DEAD DEAL! The Target Ebay merry go round

Introduction

Long time readers know I don’t blog about current deals.  Sure, I’ll get blog hits, but the deal will die quicker, and when that happens, well, I’m as hurt like anyone else.  So I don’t.  I do like to do post-mortems on these deals so that you guys know what was possible, and if you didn’t know about it, maybe it’ll help you think outside the box to find current and future deals.  See the previous dead deal lookback at Target VGC.

The merry go round

While this deal was never blogged about, if you knew someone who knew a guy, then you could have found out.  Here were the steps more or less:

1. You start with a $1000 Target gift card.  You can then buy $1000 of Ebay gift cards on Target.com, and if you had a Redcard saved to your profile, you’ll get a 5% discount.
2. Take those $1000 of Ebay GC and buy Target GC from Ebay (and earn some portal points while you’re at it)
3. Rinse and repeat

This “merry-go-round” really blew up when eBay lifted the gift card usage policy.  Back when you could only use 5K of eBay GC per 6 months or whatever it was, it probably wasn’t worth the time.  However, once eBay lifted that restriction, that unleashed the flood gates. The new bottleneck was then Target eventually cancelling your orders and banning you.  Of course others found ways to get around that bottleneck.

How long did this last?

I’m not really sure and I’m too lazy to check, but I feel the merry-go-round has been doing on for over a year now.   And eBay lifted the gift card usage back on March 15, so this deal was banged hard for a month before Target finally stopped giving the 5% as of April 24, 2016.  Now you can still ‘convert’ gift cards, but you won’t get the 5% discount.  I’m sure that’ll be blocked in the future too.

Lessons Learned

Even when things aren’t blogged about, the sheer volume of people hitting a deal kills it.  So you can’t blame the bloggers for this one.  Even I didn’t take part in the merry-go-round although I kept hearing about it.  I guess I never realized the potential of it until this post.  Oh well.