N S.

I just bought a Lands End gift card on SaveYa because it was 10% greater of a discount than the next closest competitor. While I DID eventually receive the electronic gift card and it was legitimate, I had to jump through WAY more hoops than on any competing site, including:

- Entering and verifying email address
- Entering and verifying (with code) phone number
- Waiting for "fraud review" after account creation and after purchase of gift cards

I used a "commercial" (read: for spam) email address and my Google Voice number, because I suspect that gathering this data is the main purpose of this verification. Their privacy policy and terms of service essentially say that they can use your information for whatever they want, and can continue to do so even after your account is terminated.

They also only allow payment via credit card (no PayPal, Google/Visa checkout, or others), which is kind of iffy for me because I like to keep another layer of security between myself and vendors like this.

Their verification process was also extremely buggy, sending multiple confirmation codes and emails simultaneously, only one of which was recognized by the system, so I can imagine there is a bit of luck involved in getting "verified". After my purchase, I got a notification that my gift card would be accessible "after a short fraud review", which fortunately didn't seem to delay anything because my codes were accessible immediately.

All in all, I did manage to save $5 on my transaction. Let's see if my credit card security is breached in the next two months, because if so I'm definitely going to be eyeing this site in particular...