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Once I started churning credit cards in order to reduce my expenses and maximize the money I was getting back from my everyday purchases, I started following a lot of blogs and forums related to the subject.
To my surprise, I was able to find a few of these opportunities pretty quickly and after double checking my math, I made the purchases. Since the sell prices are known going in and change rather infrequently, the risk I am taking on is relatively low. Is is all worth it? For the time being, deciding whether or not this business is worth pursuing long-term is still an open question.
Fortunately, the start-up cost of this business is next to nothing and I could stop buying tomorrow, sell the rest of my inventory over the next couple of weeks, and walk away completely still having made a little money in the process. Will I still be doing this 6 months or a year from now? Making the operation more efficient is my main goal at this point, but at some point in the future I will take a close look at the time and effort required vs.
While the benefits seem great, they come at the cost of time and effort. I am working to reduce the time and effort required when buying and selling, but it will always be a factor. As I increase my efficiency finding and buying cards, the benefits can be maintained or even go up while the time required gets smaller.
I spent some time recently driving around to a few different stores to take advantage of the deals they were offering on gift cards to acquire the stockpile below:. This post by Doctor of Credit was the first place I saw the deal: Nevertheless, the cards could be flipped for a profit a small 1.
One of those additional rebates is fuel rewards which are doubled on gift card purchases at Safeway. And to my surprise, the fuel points received were based on the value of the cards, not what I actually paid, so they were even more beneficial than normal.
For that reason, I only opted to buy a few hundred dollars worth at each Safeway instead of attempting to buy them all. In general, grocery store and gas station gift cards sell for the most money because everyone has a use for them. Amex Offers are similar to BankAmeriDeals in that you load them to your credit card ahead of time and they will automatically add in the savings on your next statement.
Because I knew about this a while ago, I made sure we both had each other as authorized users on all of out Amex cards, which means we can use this deal 8 times! We had already used 6 of the cards previously to this trip, so I only had two left to use up. The next time, we bought Shell gift cards because those can be resold or used for a nice return.
This time, there were no more Shell cards, no eBay cards, and the entire gift card rack looked like a tornado swept through and took half the cards with it. Next time, we should probably just use all of our Amex cards on the first trip, so lesson learned. The Old Navy cards I was able to immediately sell online once I got home, while the Staples cards can be sold for a higher rate if I mail them in.
I typically wait until I have several cards to mail in before actually sending them to save on postage, so it will probably be a week or two before I actually sell them. Not too bad for about 2 hours of my time. Also, there appear to be ways to get more than one AU for an Amex card even with only one significant other. Interesting that yours rang up differently and that sure would have made my life easier.
Hey Noah, this was a good read. Thanks for sharing such a detailed post! One question with regards to gift card arbitrage. Just wondering if you have a spreadsheet template that you can possibly share to track your gift card purchases and sales?
What does SP stand for? I can give you an example for that particular column. Hopefully that explanation made sense. Good read Noah, thanks—found this via CTP. I wish I had a solid answer for my profits vs.
I can provide a few thoughts towards it though. The major time sink is finding profitable cards to buy. A minute to buy, a minute to take it out of the envelope and verify the balance, and then another minute or two to sell it.
If I made a dollar or two on that deal, my hourly profit would look significant. Unfortunately, those deals are limited in the number you can buy and only happen every so often, so I end up spending time trying to find the next deal. Fortunately, I keep getting more efficient and that number should go up over time.
Profit margin is small so wondering how to do better. There are a lot better retailers to go after than Amazon if you want to start churning gift cards. It takes a few steps, but Sears is where I get my Amazon cards. Amazon cards, as well as Exxon and Shell are available. If you have nothing to buy at Kmart or Sears, this may be risky. My question is how did you approach the Safeway cashiers with multiple cards in hand? Did you go early, late, use customer service desk, go from cashier to cashier?
I basically bought up all the Old Navy gift cards at each Safeway. Did you literally stand there and have them ring them up one after the other? People at my stores would have tossed fruit at me. I guess you have a different offer than I did. When I bought the cards, I checked out about cards at a time, which was about all each store had.
Scanning each card is no different than checking out items. The only difference is after scanning, they have to enter the amount you want. Any combination will work because they all use the same gift card system. This should help you on future deals if your Safeway happens to be out of the specific type that is most profitable.
Susan, sorry for being so slow on the uptake. What the cashier had me do was scan the a single gift card, then had me swipe my CC, and sign for each individual card. Each GC purchase was an stand alone transaction.
She said more than one or two would hold up everyone else. Have you tried this more than once? Thanks for the feedback. Thanks for the post by the way. That would have saved me a lot of trouble with the small denomination cards! Just curious, now that more time has passed, how is your gift card business going?
Have your profits increased, and do you think you will continue to do this long term? Read more about it here: I acquire a lot of cards on ebay and sell most of them to SaveYa and Raise.
Hey Noah thanks for this great article and your most recent one with the calculator. I typically just sell to the exchange with the highest payout! GiftCardWiki and GiftCardGranny are both useful websites if you want to see what the payouts across exchanges are, but be careful to verify the amount on the actual exchanges before hitting sell.
Sometimes they fall out of date. I do not have that much regular spend. I read somewhere to buy pin enable cards and then convert to money orders at Walmart and then redeposit the money orders in my bank account. Reddit and FlyerTalk are probably your best bet to learn more, specifically the MS Saturday threads on reddit: Manufactured spending is becoming increasingly difficult with various options being removed.
There are some people that know how to buy pin-enabled cards and turn the funds into money orders at Walmart and various convenience stores, but very few people will flat out tell you the exact locations where you can do that.
Many have turned to reselling electronics, gift cards to meet minimum spend as well as earn more points. Check out Doctor of Credit doctorofcredit. I agree that reselling is definitely a solid option at this stage of the game However, like you stated, it definitely takes time and patience….
You have to factor in your time as an opportunity cost here. The raw numbers on fees and liquidation methods are only one part of the equation. At this point I think your idea of paying the processing fee sounds like a solid choice. Perhaps wait until the last week or two before deciding. Does Ebay care about that? The margins are a little slim, but there certainly looks to be a lot of opportunity if someone is willing to take a risk.
What would you consider a big purchase for RedRobin? That is a significant purchase though and probably more than I would risk on something like this. Great but I suffered a lot by doing this. Some gift card details were misused, and kinds of stuff like that happened.
You can also try my little hack about gift cards. It saves bucks that are equivalent to churning. There are gift cards that offer triple cash back also. Not worth it for any consistent source of income.