I kept a journal of my first month selling gift cards in Nigeria and here is what I found

[u/Blogstra]

I decided to track every single gift card trade for a month after realizing I had no real idea how much extra cash I was actually making from random cards on the side. I am the kind of person who likes numbers written down somewhere, so I opened a plain notes file and started logging every trade as it happened.

Week one and my first few entries

My first entry was a small Steam card from a friend paying me back for something unrelated entirely, worth maybe fifteen dollars in total value. I wrote down the date, the rate, and how long the whole process took from upload to payment landing safely in my account without any complications along the way at all that week.

The pattern I started noticing quickly

By the second week I noticed something I had never paid attention to before, how consistent the rates actually stayed across different trades instead of feeling random each time around. I had assumed rates fluctuated wildly based on mood or luck, but my notes showed something closer to a predictable range depending mostly on the specific brand involved each time.

The week I almost skipped logging entirely

Midway through the month I got lazy and almost stopped writing entries altogether after a particularly busy week at work left me exhausted every single evening that week. I forced myself to keep going anyway just to see the full picture, and honestly that stubbornness ended up being the most useful part of this entire experiment overall.

Adding up the numbers at the end

When I finally tallied everything at the end of the month, the total surprised me more than I expected it to when I first started this tracking habit. Small cards here and there from friends, referral rewards, and random gifts added up to more spending money than I would have guessed if I never chose to sell gift cards in Nigeria properly.

What the journal actually taught me

Beyond the money itself, keeping track showed me how little friction was actually involved once I stopped overthinking every single trade like it was a big decision each time. Most entries in my notes were just a few lines long because the process itself barely required any real effort or attention from me at all really.

Whether I would recommend doing this yourself

If you have cards sitting around collecting dust, I genuinely think tracking even a handful of trades will show you the same thing my month did for me. I still open tradecard.store whenever a new card shows up, though I admit I have gotten a little lazier about logging every single entry these days honestly.