We’ve again updated our gift card resources page, which lists every gift card secondary marketplace we’ve ever seen, and a few more sites have hit the dead pool.

Mercardi:  They’ve closed their doors and a message on their site recommends people go to Plastic Jungle.

Update:  They may have endorsed Plastic Jungle as their successor, but that hasn’t stopped competitor GiftCardRescue.com from offering a 5% discount to Mercardi users, or anyone who uses the code MERCARDI until Friday 9/3.

DFWbid.com:  I’ve never quite understood the penny-auction phenomenon, where people pay to bid on items by buying credits, which are lost if they don’t have the winning bid.  To assuage the frustrations of many of their customers, most penny-auction sites started allowing people to apply credits spent on an auction to buying the item at full retail price.  According to a Business Week article, this practice has sliced the margins considerably making it a much less profitable business, and customers otherwise have cooled to the type of marketplace as traffic at the three largest penny auction sites are down 40-60% in the first half of this year.  It was bound to happen and I suspect customers have wizened up.  In any event, this gift card focused penny-auction site appears to be dead.

The Island of Misfit Gift Cards:  AKA discount-gift-cards.info.  One of the many sites of questionable value, it simply listed gift card auctions on Ebay.  Apparently even their low overhead wasn’t enough to keep them in business.