This holiday season should be a crazy time for gift-card exchanges, where users can unload unwanted cards. And one of those exchanges, CardPool, just added a novel way to pay you for those cards: with Facebook Credits.
CardPool makes money by buying gift cards off users at a discount, then reselling them. For example, if youa4‚¬a4„ve received a $50 gift card at a store that youa4‚¬a4„ll never shop at, you could sell it to CardPool for $40, then CardPool could sell it to someone else for $45. You can also trade in your gift card for an Amazon.com card.
So why would you want to receive payment in Facebook money (Credits are used in Facebook applications like FarmVille) rather than real cash
Well, you might be a FarmVille addict. And even if youa4‚¬a4„re not, founder and chief executive Anson Tsai said Facebook Credits remove one of most annoying steps of the exchange process. With any other gift card, youa4‚¬a4„d have to mail it in to CardPool, then wait for the check. With this program, you just enter your gift card number in CardPool, and you get your Credits right away.
Tsai said hea4‚¬a4„d like to expand the a4‚¬Ano maila4‚¬¯ option to other payment types, but CardPool still needs to figure out how to avoid fraud.
a4‚¬AFacebook is a great start because we use Facebook Connect as a way to authenticate users and hopefully keep out the bad guys,a4‚¬¯ he said.
CardPool was incubated by Y Combinator and has raised funding from angel investors including StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, and Zappos chairman Alfred Lin.
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Companies: CardPool, Facebook
People: Anson Tsai
Companies: CardPool, Facebook
People: Anson Tsai
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
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