What’s up with Sixth Continent?

Hi Kristen,

I was wondering if you have any current information on Sixth Continent?  I know they’ve been a mix of good and bad, so I wanted to check.

I have some credits ($16.00 for a $25.00 gift card) and I’d love to be able to use them and possibly start buying cards through them for Christmas and building more credits.  I’m a little hesitant, though, since they were so bad for a while.

Have you used them recently?  Or do you know of anyone who has?

-Danielle

I do have updated info! Long story short, my opinion is that it’s safe to redeem your credits.

And as you will see as you read further, I’ve put my own money where my mouth is.

(I tried to publish this post last week, but the day I hit publish, Sixth Continent did an update that crashed the site temporarily.)

Read on for the longer story:

Some Sixth Continent history

Sixth Continent is a company that I was a fan of a few years back. On their site, you buy gift cards and get a percentage of credits back to use toward more gift cards.

The sign-up bonus that I got, plus a few credits for completing my profile, allowed me to get a $25 gift card for $15.

(Here’s the original post I wrote.)

I bought lots of gift cards for the next year or so, and thanks to a reader tip, I even learned that you can get Aldi gift certificates through Sixth Continent when they offer Gift of Choice vouchers.

Anyway, as time went on, Sixth Continent started to be kind of…funky.

Gift cards were taking forever to show up, no one was answering customer service emails, and my contact person there seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

So then in 2019, I quit using the site and I wrote a post letting you all know that I could no longer recommend Sixth Continent.

Anyway!

Danielle sent me this email a month or so ago, and I decided to log in and do a test purchase to see if they’d turned things around over there or not.

The test-drive

The website was updated-looking when I logged in, so I decided to test the waters by ordering a $25 gift card.

I noticed that they now let you pay with a credit card rather than with Amazon Pay, so I was happy about that. I figured that if they didn’t come through with my gift card, I could at least dispute the charge with my credit card company!

 

It takes two days to activate a card after you buy it, and I waited with low expectations.

But the $25 gift card came through with no problem, amazingly enough!

So then I ordered a $100 RewardLink gift card, which was offering a 50% reward, which means I got $50 credited back to my account.

 

Then I redeemed the Rewardlink card for an Amazon gift card and applied it to my Amazon account.

Since then I’ve done the same thing a few times over with a RewardLink card, redeeming for Target and Amazon.

(Rewardlink lets you redeem for vouchers from dozens of merchants, from shopping to restaurants to charities.)

And then I heard from Sixth Continent

Once I’d done all this cautious testing of Sixth Continent, I opened my inbox one day to find an email from someone who works there.

He told me that Sixth Continent is under some new management now and that they are working hard to fix their North American problems (their tech team is based in Italy), and he asked me to test out some functionality on their web app*.

*I found a few bugs, which they are now working on. For instance, you have to input the credit card expiration day as YY/MM, not MM/YY. The latter is the American way!

So, that explains why the site is now working properly again. I don’t know who was managing it before, but it seems like they are turning things around now.

Current sign-up bonus

If you open an account through this link, (and any links in this post), you will get a $10 welcome bonus, plus a free three-month subscription to their premium plan. The main benefit of the premium plan is that the cards you buy are activated immediately; you don’t have to wait the usual two days.

You can use credits for up to half your purchase, so you could use your $10 welcome credit to get a $25 certificate for $15 out of pocket. And as of this writing, Orange Premium members have access to an Amazon gift card.

The selection of cards changes from day to day, but my top faves are RewardLink and Gift of Choice (both of those are redeemable for tons of different merchants), Target, and Amazon.

Questions?

Hopefully, I explained all this thoroughly enough, but if there’s something that I missed, let me know in the comments.

Also, I now have a fresh contact person at Sixth Continent, so if you run into any problems or find any bugs, let me know and I’ll pass it on to him. He’d be thankful to know about anything that’s not working right so that they can fix it.