Introduction
Stockpile has been a bastion of manufactured spend opportunities since at least 2017; let’s count some of the ways:
- Treating credit cards as debit cards
- Allowing purchases of $10,000 in gift cards per day with a credit card for Black Friday weekend
- Opening the flood gates for $10,000 in gift cards per day, any day
- Allowing $1,000 in gift card purchases per day with rotating email, IP, and credit card
Underground MS
Even when all of the above died there were still several non-public ways to load Stockpile, including:
- With a credit card masked by some digital wallets (when correctly configured)
- Using certain widely available gift cards that Stockpile treated as debit
With the above methods, you could load $6,000 per week per payment method per player, and you could do even better if you bought anonymous Stockpile gift cards too. Well, all of that came crashing down earlier this week like it was BeachBody stock, with a new $100 per rolling 24 hour purchase limit with any card for funding your account. Currently the only way I know of to get more volume is via ACH, which obviously is a non-starter for manufactured spend.
Lessons
It’s no secret that I love FinTechs for manufactured spend, and lessons from Stockpile apply to other companies:
- Try everything when a platform takes cards (Credit cards, gift cards, rewards debit cards, digital wallets, crowbars, etc)
- Limits can be per-funding type
- Limits can be different than advertised
- There are often backdoor ways into scaling
- When a company has been good for MS and something dies, that doesn’t mean stop probing, a very patched ship probably still has a leak somewhere
Have a nice weekend and go pound those FinTechs like you’re Gallagher and they’re watermelons.
