I know this post is WAY OVERDUE, and I apologize to my competitors and you readers who have been on the edge of your seat waiting to read this update! I know you were more excited for this than Maypac. If not, trust me, this’ll at least be more entertaining. Here’s a recap of the contest. Here are some updates by eventual 2nd-5th places (gauntlet thrown down!)
Meeting the $20K is easy if you have the float
I’ve technically spent the full $20K already on the Amex Biz Plat card by buying $20K of AMEX GC’s. I had bought $12K of AGC at 2.25% and the last $8K at 2% for a total of $430 – $39.50 in fees for a total profit of $390.50. I should have waited a bit more and gotten the second $8K at 2.25%, but unless I can buy a time machine using AGC’s, that’s not going to happen.
Converting those AGC’s to merchant GC’s
I’ve also converted $14,150 of those AGC’s to $17,500 worth of a certain merchant that I will post about tomorrow. That equates to an average saving of 19.2%. I remember I got home one Friday night after the movies, and I was bombarded with Raise alerts for 20% off to this merchant. This was around 1AM mind you, and I was already in bed. However, this was such a great deal, I woke up and bought nearly $5K worth. I thought Raise was going to flag my account and call me the next morning, but sure enough, they processed all the orders. This means I still have $6K of AGC left to spend of my original $20K.
Buying merchandise
Now that I had $17.5K worth of gift cards to spend, I’ve actually only bought $13.5K worth of merchandise, leaving me with about $4K of gift cards to this particular merchant. Mind you this was in a span of 2 weeks! I also used a portal when I bought the items. I had a Delta portal of 12X one day, but the bulk of the orders came from a 16% cashback portal.
UPS guy hates me
By the second week, the orders started to flow in. Yes, that’s an actual photo of one of the shipments. I would get 3-4 boxes a day. I would then process them for FBA and put them out the next day for the UPS guy to pick up. Basically, he and I were swapping boxes. By Friday, I felt so bad that I left him a couple of free Starbucks coupons.
Prepping for Amazon FBA
By now, I was getting pretty good at processing the orders and learning the ins and outs of Amazon FBA shipments. I bought high valued items just because they were easier to process. Why try to sell 100 items when you can sell only 10, right? It took me about 30 minutes to process $1,000 worth of goods. I may write a more detailed post about this later.
Sold items on FBA
So of those $13,500 worth of goods, how much have I sold so far? Well as of the morning of 5/27, I have sold $5,000 so far on Amazon FBA. There was another seller who was playing “Price is Right” with me – you know, I would list it at $279.99 and they would list it as $279.98. Then I would drop it to $278.99, and they would drop it to $278.98. Eventually they either sold out (most likely) or gave up playing. Trust me, there was no way they could win playing chicken with me.
Margin so far
This is hard to do now, but since I only sold one item (and a lot of it), by calculating the margin on just one of the items, I can extrapolate out my expected margin assuming I buy 20K of this exact product, which I don’t plan on doing. So with the 20% off gift card + 16% portal cashback + 2% AGC – Amazon FBA fees – Amazon shipping fee = 17.7% margin! Take that BH and all you GC churners! Don’t bring a knife to this gun fight! Haha. Kidding. However, this “velocity” did come at a price. Like when Zach told Laney in “She’s All That” – “Sometimes when you open up to people, you let the bad in with the good….” That quote is only mildly related to this actual story; I just wanted to throw it out there on the internet in case Rachel Leigh Cook was Googling famous quotes in her movies one day and finds this page.
I appreciate how Kohl’s banned you and in the picture are Kohl’s boxes stacked four deep.
Maybe they realized the error of their ways? 😉