CardCash.com [RDE, Inc. | OTCQB: RSTN] Is Turning Unwanted Gift Cards Into Investor Profits — Here’s How

With the Christmas season fast approaching, one thing’s for certain — millions of consumers nationwide will soon be asking themselves the question, “What am I meant to do with this gift card?”

The scene’s a familiar one. As Chris Voss (of Chris Voss Show fame) humorously put it on a recent podcast with Ketan Thakker, CEO of RDE, Inc. [OTCQB: RSTN], “One of the problems I always have is Grandma, she isn’t quite there anymore, and she always gives me Victoria’s Secret [NYSE: VSCO] gift cards.”

But, as worthless as that gift card might have once been to Voss, RDE, Inc. [OTCQB: RSTN] is rapidly expanding its recently acquired CardCash.com platform to help Voss (and millions of other consumers and businesses) exchange or sell gift cards.

For someone like Voss, this is a real boon. “I can see here that I can trade in my Victoria’s Secret [NYSE: VSCO] gift card for, let’s see, Texas Roadhouse,” he said while browsing the expanded CardCash.com platform.

And, for RDE, Inc. [OTCQB: RSTN] and its investors, this is shaping up to be a very real opportunity to capture a large part of what’s currently estimated to be a $325 billion-a-year industry.

And when we say that it’s a “very real” opportunity, that’s not just some empty words. There are a few innovations rolling out here that set CardCash.com up quite nicely to capture a big swath of the market.

Here’s what you need to know.

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About CardCash.com

CardCash.com, in a sentence, is a B2B, B2C, and C2C gift card exchange platform where both consumers and businesses, can buy/sell/exchange gift cards for over 500 brands, including big names like Walmart [NYSE: WMT], Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN], and, as already mentioned, Victoria’s Secret [NYSE: VSCO].

Essentially, if a brand has a gift card, there’s a pretty good chance you can buy or sell it on CardCash.com.

As for how this looks in practice, CardCash.com operates much like many other exchanges. It sits in the middle, and earns its keep by taking a cut via a spread — the difference between the buy and sell price.

Naturally, for card sellers, this means they can’t sell the card for its full face value. However, with buy offers regularly reaching up to 92% of the original face value, sellers will quite often come pretty close to full value.

As for why buyers would want to purchase “second hand” gift cards, there are a couple of big reasons. The most obvious is that CardCash.com also resells its gift card inventory at reduced prices, making it an attractive outlet for purchasing discounted gift cards.

As for the second reason, that’s tied in with a couple of CardCash.com innovations — the same innovations that put the platform in a strong position to capture a massive chunk of value in the $325 billion gift card market.

Here’s Why RDE, Inc. Investors Stand to Win From the CardCash.com Acquisition

While we might have led off with the most obvious use case for a gift card exchange platform (exchanging unwanted Christmas gift cards), this is far from the most promising side of CardCash.com. (When viewed from an investor’s perspective.)

The real promise comes from the high-volume business-facing products the company is creating off of its base exchange technology. Specifically, uChoose, and its CardCash.com partner exchange platform.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

The CardCash.com Partner Exchange Platform

The CardCash.com partner exchange platform is, in essence, more or less the same concept as the base platform. That is, its core functionality is about letting consumers trade in gift cards.

Where the partner exchange program differs, however, is that it allows partnered brands to capture sales off of other brands’ gift cards.

For an example of how this works, let’s go through how this scenario works from a consumer’s perspective.

1. The consumer has, let’s say, an Amazon.com gift card.
2. One day, the consumer is browsing at, let’s say, Billy Bob’s Handmade Banjos.
3. As it turns out, Billy Bob’s Banjos is a CardCash.com partner.
4. That means, the consumer can now use their Amazon.com gift card towards their purchase at Billy Bob’s Banjos.
5. Everyone wins. Billy Bob’s Banjos captured what would have otherwise been an Amazon.com sale. The consumer got to use their Amazon.com gift card on something they really wanted. And CardCash.com takes a small cut from the buy/sell spread on that Amazon.com gift card.

As for why this means serious business for RDE, Inc. [OTCQB: RSTN] investors, that’s simple. As the platform that’s now enabling any gift card to be spent anywhere, it has perfectly positioned itself in a prime position to capture a pretty significant portion of the transactions that take place when those $325 billion worth of gift cards are redeemed each year.

And, for every one of those transactions, CardCash.com takes a small cut.

Now, in case it’s not obvious, if CardCash.com captures just 1% of all gift card redemptions, it will make $32.5 million on every 1% of the buy/sell spread. That adds up fast — with a 15% spread, CardCash.com could easily start pulling in close to half a billion dollars in net revenue a year from its partner exchange program alone.

The CardCash.com uChoose Platform

The second side of the CardCash.com platform that sets it up to really capture a massive chunk of the gift card market is its uChoose product.

In simple terms, uChoose is pretty much little more than a CardCash.com gift card. That is, it’s a gift card that allows its holders to purchase any other gift card they want.

For now, this is very much a business-oriented feature that CardCash.com is promoting as an employee incentive program reward. This allows businesses to incentivize their employees with gift cards (which many have done for a long time), without having to second guess what their employees actually want.

Instead, businesses can simply hand over a uChoose voucher, allowing their employees to choose any gift card they want.

As for what makes this such a golden ticket for RDE, Inc. investors, that’s tied to a pretty simple fact — the employee incentives market is projected to be worth over $9 billion a year by 2028. And, when you consider the fact that uChoose is fast becoming the ‘obvious choice’ for businesses looking to run employee incentive programs, it’s pretty clear what that means for RDE, Inc.

What’s Next for RDE, Inc. and CardCash.com?

For now, it’s still relatively early days for CardCash.com. While the platform has been around for a little while already, its acquisition by RDE, Inc. has only just happened recently. (PS: There’s some good coverage about what the acquisition means from a purely M&A perspective here.)

However, it’s fast becoming clear that, under RDE’s stewardship, the CardCash.com platform is on a fast-track trajectory to exponential growth. For starters, there are some obvious cross-pollination (in both platform technologies and promotional) opportunities it’s already positioned to leverage using its well-established Restaurant.com platform. (PPS: There’s some good coverage about the Restaurant.com mobile restaurant app here).

In more concrete terms, that means we should expect some significant shareholder value creation here as both the Restaurant.com and CardCash.com platforms hit a new era of growth.

For more information about CardCash.com, Restaurant.com, and RDE, Inc., visit its website.

For more information about the Chris Voss Show, visit its website here.

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(Featured Image by 401(K) 2012 (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr)

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