"After talking to retailers and examining current gift card mall solutions, we believe we've developed a program that addresses retailer challenges while maximizing their sales and profit opportunity. "Coinstar's gift card mall is a step up from what exists for retailers today," said Steve Verleye, general manager of electronic payment solutions. While consumer demand for gift cards is rising sharply from $79 billion in 2004 to a projected $132 billion by 2008, existing gift card mall solutions have limitations and can be costly to maintain. The gift card mall program gives grocery, drug and other retailers a turnkey, innovative gift card program to drive incremental traffic, sales and profits into the store. “And traditional gift cards aren’t the only winners this holiday season, as more and more Americans are tied to their mobile devices, we expect digital gift cards to be especially popular with consumers.”ĭirks said Alula only accepts plastic gift cards right now, but the company hopes to be able to accept digital gift cards in the future.BELLEVUE, Wash.-Coinstar E-Payment Services will roll out its gift card mall program to feature leading dining, clothing, entertainment, book, home and service cards for shopper convenience. “Shoppers today recognize gift cards as the perfect fool-proof option for friends and family,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement last year. “There is a very big secondary market for used gift cards,” he said.Īnd there’s a massive market for gift cards in general.Īccording to the National Retail Federation, shoppers spent almost $30 billion on gift cards around the holidays last year.Įach shopper spent on average $163.16 on gift cards, up 4 percent over the $156.86 they spent in 2012, according to NRF. Other times, Dirks said the company will resell the cards online. In some cases, they work with a gift card company to bundle together cards from a particular store and buy more cards there. Once the Alula has a used gift card, Dirks said they can do a couple things with them. “We’re really trying to strike that balance,” he said. The hard part from Alula’s end, Dirks said, is to walk a line between making too low of an offer on those cards that might be tough to resell. Sometimes, that might mean 75 percent of the remaining value on a card that the company deems particularly valuable, but Dirks said the numbers can be less in cases where the cards aren’t very valuable.
“We’ll know within a couple of seconds what we are ready to offer the consumer in terms of cash value,” Dirks said. The company works with another company that runs gift card islands at grocery stores around the country to track which cards are particularly valuable, and which ones aren’t. “It just all depends on the supply and demand on a real-time basis,” he said. Since then, the company has grown to eight markets around the country and a few hundred kiosks.ĭirks said the kiosks don’t give a set percentage of cash for all gift cards, but instead rely on almost- instant market data to determine how much they are willing to pay for a gift card. Jeff Dirks, vice president and general manager of Alula, said the company launched in late 2012 with a few kiosks in Columbus, Ohio and Phoenix. The kiosks will pay customers cash for their unused gift card. But if you’ve ever left one languishing in a junk drawer for months or even years, you know the occasional sad truth about gift cards: sometimes they go to waste.Ī new company with a handful locations in Aurora is hoping to turn those unused gift cards into cash.Īlula, which is part of Coinstar, Inc., has placed its bright-yellow gift card exchange kiosks in four King Soopers stores around AURORA | Gift cards are an increasingly popular Christmas and birthday present.
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