Flipping Apple TV 2’s on Ebay for 5X Chase Ultimate Rewards

Frequent Miler wrote a couple of days ago that buying Ebay gift cards from Paypal Digital Gifts is giving out 5X Chase Ultimate Rewards since they are mistakenly coded as an office supply store for Chase Ink purposes.  This is awesome for heavy Ebay-ers like myself.  Let’s do some quick math and show the economics of this (so I can help myself with the math as well)

Staples $200 Visa Gift Cards

Let’s say you had $1,000 to spend at Staples.  You’d probably buy 5 x $200 Visa GC’s that have a fee of $6.95 each.  It would cost you $1034.75 and earn you 5,173 Chase UR points.  You could liquidate the $1000 in Visa gift cards at Walmart and now you have spent $~$35 for about 5K Chase points.  Easy enough.

Buying and Flipping Apple TV 2’s

Now this isn’t for the faint of heart and you’d need to be computer literate and would need at least 100 Ebay reps to do this.  First off, we’d buy $1,000 in Ebay gift cards from Paypal digital.  That nets us the 5K Chase UR points and now we have $1,000 in Ebay gift cards.  That’s step 1 and it’s necessary to get the 5K Chase points.  Now we take that $1,000 in Ebay gift cards and buy used Apple TV 2’s on Ebay.  The current going price is $160 each on Ebay and let’s say we bought 6 of them for $960 (sorry, the math didn’t match the Visa $200 VGC example).  And let’s say we could jailbreak the ATV2’s (takes about 10 min each once you get up and running) and we can sell each one for $210.  After Ebay,Paypal, and shipping fees, we are netting $185 each.  The math:

• Sell 6 ATV2 for $1,110
• – $960 cost
• = $150 profit
• + $19.20 in Ebay bucks (2% on $960)
• + $14.40 in portal cashback (Topcashback 1.5% of $960)
• Total haul – +$183 and 5,000 Chase UR points

Drawbacks

Of course there are lots of things that could go wrong.  Let’s discuss:

• You could buy a broken ATV2.  As long as you aren’t buying from a guy with <10 feedback, you should be fine.  Plus, there are lots of Ebay/Paypal protection, so that’s not a major risk.
• Time investment – Yes, liquidating $1,000 in Visa gift cards is easier than jailbreaking 6 Apple TV’s. However, if you factor in driving time to Walmart and the slow loading of VGC’s, this might actually be a wash.  Plus, you could do all this at home in your pajamas.
• Deadbeat bidder – I did have one guy return his ATV2 last month because it was ‘too slow.’  I made him pay for return shipping, and so all I was out was the $5.35 shipping fee to him.  I then relisted it and put a disclaimer in my listing saying, “I’m not responsible for the speed of streaming channels.”
• You may not get $210 for it.  This is a good point.  The Fire TV is actually a superior device, and that’s why I was selling my ATV2.  Most sellers actually sell ATV2’s for upwards of $230.  Worst case, you drop your selling price by $10 and make $50 less on the whole deal.

More Thoughts

This was just 1 thing I thought of that I could buy on Ebay that I could also flip on Ebay.  Of course the Amazon Fire TV’s would also work.  You could also just buy gift cards on Ebay to like Target or a grocery store too, but that’s not really scalable.  I do think that Chase will eventually shut down this 5X Ebay loophole.  When they do, this will all be moot…. except when you can get 4X gas rewards by buying Ebay GC’s at grocery stores, but that’s another article.