Ebay frequently offers bonus ebay bucks promotions and while they are targeted, it’s extremely common to get them if you have an open ebay account and allow them to send you emails. Yesterday, ebay sent out a 5x ebay bucks offer for 48 hours only (ends today [11/24/15] at midnight) which brings the return up to 10% back! I buy and sell a lot of cards on ebay as a part of my gift card arbitrage side gig, and 10% back with ebay bucks actually opens up a lot of opportunities. The timing for this particular offer couldn’t have been better (mostly) because it overlaps with several airline shopping portal holiday bonuses that have ebay as an earning option. Normally, it’s best to wait for ebay to offer discounts on gift cards so they make an easy flip, but with the combination of offers going on right now, it might make sense to buy gift cards at full price or higher! I’ll break down the math below and you can decide for yourself if you want to flip a few gift cards by the end of the day.
Important Limitations
Buying and selling gift cards on ebay comes with several limitations that you need to keep in mind to make sure you come out ahead on every purchase. These primarily include ebay bucks and ebay gift card usage.
- Max $500 Earned in Ebay Bucks per Quarter (current quarter runs from 10/1 to 12/31)
- Max $100 Earned in Ebay Bucks per Purchase
- Max $5,000 in Redeemed Ebay Gift Cards per Rolling 180 days (How to Check Your Current Usage)
- Unknown Limit on Purchasing Digital Gift Cards from PayPal (See Chasing the Points for more info)
While all of these limits are per account, I don’t recommend trying to circumvent the limits because ebay and PayPal have been known to shut down accounts for any suspicious activity. The one exception to this would be to create a PayPal Business account to double the ebay gift card usage limit. PayPal rules stipulate that an individual may have one personal AND one business account.
The un-published limit on purchasing digital cards from Paypal Digital Gifts can be really annoying and every account seems to have different limits. If you get a weird error when trying to check out, there’s a good chance you’ve reached your limit for the day/week/month and will have to wait an unknown amount of time before you can continue. This is particularly annoying when bonus ebay bucks promotions usually only last 48 hours!
The primary opportunity I’m going to list out below doesn’t depend on PayPal Digital Gifts, but there are several that end up with similar numbers by going through digital cards sold by them.
The Opportunity
Normally, only the discounted gift cards can be easily flipped for a profit, but with an offer like 10% back via ebay bucks, even some of the fully priced gift cards make sense for arbitrage. In this example, we’re going to be buying and selling $250 ExxonMobil Gift Cards.
First, there are a lot of ways to get discount ebay gift cards, especially if you have a card that offers 5x back at office supply stores or even grocery stores. The Chase Ink Plus is even currently giving the full 5x back when you purchase ebay gift cards from PayPal Digital Gifts on ebay directly or on Gyft! Purchasing gift cards at the grocery store can end up even better because of fuel points or special gift cards promotions like the one currently going on at Safeway branded stores.
For this example though, I’m going to keep it simple and lay out the math you can use for ANY credit card in your collection and can do it all from home. Whether you are trying to meet a minimum spend or earn a few more points/miles in a particular program for specific redemption, this method will allow you to earn those points for little to no out of pocket cost. To top it all off, you can combine it with an ongoing airline shopping portal promotion to get an extra 5k+ miles for American, Southwest, and/or United.
Here’s the high-level plan:
- Buy ebay gift cards on Gyft to earn ~2% back and regular credit card rewards
- Click through a shopping portal to ebay
- Possibly while earning a large holiday mile bonus
- Purchase 1 or more ExxonMobil gift cards for full price + shipping
- Earn 10% back in ebay bucks
- Wait for gift cards to arrive in the mail
- Sell gift cards to an exchange for ~90% back
- Profit!
The Math for a Single Card
Let’s break down a single $250 gift card, then we can extrapolate out to whatever spending bonus we might want to achieve.
