Welcome to the latest edition of Flippy Friday where I share one of the items I recently flipped through the Amazon FBA program. This week’s item is the Apple Ipad Air 2 16GB. Ipads are great products to flip because they sell quickly. I don’t normally like to spend this much money on one item to flip, but I make an exception for iPads since they are quick sellers.
This opportunity became available when Target had these iPads on sale for $399. These iPads were going for about $445 on Amazon. Although the Target price was $45 cheaper than Amazon once you added in sales tax and Amazon fees this would have been a small money loser. Fortunately, Target also had a Cartwheel deal for 10% off iPads which could be applied to the sales price of the iPads. This brought the before tax price down to $359. Once tax was added I ended up paying $388.19 for my iPad. It sold the day it arrived at Amazon for $449. After fees I made $32.88 on this flip. That isn’t too bad for less than an hours work.
I also bought a second iPad using discounted Target gift cards. The cards were 7.5% off which just about covered the sales tax. This resulted in an almost $60 profit on the second iPad. I also received 2% cashback on my credit card that I used to purchase the discounted gift cards. Although I don’t break my shipping cost down per item I know that the credit card cashback was easily enough to cover my shipping cost.
Many FBA sellers don’t like to bother with items with this small of a profit margin. I think it is worthwhile selling a more expensive item even though the margin is smaller since it still results in nice dollar amount profit. It would have been possible to use the Cartwheel discount four times. After my iPads sold so quickly I was wishing I had purchased a couple more. For now, I don’t want to take the risk of spending too much money on one item. I can’t have my cash flow tied up for too long and there is always a possibility that the price will drop dramatically after I’ve purchased the items. I’m happy with the profit I made on these two iPads and wish I was able to find deals like this more often.
That’s a good profit for the time it took. Do you think Black Friday would be a good day to work this scheme?
Jon – I’ve heard that since so many people hit the Black Friday deals they drive the prices down making it harder to make a profit. There is probably still some good deals to be had though if you can find some deals that all the other resellers aren’t buying.