Sometimes it can be helpful to enter into another person’s thought process while learning. In so doing, we go beyond “how to” and begin to probe “why,” unlocking deeper levels of mastery. I have not planned or curated this post – but will simply document everything as I go through a sourcing session with OAXRAY. I may find something, I might not.
To start with, I’m going to see where there may be some buying opportunities today. I’ll start by checking through these sites, but if I find something worthwhile, I’ll stop to pursue it and may not comprehensively check them all:
There are other good places to start your search, but these are the ones I gravitate to. On SlickDeals and DealNews, I especially look at the front page or featured deals – often on my phone with my eyes open for site-wide discounts. I love to see 20-50% off site wide sales. These are great with OAXRAY; just plug in your discount and scan around – you’ll find many more viable products in these situations. Today, I don’t immediately find anything on Slickdeals, but I find some significant discounts at Macy’s, Patagonia and Lord and Taylor on DealNews. The Lord & Taylor sale looks the most interesting to me at this point because it appears to be a flat 30% off site wide – that’s significant. They also call it the “Friends and Family” sale, which in my experience across all the department stores, tend to be among the best sales they have.
My next step is to check the cash back and discounted gift card sites. However, since I’ve already determined that I’m interested in checking out the Lord & Taylor sale, I will skip checking all the cash back sites like Ebates (my go to service for cash back) since I can use the Cashback Watch Chrome Extension for that once I’m at Lord & Taylor. But I will go to check a few gift card sites to see what kind of discounted gift card I can get, mindful of the fact that the Friends and Family sale may require a store branded credit card to purchase, but at initial glance of the posting on DealNews, that did not appear to be the case. I’ll go to GiftCardGranny first since it aggregates many sites. I find that there are several cards in various amounts available for around 15%. That’s pretty good, so I’m optimistic that I’ll find some things. Now, it’s time to head on over to Lord & Taylor. My extensions tell me Ebates is at 4% and TopCashBack is at 10%, so that is enough for me to give TopCashBack a try, taking me up to a 55% discount. I’ve actually never used TopCashBack, so I take some time to register there. Upon doing that, I’m told by TopCashBack that I already have an account (see, I told you I had not planned this out…) – so I figure out my password and login and go back to Lord & Taylor through TopCashBack.
I decide first to go to SALE > See All, then I go to Home and Travel and run OAXRAY. I realize I have my marketplace set to eBay, so I go and change it back to Amazon.com, save and rescan. OAXRAY is going a bit slow today, so I wait and then when finished I enter 55 in the discount box, then sort by ROI, clicking the ROI header twice.
I find that some of the best possibilities are Vitamix blenders. I check on my Amazon Seller app to verify that I’m eligible to sell and do a quick search on a restricted brand list to see if Vitamix seems to be restricted. And it appears that I’m able to sell. The one that looks most attractive to me is the A2300 model for the combination of profit and decent rank. You can see them here:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N4HPJV3?sa-no-redirect=1
http://www.lordandtaylor.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/en/lord-and-taylor/a2300-black-blender
Looks like I can get a 36% ROI and a net profit of $165 per unit. So far so good. I recall that there are some exclusions on the Lord & Taylor sale, so I go and look at the details and, unfortunately, find Vitamix on the list. It does say you can get a $30 gift card for every $100 spend on this brand if I use a Lord & Taylor credit card, but that would preclude me using the discounted gift card. You could still make profit there, but since the ROI was on the slender side anyways, I’ll pass at this point on all the Vitamix blenders.
The next thing down the list sorted by ROI is some glass Mikasa bowls – given the slender ROI and the fact that they are glass, I decide to pass as well. Everything below this point has an ROI that is too low for me to fool with. So unfortunately, on this particular scan, I didn’t find anything. But there was enough possibilities on this single page for me to suspect that subsequent scans will unveil some winners. And I will leave them to you to find! Happy sourcing.