Money Metagame has been running loops around me in gift card churning through eBay. yesterday, he posted the limitations with using eBay gift cards and why he used so much eBay gift cards that they shut him down. It’s a good read because if you run into his situation you don’t have to panic thinking someone shut you down.
He’s been able to find some awesome deals and leverage additional discounts to the purchases through buying discounted eBay gift cards. Doing all of that he’s been making money.
Lately, there have been some great deals for gift cards on eBay, some examples include:
$100 eBay Gift Card for $95 – Stack with Possible 5X & Portal Cashback
eBay: $100 in Sears Gift Cards for $80, $150 in eBay Gift Cards for $144
Like the authors, Shawn, Chuck, and Noah – I would recommend using eBay gift cards to buy the gift cards so you can stack additional savings. Noah found this in the terms and conditions because of his high rate of churn:
No more than a total of $500 in Gift Cards may be redeemed per eBay purchase. Unverified PayPal accounts are limited to a total of $500 in purchases of Gift Cards in any 30-day period and verified PayPal accounts are limited to $5000 in purchases of Gift Cards in any 180-day period.
Right now, his account is in “cool” down mode until the limits are lifted. If PayPal wasn’t such a tightwad, I might have hit those limits, but I’m not having any such luck in processing any deals with velocity. Chuck wrote this post about the limitations, but I didn’t know it was strictly enforced until Noah ran into the brick wall. You just need to be cognizant that there are limits and to just keep them in mind before the panic button is pushed.
Why use eBay gift cards?
It helps drive your costs down when churning gift cards. The margins to churning gift cards are so narrow that even 1% could make or break the deal. This is partly why many people are so turned off from gift card churning because the availability to the low hanging fruit of money orders are available.
I received 11 ebay gift cards on my birthday, each in the amount of $25, for the purpose of purchasing a phone to replace a broken one. I began the process of trying to place the order at 9:30am. I am writing this at 3:11pm. I have spent all day trying to enter codes AND waiting on hold . I am STILL waiting for a call back from ebay’s technical team, which MAY come tomorrow. I called ebay first and was directed to call paypal. After a 35 minute wait, I was transferred back to ebay. At that point I insisted I needed a supervisor, and had to wait for him to call me back.
The site allowed me to enter SOME of the codes. But after $150, it not only rejected the next one, but REMOVED all of the ones I took the time to enter prior. These are LONG numbers, folks. I don’t want to keep $125 in cards, not knowing if/when I will need them again. I asked for these gift cards for the purpose of buying this phone, and I should not have to lose a day of my life to redeem them
Wow, I’m sorry to such a terrible experience!