Discover Deals Removes Walmart - What's the Next Best Shopping Portal to Use?

I logged into my Discover account this morning in order to make a purchase at Walmart and I noticed that Walmart.com was removed from Discover Deals.  This is a big hit to me.  If you are a big Walmart.com shopper, the combination of Discover Deals and a new Discover card meant 5% cashback on all your walmart.com purchases and another 1% cashback just like any other purchase.  This would get doubled at the end of the year to 12% cashback.  Not only can you not beat that, you can't really come close!


It's worth it to note that Discover Deals was shutting down entirely at the end of the month so I needed to find a replacement anyways for walmart but I was really ramping up my purchases this month and cycling through my credit limit (Discover gives notoriously low limits on new cards) to maximize my cashback. 

I'm pretty sure I was partly responsible for the shutting down of Discover Deals so it becomes incumbent on me to find an alternative solution that we can break together ;)

Alternatives to Discover Deals

Gift Cards 

I haven't been a big fan of gift cards lately for reselling.  Yes, it's a lot of money potentially but it's also a lot of tracking and frankly I tend to lose some cards (I only realize later when I find the balance - I can't quantify the ones I've lost but haven't found).  When you take that into consideration it really knocks down the savings.  You also lose out on purchase protections and when you have returns, sometimes they put it back on the original gift card which may be gone since you used it up.  Then the fraud on second hard cards.  The accounting and tracking is enough for me to just give it up.  It was also not relevant to me for Walmart since I was going to use my Discover card for purchasing through Discover Deals (shlit"a, soon to be a"h).

Either way, if you like the gift card route, you can purchase gift cards from any of the reputable sites to increase your savings.  Check out Gift Card Wiki for the current rates but be aware that Walmart gift cards are very popular so you won't get much of a discount, think less than 1%.

Alternatively, you can purchase gift cards from office supply stores like Staples with Chase Ink or Amex Simply Cash to earn 5x Ultimate Rewards or 5% cashback.

Shopping Portals

Whether you are paying via credit card or gift card, you need to find the best shopping portal to use.  As always, you should be checking Cashback Monitor for the current rates.

Here is what you see for Walmart (I didn't put in the points column because they are woeful currently):






There are a couple of things to note. 

1) Discover Deals is still on there as of writing this post so it isn't updated immediately, not a shocker, you should always double check as it isn't perfect.

2) The current #1 overall is not on there either

3) You need to check the "up to x%" ones individually.  Usually means that different categories within the same store have different earning rates.

Upromise

Upromise has a shopping portal.  It currently earns 5% cashback for all purchases at Walmart.  In general don't recommend Upromise. I have not had good success on tracking with them and speaking to others, I am not the only one but others have had consistent success as well so might be worth a try to you.  Be aware that they can be very slow to track so you likely won't get confirmation for a while even if it does track.  I have earned close to $3,000 from Upromise in the past but I stopped using them completely after hundreds of dollars of cashback stopped tracking.  It just wasn't worth it considering the alternatives.

Active Junky

I recently started using Active Junky (Referral Link - we both get $10 if you sign up spend more than $25). From speaking to others, their tracking is excellent and I have experienced that so far as well on my first couple of transactions.  Transactions tracked in a couple of days. 

Active Junky earns 4% at Walmart across the board.  Not bad but it wasn't what I used today.

LeMoney is on there as well.  Every time I've used them for Walmart it has tracked but the purchase earns $0.00!  Avoid, avoid!

Top Cashback/Ebates

When you look at Top Cashback and Ebates, they both say up to 10% cashback.  When you look at the categories, there probably isn't much a reseller is going to buy in the 10% range besides maybe baby gear (only at Ebates, not Top Cashback).  However, Toys and Home are 5% cashback from both Top Cashback and Ebates.  Keep in mind that the Toy category is going to change in 4 days on Top Cashback (and probably Ebates too).  Right now it is only 1% at Be Frugal.

Personally I prefer Top Cashback as I find their rates are better in general and they track very well.  Ebates is good at tracking but the rates aren't usually quite as good.

If you don't have an Ebates or Top Cashback account please sign up with my link and I'll get some extra money as well along with you getting something.

Top Cashback Referral Link

Ebates Referral Link

Credit Card

If you aren't using a gift card, which credit card should you use?  Whatever is your favorite everyday internet purchases.  That could be the Citi AT&T Thank You which earns 3x for internet purchases (only available as a product change), it could be the first year of your Discover It Miles Card (3% cashback everywhere) or Bank of America Travel Rewards with Preferred Rewards where you can earn 2.625% with no annual fee and no limits (if you have $100k parked at Bank of America or Merrill Lynch).  

