- Part 1 – Pros and Cons of Reselling
- Part 2 – Getting Price Down as low as Possible
- Part 3- Sourcing Deals
We will now begin to discuss many of the best retailers in more detail, starting with Staples.
Staples is one of my favorite places to source merchandise for many reasons, in fact it is the combination of all the benefits that makes Staples so enticing.
Contents
Frequent Sales
In general, Staples is an expensive store and I rarely shop there for personal consumption (aside from picking up the mandatory chocolate bar when I’m there!) , but they often have good sales and every once in a while they have great sales. Here is one recent example when iPad Air 2’s were $150 off on Staples.com. The sales can earn you money when you flip, but all the extras are why Staples is great.
Portal Bonuses
Staples historically and currently has a robust choice of shopping portals to choose from. Upromise has been 5% for Staples for as long as I can remember, Discover Deals used to be 5% but hasn’t been seen for quite some time. There is usually some airline shopping portal at 3-5x if you’re in to that kind of thing.
Even better, the shopping portals usually do not exclude Apple Products (I’m giving you the stink-eye Target!).
Credit Card Rewards
A few different credit cards have 5% cashback or 5x Points for office supply store purchases like Staples stores. The American Express SimplyCash earns 5% cashback and the Chase Ink Family of cards earn 5x Ultimate Rewards points for office supply stores. This is obviously significantly better than using a 2% everywhere card.
Discounted Gift Cards
There are plenty of Staples gift cards available at 5%+ off all the time on various gift card exchange sites (like Raise). I’ve bought them at 8% as well and I’m sure others have bought them at much greater discounts. You still earn your regular credit card rewards when buying these gift cards so you can add 2% from your 2% everywhere card to the profit margin calculation.
The major downside is that you won’t be earning 5x Ultimate Rewards and many people value UR points at well more than 1 cent per point.
I find that I am able to max out my Chase Ink 5x categories with other methods and it pays to use discounted gift cards for Staples. That’s a personal call.
In addition, for the last 6 months or so eBay has been having great sales on Staples Gift Cards. I bought as many Staples Gift Cards at 15% off I could get my hands on. See here and here. I haven’t even used them yet, but I know I will.
Considering the advantages of purchasing from eBay (for another post!), gift cards can turn a good deal into a spectacular deal with an extra 15-20% baked into your margins.
Keep in mind that there is a limit of 5 gift cards per transaction online so smaller denominations are of less use to me.
You also still earn portal points and loyalty points when using gift cards (I’m giving you the stink-eye Best Buy!).
Staples Rewards
Staples Rewards is the most generous loyalty program I know of.
Depending on your status, you can earn 2-5% in Staples Rewards for every purchase outside of gift cards. You can trigger Premier status (the highest level of status) with just $1,000 of purchases for the year (I’m giving you the stink-eye Sears!). I can easily spend 4x that over the weekend if Staples is running a particularly good sale on iPads (not online – more on that later).
In addition, Staples periodically puts out a coupon that earns either 25% in Staples Rewards or, more rarely, 40% in Staples Rewards on most purchases, but unfortunately usually excludes any of the usual reselling suspects.
Ink Rewards
Staples has an Ink Rewards program that everyone should take part of, even if you are not a reseller. As long as you spend $30 on Ink at Staples within the last 6 months, you are eligible for ink recycling which earns $2 of Staples Rewards per cartridge recycled.
If you are a basic member you can recycle 10 ink cartridges a month for $20 in Staples Rewards. If you are a Plus or Premier member you can recycle up to 20 cartridges a month for up to $40 in Staples Rewards monthly.
Even if you don’t have that many ink cartridges, you can buy empty ink cartridges off eBay for about $0.10 a cartridge. That’s a cost of $2 per month per cartridge and an average of $5 in Ink purchases per month for up to $40 of rewards! It’s a no brainer to me.
Price Match
Staples has a generous price match policy.
From their site:
Staples.com will price match prices at select competitors’ websites and Staples’ retail stores. These select competitors are: Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Office Depot, Office Max, Quill, Medical Arts Press, Reliable, Sam’s Club, Wal–mart, WB Mason and Xerox. Items must be sold and shipped by one of these competitors.
You can price match online via their chat function, use a shopping portal to purchase online and the price will be adjusted after the transaction and you still earn your portal cashback. A sale at Best, Buy, Sam’s Club, Walmart and all the other stores on the list is now also a sale on Staples.com!
