If you’re looking to meet minimum spend on a new credit card, or increase spend on a card with bonuses for high spenders, here’s a neat little trick. For this to work, you need either a Chase Ink card which gives 5X points for office supplies, or an Amex business card with OPEN savings which gives 5% back on purchases at OfficeMax of $100 or more. See Preparing for Miles for more info about these cards.
Here it is in a nutshell:
- Go to OfficeMax and buy EBay gift cards. Spend at least $100 each time to ensure you get 5% back with Amex cards. If you’re using an Ink card, you can optionally go to Staples or Office Depot to see if they carry EBay cards.
- Watch EBay for $500 Walmart gift cards. These usually sell for $485, which is a 3% discount. When available, use your EBay gift cards to buy the Walmart cards. You will get an additional 2% back in EBay bucks.
- When your Walmart cards arrive, go through Walmart.com to buy smaller denomination physical cards using your $500 card. See Washing Walmart for more info.
- Go through MyDealsAndCoupons to PlasticJungle. Sell your Walmart gift cards to PlasticJungle for 92 cents on the dollar. In other words, in exchange for your $500 worth of gift cards, Plastic Jungle will give you a check for $460. Through MyDealsAndCoupons you will earn 3% of the sale price (3% of $460 = $13.80). This comes to 2.76% of $500.
When you add up your costs and savings, you see that you lose 8% value when selling to PlasticJungle, but you gain 5% from Amex OPEN (or 5X from Ink) and 2.76% from MyDealsAndCoupons. In other words, cash-wise, you end up very close to even. Once you add in the 2% back in EBay bucks, though, you actually come out ahead!
Why only $10K?
EBay has a posted limit to how many gift cards can be used per 180 day period. Supposedly you are limited to $500 in gift cards per purchase, and no more than $5000 in purchases in any 180 day period. I say “supposedly” because a person on MilePoint reported buying a mutli-thousand dollar ring with gift cards. It appears likely that EBay doesn’t enforce these limits, but I don’t yet have personal experience to prove it one way or another.
EBay gift card terms & conditions:
No more than a total of $500 in Gift Cards may be used per eBay purchase. Further, unverified PayPal accounts are limited to a total of $500 in Gift Card purchases in any 30-day period and verified PayPal accounts are limited to $5,000 in Gift Card purchases in any 180-day period.
Notes
- When purchasing more than $100 worth of gift cards at a time at OfficeMax, the cashier will need a manager’s override.
- EBay gift cards at OfficeMax usually are available in $25 and $50 denominations. Yes, it is a bit painful to type in 10 gift card numbers when buying a Walmart card through EBay. Often the cards start with the same sequence, so copy that sequence to the clipboard and paste in each time to save a little trouble.
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Why would Amex open card get 5% back at officemax? Officemax isn’t listed as one of their partners at Amex OPEN website.
Am I missing something?
Amex OPEN used to offer cash back for OfficeMax purchases, but they no longer do. This post is very old and way out of date.
FYI – my credit card company was Citi (Aadvantage Visa card)
I posted here before – I actually received a $250 Hyatt gift card for $230 inc. shipping that checked out OK (I called upon receipt and verified the balance). When I tried using it 3 months later, I was told that the gift card was discovered to have been bought with a stolen CC, so the value of the card had been zeroed out. The buyer had closed their account by this time. Since eBay has a shorter claim period, I was out of luck with them, but my CC company claim was successful – I was initially declined but received guidelines from their fraud dep’t. to fax a letter stating that the goods received were not what was promised.
Would buying through ebay / paypal directly with your AmEx Gold Biz card give you extra protection? Of course you would lose out on the 5% discount at OfficeMax with the ebay gcs, but you could squeeze out maybe the last of your spending minimum, while minimizing losses? Would AmEx help you to fight to get your money back?
