Gift Card Granny announced Granny Exclusive on September 12, 2018, introducing a platform through which merchants could manage their product listings. The company presented the launch as a way to build direct relationships between retailers and a marketplace serving value-conscious gift-card buyers. [S01]

At the time, the business said it was working with more than 100 merchant brands. That was a company-reported relationship count, not a disclosure of active listings, cards sold or completed transactions. The announcement did not publish programme revenue or transaction volume. [S01]

Why retailer involvement matters

A merchant’s brand can appear in a gift-card marketplace through different routes. A card may have come from an individual who wants cash, or it may be supplied through a relationship with the retailer. Those routes raise different questions about sourcing, presentation and who stands behind an offer.

Granny Exclusive’s stated purpose was to let merchants take a more direct role in that presentation. Gift Card Granny described collaboration over how a retailer’s card reached shoppers buying for their own use. It did not establish that every offer on the wider marketplace had moved to the same model. [S01]

The commercial proposition

For a retailer, the potential attraction is access to customers actively seeking a discount. For the platform, a direct relationship can change how offers are assembled and maintained. Neither proposition proves incremental sales: measuring that would require evidence about who bought, how they redeemed and what they would otherwise have spent.

The 2018 announcement is a historical distribution development, with the new merchant-management function distinguished from claims about market-wide impact. It records a channel for retailer participation, without implying a current launch or a verified elimination of fraud in secondary gift-card trading.