Blick Gift Card

Blick gives you three routes, and all of them are free.

The fastest is online: Open Blick's gift card balance check page, enter your card number and the PIN, and the balance comes straight back. The page handles physical Gift Cards and eGift Cards, so it doesn't matter which one you're holding.

For a physical card, the PIN sits under a foil panel on the back. Scratch it with a coin or your fingernail, gently, because a torn panel is very hard to recover from. For an eGift Card, the PIN is written in the delivery email.

The second route is by phone: Call 1-800-828-4548 and Blick's customer service team will look it up for you.

The third only helps if you're in the United States: Walk into any Blick retail store and ask at the counter.

For anyone in Nigeria, the online check is the one that matters. It takes under a minute, it costs nothing, and it gives you a number you can quote with confidence when you sell your card to Gift Card Coach. Check before you talk to any buyer, not after.

Redeeming at checkout on DickBlick is straightforward once you know where to look, because the field is easy to miss.

• Add what you want to your basket and go to the checkout.
• Under the Payment section, choose Add Gift Card or Gift Coupon.
• Enter your gift card number first, then the PIN in the field beneath it. For an eGift Card the PIN came in your email; for a physical card it's under the scratched foil.
• Click Apply to Total.

If your card covers the whole order, you're done. If the order costs more, Blick asks you to add a second payment method for the remainder, a credit card, PayPal, whatever you normally use. If the order costs less than your balance, the leftover stays on the card for next time.

The same card also works in any Blick retail store, on the sister site Utrecht.com, and on orders placed by phone or by post. The one restriction worth knowing: you cannot use a Blick gift card to buy another Blick gift card.

If you're in Nigeria and none of those routes are practical for you, converting the balance to Naira is usually the more sensible move. Visit the Giftcardcoach sell page is for.

It depends on the face value of your card and the rate on the day you trade.

The arithmetic itself is simple: your card's dollar balance multiplied by the current rate per dollar.

What actually moves the number is demand rather than anything about Blick itself. Art supplies are a specialist category, so Blick doesn't turn over as fast as the big general retail names. Rates on specialist cards tend to be steadier than the headline brands but a little lower, and they can firm up when a buyer is actively looking for one.

Two things worth understanding. First, any figure published on a page is indicative. Rates move, and yours gets confirmed with you directly before anything changes hands. Second, be wary of anyone quoting an unusually high number to get your card details. Confirm the rate first, then send the card. Never the other way round.

Most people who lose a Blick card lose it the same way: they send the number and PIN before any money is agreed, and the balance is drained within minutes. Once a gift card code is out of your hands, it is effectively cash in someone else's pocket.

Five habits protect you.

1. Check the balance yourself first, on Blick's own balance page. Never rely on a buyer's word about what your card is worth.
2. Agree the rate before the code moves. Any buyer who wants your PIN before confirming a price is telling you something about themselves.
3. Keep the whole conversation in one place. Someone who pushes you off a platform onto a private channel is removing the record.
4. Be suspicious of rates far above market. Nobody pays well above what a card is worth out of generosity.
5. Send photos, not raw text codes, until payment terms are settled. A photo you control is easier to withhold than a code you've typed out.

The structure matters more than the individual tips. At Gift Card Coach the rate is confirmed with you before your card details change hands, and payment goes to a Nigerian bank account you provide. That ordering is deliberate.

Speed is worth less than certainty here, and the two often trade against each other.

Anything promising instant payment before a verification step has skipped the verification step. That's fine until the card turns out to have been partly spent, at which point the argument starts. A trade that takes twenty minutes and goes through cleanly beats one that promises two minutes and stalls.

What to look for in whatever platform you use:

• The rate is quoted and confirmed with you before you hand over the number and PIN.
• A real person handles the trade and answers questions.
• Balance verification happens as a stated step, not as a surprise afterwards.
• Payment goes to a Nigerian bank account you nominate, with a timeline you were told in advance.
• Specialist cards like Blick are actually accepted rather than quietly refused after you've already sent the details.

Many platforms only handle the top twenty brands. Giftcardcoach runs on WhatsApp, quotes the rate first, and buys cards other platforms turn away.

It's worth separating two things that get muddled.

Redeeming a Blick gift card means spending it on art supplies. Only Blick can do that, through DickBlick.com, Utrecht.com, its US stores, or its phone and mail-order lines. No third party redeems it for you.

Converting it means selling the balance for naira. That's what Nigerian sellers are usually asking about.

For the conversion, judge a site on process rather than promises. Does it confirm the rate before you send the code? Does it verify the balance as a stated step? Does it pay to a Nigerian bank account on a timeline it told you in advance? Does it actually take specialist cards, or only the big names?

Gift Card Coach was built around those questions. Rate first, verification second, payment to your bank account third, in that order.

The highest rates in the Nigerian market tend to sit with high-liquidity cards that many buyers want at once. Blick is a specialist art-supply card. It has a real market and a stable one, but it isn't a top-rate brand and it doesn't pretend to be.

