Gift Cards: Your Online BFF

One of the advantages of shopping online is that you get to see immediately that a product is in stock and they usually are because products available online can be sourced from anywhere where the store has a warehouse, branch or outlet.  This is one major convenience as opposed to visiting a physical store and then finding out the product is out of stock and then you go from store to store until you find one that has it in stock but doesn’t have it in the size or color you want.  On that note, online shops usually have more variations of the product than physical stores.  Moreover, availability and variety aside, shopping online is really convenient since you don’t have to dress up and drive to the mall just to make a purchase.  It saves you, among other things, time, gas and precious body fat (from all the walking).  But the big negative about online shopping is the risk of credit card fraud.  For those online fraud paranoids out there, I counter you with this (insert anime-like blade slashing sound)… gift cards.

The idea behind the  concept of the gift card was probably to save people from the trouble of having to think of the perfect (or close to it) gift and probably to take gift certificates to a cooler, hipper and multiple use level.  But other than its obvious use (as a gift, duh), gift cards can also be viewed as a sort of debit card for making safe online purchases.  Stores like MLB.com, Apple and Vans sell their own gift cards.  Gift cards from major credit card companies like American Express and Visa are also available and can be purchased from grocery stores.  Those cards issued by the latter are better as they are accepted in any online store that accepts payment from these credit card companies.  They work like a regular credit/debit card except that under credit card name you may just have to put something like “gift card recipient”.  Gift cards are limited to a specific amount and are usually non-reloadable.  American Express Gift Cards are available in $25, $50, $100, $200 and $500 denominations.

Using a gift card is a safe way to pay online because the debit amount is limited and you don’t have to give away financial information.  One downside though is that when your purchases do not exactly add up to the card amount i.e. the purchase price is over or under by a few dollars.  In the latter instance, it will be difficult to use up the balance left.  However, there are certain stores which allow multiple modes of payment or accept multiple credit cards for one transaction/payment so you can use up the balance in one card and then use a second card for the remaining purchase price balance.  Another downside, gift cards can only be used in stores within the issuing country and they aren’t available in the Philippines yet.