Don't Be Lazy Like Me!

Shipstation

I have a shipstation account (affiliate link) which I use to coordinate all my self fulfillment orders.  All my Amazon FBM, eBay, Walmart and Jet orders are automatically populated into shipstation.  It's a tool that my team uses at least once daily.


I have a separate login for my employees and I can assign specific shipments to them (the ones that I'm self fulfilling) and I don't assign them anything that will be fulfilled via Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment.  This last extra feature costs an extra $5 a month but it saves a lot of confusion and stress.  It used to be that everything was under one login and they would fulfill all the orders even ones I didn't want them to fulfill.  Good problems that they are responsible but a big fail.

The first 50 shipments a month are $9 and then after that it goes up to $29 a month. I rarely get to the $29 a month range because most of my self fulfillment are through Amazon multi channel and those don't count towards your allotted 50 even though you can add the tracking to shipstation and it will update to the marketplace.

Stamps.com

Either way, one of the best features of shipstation is free access to stamps.com  Stamps.com gives you access to USPS first class shipping rates on anything less than a 1 lb and under specific dimensions. This is a big deal, shipping can be as low as $2.66 so if you have really light items, you need to have to access to first class mail rates.  The rates are also the same to anywhere in the US.

Keep in mind that if you purchase shipping through Amazon (and I think eBay) they will also provide you with first class mail rates for no extra charge (not available for seller fulfilled prime) but that won't help for non Amazon (or eBay) orders and shipstation just puts everything in one place.  Also if you purchase directly through Amazon it usually helps you win any A to Z cases.

Me Being Super Lazy!!!

You have to connect your shipstation account to stamps.com and then you can replenish funds directly from within shipstation.com.  The problem was that I put the wrong credit card in stamps.com.  I was charging my American express business platinum instead of business Gold so I was getting 1x Membership Rewards when for the same purchase I could have gotten 3x.  It's only a few thousand in spending a year but why not!?  I tried to log in to stamps.com and I couldn't remember my password.  Then I couldn't remember my security answers!  Then I got lazy, I left it on auto pilot since I'm allergic to phone calls.  This was true even though I was keeping that card open just to pay for stamps.com replenishments!  I couldn't get in to stamps.com and it was just easier to keep things the way they were.  That's a $450 annual fee.  That's criminally lazy.

Fast forward about a year later, I finally called up stamps.com today, and got my password reset and  changed the credit card.  About time!

Lesson of the story: Don't be lazy!  Now, if I can just get myself to cancel the AMEX platinum...

My eBay Sales Have Started to Increase

I really like selling on Amazon.  It is by far and away my favorite place to sell.  The main reason is because people love buying on Amazon so the customers are there but Amazon also makes it very easy and lucrative with FBA.  For the most part, when I am fulfilling something on my own, my prices just can't compete with what I can offer on Amazon FBA.  I often have to sell for more with self fulfillment and still make less!


Let me first point out that my eBay business is still very, very small.  It is pitiful compared to Amazon but that's ok.

When you consider that I have $5,600 of sales on eBay in the last 12 months, it doesn't seem so bad that $4,700 of them are within the last 60 days.  You need to start somewhere!

Despite that, I am now finding myself increasingly interested in selling more on eBay (and other sites but so far I've had the most success with eBay) and here's why:


Amazon FBA storage prices have gone through the roof!  

I have many items at Amazon that I can't afford to keep at Amazon and the price on Amazon is either too cheap for me to sell or I can't sell it fast enough just at Amazon.

The monthly storage fees are bad but this is mostly a worry about Long Term Storage fees.  If I didn't radically change the way I did business I would have fees that would get out of control!


My merchant fulfillment business on Amazon (mostly Seller Fulfilled Prime but not entirely) has started to increase.  

This is pretty much for the same reason.  I don't pay extra storage on anything in my warehouse.  Previously if I bought 50 of something I would send all 50 in immediately.  I now send in only 5-18 and put a few up with Merchant Fulfillment immediately so that I am in stock even earlier.  If the FBA items sell I'll send in more but if they don't I wont send any more in.  That means that I'll hopefully never pay storage and LTSF on more than the original 5-18 I sent in.  I might end up being out of stock more which makes it important again to have self fulfillment available.


All this means I have more inventory in my warehouse available to use to fulfill orders for eBay.
Busy seasons like Q4 are exceptions.  I will send a lot more in late November even if I don't know exactly how many will sell.

Why the heck not!

More profitable sales are good, right!?


