roknroll

Yes, because you don't receive the miles right away. You'll place the order, it will ship out and you will get it. The miles will take 8+ weeks to post and you will have to have done the price match before that. It sounds like they were manually posting them to Delta, order by order in batches of 400. So I'm sure that they will catch an order that drops below $500.

jcmitchell21

From Skymall:

What is the SkyMall Pricing Policy?
Everything at SkyMall is offered at the same prices you'd find in the original catalog. There's no additional markup. We guarantee you'll always get the best price: if you find an identical new product advertised for less within 30 days of the receipt of your order, just send us the ad and we'll refund the difference.

Does "ad" refer to printed ad or just a website list price?


FWIW, this is my first time participating in this.

The_Wrath_of_Khan

Skymall is great and will price-matched just about anywhere. I don't think you'll find one person upset with how the last promotion went.

SkinsFan0521

Can you tell me where you got this from?

I ask because this is 100% not how it worked for the last promo. My pricematches made my order total WELL below the $500 mark and I still received the miles.

The_Wrath_of_Khan

This is a change in the T&C for this promo. I cannot post what I have, but I am telling you 100% for sure this is the case for this promo. To paraphrase the T&C I've seen, "No promos of any sort, no free shipping, no nothing. Price-matches accepted, but if your order falls below $500 (excluding shipping and taxes) after the price-match you are excluded from earning the 25,000 miles."

This means we cannot do what we did last time and buy tabs for $499, price match them for $21 off each and have our orders fall just below $500 each. I'm not going to get into my strategy on here until I've processed all of my orders.

The_Wrath_of_Khan

This is not a promo that anyone should be trying to cheat or cut corners on. It's great, straightforward and amazing. I love skymall for doing this. Be good to them because they have been great to those of us on the last order. Aaron is extremely helpful and very patient.

dwbf11

Are you serious? "Strategy?" What's so secret about buying (Insert your favorite re-saleable $500 product here) and then hopping on Ebay? Posts like that always make me laugh, you must think you're really ahead of the curve on such a basic example of arbitrage...

jcmitchell21

Strategy can be which item to buy, who to price match too, how to list/sell the item.

I can by a $500 piece of crap and sell it on eBay for $20, but that wouldn't make much sense. Why not have a STRATEGY of what you're going to buy ahead of time so you can get as many orders in that you can.

And having sensitive promo information IS ahead of the curve in my book.

drbobguy

I agree, and thanks keirna for letting us know about the price match condition (>$500) which is pertinent info that does indeed affect my strategy.

As to strategy overall I agree it does matter, even if it's not super complicated, because if you find a great item to buy/resell you don't want everyone and his mother getting ahead of you and having to wait a month for the item to ship (in which time frame a competitor might come out and resale value might plummet).

That's exactly what happened the last time around. People ordered the Galaxy Tab, and in the wait time to receive it the Amazon Fire came out.

Buying and reselling electronics means you need to (1) pick an item that won't decrease in value in the time it takes you to receive and resell the item (this is not to be neglected and it means knowing refresh schedules of the item and competitors) (2) find a good price to pricematch to (3) minimize the delta between purchase price and resale value by having a good resell strategy (e.g. buy it now is less commission than a true auction, but means you need to know a realistic selling price).

Also for this promo you want to pick an item as close to $500 as possible (while still being above) because both Skymall's shipping price and sales tax (if applicable) eat into your profit and they are based on the final cost of the item. And finally to get the best deal you need an ship-to address in a tax fee state. That's the one component I'm missing.

If you do all of those things perfectly I think ideally you could get the cost of this promo way, way down, to something like $50 for 25k miles. I'm aiming for $100-$125 (less than 0.5cpm) which I still think is quite doable this time around.

EDIT: I take it back, shipping seems to be maximum $21.25 for any order over $200 (?). This means that total price DOESN'T matter if you are getting in on this tax-free. The ideal strategy is then to minimize purchase/resell delta even if it's for an expensive item.

HansGolden

Strategy is very important. Last year, I didn't put much thought into strategy and bought Dr. Dre Beats which have a bad resale value. This year I'll have a cost of 0.2 CPM (2/10 cent). Of course, my knowledge of buying and selling gear has gone up dramatically since last year, as well. Let's just say that this promo is a bonanza for savvy shoppers/sellers.

dwbf11

@jcmitchell: I'd hardly call this "sensitive promo information." Aaron has come on here and told everyone about it. Anyone with an internet connection can find out that the promo exists.

@HansGolden: I agree with you 100%. I'm not saying it's not important to have an idea of what you're going to buy and then re-sell. Obviously you wouldn't be purchasing a $500 item to re-sell for $20. That would make no sense. But there's nothing secret about doing some Ebay searches for various completed items and figuring out which of the items on Skymall tend to hold their value better. I just find it funny when people take these things so seriously as to feel the need to post that their "strategy" is so super duper top secret that it can't be shared! Better not to say anything at all, frankly.

Fact is, most of us are probably gunning for the same 5 things. But I don't feel the need to brag about my findings, and remind you all how secret it is.

drbobguy

I think you might be surprised at how big a barrier "doing some Ebay searches for various completed items" is. That rules out lots of the people that would read about this deal on blogs and will only do it if everything is spelled out for them including photos of how to fill in the ebay auction form.

Anyways, I think I'm only doing 2 orders this time around to meet minimum spends. Even at 0.5cpm (I'd be 0.3cpm or so without sales tax) I just don't need the skymiles that badly. I will do a few orders though to meet minimum spends that I need to meet, so I'm getting sign up bonus miles in conjunction with the 50k skymiles.

I just got into the miles game 6 months ago and I'm already up to 700,000 or so which is way more than I can reasonably use in the next few years.

ramkashyap

I just saw that the Canon T2i Kit is also a nice option for this promo.

This item is priced 899.99 on SkyMall:
http://www.skymall.com/shopping/deta...d=203386905&c=

Amazon is selling them for $605.00:
http://www.amazon.com/Canon-T2i-Digi...2679248&sr=8-1

This item is sold by Amazon and this item qualifies for a price match.

I just checked with SkyMall and they responded that they would price match this item.

To start of, 605$ for that Camera is a sweet deal.
I know this was sold at a much lesser price but still 605 is a nice price IMO.

The total cost would be
Price: 605.00
S& H: 21.50
Tax:

Vacation time

So I am guessing the price match can be done after we get the order in correct.

So I will Aim for multiple products them

ramkashyap

I don't if SkyMall will match the price with an old ad.
If the price goes down on any site after the purchase then that is good. If it goes up then we will be at loss.