Zeek voucher marketplace app review

Here’s a quick review of the new Zeek app for you. Can it help you to save or make money? Let’s see…

Zeek has now arrived in the UK, and the best way to describe the app is that it’s a marketplace for gift vouchers. You can sell your unwanted vouchers on there for less than face value to make a few quid, and you can buy gift vouchers on there for less than face value too.

The app’s free to download, and the interface is very simple and easy to use – just swipe between the screens or tap to buy or sell.

If you’re selling, they ask you a lot of questions and take your full details. This is of course to provide a guarantee of safety for the buyers. You can sell online gift voucher codes, or in-store gift vouchers. You won’t get face value, but if the voucher is not of use to you and you’re never going to spend it anyway then some might argue that getting some money for it is better than getting no money for it.

Apparently about a third of gift vouchers in the UK are never spent, which does seem like a bit of a waste…

How to buy vouchers at a discount

I used the buying section of the app, first scrolling though their ‘latest vouchers’ section to see what had just arrived (and was possibly going to get snapped up) and then looking at the ‘biggest discounts’ section. On the day I made the purchases, the biggest available discount was 30% off face value, but there were many other vouchers on offer with smaller discounts.

My first purchase was a National Book Token with a face value of £20. This was sold to me for £15, so technically a 25% discount. At this point, the app made me pay an extra £1 on top – I couldn’t work out what this was for or what was going on (it’s not mentioned in the FAQ) but eventually found out it was being added to my store credit.

Then I bought another voucher, this time a £40 face value Boots voucher for £36, or a 15% discount. This was an in-store only voucher. Again, £1 was taken on top of this purchase from my PayPal account, and again this money was added to my credit. To be honest, I found this £1 charge a bit annoying and I’m still not clear what the point of it was, although the good news is that I did eventually get all the money back.

Anyway, it’s rare to get money off when purchasing gift vouchers in shops, and the discounted vouchers have significantly boosted my spending power. I can now give them away as gifts to someone else, or spend them myself. If you buy supermarket vouchers from Zeek, you could also save on everyday expenses such as grocery shopping.

I also made a third voucher purchase after this, where I was able to spend the £2 that had been taken from my PayPal, I wasn’t charged a further £1 and I ended up with no further credit. I believe this is how it works for all new customers, so be warned that this might happen. If you shop with Zeek regularly, I’m assuming you’ll get all your money back too – the promoter has reassured me that this is the case.

How long until the vouchers arrived?

All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for my vouchers to be posted to me. According to the FAQ it can take seven days, but mine were with me within 48 hours by Royal Mail Signed For service. Each was a plastic card, and they had a small sticker on the front saying how much each card was worth. I found this sticker information very useful – cards often don’t tell you how much is on them and it’s easy to mix them up.

You can save a fair amount using Zeek if their best offers coincide with favourite shops you’d want vouchers for. Of course, this does tie you into buying from a specific shop, unless you buy a generic ‘high street’ voucher or something like theatre tokens.

How to use Zeek for even bigger savings

I think you could also ‘stack’ the deals to make the biggest savings, i.e. make in-app Zeek purchases via a cashback credit card (please only get a cashback credit card if you’re VERY organised with your finances), then make online purchases in shops via a cashback website with related discount codes, or combine in-store purchases with a store discount card. Combine this with the store’s own sales and offers, and you could make huge savings.

Essentially, Zeek adds another useful layer to the general money-saving arsenal.

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To sum up: Zeek is very easy to use, the financial side of things seems safe and secure, and it could help you to save or make some extra money. The Zeek app can be downloaded here, and works for iOS and Android. For a FREE £10 voucher, use my referral code when you sign up: 2rf2kx

EDITED TO ADD: This code now gives you a free £5 voucher.

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Full disclosure: I was given some in-app credit for review purposes, but also had to spend my own money to get access to the vouchers and made an additional purchase to get the voucher access money back. The link above is a tracking link and could potentially help this site with further app credit, but I’m not an affiliate of Zeek. All thoughts, comments and opinions my own.