As appeared in The Hindu on 26 August 2016.
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Are you one of those saddled with too many gift cards and looking at ways to get rid of them. Don’t let them go to waste: there is now a place where you can trade them for cash.
Qwikcilver Solutions, a leading gift card technology provider, has come up with a platform that enables consumers to turn their partially used or unused gift cards into cash by listing them on the Woohoo gifting app.
They will also be able to convert loyalty points, generated from loyalty programs of multiple banks and NBFC channels, to digital gift cards, which can subsequently be sold on the newly launched Woohoo Secondary Marketplace. Once the card is sold, the money is credited directly to the seller’s bank account.
In order to obviate possibilities of misuse, all the listed gift cards are verified and authenticated in real time in the backend, said Pratap TP, Co-Founder & CMO, Qwikcilver.
Customers, who have physical gift cards, need not have to ship them to the buyer. Once customers list their physical cards on the platform, they get disabled and a new electronic version of the same (with the value and validity intact) gets created and listed, which can then be purchased by someone who is looking for a gift card.
The platform also allows sellers to change the price of the card, or even pull it off before it’s sold.
Stating that it’s India’s first fully integrated consumer-to-consumer marketplace for selling and buying gift cards, Mr Pratap said the launch of the platform ahead of the festival season is expected to give a further impetus to the Indian gift card industry that is growing at 300% annually.
There are over 150 brands and more than 5,000 stores and portals on board Woohoo, which is available on Android and also on the web. It allows customers to redeem the gift cards either at online or offline stores. Woohoo comes from Qwikcilver, the company whose technology works in the background powering the gift card schemes of a large number of online and physical outlets.