Credit Card Rewards for shipping and purchases are kind of nice but this is very much a side benefit.

You can use the Amex Business Gold for 3x Membership Rewards or the Chase Ink Business Preferred for 3x UR for shipping.

If you are doing Seller Fulfilled Prime you have to purchase shipping through Amazon so no credit card rewards for that.

If I'm selling more that means I have to buy more which means more credit card points. 

There has been one large revelation to me that has really driven my eBay sales.

It's ok if I don't make as much money per sale on eBay as I do on Amazon!  This is for a couple of reasons:

1. eBay has a lot fewer returns than Amazon.  You can even choose to not allow for returns but even allowing for returns the return rate is lower.  You have to bake in your return rate into Amazon margins.
2. eBay can't lose your stuff like Amazon FBA does.  Amazon loses a lot of stuff!  There is a certain percentage of shrinkage that you have to compensate for when you sell on Amazon.  Unless your workers are stealing from you or losing items as well, if it is in your warehouse, it isn't getting lost.
3. My primary objective is to make money on eBay but a close second is mitigation of Amazon storage fees.  Even if I just breakeven after fees on all of my eBay sales (I have been making a small amount of money), I am still saving a lot of money in Amazon fees from all the storage I'm no longer paying!

Lack of Time Investment - Automation to the Rescue!

Automation may make me an irrelevant sack of potatoies in the economy at some point (Read Yuval Harari's book Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow if you want to be scared about this stuff.  Before that you should probably first read his original book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind which is one of the greatest books I've ever read - both affiliate links)  but for now it's really nice!

Either way, I use automation for 90%+ of my eBay selling through Joe Lister (affiliate link).  I've talked about Joe Lister before.  Joe Lister automatically turns your Amazon listings into eBay listings in less than an hour.  You can tell Joe Lister to price on eBay to earn the same amount of money as on Amazon and they will automatically calculate eBay fees and fulfillment fees for you to arrive at the correct price.  You can also ask them to make more or less money per sale compared to your Amazon price.  They constantly monitor your Amazon inventory so that you don't sell something on eBay you don't have in stock and when an eBay sale comes in they initiate a Multi Channel Fulfillment order from your Amazon inventory to fulfill this order.  They will then update the tracking on eBay once available.  You need to literally do nothing, except pay them of course.

At a certain point, I quit Joe Lister because it just wasn't working out as well as I would like and I was paying a lot of money in listing fees.  I hate listing fees!  eBay charges $.30 a listing if you don't have a store or a promotion.  

So what changed?  

1) My prices.  Instead of telling Joe Lister to price at the same profit levels on Amazon and eBay (making my eBay prices higher) I am willing to sell for 2% lower margins.  I might even lower that at some point.  You can always change individual listings if you think it is selling for too little. 

2) I increased my Joe Lister plan to 250 listings.  That means that I just have more listings on eBay which might sell.  I used to pick my top 50 and 46 of them didn't sell at all.  Now I can pick 95% of my active listings on Amazon.

3) I opened an eBay Store.  I started with a basic store.  It comes with 250 free listings which means that I am no longer getting dinged with listing fees.  I've had months where I've paid over $50 in just listing fees which was awful.  

Also, eBay's commission goes down from 10% to 9.15% with a basic store (remember there is still the 2.7% paypal commission).  If I can sell $2,500 worth of merchandise on eBay every month (I've been doing about that the last 2 months), that .85% savings will equal a savings of $21.25 monthly, which is exactly equal to the $21.25 monthly fee for the store (when you sign up for a year at a time).  So I'm saving on listings and hopefully the commission savings is breakeven or better for the store fee.

If I can make $60 a month in profit on top of that I can mitigate the Joe Lister fee and every sale is one less item I pay storage on.  If I am selling $2,500 a month, $60 is a margin of 2.4%. Hopefully that's sustainable.

My fixed fees are set so if I can increase it to $5,000 a month of sales, the extra sales will only be profit and not paying for any listing fees or Joe Lister fees so I can actually make some money besides just lowering storage fees.

At some point if sales increase I will probably pay a developer to do something similar to Joe Lister for a one time fee and make my money back over time.

Conclusion 

My expectations for eBay are minimal (at least breakeven on $2,500 a month of sales on average) and then I consider this a win.  My time input is very low since almost everything is automated.  So far eBay has surprised me with how many orders I've been receiving.  I hope to continue to be surprised with increased orders!

