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Zeek is a Israel-born mobile phone app launching in the UK that looks to solve the issue of unwanted gift cards.
Picture this. Your distant aunt Agatha, whom you’ve met twice in your life, kindly gifts you a voucher for a shop you’ve got no intention of ever going to. “I always wanted a tenner to spend at the Soil Emporium,” you feign. A familiar scene, we're sure.
You make grand plans to pop along for a fresh bag of fertiliser at some point, but three years down the road as you’re giving the old wallet a spring cleaning, the gift card tumbles out from its leather coffin, lifeless and long past expiry date. Woe betide Agatha and her good intentions.
Zeek looks to combat this age-old frustration by setting up a digital marketplace where unloved gift cards can be bought and sold with ease.
It’s simple really - Agatha’s ungrateful sod of a nephew uploads a picture of his gift card and sets a price, all via his smartphone.
The app then lets willing buyers pick up the gift card at the discounted value – Zeek reckons it sees an average 20 per cent skimmed off – and find it in their postbox shortly thereafter.
Money goes direct to into the seller’s bank account or PayPal, and the buyer is now free to spend his or her new gift card as he or she pleases.
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But is this all just one big crackpot idea? Well Zeek already has 70,000 users back in Israel, and it reckons it can make quick work of the Uk’s £1 billion unredeemed gift cards each year too.
Daniel Zelkind, co-founder at Zeek, said: “We’ve looked closely at the UK market and have found that 47 per cent of UK consumers receive more than one gift card a year and over half of those never get redeemed.”
“They get put in the drawer and forgotten about. With Zeek, this is a thing of the past.”
Zeek is officially launching today, and is now available to download for free from the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play store.