Almost everyone in the miles and points game has a Chase Ink card. The reason for that is because the card gives you 5X at office supply stores. Most people, including myself, buy $200 Visa gift cards there for $7 a piece to build up their Ultimate Rewards points, which they then transfer to United, BA, Korean Air, Singapore Air, or Hyatt. The gift card earns you 1,000 points at a cost of $7. However, because I love reselling, I look for deals like these when they pop up. This week, Staples is selling these Fire TV devices for $80 + tax.
About a month ago, I bought these Fire TV’s for about $70 a piece from Staples (there was a coupon then.) Before I buy anything, I look on Ebay to see how much things go for. I noticed that these Fire TV’s could be rooted (similar to an iPad or Apple TV jailbreak), and they were selling for over $100 on Ebay. I went ahead and bought 4 of these (3 to resell and 1 for myself to use [to replace my jailbroken ATV2] since these are faster than the ATV2.
Once I got the Fire TV, I went to http://www.aftvnews.com/ to learn how to root the thing. I later learned that newer versions were no longer rootable; luckily, Staples shipped me older versions. It took me about an hour to root the thing. Then I needed to remove my Amazon account, but when I did a factory reset, the Fire TV’s root broke. I had to then re-root the thing. I couldn’t figure out how these people were selling these FTV’s on Ebay with their Amazon account still loaded to the FTV. At this point, I was questioning this whole deal; I was 2 hours in and was barely going to make a profit on these things, and it took too much time to root to be really scalable. After a little Google research, it turns out you can ‘disassociate’ your FTV from your Amazon account page. Once I removed my FTV from my account, the system magically rebooted and the root stayed. Score!
I posted the 3 FTV’s to Ebay, and after a week, I was able to sell them for $140 each. Ebay, Paypal, and shipping fees came out to be about $18. My cost was $70 not counting the 6% Savingstar portal rebate. My net profit for each one was a little over $50 each.
I didn’t think they would sell for $140; I think it’s because you just can’t find rootable ones anymore. I haven’t done any research since to see if they are shipping with rootable ones anymore. The prices seem to fluctuate between $130 and $170 on Ebay right now. If they are rootable again, and you can streamline the rooting process, this may not be a bad option. The 400 miles you get is nothing compared to the $50 in profit you’re making on each FTV.
Gift cards to build points that is genus I’m getting that ink card asap!
You should get the Chase Ink card. I’ll do another post shortly on what cards I have and what cards I recommend.