The major problem with a price match is that they have always limited me to one item per pricematch. Please comment if you have had a different experience.
Coupons
Staples publishes weekly coupons online. In addition, you can buy Staples coupons online from eBay. Make sure you know the terms and conditions of the coupon so that it doesn’t exclude what you are planning to buy.
Apple Pay
Using Apple Pay in combination with Discover to earn 22% off in store purchases at Staples is awesome! I mean it’s really awesome! I only mention this last because it is a limited time offer, but don’t underestimate its importance, if you don’t already have a bunch of discounted gift cards to use!
A Word of Caution – Beware of the Ban, especially with Apple Products
Staples has fun habit of banning people who are not profitable (aka – resellers). That could mean banning your IP address, your home address, your Staples Rewards number, your online account. Any and all are possible. It’s actually one of the benefits of Elite Status at Staples! Just kidding of course.
You also might get a “easy there” email in which Staples warns you to lay off the Apple products for a little while. I have been banned before (thankfully when I moved the ban was removed) and it was for using coupons to lower the price of Visa Gift Cards. Since then (a few years ago), I have not had problems.
I have yet to have a problem with in store purchases (even with quite a few), but I have read reports of bans for that as well. It’s always wise to be careful. The reselling game, like anything else in Manufactured Spending, is a game for life. You don’t want to prematurely close any avenues.
Conclusion
Staples is a great place to look for deals. They sell products that resell quickly and with a profit. Portals, discounted gift cards, Chase Ink, Staples Rewards and Apple Pay all sweeten the pot. Just don’t get too greedy!
Editor note: Big thanks to Oren as always, he will be available to answer questions in the comments. If you want to find some good reselling deals with Staples then follow him on Twitter and then check out his site as well.
I don’t know if you get notifications for new replies to very old threads, but was doing a search to find a way around a staples ban and came across this 🙂 I’ve been ‘banned’ for a while now and it’s for the very same reason you were banned. Coupons on Visa GCs. Fun stuff!
I opened a new account two months ago and purchased two Apple products. Today I tried purchasing one more and Staples cancelled the order and called me and told me that only two Apple products can be purchased in the lifetime of an account, so I guess they are cracking down.
Oren or Doc, can you add your uPromise referral link to the article? I couldn’t find it.
There is no link. You have to send an email referral. Send me an email at [email protected] and I can refer you.
Oren- thanks for a great review! Which products/ product categories have you done the best with in the past from Staples, is it iPads /laptops? Also, is Amazon generally the easiest place to resell purchases from Staples, or are planning to cover this in a separate article?
Mostly electronics and mostly iPads but not exclusively. I almost always use Amazon and yes that will be in a later part of the series!
When you say you max out your ink plus 5x with other methods do you mean something other than office supplies stores?
Yes, buying gift cards
But not giftcards from office supply stores right? But some other places where they code as 5x for some reason. Never thought the discounts allowed that much volume. Unless you are selling some for a loss.
No, gift cards for purchases, not resale.
How much volume is Staples tolerant of? I’m a Staples rewards elite earning 5%. What good does that do me?
As far as Apple products is concerned, I’ve noticed any order of more than 8 units gets cancelled and can get you banned. But the magic number could be smaller. I’ve had multiple orders cancelled despite some of them having only 4 units (because they were all for apple products and one of the order was 8+ units)
They don’t tell you how much you can do before you are banned.
You get 5% of your purchases in Staples Rewards which can be used the following month as cash for staples purchases, excluding gift cards.
I just got a couple of coupons for Staples Rewards. I just apply them to my check out and save more?
Yes, it will be as if the item costs less (both in terms of earning more Staples Rewards and your portal payout).
“You also still earn portal points and loyalty points when using gift cards”
this has not worked for me for the past few months. only got miles on the portion of the order that was paid with credit card, not Staples gift card. 🙁
Which portal?
Alaska and United.
I’ve specifically got miles when using United many times. I’ve never used AS. Weird.
Thanks for this Oren! Only wish I had taken more of an oppprtunity with the last iPad sales (150 off). Here’s hoping it comes back soon – they are currently running 75 off promo.
There is actually a $90 off promo for the 64GB iPad Air 2. It has the potential to be a decent money maker.