Rosher.Net

I wonder how many of us send out Amazon gift cards via email, as last minute presents or stocking fillers? I’ve just had reason to check my Amazon order archive, and I found a whole load of unredeemed vouchers from last Yule / Christmas / Solstice amounting to a couple of hundred quid!

I’ve never checked before, and perhaps that’s my bad. The orders that are more than a year old are shown as redeemed, but I’m now wondering if they just time-expired… did they actually get spent?

I’m sure it’s not just Amazon gift cards that are subject to being lost in the mail, so to speak. The online gift companies must, I suppose, get quite a decent income from such undelivered gifts. Is it that the email address was changed? That’s a not-infrequent event, maybe. 100% profit there folks.

Happily, finding them in the lost letters department and remembering the credit card I paid for them with (gone now), I was able to redirect them to a new home. Mine. I can use the gift cards and make contact with the initial recipient and find out what happened. If of course they’ve been sitting on the certificates, waiting for the right amount / moment, that’ll be another conversation. But I think they’re simply lost.

I thought I’d blog the issue. I’m confident I’m not alone in paying into the black hole that is undelivered online gift cards… be nice if Amazon et al emailed the person making the gift if it hadn’t been redeemed after a reasonable period.