MMMT: My Results from Reselling Amazon’s Kids Fire Tablets

Monday Morning Miles Talk is a regular series that has some smaller, more quirky ideas to kick off the work week.  These are essentially random ideas that I wanted to share with you.  Here are the 4 most recent topics.

• Using Swagbucks’ Referral program to increase your profits
• Reselling the Apple TV 4K
• Reselling Justin Timberlake tickets
• My Star Wars Reselling Flop

If you would like to read even more articles in the series you can click HERE.

Results from Reselling Kid’s Amazon Fire Tablets

Amazon had a pretty good sale on their Fire tablets a few weeks ago where you could get $20 to $40 off by using 1 American Express Membership Rewards point. The sale got even better when Amazon put all of their Fire Tablets on sale last Sunday.

For this sale the regular Amazon Fire tablets prices came nowhere near being as good as they were last time around.  But the Kid’s Fire tablets became a profitable purchase, the 8″ ones in particular.

Searching the Deal

The price on the 8″ Fire tablets for kids dropped down to $49.99 when stacking the promos.  These version of Fire tablet normally sell for $129.99 on Amazon but they were priced at $89.99 with the sale, before getting the Amex MR discount.

After checking the price on eBay and seeing that they were selling in the $90-$100 range I decided to buy 5, the max amount you could buy per account.  I also decided to wait and see how they sold before buying 5 more with my wife’s account, BIG mistake :(.

I had thought the sale would last a week like it did with their last, much better, sale.  It only lasted a day or so and I ended up missing out purchasing them with my wife’s account mainly because of laziness. Waiting until the next day, even after a few had sold, before attempting to buy more with my wife’s account cost me dearly.

I was also worried about the market getting flooded because of how long the last sale lasted and these versions don’t seem to move as regularly as the standard Fire tablets.  I decided to list the tablets right after purchasing them and explained that I would ship them within 2 business days (giving Amazon time to get them to me).  This was a little risky because Amazon might not ship them etc.  But I wanted to beat the influx of tablets to the market.

I settled on listing them at $84.99 a piece since they were $89.99 on Amazon at the time and that comes with a 2 year replacement guarantee.  If your kid breaks it Amazon would replace it, no questions asked, for 24 months.  That is worth a lot more than $5 so I wondered if they would move.

Crunching the Numbers

They ended up moving pretty quickly at $84.99.  I sold my two pink ones the first night and the other 3 were bought by one person the next morning.

The thing that upsets me a little bit is the fact that the sale ended quickly and Amazon’s prices went back up to $129.99.  If I had waited a little bit I probably could have gotten another $10 or more a tablet.  But I don’t apologize for taking a quick profit and you guys know I hate holding inventory and that I despise float :).

Here are my final numbers:

I had 2 discounted Amazon gift cards that I bought during my latest Chase Offers escapade which helped widen my margins some.

I used padded flat rate envelopes at $7.10 a piece, thanks for the increase USPS :(, and the 3 tablet order cost me $16.15 to ship in a box.  The combo order saved me $5.15, versus having to ship them all out separately, so that was a nice little bonus.

The eBay fees killed me some and if I had an eBay store they would have been $25 cheaper.  I don’t currently sell often enough to justify the $20-25 a month cost of having a store.  But something I plan to consider if I continue to increase my reselling.

I went through the JetBlue promo instead of doing the cash back offer on Amazon products…mainly out of habit when shopping on Amazon instead of an active choice.  The cash back rates would have brought me another 5-6% in profit most likely.

Conclusion

This was a solid deal that I wish I would have acted quicker on purchasing some more from my wife’s account.  Live and learn I guess.

There were some mistakes made, as there usually are.  If I had held them a little longer I could have most likely made a better profit.  And forgetting that Amazon tablets usually earn cash back was just dumb on my part.

The flip side of that is that I was able to sell all of my inventory before Amazon even shipped them.  Something that I wouldn’t mind happening more often!

All in all I would call it a success.  I was able to make close to a $100 profit for about 45 minutes worth of work.  I will take that type of deal all day.

If you enjoyed reading this entry you can read some of my other entries about reselling here:

• Reselling SNES during the holidays
• Reselling Kindle Fire Tablets
• Thinking outside the box to increase reselling gains
• Reselling AirPods at the end of their cycle
• My Star Wars reselling flop
• Reselling Justin Timberlake tickets
• Reselling Apple TV 4K

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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