Should you sell unwanted gift vouchers?

Almost half of us get more than one gift voucher every year, and around half of those never get used. Instead they lurk in the bottom of bags and drawers until eventually they expire. A new study has revealed that in total, this amounts to £1 billion wasted every year.

The people behind the research say you don't have to let this money go to waste, because you can get value from your vouchers. They're right, and there are five ways to do this.

1. The research was done by Zeek, an app which you can use to sell your unwanted vouchers. The idea is that you can just scan your unwanted vouchers, and the app will put them up for sale on a voucher-only marketplace. It apparently sells them for an average of 90% of their face value, and 94% of them sell within 24 hours.

It's a solution that doesn't require much effort, but it's worth bearing in mind that when you sell a voucher it will cost you an additional £3, plus the cost of posting the voucher to Zeek. If, for example, you were selling a £10 card, you would receive an average of £9 for it, but you would only end up £5.50 better off.

It's not the only option. There are a number of specialist services like this, including Cardpool.

2. You don't necessarily need a specialist either, because eBay is full of people selling on their gift vouchers. This works particularly well if you are selling a voucher for a popular retailer, worth £50 or less.

At the time of writing, one seller is about to get £45.18 (plus £1.90 postage) for their £50 National Garden Gift Voucher. Meanwhile someone else is on the verge of getting £47 for a £50 gift voucher. It's not overly optimistic to hope you get at least 90% of the face value of the card.

Using the same example as before, if you sold a £10 voucher for £9 and charged for second class postage, you would then have to pay the eBay fees of 10% of the transaction total (including postage), which would work out at 95p. You would therefore end up with £8.05 value.
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3. There are companies that will buy your gift vouchers directly from you, which are even more simple - but rather unrewarding. These include the likes of Cash4Voucher, which offers a postal service, and "up to 70%" of the face value of your vouchers. You also have to pay to post the voucher to them, so you could easily end up with less than £6 for a £10 voucher. There are several firms offering this sort of service, but don't expect market-beating returns.

In fact, given the numerous alternative options, and the fact that this one will usually provide you with the worst return out of all of them, it's worth thinking long and hard before you take this particular route.

4. There is the more traditional, and still very popular, option of re-gifting. If you were after the money in your pocket then this isn't going to work, but if you just want to get as much value from the voucher as possible, you can give it to a friend or family member for their birthday or Christmas, and get the full value out of it.

5. Alternatively you can spend it. Naturally these services have sprung up precisely because people don't get round to spending these vouchers. But selling them on means usually taking a hit on the face value and takes a bit of time and effort. You have to ask whether it would really be so much more work just to go online and spend them.

If you don't want anything from that particular retailer, you can just buy presents with your voucher, and reward yourself with the cash you would otherwise have spent on other people. You can even wait for the pre-Christmas sales or Black Friday, and end up turning a £10 gift voucher into a present that would have otherwise cost you £20.

But what do you think? Do any of these options appeal? Let us know in the comments.