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Amazon has a new competitor called Jet. Here’s how to get a free membership! Plus, how to get an easy $20

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The latest BusinessWeek has a pretty interesting story on a man by the name of Marc Lore, who’s gearing up to take on Amazon. He sold his first venture, Diapers.com, to Amazon after Jeff Bezos severely undercut his prices and forced his hand. His noncompete expires early this year and he’s ready to take on Amazon again. Here’s the business idea in a nutshell:

Like Costco, Jet plans to make money on membership fees. Every other savings will be passed along to the buyer. And like EBay and the dominant Chinese e-commerce player, Alibaba.com, it will function primarily as a marketplace, allowing other merchants to compete to offer their wares to customers. But there’s a twist: Shoppers can squeeze out more savings if they can control the urge for instant gratification and let Jet figure out how to deliver the goods as economically as possible. For example, prices can drop when a shopper combines multiple orders into a single shipment or is willing to wait for a seller offering a more economical shipping option.

I’m all for an Amazon competitor. Over on the Saverocity forums, user dboston1 pointed out that you can get a free six-month membership if you sign up now. All you need to provide is an email address, so why not? You can sign up here with dboston1’s referral link–if enough of you join, dboston1 will get a 1-year membership and maybe even more.

$20 FOR SIGNING UP FOR UPROMISE: It looks like I got the same email as Big Habitat:

You’re off to a great start with your Upromise membership. In the past 12 months, you’ve earned more than $25 in your Upromise account, and those dollars start to add up as you continue to earn for college with our partners! Why not share your savings success with friends and family who can also benefit from a Upromise membership?

Let them know how easy it is to earn cash back doing the things they already do. They too can jump-start their college savings by shopping online (with 850+ Upromise partners), dining out (with thousands of Upromise Dining locations), booking travel, and even pumping gas. New members will get $20 in their account for joining.

I’ve used Upromise in conjunction with the Upromise credit card, and it has worked well for me. That 5% on the Staples portal was nice.

Anyway, there’s no referral link–I have to input your email address myself. So if you are not signed up with Upromise and you’d like $20, please send me your address (you can reach me at pfdigest at gmail) and I’ll hook you up. Or, if you like Big Habitat and his super anagram powers, get in touch with him. And if you earned more than $25 with Upromise, please check your inbox for this email since you can get up to $200 by referring people. Thanks everybody! UPDATE: I’ve already reached my limit–thanks! I can still refer you if you want, BUT there’s now a conga line on the Saverocity forums. Other people who received this Upromise email can refer you and they’ll also get the $20. Win-win! (If that doesn’t work for some reason, I’ll still be happy to refer you.)

 

Small transactions and monthly deals: worth the trouble?

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Chasing The Points alerted me to a new credit card from Citizens Bank, the Green$ense Platinum:

You can earn $20 per month with this thing, BUT you would have to make 80 transactions per month in order to get that $20. It’s a lot of work unless you can figure out a way to automate a bunch of small transactions. Given the much lower-hanging fruit to be had with manufactured spending, there probably aren’t a whole lot of people into this sort of thing right now. That makes it a great time to talk about this since there’s probably little danger of killing this deal by writing about it.

Where can you do a bunch of small transactions? Back in the good ol’ days that cranky old-timers are always talking about, you could buy Amazon gift certificates in one cent denominations. Ka-ching! In fact, Chase was paying out ten points per purchase at this time, and this led to a hundred-page credit card statement for at least one person (and I would assume more). Chase later raised the minimum gift certificate purchase to $0.15, then just a couple of months ago it went up to $.50. So unless you already do a lot of shopping there, Amazon’s off the table.

Next, there’s the question of how you can automate. I think there’s something called iMacros that can be used for this, though I’ve never looked into it.

So yes, there’s some work to do upfront, but I would imagine that as you get up the learning curve it becomes less work. I could be wrong, but I would also guess that if you build up a competency in small transactions you might find other opportunities as well. Worth the trouble? Beats me.

If you have a spouse, you’re looking at $480 per year, which is roughly 1% of the median household income in the U.S. Question: how many deals are there where you can earn a few bucks per month? If you put them all together, how large an income stream would that potentially be? Off the top of my head, I can think of Staples ink recycling and the Santander Bank thing, but I’m sure there are others.

 

How to work the system even if you’re only six years old

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A lot of us enjoy outfoxing the powers-that-be, so maybe some of you will enjoy the story of how my six-year-old son managed something similar.

He was at the mall with Mrs. PFD to get a new pair of shoes. On their way out, she received a phone call and stopped to take it for just a minute. She happened to stop right by Sbarro’s. With his mother distracted, my son confidently strode to the counter and ordered a piece of cheeze pizza for himself. He had neither the money nor the authorization to do so, and in fact had never even ordered food for himself before.

But as the saying goes, it never hurts to ask. My wife finished the quick phone call and turned around to find the cashier saying, “That’ll be $x.xx, Ma’am.” Once she figured out what had happened, she rolled her eyes and paid. While she was paying and thus distracted again, my son snuck over to the restaurant next door and asked for–these is how he put it–“a glass of sugar water”. They gave him a cup of Hi-C on the house.

And that is how my son ended up with exactly the dinner he wanted even though it wasn’t in Mom’s and Dad’s plans.

Next up: I’m going to send him out to buy some Vanilla Reloads for me.

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