Giftah, the gift card marketplace, was the winner of two out of three prizes at the March 2009 Velocity Symposium. The first prize was $2000 from the Ontario Centres of Excellence and the second prize was a half day consultation with Basecamp partners.

Photo by Chris Hughes

A segment featuring Giftah was recently shown on CTV News in Montreal. A lot has changed on the site since the video was recorded, but its nice that news about Giftah reaching so many people. If you like the video be sure to share it with your friends and give Giftah lots of stars on youtube.

Often when people have no idea what present to buy they end up getting a gift card. Most of the time the recipient can find a use for it, but what happens when you receive a gift card you know you will never use?

Many electronic, entertainment, sporting, jewelry and clothing retail stores will not offer you any money for their own gift card, but there is a way you can convert unwanted gift cards into cash.

Giftah offers an online marketplace for buying and selling gift cards. All you need to do to sell your gift card is sign up for an account with Giftah and list your card on the site. Once your card has been posted on Giftah it will be viewed by hundreds of visitors who are looking to buy gift cards. Giftah users will place bids on your card until the auction is finished. After that all you need to do is follow Giftah‘s instructions, mail the card to the successful buyer and wait for your money to arrive. It is an easy and fun way to sell your gift cards online.

You read it correctly!

To celebrate the unveiling of the many new features at Giftah we are giving away $100 to one lucky member to use on any gift card they wish that is listed for sale on Giftah.

All you have to do to take part in this giveaway is sign up on Giftah! Any person that signs up from March 1st 2009 to March 31st 2009 is eligible to win! One member that has signed up between those dates will be picked randomly and awarded the $100 credit. You are not required to purchase a card or sell a card. You may use the $100 on the Giftah website at anytime you wish, it does not expire nor are there any restrictions as to what card you may purchase. The $100 cannot be withdrawn and must be used to purchase a gift card listed on Giftah. The currency of the gift card will be given depending in whichever country the user is from (CAD or USD; the user must be a legal resident of that country and proof will be required).

In short the two rules are very simple:

1. Sign up for Giftah between March 1st and 31st 2009
2. Be a legal resident of Canada or U.S.A

The contest is over on Wednesday March 31st 11:59 PM Eastern Time. The winner’s username will be announced on the blog and they shall also be contacted via e-mail.

So what are you waiting for!? Sign up for Giftah today.
Update: The winner of our first giveaway is missy.e from Toronto. Congratulation missy.e!

Since the launch of Giftah we have received a great deal of feedback on the service itself and ideas of features we should offer to our users. We have taken this feedback very seriously and have gotten to work to implement these ideas! Two weeks later and this is what we were able to accomplish:

• All gift card transactions are now handled by Giftah, the winning bidder is able to pay the seller of the gift card and the seller then withdraws the winning amount.
• Gift cards on the site are now verified by Giftah and the amounts the seller states are then guaranteed to be correct. Look for the “Verified by Giftah” signature for cards that are guaranteed by Giftah!
• We have changed the way you look for cards! All gift cards are organized into categories.  No longer will you have to wonder where the card to your favorite store is located.
• We gave the homepage a brand new look! You are now able to see at a glance the gift cards you save the most money on, auctions that are just ending and auctions that have just begun.

We are very excited about these new changes and we hope they will change the way you use Giftah! We would like to also remind you that we have made a few changes to our Terms & Agreement, Policies and FAQ .

If you have any questions or would like to know more about these changes feel free to drop us a line by simply replying to this blog post or email us at [email protected]. We also love to hear about other ideas you may have to better enhance the site. Feel free to let us know by visiting our feedback center .

Hi everyone, first and foremost I would like to welcome all the users to Giftah. Thank you for signing up, we hope you have a great experience using Giftah. Since we have been live for less then two weeks we have been adding many new features. In this post I will go over some of the new functions that have been added to the site.

Add a new Store

Its impossible for us to find and add every single store to our site, that’s why we have now made it possible for users to add stores. If you can not find the store your gift card came from on our drop down list, just click the link next to it to add a store. Once you have filled out the brief form the store should be added to the list in no time.

View by country

The currency a gift card is sold in also designates which country it can be used in, to make it easier to find gift cards for sale in your country we added the ‘view by country’ drop down menu. To use this function just click on the buy button to view a list of all cards currently available and select you country from the drop down menu in the upper left hand corner of the page. Currently Giftah supports buying and selling gift cards in the United States and Canada.

More new features are on the way

We are always improving Giftah, whether its adding additional functions or making it easier to use. If you have an idea you would like to see implemented or have any problems please visit our feedback page and let us know what you would like to see on Giftah.

Back in November we took part in the Velocity symposium and we had made some flyer to hand out to everybody that stopped by our booth. Still had a few copies lying around so thought why not share them on the blog?

So this will officially be Giftah’s first blog posting, ever. Giftah finally has a voice!

We have been working hard behind the scenes during the past few days fixing various things. While we have been busy working on the site so has the press! The Montreal Gazette featured Giftah on their Friday paper. We received a lot of feedback from the Montreal community as a result and we are glad they are enjoying the site.

That’s all for now, but expect to hear more from the rest of the team behind Giftah!

So long, for now.