[Expired] Swych App Review for Buying and Swapping Gift Cards + Referral Bonus

We’ve been seeing numerous deals with Swych over the past months. After ignoring it for while, I decided it was time to signup. Here’s my review of the Swych app.

Buy Gift Cards with Swych

Swych iOS link, Swych Android link

The Swych app sells first-hand gift cards for many merchants. All gift cards are instantly available in the app. Popular options include Amazon, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Hotels.com, Groupon, and Sears.

An interesting feature of the app is that you can specify the exact amount of the gift card to purchase. You’ll always have to either round up or down to the dollar amount closest to what you want.

You can buy a gift card for yourself or send to a friend.

They also have some fancy way of giving a gift card through Siri. These kinds of things don’t interest me, but here’s a link for those who are.

Gift Card Discounts

Many of the gift cards come with a discount at checkout of between 1-4%.

It’s not well advertised what the discount is, just begin the checkout process and see if there’s a discount at checkout. The biggest discount is 4% on brands like Gap, and other brands like Amazon and Best Buy don’t have any discount at all.

I like the fact that the discount comes off the purchase right away, not as a credit for future use.

Promotional Offers

Swych periodically has deals to get popular gift card brands at a discount with a promo code. These offers aren’t ever scalable since they can only be done once per account. Promotions will usually show near the top of the gift card list in the default setting.

Sample Promotions: We’ve seen deals like $50 Hotels.com for $40, $60 Nike for $50, and $100 Lowe’s for $85.

Swap Gift Cards

The app is specifically designed to allow ‘swyching’ one gift card for another. In practice, it only works (as I can tell) in the following limited scenario: if you receive a gift card from someone else via the Swych app (as noted above, there is an option to send a card to a friend), then the recipient will be able to switch/swap that gift card for another brand they’d like instead. Swipe right or left on the gift card for swapping options.

The swych/switch is at an even $1-$1 ratio, so if you get a $50 Old Navy gift card, you’d be able to swych/switch it for a $50 Amazon or Best Buy gift card, for example.

Send GC and Earn Swych Points

You can buy a gift card for yourself or send to a friend. Toggle between those options at the top of the page.

When sending a gift card to a friend, you’ll earn Swych points. Each $1 of gift card value gives you 1% back in Swych Points which you can use on a future purchase. Points expire at the end of the following calendar year.

I can’t actually get the For a Friend option to work for me at all; when I enter the email address, there is no Continue button to click (an IT glitch as I see it). I’m not sure whether gifting gets the discounts mentioned above (‘Gift Card Discounts’) in addition to the 1% in Swych Points or not.

Swych Wallet

All gift card purchases are saved in your Swych wallet. You can reference them at any time in the future.

You can also add other cards, purchased elsewhere to your Swych wallet which helps with obtaining a bar-code for in-store use. It can also be a way to consolidate all your gift cards in one place.

Payment Options

The app initially shows Apple or Android Pay and Pay with Amazon options. If you click Change Payment Method, a Paypal option will show. They don’t currently support direct credit card payments (coming soon), but of course you can use a credit card with the Amazon, Apple, or Paypal payment methods.

On the checkout screen you’ll see the Amazon and Apple payment options at the bottom, and higher up you’ll see a place to input a promo code. Only one promo code is allowed per purchase, so you can’t stack your $5 signup bonus (which comes in the form of a promo code, see below) with some other promo code (like the promotional gift card offers, see above).

An interesting thing is that Swych apparently counts as a bonus 5x category on the Chase INK card when you choose Paypal payment option. So this is another way to buy just about any gift card and earn 5x with INK. Update: no longer earns 5x.

$5 Signup Bonus

There is a $5 referral bonus for the new member and the referrer. The minimum gift card purchase on the app is $10 which means you can basically get any $10 gift card for $5 with the signup offer.

I bought a $10 Amazon gift card for $5.

For the New Member

Use a referral link when signing up to get $5 off a purchase. You’ll have to enter the referral code at checkout to get the $5 discount (the referral code is the promo code to get the discount).

You probably need to use the referral link at the time of signup for the bonus to work. Also, it seems you need to use the referral bonus on your first purchase. If you want to take advantage of another promotional offer on Swych, be sure to first buy the $10 Amazon/whatever gift card for $5 before doing the other offer.

For the Referrer

The referrer also gets a $5 bonus for each referrer. You’ll get the referral bonus within 48 hours of when the new user makes a purchase.

There is a limit of ten $5 referral bonuses. There is also a limit of one $5 bonus per day, but that just means that the credit will delay until the next day, e.g. if you refer two people the same day, you’ll see one $5 bonus and then the next day you’ll see another $5 bonus.

You can find your referral code by going to the menu in the top-left of the app.

Feel free to share your referral link in this dedicated page. Don’t share it in the comments here since we want to reserve it for discussion.

Final Thoughts

The Swych app is actually more interesting than expected:

• Earn 5x with INK when paying with Paypal
• They regularly run nice promotional offers
• Get up to a 4% instant discount on select cards
• Purchase gift cards in exact amounts (rounded to the nearest dollar)

Could be a useful app to download and keep in mind for the future to earn 5x on various gift cards and maybe get a small discount to boot. And hopefully there’ll be some nice promotions along the way. In any case, you can use a referral link and get $5 off any $10 gift card the app allows.

Similar sites we’ve reviewed on Doctorofcredit:

• Seashells: Website for Buying First-Hand Gift Cards at a Discount
• Review of Mygiftcardsplus – Site for Buying Brand New Gift Cards at a Discount
• MPX Review 
• Raise Pay Review: Buy New Gift Cards in Exact Amounts from Raise.com and Earn Cash Back