MAXIMIZING gift card BUYING VALUE ON EBAY

We all want to maximize the % of cash back on our day to day shopping, specially at stores for which the gift cards are easily available. Assuming you can get one of the Cash Back Card which gives quarterly rotating category bonus of 5% such as Discover IT credit card or Chase Freedom credit card or American Express Blue Cash Preferred credit card which gives 6% cash-back on stand-alone super markets or grocery stores (limited to max $6k/year) you can easily get atleast 5% or 6% off of your gift card purchase from the stores included in above categories. The interesting twist here is if you can find a store which falls in 5% or 6% cash-back category and sells the Ebay/MasterCard/Visa gift card you can further stretch your dollars to easily get a total discount of anywhere from 7% to 20% on the final merchant gift card which you can eventually use for your actual purchase. Below are couple of ways on how to get this to work!

Buying merchant gift cards using Ebay gift cards: 
Note: You will need to have a PayPal account or create one for this to work.

• If you are US resident, register for Ebay bucks program which gives 2% Ebay bucks for almost all the purchases on Ebay. This Ebay bucks are 1:1 dollar value and can be used for any of your future purchases on Ebay.
  
• Buy Ebay gift card at one of the grocery stores which provides either 5% or 6% cash-back on your purchase. 
  
• Go through Ebay and purchase the merchant gift card for the store you plan to shop in the future. You can only purchase "Buy It Now" listed gift cards immediately without bidding. Even if you purchase the merchant gift card listed at face value (e.g. $50 card listed for sale at $50), the 2% Ebay bucks rebate will make your cash-back amount atleast 7% (5%+2%) or 8% (6%+2%).
  
• If you are willing to spend some time and try your hand at bidding you can more often than not get the gift card at 5% off from the face value, thus taking your total discount to 12% (5%+2%+5%). Some gift card sell at high discounts and you could be able to even score about 20% as total discount.
  
• Once you "buy" the item you will see "Pay Now" button. After clicking on it you will see a field called "Redeem a Gift Card, Certificate or Coupon". You can enter your Ebay gift card number in this field to pay for your purchase. 
  
• You will be taken to PayPal to complete your transaction and once you receive your merchant gift card in the mail/e-mail you can use that to make your "actual" purchase online or in-store.
  

Purchase using MasterCard/Visa Prepaid card:
If Ebay seems to be too limited in scope or lot of hassle you have another option below.

• Go through the store (supermarket, grocery store or drugstore) which earns you bonus of 5% or 6% on your purchases and buy a prepaid MasterCard or Visa. Since this card have associated fees you are better off buying a high value card. A $500 MasterCard/Visa generally comes with purchase fee of $5.95, thus reducing your cash-back to 3.81% 4.81%. 
• Use this prepaid gift card to purchase discounted merchant store gift cards from CardPool or PlasticJungle. These stores sell merchant store gift card (e-gift card and physical gift card) at a discount of 2% to 30%. You can compare the "buy" value at GiftCardGranny.com. 
• As a bonus, buying gift card at CardPool or PlasticJungle through Cash back portal like TopCashBack.com gives you 2% to 4% discount on the buying cost of the gift card.
• If you add it all up, you would easily save anywhere from ~7% to ~35% on the merchant store gift card purchase.

Put above techniques to use to get great discount even before you hit your store, but before you go make sure you already have 5% or 6% cash-back credit card at your disposal.

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