What Are Buying Groups? | Prince of Travel

The most common way to earn credit card points is through everyday purchases. For some households or businesses with high spending levels, the numbers add up quite quickly, but for others, it can take a while to build up a meaningful balance.

One unique method for boosting your earnings can be through buying groups, which are more popular in the United States, but are now rising in prominence in Canada, too. It’s a bit of an advanced topic; however, as we’ll show, there are plenty of reasons why it could very well be worth your while to know about.

What Are Buying Groups?

Buying groups, which are also known as buyers groups, are companies that specialize in crowd-sourcing products for resale. Broadly speaking, they buy low and sell high, thus netting a profit.

In some cases, buying groups can leverage large orders of products in order to score a discount from a retailer. If they’re able to do so, they can then resell the products at a greater profit margin.

However, buying groups are more common in the Miles & Points world for harnessing purchases from a wide range of individuals in order to take advantage of sales. Rather than trying to make a large single order of products, buying groups have a large number of individual orders that together form a large order.

Let’s use an example to illustrate why buying groups work this way.

At various points during the year, such as Black Friday, brick-and-mortar and retail stores offer significant discounts on popular products.

For example, suppose that an iPad that typically costs $1,000 (CAD) is on sale for $800 (CAD) during a Black Friday event. There would almost certainly be a limit or one or two products during a sale like this, so a buying group wouldn’t be able to place a large order.

However, if the buying group were able to get a large number of people to place smaller orders on its behalf, it could still end up with a large number of iPads purchased for the sale price. In this sense, it would have bypassed the limit, and could then resell the discounted iPads at a profit.

That sounds great for the buying group, but why would anyone want to buy something for someone else?

Well, the individuals who purchase the iPads for the buyers group would get to keep any of the credit card points earned from the purchase, as well as any points or cash back gleaned through various shopping portals, such as Rakuten or the Aeroplan…