All gift cards not created equal—especially when it comes to resale

Popularity and resale value do not always correlate when it comes to gift cards.

Visa is tops in a ranking of the gift cards expected to be most popular this holiday season.

Rounding out the top 10: American Express; iTunes; Wal-Mart; Target; Starbucks; Netflix; eBay and Google Play. The ranking is from CardHub, a credit card comparison Web site owned by Evolution Finance.

The most popular cards, however, are not necessarily the the cards with the highest resale value. Shell has the highest resale value in the GiftCard study, followed by Wal-Mart; Target; MasterCard; Home Depot; Costco; Apple Store; Babies ‘R’ Us; Visa and Ikea. (To see a complet listing of the 50 most popular gift cards, click here.)



CardHub noted that holiday shoppers are expected to shell out an average of $805 this year, with the average gift card buyer projected to spend more than $173 on plastic alone.



In other key findings:

• 
  Gift cards with the lowest resale value are from Google Play and H&M.


• 
  The gift cards that increased in popularity the most from 2014 to 2015 are from TJ Maxx, Chick-Fil-A and Home Depot Gift Card.


• 
  The gift cards whose popularity declined the most in the past year are the Ikea card and the QVC card