Sell your Amazon gift card for cash

Amazon is the default gift card. It is what you give when you have no idea what someone wants, what employers hand out at the end of a quarter, and what shows up as the reward for finishing a survey or switching a phone plan. That ubiquity is exactly why so many Amazon balances go unspent: a card you chose yourself gets used, and a card that simply arrived tends to sit.

The specific thing worth knowing about Amazon credit is that it is one-directional. Once you redeem a gift card to your account, the value becomes an Amazon balance, and there is no mechanism to move it back out to a bank. It is not like a refund sitting on a debit card. From the moment it is applied, that money can only leave your account in the form of something shipped to your door.

That makes the decision to redeem worth pausing on. An unredeemed card is still a portable thing you can sell. A redeemed balance is locked to the account it landed in. If you are holding a physical Amazon card or an unclaimed email code and you would rather have cash, sell it before you apply it, not after.

We pay 80% of the verified balance, flat. A $100 card is $80 and a $250 card is $200. The rate is the same whether the card came from a rebate, a relative, or a company you no longer work for. Cards from $10 up to $2,000 work on a single submission, and partially used cards are completely normal — the majority of Amazon cards we buy have already had something bought against them.

Amazon cards come in more forms than most: physical cards sold in supermarkets, print-at-home certificates, email codes, and reload credit bought directly. All of them end up as the same account balance once redeemed, but only the unredeemed ones are transferable. Corporate and incentive cards are usually email codes, which are the easiest to sell because nothing has been claimed yet — the code itself is the asset.

One case where you should not sell: if you have a subscription or a recurring order running on the account, the balance will be absorbed automatically and you get full face value without doing anything. Selling at 80% only makes sense when the credit genuinely has no path to being spent — you shop elsewhere, the card was a gift you did not want, or you need the money as money rather than as goods.

The reason it is 80% and not more is that the moment we buy the card, the risk moves to us. We pay you before we have resold anything, and a proportion of cards come back drained by someone who had the number before us. That gap covers the losses, the balance verification, and the payment fees. What you are buying with the 20% is certainty and speed: no listing, no buyer to vet, no waiting to see if a payment clears.

Check the balance at amazon.com/gc/balance before you submit, and enter the figure exactly as it reads. If our verification comes back lower than what you entered, you will see the corrected offer before a single dollar moves, and you can decline and keep the card.