Information and Alerts

Pattern of Complaints

A recent review of BBB complaints has delineated a pattern of consumer allegations against Gift Card Spread

In their complaints, consumers allege that:

Emails and voicemails were left multiple times, yet they received no response from the company.

Furthermore, they claim they received cards/e-codes with zero balance or a balance that was later removed without warning.

They sold gift card(s) to Gift Card Spread, but no payment from the company was received by consumers.

On August 9, 2016, Gift Card Spread informed the BBB of the following procedures they have in place to assist consumers with these concerns:

"The spike in...complains about VM not being answered was due to a faulty setting made by our phone processor, which did not deliver voicemails to us. This was soon identified and corrected back in Jan. As for the ongoing complains, based on our cases studies, the voicemails are all being addressed and issues were opened in our system for the same, however the customers were unaware that we are already working on the problem. In order to rectify this, our team members have implemented a call back / email system for our customers in order to notify them of the updates."

"Zero Balance issue: Being a third party provider of gift cards, we have less control of a gift card going back after sales, however we have drafted a few different approaches of how the problems can be minimized and better responded to.

"As an immediate solution, we have allocated better resources to bring down our average turn-around time in resolving a customer’s issue. I’m personally making a trip next week, to our outsourced team for a training sessions in order to improvise the overall customer satisfaction."

"We are looking into a setting up a call back system in order to keep customers in the know of the day-to-day progress made"

"As for longer term solutions, We are working on adding more resources to our team, so If a certain seller has more than 1-2 bad cards in an order, we will verify all the rest of the cards associated in the order, so we can detect a problem with a gift card even before one is reported to us. This requires changes on software level and man-power, and we are working on adding this to the system asap."

"We will be setting up pattern identification techniques so we can better stop certain brands and better link bad-seller accounts"

"As we make developments on the software end, we will be adding more pop-ups / clarifications before the customer’s order in order for them to clarify how a certain brand is used."

Per a February 10, 2017 review of newly closed complaints, the BBB found that although Gift Card Spread provided procedures detailing how they intended to address consumer concerns, the pattern of consumer allegations has continued. At this time the BBB has found that Gift Card Spread failed to alleviate the pattern of complaints and will continue to monitor complaints against the business.