The holiday gift card buying spree is over. Now, instead of buying gift cards for others, why not buy a discount gift card for yourself? A new startup, called Biddees, allows you to buy gift cards at discounts.

Santa Monica-based Biddees launched a new web site today focused on selling gift cards from major retailers using a reverse auction technique. The site allows participants to purchase discounted gift cards from brand name merchants (like Amazon.com, Walmart, etc.). Biddees sells gifts cards at a discount, using a model similar to that popularized by Swoopo.com, where users can’t see the current price of a gift card until they use a bid credit (which costs $0.99). The use of a bid credit decreases the price of those gift cards by 50 cents, and gives the user an option to then buy the card-or wait until that card has received other bids and decreases in price.

Here’s another fun twist. A portion of each bid goes directly to a nonprofit of the user’s choice.

Biddee is headed by Steve Adler and Dan Zuckerman, the co-founders of Shoes.com and The Walking Company, and was started by Barry Shore, founder of Fax4Free.com.

From the company Website:

At Biddees.com, we are dedicated to making the world a better place by helping you stretch your dollars further and providing charitable organizations with the revenue they need to meet their goals. We want you to enjoy your time at Biddees.com, whether you’re a mom looking to save on groceries, a college student who wants a great deal on mP3 downloads or an office manager trying to keep the supply costs down.