Just launched: CardNap, a website for buying discounted gift cards

Love gift cards but want to pay below market prices? CardNap could be your new favorite site. The gift card platform launched today, allowing visitors to either resell or buy discounted gift cards.

“We initially launched this as a Cardpool like company for Australia, but it failed due to lack of profitability and how intense it was. So we looked at our options, and looked at the pains of these sorts of sites. We found it was impossible to find the best discount, or all the available cards easily. So we fixed that problem,” says Lachy Groom, the 16-year-old entrepreneur behind the site.

The pretty-looking site currently has 11,242 gift cards available from hundreds of merchants including movie theaters, restaurants, airlines and retail stores at discounts as low as 2% to as high as 24%. For example, get a $30 iTunes card for $27 or a $50 card for $45 from sites like CardPool, SellerPlastic Jungle, GiftCards.com and Gift Card Rescue. CardNap will be adding EBay and Craigslist soon.

How do these companies make money buying discounted gift cards? Groom tells us that they buy them for a lower percentage than what they’re selling them for directly on the car buyer’s site. E.G. if you want to sell your Target gift card, they’ll give you 90%, but sell it for 95% on CardNap. So, that having been said, in the future you should probably sell it yourself on CardNap.

Users can browse physical and electronic gift cards and sell gift cards- for cash, Amazon gift cards or Facebook credits. Want to know more about the brains behind CardNap? See our interview with Lachy Groom when he was 15 and just starting to build CardNap, here.