Turnover Tuesdays - My Sam's Club iPad Collection for the $20k Challenge

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For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

I also joined the $20k challenge trying to resell $20,000 of merchandise in 3 month on the AmEx Business Platinum.  I'm basically done with the $20k challenge with a profit margin of about 10%.  Almost half of that came from one type of purchase from Sam's Club.  It was so successful that I did it over and over again (not too many times to be deemed a reseller and lose my portal payout.)  If something is working well, you can keep doing it while also looking for other options.  You can also check out Week 8 and 12 for other purchases during the challenge.

Like most of my resells, buying it straightup doesn't get you very far, it's the combination of many avenues of sales that make it worthwhile.

Unfortunately, this is not something that works right now, but who knows it may come back at some point in the future.

Week 1 - First attempt at reselling
Week 2 - My second straight fail
Week 3 - My iPad mini collection
Week 4 - Bed Bath and Beyond
Week 5 - An iPad Idea for Your Staples Gift Card Collection

Week 6 - An iPad idea for Manufactured Spending
Week 7 - The Great iPad Deal that Wasn't
Week 8 - Lenovo Tablets
Week 9 - iPads at Staples
Week 10 - Loving that Groupon iPad Deal
Week 11 - iPads on Sale at Sears
Week 12 - Roombas at Bed Bath and Beyond

The Item - iPad Air 2 128GB Silver

I signed up for a Sam's Club membership recently because of a very lucrative AmEx Offers for you of $20 off a $20 purchase at Sam's club.

For about a month, iPads were on Sale at Sam's Club. I'll highlight one purchase because I did the same thing for all the purchases, just in different sized iPads and slightly different profit margins.

As you can see from my order, Sam's Club was taking $100 off their already slightly discounted prices for iPads.  The base price of $687 went down to $587 and with taxes.  The total price was $644.25

 That's a nice start.

The same item usually costs $699 before any discounts and it costs about $655 months later on Amazon

Credit Card Points 

The $20k Challenge required all money spent to go through the AmEx Business Platinum.

Sam's Club allows you to use 2 credit cards per purchase besides any gift cards you are using.  I used 2 AmEx credit cards enrolled in the $20 off $20 AmEx Offers for you to save $40 off the price.  My price is then $606.25 before any gift cards.

I bought AmEx gift cards at 2.25% off for a net of about ~2% after fees.  I used the AmEx gift cards to buy discount Walmart gift cards at raise for an average savings of 3.5%.  That's 5.5% when you include the 2% from the AmEx gift cards.

Walmart gift cards can be used Sam's Club since they are the same company.

5.5% off $606.25 is a final price of $572.91.  

That earns 573 Membership Rewards points.  We did not count MR points towards profit margin of the $20k Challenge

Shopping Portal

This is where it got a little tricky.  If you look at the breakdown from Top Cashback, you see that electronic earn 1% cashback.  That's not very enticing.

I looked around and I saw that Be Frugal did not have the same exclusion with he same 4% cashback rate.

4% of $587 is $23.48.  Shopping Portals don't pay out for taxes.  As you can see from the picture, it worked perfectly!

Loyalty Points 

I honestly didn't even realize it at the time, but the membership I bought from Groupon was Sam's Club Plus membership which gives you $10 in Sam's Club cash for every $500 you spend (2%  - not exactly because if you spend $900, you still only get $10)

Therefore this purchase earned an additional $10 in Sam's Club cash.

I earned $180 in Sam's Club cash during the challenge, you can do the math!

Fulfillment by Amazon Fees

Amazon's FBA fee was $42.09. Shipping was $0.59 since I bundled a few iPads together.

The Haul  

I paid $572.91.  I sold the iPads for $668.  After FBA fees, that is a gain of $52.41 of 9.15% on just the sale

Here is how the numbers work
Cash = $52.41
Credit Card Points = 573 MR points.  Let's call that $5.73
Portal Points = $23.48
Loyalty points = $10


If you include the value of the CC points at $0.01 (certainly worth more than that), your profit is $91.62 which is ~16%

For the purpose of the $20k challenge, you need to take out the $5.73 which makes your profit $85.89 and profit margin of ~15%.  Not too shabby!