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Also, I was looking at the helpmainstreet.com website that you mentioned in your comment and noticed they had a lot of businesses all around the country with li
by JangoSteve 6y ago
Also, I was looking at the helpmainstreet.com website that you mentioned in your comment and noticed they had a lot of businesses all around the country with links to gift cards. It's taken a fair amount of time for us to curate the gift card links for all the businesses on savemifaves.org, so I couldn't fathom how they could curate that many.
Looking through the links, it looks like almost all of them are links to squareup.com, toasttab.com, or quickgifts.com. I don't know about squareup.com or quickgifts.com, but when we were verifying the gift card links people were submitting (to ensure that people aren't setting up their own fraudulent gift card links for local businesses that don't already have their own way to purchase gift cards), we specifically looked at toasttab.com and realized that toasttab gift cards aren't all set up by the businesses themselves. Toasttab seems to set up their own gift card purchasing for local businesses, probably in order to reach out to the businesses and force them to sign up to claim their money from anyone who unwittingly purchases gift cards from there thinking the business must already be signed up.
So, we've had to spend a fair amount of time verifying submitted toasttab links to make sure the businesses actually signed up to sell gift cards through them, and that they weren't automatically set up without their knowledge. Otherwise, it's not going to help out that business much.
Looking at the helpmainstreet.com site, I'm a little disappointed, since I'm guessing the vast majority of businesses on there won't immediately and directly benefit from the purchase of gift cards as listed there. It's one thing to set up such a site as some sort of enterprise, but it seems disingenuous to use COVID-19 and claim that it's directly helping the businesses if it's not.
- gabem1 6y agoWow, thanks for that info. I didn't realize toasttab had that issue. I will keep an eye out as people submit businesses via my form. Also, great work building your database -- very impressive!
- JangoSteve 6y agoAdditionally, almost none of the nearly 400 businesses that have been submitted or added to our site for Michigan have used squareup or quickgifts for selling gift cards, so I have the same suspicion about the preponderance of those links as well.