📦 My First Ever Experience With Buying Groups: Good, But I'm Not Sold Yet

DISCLAIMER: You can essentially disregard everything in this post since Max Out Deals' owners have been arrested and accused of over a half a billion dollars of fraud. I would not recommend using a buying group in the immediate future.

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Buying groups have been a big part of the manufactured spend world for a while. It was one of the first MS methods I'd heard of, but until recently I hadn't tried it myself. I've had success going pretty hard with gold over the past year, but I wanted to try diversifying my MS strategy a bit with the impending full death of Kasheesh.

I'd heard good things about Max Out Deals (MOD) from some peers in the points game via the Discord. They had some pretty good deals happening for Prime Day. I wasn't worried about trying to make any substantial money on these—simply wanted to test out how things went for a couple thousand dollars' worth of spend on my recently upgraded Amex Gold card (50k MR for $2k of spend when upgrading to Plat).

I wound up buying around $2k worth of mostly Apple products, specifically iPads, Apple Watches, AirPods, and a few Amazon Kindles.

The process itself was fairly straightforward:

1. Check which products MOD is offering to purchase and add a 'commit' to those via MOD's website.
   1. I don't see the point in buying anything unless you're at least getting paid back at cost. Maybe you could justify losing 10% if you absolutely needed to put a certain amount of spend on a card quickly or would miss out on a bonus, but for this first run with a buying group, I was only interested in the best deals.
2. Ship items directly to the MOD warehouse using your real name. MOD has 3 warehouses: 2 in Delaware (which is tax-free) and one in California (which is not). After some research, I found their Grantham St. address in Delaware had been issue-free for people recently and wasn't at risk of having orders cancelled. Many of these buying groups' addresses are known, and your orders will automatically get cancelled when dropshipping. Amazon seems to care the least, and I didn't have any issues.
3. My orders were delivered successfully and confirmed as received by MOD within 2-3 days. One order was delivered to a "secure location" after hours—not sure what that means exactly.
4. It took about 8 days for MOD to generate a check for me, which deposited without any problems via my bank's app.

Everything went very smoothly for me and mostly without a hitch. I didn't have any issues with my items eventually being checked in and getting paid, despite some small delays between actual delivery and acceptance by MOD. It was honestly kind of nice to not think about the volatility of gold and know exactly what I was going to get paid when I purchased each item.

Despite the relatively frictionless experience, I'm still not totally sold. Here's why:

• I know MOD was busy with Prime Day orders, but I didn't like the delay between the delivery confirmation from Amazon and the confirmation on MOD's side. I opened tickets and they were answered relatively quickly within a couple of days, but if I had placed thousands of dollars worth of orders, I might have been more nervous about the confirmation gap.
• I still don't fully trust dropshipping to other people. While MOD does accept packages shipped directly from users (they also provide a free shipping label, which is great), living in a state like California with a high tax rate would make that not worth it. In fact, I think any state with sales tax on Amazon would make it not worthwhile. Hence, MOD operates in Delaware to make it worthwhile for people.
  • Sure, buying and selling gold is inherently volatile, but I like receiving the item first and shipping it myself. If MOD lost an order (or there was theft), I'm not sure how the claim with Amazon/chargeback would go.
• You have to trust Amazon (or whatever courier) drivers that you don't know. Surely these Amazon drivers eventually learn what they're delivering and to whom. I could see a theft ring developing at some point.
• You run the risk of having your Amazon account shut down. From what I can tell, it's fairly hard to get going again with buying groups on Amazon once that happens. I don't feel like these small $2k spurts would cause that, but you never know when Amazon might crack down.
• You're kind of screwed if the buying group randomly shuts down or runs out of money. As far as I know, dropshipping to yourself at another address isn't an official business transaction, so I assume you'd be out of luck in this situation with insurance, legal recourse, etc.

Having said all of that, I think I'll continue to use MOD for some of the smaller SUBs that are only a few thousand dollars or less. I think buying gold for ABP/ABG and large $10k+ SUBs via Walmart (and maybe Pure in the future) still makes the most sense for time efficiency. I can't imagine buying $15k worth of Apple products and blindly shipping them somewhere literally across the country from me. At the end of the day, you're trusting someone you don't know to be completely honest in an already somewhat shady business.

I'd recommend giving a buying group like MOD a shot if you want to do some quick, smaller SUBs like an upgrade or $3k-$4k SUB. I still think gold is easiest, but buying groups seem like they could be great for MS supplementation or for those where gold doesn't work.

I've got a lot to learn and am still obviously very new to this. I know some people process hundreds of thousands in buying groups per month and do it successfully, so I'm excited to learn more tips and see where this could potentially take me. I have yet to see any worthwhile deals from MOD pop up since the Prime Day sales, but I'll continue to keep an eye on things and potentially explore other buying groups.