Amazon FBA Prep Centers

Hopefully, at some point you will reach a point in your business where you don't want to receive all your packages and send them out yourself.  That happened for me a few months in when I received mail from my landlord saying that I can't conduct business from my apartment and he will report me to the authorities if I don't stop.  Ok then, it was time to find somewhere else.  Pretty sure he didn't like me overflowing the garbage every week.



Once you have made that decision, you can go in one of two directions.


1) Rent a facility and hire someone part/full time.

Having a facility to yourself is great but most people in this business need to have a facility that's always open for deliveries.  It can be very expensive to have someone there full time just to keep the place open if there isn't enough work to justify a full time employee.  Often, people will rent a place in a facility that already has someone there full time for a different business who can accept your packages and direct carriers to what needs to be picked up.

This also comes with managerial responsibilities of your new employee, hiring and firing and possible implications for retirement accounts like SEP IRA, 401(k)s and benefits.

As your business grows, this will become the financially sound option, but it may not be necessary at first and you may never want to do it because of the extra headaches.  I live overseas, having an employee to manage from Israel is just not something I want to do right now.


2) Outsource

There are businesses dedicated to receiving inventory and shipping them out.  They are called 3PLs (3rd Party Logistics).  These existed before Amazon and there are tons of them that perform services for businesses small and large.  For non Amazon businesses they might be individually fulfilling orders or shipping wholesale for you.  You can use a 3PL for this as well or you can hire an FBA Prep Center whose business model is to handle Amazon packages.  They know the Amazon requirements and there is less, or no, training required from you.

What to look for in a Prep Center

I've used a few different prep centers over the last couple of years so I have an idea of what I am looking for.  Here is an incomplete list of many Prep Centers.




1) Cost

This is obviously the most crucial.  The amount that you pay per unit (or per box - however it is calculated) directly effects how much money you will make and what prices you can set.

There are other important factors to the price as well.  Does it include labeling and entering in box level content or do you have to pay Amazon or the prep center to do this?  It will add another $0.30 per unit to have Amazon manually apply these.  That adds up fast.

Do they make you pay for boxes and polybags?  Is it extra for bundling?

Is there a discount when your volume increases?

Is there a one time account set-up fee?

2) Shipping Cost 

How close is it to an Amazon Fulfillment Center?  That will have a direct affect on the price you will pay for shipping and the speed in which your inventory is checked in and ready for sale.

Also, can they support pallet shipping?  Pallets tend to be a much more cost effective way to ship, especially if you are shipping multiple at a time but not everywhere is set up for them and some charge more.

3) Sales Tax Free State?

There are a few states which have no sales tax and they are referred to as the NOMAD states and they are New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska and Delaware.  If you are still paying sales tax on all or some of your purchases, a prep center in a state without sales tax can pay for itself with sales tax savings if the price of the item is high enough.


3) Your involvement

Amazon allows you to give user permissions to 3rd parties to have limited access to your account to make shipments.  Ideally, once you create the shipment in Amazon, the prep center should be able to go into your account and see the shipment you have made and then enter all the information necessary to process the shipment including agreeing to pay the shipping fees.  You shouldn't have to do anything.  That is not always the case

4) Speed/Efficiency

How long does it take for them to add the item to your inventory and how long does it take for them to ship the item out after you have made a plan?


5) Inventory tracking

How does the prep center track inventory?  I've seen proprietary software, shared google spreadsheets to not tracking (meaning you have to track it yourself).  Lost inventory is a problem that can't be ignored so this important in your decision.

Also, if they have software to track, do they notify you when new inventory has come or do you need to constantly check?  This might not really be an issue for vendors that ship items quickly but some manufacturers take their sweet time.  It might be weeks after you order that it arrives, it's nice to know when that happens.


6) Customer Service

How responsive are they to issues and how quickly do they get back to you?  Do you receive a notification when there is a response to your query?

7) Retailer bans?

Many retailers like Target and Kohl's will ban the address of a prep center since so many people are shipping to the same place.  This can be a big bummer and you might not know about it ahead of time.

8) Storage Fees

Are there storage fees for items that stay there for a month or longer?  Are they reasonable?  I've seen places that say they charge storage but don't and I've seen places that actually charge.

9)  Quarter 4

Do they fall behind during Q4 when there is increased volume?

I've seen places go from about 5 business days to 10 for Q4.  That's a big problem when every minute counts.

10)  Returns

Do they handle your returns and grade the item?  How much does that cost?

11)  Monthly fees

Are there monthly fees?
Important if you want to have backups for when things get a little crazy at your main location

12) FBM?

Do they do FBM?  How fast?  What price?

