I've been looking into buying some of the First Spouse coins on eBay. They're a bit pricy, so I've been looking around for deals. Yesterday, I found something called "Live Search Cashback." My main question is whether or not anyone has ever used this for gold coins and if so, how did it work... For those who don't know, Microsoft seems to be running some kind of cashback program through live.com (presumably to try to steal some google users). As I've said, I've never used this program, so I don't know how well it works, but I'll explain what I've discovered so far and hopefully someone else can tell us how well it works. Step 1.) Go to live.com and search for "gold coins" under the "sponsored sites" section you'll see an icon and the text "Live Search cashback" next to the ebay link. Click that link and you'll be taken to eBay. Step 2.) When you get to eBay, you'll see an image at the top about cashback. There are 2 catches: 1.) It has to be a Buy It Now (you can NOT make a best offer) 2.) you must pay with PayPal (a good idea anyway since you get a little extra protection). There is also a limit of $2,500 in rebates per year, and (I think) a max of 6 transactions. Step 3.) Click on "Buy It Now" for an item. You'll see a message telling you how much you'll get back. There is a max of $200 per transaction. I found one coin for right around $600. At $180 off, it puts it right around bullion prices for the First Spouse coins. Also (a little confusion here), eBay says you can use coupons (Microsoft says you can't, but it also says that the merchant's terms superceeds MS's, so I guess that means you can). So I can use my current 10% off coupon, plus the MS 30% off program to get this coin for about $380. I attached images to this post showing the various things I described above. I know it seems like one of those offers that is too good to be true... I guess that's why I'm hear. I've found several people saying it IS true, but I wanted to make sure that people out there have used it for gold coins. I'm also curious if anyone did it using an eBay coupon. Thanks in advance! Anyone interested in trying this out, I'd encourage you to read both the terms from MS and eBay.
Its already been done and used by Spock. He posted a thread about this a couple of weeks ago. He used it several times for quite a bit of a discount. I am glad you explained everything in detail. I wanted to do it, but I thought the directions were kinda confusing.
Hmm I tried searching, I didn't see anything come up, turns out I needed to search for "cash back" not "cashback." In any case, so far the current percentage is 30% but MS (eBay?) has lowered it to $200 max per item instead of $250 like spock said. I guess at this price the First Spouses don't seem quite as crazy. Getting in at around $400 a piece is pretty close to spot... Decisions, decisions, decisions.
i can not really offer any information with regards to coins/ebay, but i have used microsoft cashback about 15 times and it has worked perfectly. the site has become less attractive as they have reduced just about all of their percentages, but there still are some nice deals out there. just for a quick comparison, i was able to get 62.5% cash back on the three magazines i subscribe to. i ended up getting them all renewed until the end of 2011. also, 65% cash back on running shoes and gear and 20% on my tv. the magazines site went down to 20%, athletic site down to 18% and tv site down to 3%. i guess they were just trying to get everyone to use it with the higher percentages. oh well. all of that said, it seems i need to revisit once again to see what i have been missing. thank you for the heads up.
