Cardswap Case

“I was at the point where I knew I would never use them all but I didn’t want to throw money away and I didn’t want to re-gift them. What I did want was to cash them out. In the U.S. there are services where you can convert gift cards to cash but not in Canada.” As Frances Ho has a problem of using gift cards, she and Zaheed Poptia decided to created a private company named CardSwap. It is an online service where consumers can convert unwanted gift cards into cash. CardSwap is Canada’s #1 site for discounted gifted cards and this is one of the strength of the company. It is currently the biggest in Canada. Additionally, in order to protect consumers against fraud and gain trusts to the customer, CardSwap uses the unique UPC code to validating cards if it is available to buy it.

They do not get respond from the company and there is no connection between the buyers and the sellers. Since it is a small company, they have a low advertising budget. Therefore, it would lead to the problem where not a lot people know about this. There is 6,500,000 million people aged 15-30 in Canada, while only 100,000 transactions were made on CardSwap. The second weakness connects to the third one. Their problem is supplying and getting more cards in. There is not enough cards are sold to CardSwap. There are only 11,000 likes on Facebook. There are less than 10 percent of national retailers are able to accept electronic gift cards. Comparing to the United States, they have more than 50 percent that have the ability to accept the online gift