Ok, so if you are a real nerd, here is how to make all this work. It maybe the Holiday season but Ebay seems pretty broken. Right now I can’t buy either staples or Best Buy gift cards. Goes into cart but on checkout says unknown failure. I wish they would just say they have anti-fraud limit. The net is that you can (like me!) end up with $$$s of gift cards on eBay that are unusable for the next month!
- There is a 30-day $1000 limit on gift cards.
- There is a $250 per day limit that seems to vary as well. I bought $400 worth of eBay Gift Cards, so it fluctuates
- It will ask you Bank and credit card validations a bunch of times.
- Even if you use eBay Gift cards as the purchase mechanism, the PayPal limits apply if you are using them.
Basically, this means this mechanism is good for small purchases only but here is how you can end up with a Best Buy gift card most useful for electronics (for instance, Nestcam 3-packs at $499)
- Go to cashbackmonitor and you will see a 1.25-2% rebate on ebay purchases
- Go to ebay and use an Ink business card. If you use Paypal digital, this counts as office supplly so you get 5x bonus points, (at 2.1% per point this is 10.2%)
So any gift cards you buy via this route will be 13% off roughly. - Now on to the next level of dipping. Buy a Best Buy e-gift card
- Sign up for Best Buy Rewards which effectively gives you another 1-2% off (depening on your status level).
- Now you finally can use that to buy something with 15% off the top before any Best Buy deals (they are selling iPads and Apple Watches for 20% off right now for instance).
Another method is to get to a Visa gift card which is completely general, there are again two ways to do this:
- Go through the ebay route above and get Staples egift cards.
- Staples has its own reward program so sign up for that to get another 2%
- Buy Visa cards at a cost of about 3% ($300 for $8.95). While you lose 3% here, you gain 12%, so you are getting these cards at about a 7% gain. Not bad.