[…] Add an extra $10K spend to your Amex or Ink […]
well, I took a leap of faith and just went in for $500. As it usually is, says it will take about a month to ship. I am thinking about doing this weekly until I don’t need more spend then enjoy the checks coming in until I get burned…..
Regarding to the Freedom card, next quarter bonus is on grocery. May I ask if I can buy Shell or Chevron gas card in a grocery store for this bonus? If yes, what are the name of grocery stores? Thanks.
Nguyen: Yes, I’m sure you can find those at various grocery stores. I’d recommend that you look around and see what’s available.
Kushal: Thank you very much for providing so much detail. Sorry to hear about your predicament!
Kushal,
thank you so much. That is the kind of detail folks should leave when bad mouthing ebay.
Ebay and their evil empire Paypal do not care about anything except following their rules.
Google “paypal is the devil” and have a nice read.
Everyone that is buying gift cards on ebay will be burnt at least once.
It was bought using the Ebay gift cards + PP as posted here in the post :-). Yes, I know I would have disputed it with CC and received the money back. Its hard to believe that I will get money back on this one since all the evidence is against me.
did u buy with a credit card via PP? might be worth disputing with the. although it seems like there’s a chain of evidence against you on this one. It sucks that you didn’t get it even tho everyone (including USPS) says you did, but hopefully you can work this one out some how…
I will share in information in hope that someone will be helped. Please note I am actually going through this purchase from Ebay right now so its kind of fresh.
On Feb 9th I won this auction by doing a BIN for $250 worth of walmart GC for $240. I know I know it was greed on my part.
Text from ebay auction
=============Winner will receive one (1) real / authentic / unused / unscratched $250.00 Walmart Gift Card with $250.00 available. PLEASE NOTE: this gift card will NOT ship until March 30th (next month) and I have to physically ship it to you. If you can’t wait until then to receive the gift card then please do not purchase it. If you look at other listings from some of the more trusted and higher valued gift card sellers they are doing the same thing which is what gave me the idea.
SHIPPING is 100% FREE which includes USPS First-Class Mail but remember card will shipped on March 30th. BUT, I only ship within the United States. Please do not purchase this card if you live outside the U.S. or wish for it to be shipped outside the U.S.
PAYMENT is to be made through Paypal ONLY within three (3) days of this listing ending.
PURCHASING THIS GIFT CARD IS A GREAT WAY TO SAVE $10.00 AND MAKE SOME MONEY RACKING UP EBAY BUCKS!
================
I first made contact with the seller on Feb 29th asking Q when should I expect the card. His response was he will check and get back to me.
I start the dispute with paypal on Mar 9th.
My Mistake: I waited so long to initiate a dispute with paypal.
Fast forward: Seller gives me a USPS tracking number which shows that something was delivered to my zip code on Feb 27th started from VA on Feb 24th.
Paypal closes the dispute in favor of seller.
I initiate a inquiry with local USPS office to find what was delivered. They tell me that a letter was put in my mailbox and they wash hands.
I can confirm 1 thing that I have not received anything in mail. I know some of you might be suspicious but its $250 and how can one miss a mail like that. My suspicion is they might have sent something junk or they have copied a tracking number and just pasted into the dispute.
Paypal and Ebay has washed hands and no longer want to entertain anything from me.
Presently I am trying to get in touch with seller to get a copy of receipt but during all this he has responded only once and that too on Feb 29th.
Seller has a feedback of 96.7% with a total of 88 feedback.
Let me know if anyone has suggestions. I pretty much have written down $240, but will try anything based on suggestions here.
you can open as many eBay accounts you wish, so you can actually spend 100k……..
I am very intrigued by this discussion. I have considered buying those $500 gift cards many times for Walmart on-line. For those who have been burned, I would like more details like what was their reputation on Ebay? What actually happened? What did Ebay do to help you? Otherwise, everything you say seems trivial when Frequent has already pulled it off and many of us a clammoring for way to get our 10K done on the Amex Gold.
Will Office Max allow the purchase of eBay gift cards with an office max gift card?