The other day I posted about my experience dabbling in reselling, with the 9x bonus at Sears.com through the Southwest Rapid Rewards shopping portal.
I first went through and bought 2 $500 gift cards, and then went back through the portal to buy 3 items. With the Sears Shop Your Way Rewards (SYWR) points that I got (and then applied to the next order), the orders were as follows
Order 1: $497 before tax – I used $42.90 in SWYR I had from before, plus a surprise $40 that showed up in my account (bonus!). I used $443.01 off the first gift card
Order 2: $497 before tax – I used the $104 I got in SWYR in Order 1. I used the remaining $56.99 off the first card and $363 off the 2nd one
Order 3: $299 before tax – I used the $103 in SWYR from Order 2, then used the remaining $137 off the 2nd gift card and then $176 off my Barclay card.
I was expecting my 9x Southwest points to be calculated off of the actual amounts that I spent, but it looks like they are actually calculated off of the total price (before tax!)Â Logging on to my Southwest Rapid Rewards account this morning, I see:
That’s a total of 20,656 (+1000 for the CC points I will get from paying for the gift cards) Rapid Rewards points, off of only $1137 total spend, or 19.04x spend. If I had planned things better, and gotten another $137 in gift cards, that would have been over 20x.
Not to mention that Southwest has a Back to school shopping promo going on (through August 31)
So that should be good for another 1000 points. The idea is that the 3 items I bought I can resell for at least the $1137 I paid (in theory, that shouldn’t be too hard, but we’ll see). I will keep you posted about whether or not I am able to do so, or how much those 21K Southwest points ended up costing me
Is it worth it to resell?
That’s the big question, isn’t it? Certainly there is some time involved, but it’s not a ton of time, once you know what you’re doing. For me, the real question will be how I end up as far as making vs. losing money. I don’t know that I’d be wanting to pay money if I have to come out of pocket.
But if I’m able to turn a small profit for a small amount of time (and earn a ton of miles in the process), then I think that might be worth doing.
The big reason I want to dabble in this is that I feel like Manufactured Spending (MS) has got to go away. With apologies to those who have really turned it into an art, I think it is not sustainable and probably due to be revamped to make it a bit harder to do. It’s always good to diversify your point-earning options, so I’m dipping my toe in here in case reselling needs to be a bigger part of my repertoire at any point.
Have you ever done any reselling? What was your experience?
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Just wondering if the reselling worked out to getting what you spent?
Thanks for the comment. I meant to do a bit of a followup on that – I would say that I ended up losing about $25 total on the deal, but I could have done better with a bit better planning / product picking I think