What Blick does offer is dependability. Because demand for specialist cards is steadier, the rate tends to move less from week to week, which makes it easier to plan around. And because Blick cards don't expire and can be reloaded, a card sitting in a drawer isn't losing value while you decide. If you want to compare properly, look at the full rate board rather than trusting a single claim on a single page.

Blick states that eGift Cards reach the recipient's email inbox within 30 minutes of the order.

Physical Gift Cards run on a different clock. Blick processes gift card orders Monday to Friday during business hours. An order placed before 1:00 pm Central ships the same day; anything after that ships the next business day. Actual delivery then depends on the postal option chosen at checkout.

Two practical notes if you're waiting on an eGift. Check the spam folder, automated gift emails land there routinely. And confirm the recipient address was typed correctly, because a mistyped address is the single most common reason a gift card appears not to have arrived.

If more than an hour has passed and nothing has landed, call Blick on 1-800-828-4548 rather than waiting it out.

Generally no. Blick's published terms state the card cannot be redeemed for cash except where the law requires it, and it cannot be applied as payment against a Blick account.

That cash-out exception is worth understanding properly, because it gets misrepresented. Several US states require retailers to cash out small remaining balances on request, usually under a threshold like $5 or $10. Those laws apply to customers standing in a store in that state. They do nothing for someone in Nigeria.

Blick also reserves the right to cash out or issue substitute certificates for remaining balances if it ever ends the gift card programme. That's a housekeeping clause, not something you can trigger.

So for a Nigerian holder the realistic options are two: spend it on Blick products, or convert the balance to Naira. If it's the second, the Gift Card Coach rate board tells you where Blick stands today.

Blick's checkout is built for it. The Add Gift Card or Gift Coupon option under Payment can be used more than once, so you can stack several cards against a single order, useful if you've collected a few small balances.

Apply each card in turn, entering the number and PIN and clicking Apply to Total each time. The running total drops as each one lands. If the cards together don't cover the order, add another payment method for the remainder. If they overshoot, the leftover stays on the last card applied and remains available.

One restriction holds regardless of how many cards you have: you cannot use a Blick gift card to buy another Blick gift card.

No, and this is one of Blick's better features.

Blick's published terms carry no dormancy fee, no inactivity charge, no monthly service deduction, and no expiration on either the physical Gift Card or the eGift Card. A $50 card left in a drawer for three years is still a $50 card.

Shipping on a posted physical card is a separate charge paid by whoever ordered it, and it doesn't come out of the balance.

The one thing to watch has nothing to do with fees. If you're buying a Blick card second-hand from an individual, you have no way to know whether the balance is intact or whether the seller kept a copy of the number. That's a fraud risk, not a fee, and it's why buying gift cards from strangers is a bad idea in any market.

Yes. Blick is one of the more genuinely reloadable cards in the market.

To add value, visit any Blick retail store, or call 1-800-828-4548. Either route puts more money on a card you already hold, so the same physical card keeps working indefinitely rather than becoming dead plastic once the balance runs out.

This matters more than it sounds. Plenty of retailers describe their cards as reloadable but only allow it at the point of original purchase, or through an account you have to create. Blick's version is simple: walk in or call.

For sellers, reloading has one implication worth knowing. If you added your own money to a card that was originally a gift, be upfront about it when you trade. It doesn't cause a problem, but a card whose balance is higher than its original face value looks odd on a verification check if nobody has explained why.

The eGift Card is the easier route. Order it on DickBlick.com, pick a design and a value between $5 and $500, and enter the recipient's email address. Blick delivers it within 30 minutes. If you want to send several eGift Cards with different personal messages, place them as separate orders. Blick applies one message per order.

For a physical card, order it and have it posted. Gift card orders are processed Monday to Friday; before 1:00 pm Central ships same day, after that the next business day.

You can also simply hand over a physical card you already own. Blick's terms don't restrict who uses the card, so passing it to a friend is fine.

What isn't fine is sending the number and PIN to someone you don't know in exchange for a promise. That's the shape most gift card fraud takes, and it works because the code is the value. If you're converting rather than gifting, go through a buyer that confirms the rate before your details move, that's the sequence Gift Card Coach uses.

Yes. The eGift Card isn't restricted to online use. It works at Blick retail stores as well.

Bring the number and PIN with you, either on your phone or printed out. The staff at the counter can enter them manually the same way they'd swipe a physical card. Keep the email accessible rather than relying on memory, since the numbers are long and a mistyped digit means starting over.

The reverse also holds. A physical Blick Gift Card works online at DickBlick.com and Utrecht.com, over the phone, and by mail order. Blick doesn't divide its cards into online-only and store-only products, which puts it ahead of a good number of retailers who do exactly that.

For a Nigerian holder neither route is reachable in person, which is why converting to naira is usually the practical answer. Today's Blick rate is here.