Gift Cards are truly an ingenuine business tool. They get people to commit money to your company before even buying your products or services and when they actually purchase them, they either spend more than their value and pay extra or they spend their exact value and you just got yourself a $50, $100, or $200 sale thanks to a cheap piece of carton or plastic. In some rare instances, people will even spend less than the value of their gift card which literally equals free money for you. Now, while gift cards are usually hard to get off the ground for small businesses, if you’re a multinational company with a global market and hundreds of thousands of outlets which can sell your products or services, gift cards make all the sense in the world. Now, guess which one of those two Uber is and what it just did.
That’s right, thousands of US stores including Walmart, CVS, and Target are now selling Uber gift cards. The San Francisco-based company promised that the cards will be stocked at approximately 35,000 locations by the end of October and digital versions should be available for purchase online before Christmas comes knocking. If you already got one of these gift cards, you can redeem it by opening the Uber app Payments menu, select the bottom promotional option and enter the code written on the card. Note that any gift card added to your Uber account automatically becomes your default payment method so you’ll have to manually change that option if you want to save your balance for whatever reason. The cheapest amount that can currently be purchased in this form is $15 while the most generous gift card comes with a $500 code. Of course, the amount of money you redeem can be used on as many rides as you want.
It’s worth noting that Uber gift cards can currently only be used to pay for rides which the San Francisco-based company sets up for you. So no, a $250 card does not equal $250 worth of food delivered to your doorstep thanks to UberEats. Not yet, at least. Also, while Uber is already available in 77 countries worldwide, there’s still no info on when will these gift cards make their way to European, Asian, and other markets.