This deal is SORTA dead right now, but I wanted to tell you guys about it 1) in case it comes back in stock and 2) how I decide whether to buy and resell a certain deal. Yesterday as I was browsing Slickdeals, someone posted that Bloomingdale’s had the Dyson DC65 Animal Complete for $329. I knew this was at least a ‘warm’ deal because I had just recently sold them on Ebay for $420. Shipping cost $30 and the Paypal/Ebay fees totaled ~$50. So at best, I was going to make $20 (a 5% margin) excluding portal points, which really isn’t worth my time.
Buying Gift Cards for 17% off
However, when I clicked through and read the post, the OP mentioned that Raise had Bloomingdale’s gift cards for 14% off. I then fed that data point into my spreadsheet. When I did that, my profit shot up to $71 (a 17% margin) per Dyson. GAME ON! My next big concern was, “What if Raise doesn’t send out the gift cards in time and now I’d be stuck with $300 in gift cards?” That was a very real risk, but I figured if I don’t take advantage of this deal, I could use the gift cards for the next deal. I also decided to go big and buy 3 of them, which meant I needed $1K in Bloomie’s gift cards. And for some reason, the gift cards were actually 17% off and not just 14% off. SCORE! I used my wife’s AMEX Biz Platinum card since I still needed to spend the $10K in 3 months on her card. When I tried to buy the gift cards, the card was denied due to a fraud alert. Since she wasn’t home, I signed into her account and was able to clear the FA. I reprocessed the payment, and it was approved. And luckily for me, since I was an existing Raise member, they emailed me the egc’s within minutes.
Buying through a shopping portal
The next step was pretty easy. I went to cashbackmonitor to see who had the best rate for Bloomingdale’s. At the time, the AA portal had 4X on Bloomingdale’s. Another note – before I had bought the gift cards, I went through to the final checkout screen to see if there was a limit on gift cards. Luckily you could have up to 25 gift cards, so I knew my 10 gift cards would work. I decided to buy 3 of the Dyson’s and the total came out to ~$975. On the final checkout screen, I also noticed that there was no tax for Washington state. I thought this was odd since Bloomingdale’s is owned by Macy’s and there is a Macy’s here. Whatever; I’m not going to argue about that.
Final Thoughts
Since there was no tax and the gift cards were 17% off, I’ll be able to squeeze out a $107 (26% margin) profit per Dyson as well as 1,300 AA portal miles. Not too shabby for about ~10 minutes of work. When I checked back an hour later, the Dyson was no longer available. If you visit the site now, you can see that they ‘on order’ (see screenshot), which means you might be able to take advantage of this deal before 3/1. They also have other Dyson’s on clearance too, but the margins aren’t as great.