What I've used and What I'm using now

When I moved the business out of my apartment I was exclusively using a local shipping facility near where I lived.  I know the people there, trust them, things got out the same day they came in if I made the plan fast enough and I could drop by check up on it.  It was always a bit more expensive than a regular prep center but it was worth it.

As time went on and my volume increased, the speed of the facility slowed and the prices started increasing so I started to look for other facilities to at least share the load on items that aren't as time sensitive.

Prime Zero Prep (PZP)

I started at Prime Zero Prep a few years ago.  Their pricing model has changed multiple times since then and it's hard to figure out exactly how much you will be paying in 2 months time.  According to their website now it seems like it is $1.20 per unit but their last update had made a difference in price based off the speed in which they work on your shipment.

I found them to be a bit expensive and slow.  During Quarter 4 I really had no idea how long everything would take.  Often it was 3 business days to update inventory and then 5-10 business days to ship it out.  Overall things were fine but I was still looking for somewhere a little more reliable and cheaper.  In one of their price iterations they were charging $1.90 or $1.90 per unit, then they offered $1.60 per unit lifetime and now I think it is based off speed.  Hard to follow them.  I don't use them much but now I'm on the $1.60 lifetime plan.  It's too expensive currently but in 10 years it might be useful and it cost me $3 once to sign up so little risk if they deny it.  I don't think it's available anymore.

Sell Tech Prep (STP)

A few months ago, I started at a place called Sell Tech Prep and I'm reasonably happy there.

The main advantage is the price.  Their prices are subject to your volume within a given 2 week period. If you send 1000 items during that 2 week period you will pay $.85 per unit. If you are over 5000 units in 2 weeks the price goes down again to $.70 a unit.  They frequently run prepayment bonuses of 15-17%.  For example, if you pay $1,000 you will get $1,150 of credit which brings down your price even lower.


They are very responsive to any issues as well, their software is good and they automatically update you when new inventory comes in.  They handle FBM (too expensive for me to consider) and returns.  There are however some serious drawbacks.

1) Location

They are located in Montana.  That's good for sales tax but it's very far from the Amazon fulfillment center in Chicago which is where most things are shipped to. That means that shipping is quite expensive.

To get around that, STP provides full truckloads (FTLs - 26 pallets) that arrive in Chicago in 2-3 days time.  The price is very good to ship that distance but it's still objectively expensive.  It comes out to around the same price as shipping non pallets from New Jersey where I was.  If you are used to shipping pallets for $80 or cheaper a pallet, there will be some sticker shock.  To ship with Amazon provided shipments it will cost about $180+ to start, their price is $165 per pallet but with no discounts for more pallets.  However, you prepayment bonuses will work on outbound shipments which is nice.  The other good thing about this is that you pay STP directly via credit card you get the points instead of Amazon debiting your seller payout.  It's not huge but something.

2)  Speed

They need to have a full truck to make it worthwhile so currently FTLs are only scheduled once a month.  That can be a major problem as you have to estimate how much inventory to send in and speed of sales varies tremendously based off current competition and the way Amazon's search algorithm is going that wee..  Hopefully with more business they will be able to provide more frequent service but right now it is once a month.


I send everything I can to STP, then if I run out mid month I use my old center or I'll send to the old center if I just want something in faster.  I also try to concentrate my orders to the two weeks before shipments to get the best pricing.  So far, this has been working for me and my fees have gone down significantly.

Special Referral Rate

I spoke to STP about a reduced fee for readers if someone signs up for a referral.  They have agreed to waive the account sign up fee (I believe that's $300 - I had to pay that when I signed up) and to provide a reduced rate for the first year.  It breaks down as follows:

Your first month, you will receive a 10% credit of your first month's invoice applied to your account.  For example, if you spend $1,000, they will add $100 credit to your account for future payments.

From month 2 until month 12, you will receive a 5% credit of each month's total invoicing, if the total amount meets or exceeds $1,000, for a period of 1 year from the sign up date.  Months with a total invoice balance of less than $1,000 will be ineligible for a percentage bonus.

If you are interested you can email referrals@selltecprep.com with the subject line "Referred by OMS" and they will get you started.

My disclaimer is that I will be receiving a credit to my account if anyone signs up and uses it.  I asked for the credit to be for readers instead (originally there was only a credit for me) and instead of taking away my bonus, they added a bonus for readers as well so I don't feel too bad about it.

Even though I will be receiving a bonus, my main goal is and was to have shipments every 2 weeks to make it even more useful of a service and to share a good price with readers as well.


There are lots of other places as well and many which I've never researched so do your own research to find the place that works best for you.


If there are other fulfillment centers that you prefer, I would love to hear about them in the comments.