Breakdown of Stacking eBay Gift Card Deals for Rewards & Possible Profit

Breakdown of eBay Gift Card Deal

Paypal Digital Gifts via eBay is offering a $100 eBay gift card for $95 with a limit of 2. They are also offering a $65 Staples eGift card for $75 with a limit of 3. This isn’t the best combination of deals we have seen in the past few weeks, but you can still achieve a pretty decent discount. Since these are the best deals available now, I thought that I would break them down as an example.

Purchase eBay Cards

The first step is to purchase 2 $100 eBay gift cards for $190. eBay gift cards don’t generally earn portal cashback, but some people claim to have success with Ebates so I would give it a try. (Referral link) If so, that would be an additional 1% back. Remember also to use your Chase Ink card to pay via Paypal, since that should earn 5x Ultimate Rewards.

eBay gift cards will come via email within about 30 minutes, but they can take several hours to activate. There is a risk when buying them for another deal, since the other deal can go away before you have the opportunity

Use eBay Gift Cards to Purchase Staples Gift Cards

Once your eBay gift cards are activated, you can use them to purchase the Staples gift cards. Purchasing 3 $75 Staples gift cards will cost $195, meaning you can use your new eBay gift cards and still have a $5 balance left over.

You can also go through Top Cashback or another portal and earn 1.1% back for the Staples gift card purchase plus 2% in eBay bucks.

The Math

So for $190 out of pocket, you now have:

• $5 in eBay credit leftover on your gift card.
• $225 in Staples gift cards
• $3.90 in eBay Bucks
• $2.15 in portal cashback (not including possible 1% from Ebates)
• 950 Ultimate Rewards points (190 x 5)

Now lets look at this a different way. What if you wanted to buy something at Staples. If we assume the eBay credit is as good as cash then you paid $178.95 for $225 in credit. That amounts to a 20.5% discount.

But what if you want to resell? For many merchants you can simply enter the gift card code online and sell the card that way, but most gift card resellers require Staples physical cards be mailed in. Since these are eGift cards that won’t work. Only Cardpool allows the codes online (as far as I can tell), but they pay only $57.75 for a $75 card. Is it worth it?

Remember you paid $178.95 for those cards assuming you convert the eBay credit into cash. If you sell the three cards for $57.75, then you will net $173.25 or a loss of $5.70, but still have the points. In this case, I would value those 950 points at about $16.15, so it is an overall profit, but not a great one.

Other Considerations

This is just a quick example based on two deals that are available right now. The math gets significantly better for merchants where entering codes online is more acceptable. There are also increased portal cashback deals occasionally and eBay also sends out 3x, 4x and 5x eBay Bucks deals as well.

Conclusion

The point of this was not to tell you to purchase these cards. This deal isn’t great to be honest and I would probably pass on the Staples cards and just purchase the eBay gift cards to save until a better deal comes along later. No matter what you do, I hope this shed a little light on some of the opportunities these deals present.

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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