In the gift card resale market, some cards are more valuable than others. This makes sense: you can buy a wider variety of items at a big-box or grocery store than at a clothing or toy store. How much of a difference does the brand of a gift card make? To find out, our card-carrying colleagues at Consumer Reports checked multiple exchange sites to find out how much a selection of cards might be worth.

While gift card exchange sites can be a problematic dumping ground for fraudulently obtained merchandise return cards, they can also be a place to get respectable small discounts, and to sell your unwanted gift cards at a small loss. How small that loss is depends on which card you want to get rid of.

There are lots of companies that are happy to take your gift card off your hands: even CoinStar has gift card kiosks, and Target joined the party only last month.

Consumer Reports tested four sites: Giftcards.com, Cardpool.com, Giftcardrescue.com, and Monstergiftcard.com.

The most important thing that they learned is that checking multiple sites can pay off: for a hypothetical $100 gift card, offers varied between sites by as much as $34.50. If you’re going to resell a card, make it one for Walmart: all four card exchange sites that Consumer Reports checked paid at least $80 for a card from there.

The more specialized a retailer, the less its card was worth, all the way down to Bass Pro Shops, which has relatively few stores and specialized merchandise. The four exchanges offered only $50 to $74 for a card from there.

How to Exchange Gift Cards and Get the Most Cash [Consumer Reports]

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