be renamed that way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

This email update from Raise doesn’t do much to reduce confusion with their future name though. For starters, they’ll become GCX, but their full name – The Gift Card Exchange – would suggest the acronym should be TGCE.

What I’m more curious about is what their domain name will be. GCX.com is already taken, GiftCardExchange.com and TheGiftCardExchange.com are both for sale currently, so it doesn’t seem like they’ll be using one of those unless they’ve bought the domain name(s) already. The Whois details for those two domain names don’t indicate that’s the case though.

That raises the prospect that they’ll continue using the Raise.com domain name, but rename the site as GCX/The Gift Card Exchange. If that’s what they do, that’ll be even more laughable. I sort of doubt that’s what their plan is, but given their past efforts it also wouldn’t surprise me if that’s where things end up.

If this had appeared a couple of days ago I’d have thought this was an April Fools’ joke, but it’s not. Raise has decided that it needs to rebrand one part of itself yet again.

As a quick recap, a few years back Raise – the website and app that sold gift cards – launched Slide, an app that also sold gift cards. They changed how Slide worked a few times, going from offering 4% flat cashback to varying cashback rates, being able to earn additional cashback on purchases through a shopping portal and then not, etc.

Raise then seemed to decide that having an app branded as Slide didn’t make sense, so they rebranded it as Raise. Except it worked differently (in terms of the Raise Cash you’d earn) to the Raise website as well as to the Raise Marketplace app, also owned by Raise. You therefore had one company called Raise which had three different Raise-branded outlets that sold gift cards but in different ways.

Apparently that wasn’t confusing enough, so Raise Marketplace is soon going to become GCX. I’m assuming this refers to the Raise Marketplace app rather than the Raise website, but it’s hard to keep track of the different Raise options out there. There’s not currently any date provided for when that’ll happen, nor if this’ll presage any other changes beyond a simple rebranding. Clicking on the banner scrolling through on the Raise website homepage doesn’t do anything despite it seemingly being clickable.

While I can understand why they’d want to differentiate the names of two Raise-branded apps that both sell gift cards, this is a curious choice. For starters, I imagine that the Raise name has a lot of familiarity having been around for more than 10 years, so rebranding as GCX might confuse matters further.

An even more curious choice is deciding to rename their app with ‘X’ being a significant part of the branding. We’ve all seen how another site has gone down the Xitter over the past year, with that X rebranding initially having an impact on app downloads before its racist Nazi douchecanoe owner decided his already-negative impact hadn’t been sufficient and doubled tripled quadrupled down on the insanity. Raise is clearly (well, hopefully not) on that same path, but deciding that rebranding to include ‘X’ as a prominent part of your name makes for a winning option is a bit of a gamble.

h/t This Eye