Gift cards are excellent resources to exchange for specific products, services, or items. The most influential companies and businesses in the world, including Visa, Apple, Amazon, and numerous others, implement this business model to promote commerce in all of its forms.
These cards are often used in digital platforms, rather than being physical assets. They can be redeemed at specific websites, and then people can exchange them for a wide array of products and services.
However, the platforms in which some of these gift cards function, and the card themselves, sometimes are geo-blocked. The term means that they can’t be used in any country but the one in which the site performs its commercial activities.
The United States are recognized globally as the mecca of commerce and sales. The country is the home of numerous enterprises, websites, and platforms that promote the use of gift cards to incentive the purchase of merchandise and specific items. However, once you leave the nation, they most likely won’t work because of the aforementioned geo-blocking restrictions.
Using a Virtual Private Network to disguise your location and make every platform and Internet Service Provider (ISP) believe you are in American territory will get your US Gift Cards to work outside of the United States. We will show you how.
Gift cards: what are they?
Excellent choices for birthdays, holidays, weddings, and other events, gift cards are fantastic ways to show your loved ones that you care about them, providing them (or even yourself, if that’s your wish!) with the chance to redeem the instrument for prizes and exciting stuff.
Essentially, a gift card is a prepaid payment card loaded with a specific amount of money, which happens to be available on several electronic payment purchases. These instruments are mostly used online.
For example, if a specific item costs $200, and you have a $150 gift card, you will end up paying only $50 for your product if you apply for the gift card in a valid online store. These payment instruments are very useful and have become popular all over the world, most notably in the United States.
Overcoming geo-blocking while shopping online
If you are, say, in France, you may not be able to use your gift card balance because the American platform might only allow access to local users. In fact, many US-based e-commerce sites are blocked outside the country.
However, using a Virtual Private Network is a fantastic solution because it allows you to change the location you appear to be connected from. You can acquire an American IP address from wherever you are, and that way, you will be able to use your US gift cards outside the United States.
VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are online resources that let people protect the content they share over the web by encrypting it, along with their IP address, and rerouting all the information to remote servers, managed by the VPN brand and not by the data-logging ISPs.
The communication that the user establishes with the endpoint, or the websites it visits, will be encrypted all the way if a VPN is used. The resource creates a virtual tunnel for the person’s location and traffic to travel around the Internet safely; away from hackers, cybercriminals, crypto miners, malware developers, copyright trolls, geo-blocking measures, surveillance, censorship, and even behavior-based advertising.
The best VPN brands in the market are reviewed at VPNTierList, in the form of a VPN tier list. It is a way to rank, sort, and evaluate several companies by the quality of their apps, reputation, extra features, encryption, privacy, speed, and other factors.
Each tier represents a group of similarly-rated options. To use your US gift cards outside the United States, and for nearly all purposes, TorGuard is in a tier of its own. It is very affordable, at $10 per month, the speeds are top-notch, and its reputation is among the best in the industry.
TorGuard offers secure AES 256-bit encryption, OpenVPN availability, multiplatform compatibility, a huge network of 3,000 servers in 55 nations, and a spectacular customer support department.
Additionally, the American brand offers other protocols, such as IPSec, L2TP, SSTP, OpenConnect, Squid, and more. The no-logging privacy policy is highly convenient if you want to protect your anonymity, and the option to connect five devices at the same time under one account comes in handy, as well.
How to use your US gift cards outside the United States
- Download TorGuard by going to its website, the App Store, or the Google Play Store
- Register for the VPN service by choosing your plan and paying for it
- Log in to your account
- Connect to a US-based server to obtain an American IP address
- Go to the platform in which you will use your American gift card
- Enjoy safe shopping without geographical restrictions
In conclusion, TorGuard is the lone option in the God Tier at VPNTierList, which means that it is the most recommended option to use your US gift cards outside the United States.
Gift cards are popular options to give away as presents for specific occasions, such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and more. Since the platforms in which they are going to be redeemed not always work on foreign lands, you will need a VPN to ensure you can get them to work outside the United States or whichever the host nation is.
