Thursday, December 3, 2009

How eBay Helped Me Pull $62 Out of Thin Air

You may have heard me talk about selling gift cards on eBay. Here is my most recent sale of Starbucks gift cards, which I obtained FREE by using Swagbucks:



This is the strategy. Sign up at Swagbucks. You earn points for using their search engine. You don't have to use it exclusively, but just use it a few times a day.

Once you have 130 points, you can redeem a $10 Starbucks Gift Card. The Starbucks cards are the only ones on Swagbucks that are NOT e-Cards. In other words, you get an actual gift card in the mail in about a week. Every other gift card on Swagbucks must be redeemed online - such as at Target.com, Amazon.com, etc. And with e-Cards comes shipping fees on the merchandise you are getting free, so your "prize" can actually be eaten up paying for shipping. (I found this out the hard way.) The Starbucks card is is an actual physical card that you can sell on eBay.

I usually wait until I have a few and sell them as a batch. That reduces your listing fees, final value fees, and Paypal fees. And always use delivery confirmation when shipping a gift card, so you can prove that the item was delivered to the buyer.

Click here to sign up at Swagbucks and start earning points for Starbucks cards to keep or sell for cash on eBay!

I am a big believer in multiple streams of income. This one is easy. It cost me zero dollars to accumulate these gift cards, which I then sold on eBay and my profit after fees was $62.00. Not bad for something you can do without ever leaving your chair. So far this year, Swagbucks gift cards have helped me earn over $800 on eBay without doing more than creating a listing for a gift card and mailing it.

Do you like free stuff? Check out these articles on how to get more freebies you can resell on eBay or Amazon.

How to Get Free Gift Cards

How to Get Free Grocery Coupons

How to Get Free Items to Sell on eBay

Happy Selling!

5 comments:

Paula said...

Great idea. I did the same thing with my Pampers Points. I saved them up then cashed them in for items I could sell for $$$ on Ebay.

Anonymous said...

I love this idea! I'm definetely one for multiple streams of income (one reason so I don't get burned out on one thing), but I do have a question:to earn your swagbucks, did you just search a few items a day or did you do other things like swag codes and whatnot??

Vyeshi said...

my problem with swagbucks is that I want to use the Starbucks cards!! i love their coffee. So i guess that's good too..a few free cups of coffee is a great deal for just searching the web!
Recently I used my SB's to get a $5 Amazon e-gift card which I then used to purchase a $5 subscription to Real Simple magazine. (special deal) Whoo hoo!! Free subscription to my favorite magazine!

Unknown said...

We have also sold Purina points on eBay. There is a weight circle one the side of any Purina brand product. (dog chow, cat chow, pro plan, etc.) You can google it to find out all of the different brands, but I bet there are a lot of them that just get thrown away. We normally sell 5 weight circle from the 44 pound bags for about $15. It's like getting $3 off per bag. Hope this helps someone.

Unknown said...

I enter a lot of sweepstakes that have gift cards as prizes. I've won several gas cards, Sears, Home Depot and iTunes ones and sold them on ebay. Gift cards sell great!