Look Around You!
Sunday, March 30th, 2008An interesting thing happened recently at Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. I travel frequently, and while on the road I’m always on the look out for unusual marketing and product ideas. And I usually find them too. It’s actually quite amazing how many good ideas you can discover just by keeping your eyes open.
So there I was, walking through the terminal at Reagan airport, and I saw one of those static carts, like they have in shopping malls. Often these carts feature unusual products with a high markup so I tend to be attuned to look at them for ideas I can use or adapt.
In this instance, the product being sold wasn’t new or original, but it was being sold in an unusual environment.
The product was simply gift cards from a wide variety of well known stores – Best Buy, Sears, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, Macy’s etc. Picture rows and rows of these gift cards. Maybe you’ve even seen this type of cart yourself.
It’s clearly a great product to sell, especially in the airport environment – a no brainer gift idea for business people passing through, short on time, perhaps on their way home. From the merchants point of view it takes up a fraction of the space that other products do. They probably only have to replenish stock once a week.
As with many good ideas, they can often be adapted for eBay, and that’s where my brain took it. I knew…coupons sell well on eBay, so I suspected that there is a good market for gift cards too.
Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why retailers sell gift cards, one of the main ‘hidden’ reasons is that lots of recipients never use their cards! They forget they have it, and often by the time they do remember the card has expired.
To illustrate the point, I was recently doing some accounting and came across a receipt from a purchase during the thanksgiving sales at Best Buy (an electronics store). Apparently I had been awarded a $100 gift card with my purchase. However, no one had told me about it and I had assumed they had included the card in the hope that I would put some value on it (they have done that in the past and I knew that cards need to have a monetary credit applied to them to become valuable).
Anyway, as you might have guessed, by the time I realized what had happened, the card had expired. I know I’m not the only one that’s happened to.
Coming back to my Washington discovery, my first instinct proved right. Not only do all types of gift cards sell well on eBay, but I also stumbled across an active market for collectible gift cards.
As you might know, stores regularly change gift card designs, especially for seasonal holidays like Easter and Christmas, and often as frequently as every other month. Also, some stores offer different designs for different geographic regions. For example, I’ve noticed that European branches of many international stores feature different designs.
As a specific example, I searched for ‘Starbucks gift card’ within the Collectibles > Starbucks category of eBay.com
found 153 items offered, and the first listing I clicked on is the one shown on the right. As you’ll see when you look at it, for a single Starbucks card from 2001, the bids were up to $212.38 with 2 hours to go, and the listing hit counter shows 429 people viewed this listing! Needless to say, this category is worth researching, and when my wife Luci found out about it, she started collecting Starbucks cards everywhere we go. She already has some unique designs from Hawaii and Europe. Some designs also include special holders, which she keeps too. They take up very little space and who knows what they’ll be worth in a few years time.
I think you’ll agree, it’s wise to keep your eyes open! I uncovered a goldmine opportunity on eBay by doing so. Look around you and I’d love to hear what YOU discover!