- Buy a $250 ebay gift card on Gyft through PayPal
- Spend $250 on any credit card
- Earn $5+ in credit card rewards (a standard 2% back, but substitute your favorite miles/points here)
- Earn $5 in Gyft Points to be used towards the next card
- Wait up to 4 hours for the gift card to activate… (they usually work within an hour for me)
- Click through a shopping portal to ebay
- Search for “$250 ExxonMobil Gas Gift Card – Mail Delivery”
- Select “Buy it Now” for 1 $250 card
- Apply the $250 gift card purchased from Gyft and select a credit card to pay the $4.95 shipping fee
- (The shipping fee can also be paid for with a gift card, but I’m keeping the math simple here)
- Spend $4.95 on any credit card
- Earn $0.10 in credit card rewards (2% back)
- Earn $25 in eBay Bucks
- Earn $2.50-$5 or 125-250 airline miles depending on the shopping portal chosen
- Wait for the gift card to arrive in the mail (may take weeks)
- Sell the Gift Card to a gift card exchange at 90%
- Use Gift Card Wiki to find the best sell rates
- Sell for $225
Totals:
- Total Spent: $254.95
- Total from Sales: $225
- Total Rewards Earned: $40.10
- Profit: $10.15
Note: Using an Ink Plus to buy the ebay gift cards and going through a 2% shopping portal would make the profit $5.15 AND 2,500 Ultimate Rewards points!
Direct Link to $250 ExxonMobil Gift Card on ebay
Let’s Scale It Up For Shopping Portal Bonuses
What makes this ebay bucks 5x (10%) offer that much better is that the timing coincides with several ongoing airline shopping portal holiday earning bonuses. Miles to Memories did a great round-up of all the different offers available, but we’re going to focus on the ones that currently have ebay as an available store. This includes American, Alaska, Southwest, and United, but we can toss out Alaska because their holiday bonus ended back on November 20th.
That leaves the following options with their highest earning tier:
- Earns 1 mile per $1 spent
- Adds a bonus 5,000 miles after spending $1,200 before 11/26
- Earns 0.5 points per $1 spent
- Add a bonus 5,500 miles after spending $1,500 before 11/26
- Earns 0.5 miles per $1 spent
- Add a bonus 6,000 miles after spending $1,250 before 11/24
To max them all out and earn an extra 16,500 miles, we’ll need to spend $3,950 through multiple shopping portals (excluding shipping, which means out initial out of pocket will be a little higher). To calculate the final numbers, we just need to slightly adjust the previous calculation.
Earning The Shopping Portal Holiday Bonuses Calculation
Total Spent on Gyft: $4,000
- Buy 8x $500 ebay gift cards without using any earned Gyft Points
- Then use earned $80 in Gyft points to buy an $80 ebay gift card (this will cover shipping almost exactly)
- Earn $80 in credit card rewards (assuming 2% back)
- Obtain $4,080 in ebay gift cards
Total Spent on ebay: $4,079.20
- Be sure not to buy more than $1,000 worth at a time because of the ebay bucks cap per purchase
- This buys 16x $250 ExxonMobil gift cards with shipping
- Be sure to use the gift cards obtained from Gyft (you will end up with $0.80 left over on one of them)
- Earn $400 in ebay bucks
Total Spend Counted Towards Shopping Portals: $4,000 (shipping doesn’t count)
- $1,250 through American’s shopping portal (6,250 miles earned) (Note: This is $50 more than necessary)
- 1,250 regular miles earned
- 5,000 bonus miles earned
- $1,500 through Southwest’s shopping portal (6,250 points earned)
- 750 regular points earned
- 5,500 bonus points earned
- $1,250 through United’s shopping portal (6,625 miles earned)
- 625 regular miles earned
- 6,000 bonus miles earned
Sell Gift Cards at 90% for $3,600
Total Earnings: $80.80 AND 19,125 miles
- -$400 cash out of pocket cost
- +$400 in ebay bucks
- +$80 in credit card cash back (assuming 2%, substitute your best cc rewards here)
- +$0.80 left over on an ebay gift card
- +6,250 American miles
- +6,250 Southwest points
- +6,625 United miles
Mitigating Risk
The biggest risk in this particular gig is that the gift card exchanges won’t be paying 90% for the cards by the time you actually receive and go to sell them. Historically, this risk is minimal with gas gift cards but the risk is always there. On the other hand, gas cards sometimes go above 90% depending on supply and demand (the most I’ve seen is 93%). Given the final “profit” on maximizing this deal, even if the exchanges drop a few %, you’ll still come out ahead depending on how you value the miles earned. For example, if we can only sell the card for 87% of their value at the end of the day, we will walk away with over 19,000 miles for an out of pocket cost of ~$40. That’s not bad in it’s own right at a cost of 0.2 cents per mile.
