Oren's Money Saver

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Best Buy 5% Cashback Removed from Discover Deals

When I checked last night and again this morning, 5% cashback at Best Buy had been removed from Discover Deals.

The only deal available to me was 20% off one appliance. Both deals were available as of yesterday afternoon.

This is a big hit. I spend a lot at Best Buy (watch out for bans, they do happen!) and the next best portal is 2%. That's a big difference especially with Discover hopefully doubling my money soon.

What do you guys see in your Discover accounts?

Portals May No Longer Pay Out for eBay Gift Cards on eBay

HT: @joeyredmond

eBay has sent a notice out to their affiliates that they are no longer considering purchases of eBay gift cards to be a revenue sales and are therefore not going to pay a commission on those sales

I don't know the ins and outs of portals but my understand is that many portals use a similar program for tracking of sales. If true, this would mean that portals would no longer pay out for purchases of eBay Gift Cards.

The truth is that portals already exclude eBay Gift Cards from cashback but in practice many times you still get cashback for that. This may no longer be true after March 6th. Time will tell.

Here is the whole email:

Dear Valued Publisher,

We wanted to inform you of changes being rolled out regarding eBay gift cards, and to let you know how these changes may affect your affiliate promotions.

Beginning March 6, 2016, eBay will no longer count sales of eBay-branded gift cards within checkout metrics, as they will no longer be counted as revenue-generating items for eBay. What this means for our partners is that you will no longer be able to earn affiliate commissions by driving sales of eBay-branded gift cards after March 6.

While no other merchant gift cards sold on eBay are affected by this change, you should be aware that gift cards in general can result in little to no affiliate commissions based oneBay’s revenue on these products. Because we want to make sure you are maximizing your affiliate earnings, we also want to remind you that products which earn little to no affiliate commissions include items sold by charities, extended warranties, and occasionally items sold on eBay Stores with seller fee promotions.

We welcome any questions regarding these changes at epn-cs-english@ebay.com. Thank you for your continued partnership.

Sincerely,
eBay Partner Network

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Turnover Tuesdays - I Should Have Taken My Own Advice

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

Week 1 - First attempt at reselling

Week 2 - My second straight fail

Week 3 - My iPad mini collection

Week 4 - Bed Bath and Beyond

Week 5 - An iPad Idea for Your Staples Gift Card Collection

Week 6 - An iPad Idea for Manufactured Spending

Week 7 - The Great iPad Deal that Wasn't

Week 8 - Lenovo Tablets

Week 9 - iPads at Staples

Week 10 - Loving that Groupon iPad Deal

Week 11 - iPads on Sale at Sears

Week 12 - Roombas at Bed Bath and Beyond

Week 13 - My Sam's Club iPad Collection for the $20k Challenge

Week 14 - Best Buy Gift Cards Fail

Week 15 - Staples Ink Recycling and Staples Rewards

Week 16 - What Happened to My Surface Pro 3?

Week 17 - Dell - Love that AmEx Offer

Week 18 - XBox Saves the Day

Week 19 - Using Amazon Chat and the Importance of Organization

Week 20 - The Impact of Returns

Week 21 - Apple Watch is the Best Watch

Week 22 - Headphones, Lots of Headphones

Week 23 - Storage Fees - I Don't Like Heavy Items

Week 24 - Some Companies try to Bully!

Week 25 - An iPhone is not an iPad

Week 26 - Patience vs. A Quick Hit and Fewer Deals Coming!

Week 27 - Competing Against Amazon

Week 28 - Toys and Retail Arbitrage vs. Online Arbitrage

Week 29 - Check Your Listings Carefully - My Big Fail

Week 30 - Killing it at Walgreen's!

Week 31 - Sometimes You Need to Stop, Refocus and Reprice
Week 32 - Target Cartwheel and other Coupons can have a Major Impact
Week 33 - Got a Return? You Might need to Reprice
Week 34 - Sometimes Returns Can be Very Profitable
Week 35 - Best Buy Gamer's Club

Week 36 - Reselling in Earnest Has Hurt My Credit Score

Week 37 - A Purchase Just for the Points

Week 38 - Don't be Afraid to Recall Your Inventory
Week 39 - Sourcing From Slickdeals Works but Everyone else is Doing it Too

Use MPX to Almost Immediately Top off Your United Balance

Yesterday, I shared the story of my upcoming trip in which I used hundreds of thousands of miles (still hurts) to save thousands of dollars from leaving my bank account.

One interesting tidbit is that I made a math error while trying to book.

I had 357,993 Ultimate Rewards points and I had 108,993 United Miles. That's 466,998 miles I could have since I can transfer UR points into my United account.

I needed 510,000 United miles to make the trip happen so I calculated that I was 43,002 short. I decided that the cheapest and fastest way (I needed to book that day) to get the extra miles was to buy them from United. They only allow you to buy in 1,000 mile increments so I bought 44,000 miles so I now had 152,993 United miles. More than enough, right?

Dead wrong!

4x eBay Bucks - Targeted - I'm Buying Kohl's Gift Cards

Disclaimer: I receive a referral commission for the following link(s) and I greatly appreciate supporting the site: Top Cashback and eBay

Update: You can juice it up a bit by buying eBay Gift Cards from Target for 5% off with a RedCard.

HT: Danny Deal Guru and Doctor of Credit

eBay is sending out emails targeting people for increased eBay Bucks of 4x on every eligible item of $50 or more.

That's 8% back in eBay Bucks for today and tomorrow.

I will be buying $60 Kohl's Gift Card for $50

. That's 17% off which isn't bad on it's own but add in 8% in eBay Bucks and 2.5% in Top Cashback and you have yourself a deal!

Limit of 4 so you can buy $240 of GCs and earn $16 in eBay Bucks

You can check out all discounted Gift Cards available here

Even I Earn (and use) Points

If you have followed my site for a while you will notice that I lean heavily towards cashback earning with credit cards. I love cold hard cash, big stacks of it!

I'm not a big traveler so my need for points is not huge and my credit card habits reflect that. I also travel in economy and the value of points is more limited there.

That being said, I do earn plenty of points from reselling and it has been very helpful. This blog is not in the business of showing you how to have cheap aspirational travel but yesterday was a day for me where having a large stash of points was great.

My family is planning a trip for a family event which we really wanted to participate in. The problem was that due to time/work constraints our window for tickets was very tight.

There was only one night that we could fly out and one night/early morning we could fly back and for many reasons a stopover was not an option either.

It was also peak season so flights were very expensive. It would have cost $8,000 for roundtrip tickets in economy for the whole family! That's a tough pill to swallow even for a family event.

Sneak Peak to Saverocity Observation Deck Part 2...

In case you missed it, I was a guest of Trevor's (of Tagging Miles) and Joe's (As the Joe Flies) as we discussed Reselling on the Saverocity Observation Deck Podcast.

Back by popular demand, we plan on having part 2 recorded soon.

Among other topics, we will discuss:

Amazon Fees - all those fees you like to pretend don't exist. What are they and how can you avoid them?

Respond to Matt - Matt asks why Reselling is so attractive to the MS world? Money and points of course! Well, hopefully we will come up with more sophisticated answers during the Podcast and respond to many of the issues raised in his post.

We also want to hear from you! What your burning questions you would like answered? Leave a comment so we can address it during the podcast.

I think Trevor may have his own sneakpeak tomorrow...