No-Fee Manufactured Spending via Buyer’s Groups
Buying my way to Delta Diamond Medallion Status
What are Buyer’s Groups?
Buyers Groups are a manufactured spending (MS) play that allows you to spend on your credit card, and earn back that exact amount of money in your bank account. In these groups, you will purchase discounted items (typically electronics from online retailers) that you will ship to a warehouse owned by the group. Upon receipt of the item, the group will refund you your full purchase amount to your bank account.
This is an easy way to generate spend directly on your credit card from the comfort of your own home. We’ve encountered folks who generate spend that is upwards of $100K per month with these groups. Personally, I spend about $10K/month with these groups, since they are a perfect MS method when your rewards play doesn’t care about spending categories and you want to minimize the fees involved.
As with any MS play, this method does come with some drawbacks, which we’ll get into in a bit.
May 18, 2023: If you’re looking for a similar play with less risk, you can check out this post on Gift Card Buyer’s Groups.
What are the best Buyers Groups?
Let’s get right into it - as of June 2023, here are the larger Buyers Groups that I’ve personally tried and seen others have success with:
BuyingGroup (Recently merged with The Deal Buyer)
Some groups that I’ve seen folks have issues with:
MYS - I’ve read that the payout times for this group can be several weeks, so I’ve not touched this one.
How do Buyer’s Groups work?
Buyer’s Groups are essentially resellers. Whenever an item (typically electronics) goes on sale on a website like Amazon or Walmart, these groups will send out a notification to their members. The members will then buy the item on their own credit card, and then ship them to a warehouse owned by the Buyer’s Group. Once the item is received by the Buyer’s Group, they will credit you the amount paid to your bank account.
The incentive on the Buyer’s Group side is to collect as many of these discounted electronics items as possible, which they eventually go on to resell to other consumers for a profit.
How do I get started?
Start by signing up for the group. It can take a few days for your registration request to be approved. Once approved, you’ll provide your bank account info so they can refund you for your purchases.
Once you’re in the group, make sure to sign-up for notifications when new deals go out. If the group offers notifications via Discord or Whatsapp over E-mail, since you will get notified faster. Many groups limit the quantity of items they’ll accept, and since good deals are competitive, you’ll want to be quick to commit to a deal.
Whenever a notification is sent, they’ll provide:
A link to purchase the item from an online retailer
The cost of purchasing the item from the retailer
The price that they are buying the item at
(Depends on the site) A link to commit to a certain quantity of orders
Note that the cost of the item is not always the same as the amount that the Buyer’s Group will give you for the item! For example, take a look at the current deals on BuyForMeRetail.
Look at the 4th column to see examples of this. In some cases, the group will give you a commission (i.e. profit) for purchasing the item. Generally, this happens when the item is hard to acquire (i.e. retailer has quantity limits). On the other hand, some deals are “Below Retail”, meaning that you will lose a small amount of money on the transaction. Personally, I prefer to stick to deals that are “Full Retail”, which means you will be refunded exactly what you paid.
How does purchasing and shipping the item work?
If you follow the link from the Buyer’s Group, you will be taken to the retailers page, where you can buy the item using your preferred credit card.
The main challenge is around shipping. All Buyer’s Groups will have their own warehouses that are in tax-free states. This allows you to directly ship the item to the Buyer’s Group’s address from the online retailer, instead of shipping to your own home first and then re-shipping. However, most of the online retailers are now wise to Buyer’s Groups, and some of them will cancel transactions if they think the purchase is for reselling purposes. The aggressive retailers will keep track of Buyer’s Group addresses, so they can easily detect when you are shipping to their warehouse. To get around these limits, we can do something called Address Jigging (more on this in a bit).
Which Online retailers are friendly towards Buyer’s Group addresses?
My personal go-to’s have been Walmart and Amazon. Walmart in particular, will allow you to purchase large quantities of electronics (I’ve had success up to 10) within a few hours, making it easy to get large MS volume. It’s also really easy to create multiple accounts on Walmart, so you can scale up even further that way.
Amazon similarly will not cancel your transactions, but they typically limit electronics purchases to 2 or 3 items per account. You also require an Amazon prime account to get free shipping on their purchases.
The above suggested retailers apply to cases when you ship directly to the Buyer’s Group warehouse. If you ship to your own personal address and then re-ship to the group, you can purchase from almost any retailer.
Why would you ship to a Buyer’s Group warehouse if there is a risk of getting your order cancelled?
Taxes! Many of us do not live in tax-free states. This means that if we ship to our personal homes, we will need to pay tax on the item. Buyer’s Groups typically do not refund you for the tax portion of your purchase.
Benefits to Buyer’s Groups
When everything goes right with Buyers Groups, the benefits are obvious. All you have to do is click a few buttons from the comfort of your home, and you have a fee-free MS play. You can generate tons of spend, easily upwards of $10K per month if you find good plays.
My PointsMaker earning rate for the month of April
Downsides
The primary risks with Buying Group’s are related to lost shipments and non-payment. A general rule of thumb with MS is that anytime we introduce a third party into our MS plays, we introduce some degree of risk.
Lost or Damaged Shipments
Given the large monetary value of the items we are shipping, we’re putting a large degree of trust in the shipping companies to correctly deliver our items. Unfortunately, the reality of this is that packages can get damaged, lost, or even stolen.
Fortunately, I’ve yet to experience a lost/stolen package, so I can’t speak much to this. Most retailers, especially those with friendly customer service agents like Amazon, will likely be willing to refund you for the item if this is the first time this has happened. However, if I experienced this multiple times with the same retailer, I would stop purchasing from the retailer going forward.
Damaged packages are something that I have experienced several time, and each time has been resolved smoothly. Since Buyer’s Groups are resellers, they cannot accept items that any amount of damage, even subtle tears in the packaging. In these cases, the group will contact you. The typical course of action here will be for you to contact the retailer and let them know about the damage, and that you would like to return the item. The retailer will give you a PDF shipping label, which you forward to the Buyer’s Group. The Buyer’s Group will then re-ship the item back to the retailer on your behalf.
Non-Payment from Buyer’s Group
This is arguably the biggest risk we take on with Buyer’s Groups. There is not much to stop a Buyer’s Group from deciding to pack it up one day and not pay out to their customers. In fact, this has recently happened with a private Buying Group, and some people are now out hundreds of thousands of dollars. The main suggestion I have here is to stick with Buyer’s Groups that have a known long-term history of payouts, such as the four I linked above.
Additionally, always remember: Never spend more than you can afford to lose!
Summing Up
To wrap up, Buyer’s Groups are a fantastic way to get a large volume of MS spend, particularly for sign-up bonuses where the spending category doesn’t matter. However, this method does introduce several third parties, which increases the risk factor. So please be careful, and have fun churning!
If you like the ideas of Buyer’s Groups, but don’t like the shipping aspect, you’re in luck! Check out our latest post on Gift Card Buyer’s Groups.
