Rakuten has decided it wants to get in on the gift card selling game as they’re now offering cashback when buying first-hand gift cards from them.
The thing is, they’re offering very little value because with the exception of one brand, they’re only offering 1-2% cashback. The exception is 1-800-Flowers and that’s only at 3% cashback.
In pretty much every case you can get a better cashback/rewards rate by using a different site or app which sells gift cards. That includes:
- Pay With Ibotta
- Raise
- Fluz
- United’s MileagePlus (MPX) app
- Slide
- CrayPay
- GiftCards.com
To be (slightly) fair to Rakuten, what they’re offering is better than Gyft and Bitmo seeing as neither of those offer any incentive to buy gift cards from them other than the occasional deal. I guess Rakuten will capture some share of the market simply because of their size, but their gift card offering can, by and large, be ignored.
The exception to this will be if they offer increased rates on certain brands at times. I’ll keep an eye on this each day and will let you know if there’s anything noteworthy so that you don’t have to waste your time. I’m not holding out much hope that they’ll offer many deals though as I would’ve thought they’d launch their gift card selling venture with some kind of promotion in order to grab some attention.