Monday Morning Miles Talk is a regular series that has some smaller, more quirky ideas to kick off the work week. These are essentially random ideas that I wanted to share with you. Here are the 4 most recent topics.
- Are You Prepared in Case Tragedy Strikes?
- How to Remove Fighting over Money from your Marriage
- Selling Amazon Fire Tablets Results
- 5 Mistakes Experienced Travel Hackers Still Make
If you would like to read even more articles in the series you can click HERE.
Taking Advantage of eBay Site Wide Sales for Profit
There have been a lot of eBay site wide sales lately and I wanted to talk about my results for a few of them recently.
These sales usually run for one day and offer a flat 15-20% off anything on the site. They also run more restrictive sales that are limited to certain sellers. These can also be profitable depending on which sellers are listed.
Reselling the Nintendo Switch
If you remember in a previous edition of MMMT I discussed my results selling a Nintendo Switch during the holiday season. I was able to net a nice profit after purchasing it at a deep discount. I decided to stick with what I know and purchased a Nintendo Switch during each sale. The Switch is also a more expensive item which allowed me get more out of the discount.
By purchasing the Switch through eBay I also don’t get charged my state’s 6% sales tax, which is a big savings on it’s own.
The prices on Facebook and Craigslist had dropped from the holiday season highs where I sold mine for $290. The 20% off deal came right before Easter and I thought that may help the prices rebound some. They were listed for around $270 at the time of the deal.
Crunching the Numbers
With the 20% offer I purchased a Blue and Red Switch for $299.99 before the discount. The 20% off coupon dropped the price down to $239.99.
To increase my margins I purchased a $240 eBay gift card off of Gyft with my Ink Plus. This netted me 1,200 Ultimate Rewards points. I also earned $2.99 in eBay bucks which I value at 100% since I can use them to purchase discounted gift cards for resale. Portals no longer pay out on electronic purchases on eBay otherwise that could have netted me a few more dollars too.
I ended up selling the Nintendo Switch for $265. This netted me a cash profit of $25 plus $3 in eBay bucks and 1,200 UR points. Not too bad and the whole thing probably took me around 45 minutes.
There was a 15% off offer a few weeks later and while not as good I thought I could net a similar profit since the black consoles were on sale at the time of the offer.
I purchased a black system for $289.99. After the 15% discount the total came to $246.49. I purchased a eBay gift card from Gyft for $245 which netted me 1,225 Ultimate Rewards points. I also earned 2.46 in eBay bucks for the purchase.
Without an upcoming holiday and it being the black console this sale took a little longer to complete. After about a week of low ball offers I decided to accept one for $255 just to move on from it.
The final figures equaled out to an $8.51 cash profit, $2.46 in eBay bucks, and 1,225 in Ultimate Reward points. A flop for sure and it took about an hour of my time because of having to try to negotiate with so many different people.
Lessons Learned
I think taking advantage of these deals will be more profitable if there is something coming up, a holiday etc., that can help drive the sales. The color consoles also tend to be a better seller as far as I can tell.
If you are a seller on Amazon I think you may be able to net a better price when selling and a slightly better net profit vs the peer to peer route.
I would take advantage of another 20% off offer if the timing was right but I will probably stay away from Nintendo Switch’s with the 15% off offers. I need to find something else that will sell closer to full value.
Conclusion
As you can see there are a lot of factors that need to be considered when reselling. You have to take the life cycle of the product into account and the time of the year in which you are attempting to resell the item. Those factors play a large role into what kind of profit you can achieve. Having said that the eBay site wide sales do offer opportunities to the re-sellers out there.
Did you take advantage of the eBay promos? How did you end up doing?
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Thanks for sharing your results! I’d love to get into the reselling market, but haven’t taken the plunge. You always have great ideas!
Thanks for reading and for the kind words Becky.