Turnover Tuesdays - Buying Roombas at Bed Bath and Beyond

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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 iPads
Week 9 - iPads at Staples
Week 10 - Loving that Groupon iPad Deal
Week 11 - iPads on Sale at Sears

Bought a Gift Card on eBay and Selling Price Went Down? Wait it Out

eBay can be an excellent source of gift card deals.  The great part about it is that eBay, Forums and Bloggers do a great job telling people when deals are available and when they can be sold for a profit.  The big problem is that eBay, Forums and Bloggers do a great job tellign people when deals are available and when they can be sold for a profit.  This results in a glut of gift cards hitting the market and resell prices plummeting.




My suggestion is that once the gift card comes in the mail, sell it that day before the price drops.  What if you got in on the deal late or you couldn't sell it that day for some reason and now you are stuck with a gift card with lower value?  My recommendation?  Wait it out.

My Example - Chevron Gift Cards

There was a nice opportunity a little while back with Chevron Gift Cards on eBay.  You could break even on the sale, keep your points and eBay Bucks.

I tried to sell my cards to SaveYa immediately but I had already reached my monthly limit with them.  I was having trouble getting them to respond to my Bulk Seller status request until a reader helped me out (thanks!).

In the meantime, the prices dropped and instead of SaveYa and others buying at about 90%, they were buying them at closer to 87%.  Not very good.


So I waited and it's been more than 3 weeks now since the eBay deal came out and the prices are finally back in the 90% range so I sold them today at 90.25%  Not too shabby!

Here is a chart from Gift Card Wiki that shows Chevron inventory and you can see how there was a big increase in the amount of gift cards sold and we have dipped back down at this point.

Gift Card Wiki is Really Powerful!

Update:  After posting on Twitter, Chasing the Points pointed out that I may have the incorrect filter.  When I changed on Raise from View 25 to View All, the higher denomination gift cards showed up as well. I don't know why they don't show up when you filter based on value.  I would think the highest denominations would be in the top Top 25 when you filter based on value, but for some reason they are not.  Lesson learned, always change to view all when on Raise



Recently, Miles to Memories introduces Gift Card Wiki to the blogosphere.  See here and here.

I tried it and saw that some information was not updated yet and good old Gift Card Granny was more correct.  I concluded that for now I need to check both to be sure because others were still having more success with Gift Card Wiki.

This morning, I saw how powerful Gift Card Wiki is.

I was searching for some Staples discount gift cards.  I went directly to Raise to see their prices.
I like to buy my gift cards off of Raise because they allow me to use American Express Gift Cards.  This adds an extra 1.9% cashback to the transaction (2.25% from Top Cashback with free shipping minus activation fees).


Raise showed me that I could buy Staples Gift Cards for 6.9% off, but the highest denomination was $100

That's a nice discount, but I like high denomination gift cards since Staples only allows 5 gift cards per transaction.

I checked Gift Card Wiki and this is what I saw:

Wow!  All these high denomination gift cards showed up from Raise.

I clicked on one (The second to last one) and it took me directly to that gift card on Raise

I was able to add it to my cart.  Wow!  Even raise couldn't find that card and Gift Card Wiki found it!
I didn't buy it yet so that I could see if Gift Card Granny could do the same.

I then went to Gift Card Granny to see if I could duplicate the success.


Here is what I see:

They also found high denomination gift cards, including the same one I clicked on before.

When I clicked on it from Gift Card Granny, instead of taking me directly to the gift card, it took me to Raise's site with all of their Staples Gift Cards.

Once again, Raise couldn't find anything higher than $100.



Gift Card Wiki was more powerful than Gift Card Granny and even Raise in finding Raise Gift Cards.  It isn't perfect, but it is a great tool to check.

Money Metagame adds a New Tool to Digital Gift Card Reselling

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while someone adds a tool that makes everyone's manufactured spending life a little easier.

Noah from Money Metagame has put together a list of gift card brands that can be sold digitally through SaveYa.  This will save you the time of trying to dummy sell your card on SaveYa to see how it will be accepted.