It’s no secret: consumers love their gift cards. The more places they can get them, the better. To cater to this consumer desire, Cardency, a seller of physical gift cards, has brought its digital storefront to eBay.
With the partnership, Cardency offers consumers the opportunity to purchase gift cards on the marketplace without any purchase fees and only a minimal shipping charge of $1.
“EBay had a need to expand their portfolio on the gift card side,” said Mike Fletcher, General Manager of InComm Digital Solutions, the parent company of Cardency. “‘Gift cards’ is a top-10 search item for eBay users, and eBay wanted to start expanding their options.”
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EBay has also started to work with brands more aggressively to start promotions around gift cards, Fletcher added. These promotions can provide consumers with additional value on their gift card purchases, such as discounts or buy-one, get-one free offers, whenever they visit Cardency.
“We’ve leaned on eBay to give us guidance around what that consumer experience should be, and how some of this content should be presented,” Fletcher said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “They have a lot of data, background and history in understanding customer preferences, as well as what promotions work best on the site. The Cardency brand is designed to build familiarity with the retail side of it, so that the consumer can have a consistent experience and a central place where they can purchase their gift cards.”
The Cardency storefront offers consumers a variety of cards from premium brands, and also is backed by the eBay Money Back Guarantee. Cardency’s store on eBay lets customers purchase gift cards for restaurants, sporting goods, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, health and beauty products and more. The cards’ values range anywhere from $25 to $100. Presently, the site only accepts PayPal as a form of payment.
The physical gift cards found on Cardency are an extension of InComm’s physical and digital prepaid gift card offerings. As such, the company had little trouble in gaining retail partners for the eBay storefront. The company plans on expanding its catalog of brands, fulfillment options and promotions before the end of 2016.
“We have a significant infrastructure here at InComm to facilitate those approval processes and brand relationships, get the right mix of brands in our catalog, and find the correct partners based on the type of consumer that is being targeted,” Fletcher asserted. “That’s been a core competency of ours and we’ve been able to leverage this opportunity successfully.”