The easiest way to mitigate risk is by diversifying your assets, or in this case, spreading your $4,000 in gift cards across multiple brands. While I detailed the ExxonMobil gift card above, there are several other potentially lucrative cards available right now. You can even try to flip everything much faster by sticking to digital cards, but your payout might not be as high. Which gift card(s) work best for you will depend on what bulk seller statuses you have (if any), what sell limits you have with the different exchanges (if any), and which cards are selling for the most at the time.
Here’s a few gift cards currently available that just might work for you:
$250 ExxonMobil gift card (+$4.95 shipping)
$250 Chevron gift card (+$4.95 shipping)
$250 BP gift card (+$4.95 shipping)
$100 76 gift card (+$3.95 shipping)
$100 Marathon gift card (+$3.95 shipping)
$100 Shell gift card (+$3.95 shipping)
$25-$100 Target gift card (+$2.99 shipping) ($50 and $100 have been sold out a while…)
$25-$100 Babies R Us (digital card, no shipping fee)
$25-$100 GameStop (digital card, no shipping fee)
$25-$100 Best Buy (digital card, no shipping fee)
$10-$100 Staples (+1.49 shipping)
$50-$100 Sears (physical card, no shipping fee)
How do you plan to maximize the 5x ebay bucks promotion?
Both the AA and SW portal bonuses exclude gift cards from their promotion. Has anyone experienced anything different?
The holiday bonus terms and conditions do exclude gift cards, but this is typically directed at buying the own store’s gift card through the portal (such as buying ebay gift cards from ebay). Having said that, if they have a way to distinguish that third party gift cards were purchased through ebay (or you have to file a claim for the miles), it would be possible for them to deny the bonus. As with most things, YMMV.
As I know, UA portal also excluces gift card purchasing. Did you really susessfull with your plans or just sharing your thoughts?
I’ve been successful in getting my purchases tracked though the portals (non-ebay gift cards aren’t excluded from the portal itself), but as the bonus won’t pay out for weeks we have no way of knowing for sure whether or not it will work. Based on what I’ve done in the past it “should” work, but YMMV as always. Worst case you still end up with the regular miles and maybe a little profit on top.
My gift card purchases via United portal tracked for 1 miles/$, but the bonus excludes gift cards, so I stopped using the United portal. I prefer TCB 1.25% cashback much more than the United miles since TCB has tracked consistently.
Does TCB track for ebay GC purchases too?
TCB tracks very well for purchasing non-ebay gift cards on ebay, but typically tracks ebay gift purchases for $0 cashback in my experience.
Question on the ebay gift card usage.
For months I’ve been sitting on about 2k of ebay gift cards I got during a Giant/Stop&Shop fuel points promo that I can’t use cause I went over the 5k/180 day limit. I’ve sold some items on ebay so I have a paypal business account. So you’re saying that I can purchase items on my regular ebay account, but then link it to my business paypal account, and I can use the gift cards? Just want to be careful, don’t want to risk my relationship with them.
Thanks!
I haven’t done this myself yet, so don’t take my word as gospel, but that is my understanding. The $5k limit on gift cards is per PayPal account, not per ebay account. That means you should be able to use the same ebay account with your business PayPal account and use another $5k worth of gift cards.
I don’t see anymore ebay bucks offers lately. At least for 2016. I often do my phone upgrades when the have 5x or 4x ebay bucks.
I’ve noticed there tends to be more ebay bucks offers towards the end of each quarter (March, June, Sept, Dec). As they no longer apply for gift card purchases, it’s less exciting for deals like the one mentioned above, but can definitely be beneficial for something like buying phones as you mentioned.
Thanks for reading!
Cool! I’ll definitely wait for the next ebay bucks multiplier. And yes I used to buy giftcards as well. I am very interested in the topics you write about and looking forward to reading more great content.