Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper compare two recent flips: high value vs. low value and you won’t believe the numbers!
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - Comparing 2 Recent Flips: High Value Vs. Low Value.
Rob: What's up, guys? On today's episode, we are comparing two recent sales, a low price sale recently that we had and a high price sale. You guys are not gonna believe the numbers.
Rob: Okay guys, we are comparing two recent flips that we had a low price flip and a high price flip to kind of get the comparison of the numbers our spent, profit made, how much it costs us in total to flip these two items.
Excited when I broke these down. Super excited to talk to you guys today about these two flips.
Melissa: Yeah, this is some, a question that we get kind of often like, well, what goes into, you know, you sold that oven or cooktop or whatever. What, what time goes into that versus, you know, I don't have to spend as much time here.
So we kind of, we wanted to break down those numbers and it was actually pretty interesting ones you did.
Rob: Pretty cool.
Melissa: So, I mean, we know why we gravitate towards these things, but when you actually look at cuz neither of us are really numbers people. So it's pretty fun to to dive in whenever you look at it some.
Rob: So you guys might be wondering what two flips we're talking about. One, actually I packaged it up last night. It is a ballast, a LED and don't quote me on it. It's something that we sold. I was given a box of these from one of my contacts who got pallets of these ballast systems. And I got a box of 'em. I think there's about 24 in the box.
We've already sold 10, 12 of 'em, for $80 a piece. That's what we're selling them for. I just sold another one last night or the night before. I packaged it up last night. It's actually going to be delivered to the shipping company today. But we had no money invested into this and we sold it for $80.
We broke this down and the other thing we're comparing it to is one of our high profit flips, which is a turbo chef oven that we recently flipped. If you guys missed it last month. Yeah. And just sold it last month. And, we're gonna break down the two numbers on those. So let's dive into it.
Actually, the turbo chef, we told you what we got for the ballast, it was free. We sold it for, $80 and we had $21 total. So it was $10.50 for eBay fees. $10.50. This is really crazy because I couldn't believe it when I saw it, but it was actually $10.47 for the shipping label and the same exact price for the eBay fees and I, that's never happened before.
But anyways, so we'll call it roughly $21 is what we had into shipping and what it costs on eBay. And then we actually got that for free. So, total profit in that was $59 into that unit that we didn't put any money into it.
Melissa: Which is great for not having to have invested any money into anything.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: And almost $60 profit. So we are all about the profit. So, so that's awesome.
Rob: Yep. And how much time did we have invested into this pro this, this item? That's a key too because you can trade your time for money and you only have so much time in a day that you can spend doing this.
So this one actually was a small man, I should have grabbed it for the video, but this was actually a small one. It's a ballast system fit into a, I doubled up an actual Amazon padded envelope is what I put it in. So you can imagine it's small. Took me total time from start to finish. Talking about actually pulling it out, getting pictures of it, doing a listing, getting it packaged and shipped roughly, i, I would say 45 minutes to an hour. We'll just round it up to an hour, an hour spent on this one item to make $60. $60 an hour. Not that bad. Not too shabby to make $60 an hour on something that's small, not that hard. So that's roughly what we did on this smaller item.
Melissa: And did your contact that told you about these, was it just an extra bonus of something you were already going to get?
Yeah. Or was that?
Rob: No, absolutely. So I was buying something else from him. He gave me this box. No time invested in sourcing, no sourcing whatsoever. He had pallets when I went in there of it, and I'm talking pallets. He probably had thousands of these things, which the other ones, had I sold these quicker.
That's another comparison. This actually probably has sat on eBay and I've sold 'em because I have multiple ones that I'm selling 'em one at a time. It's probably this one, we probably had 'em on there for probably a year. Sold 12 of them outta the year. But it's in my shop. It's taking up a box, a small box size.
You can imagine it's not very big. I put it up on a shelf. It's listed on eBay and just multiple sales. Every time one sells, I go grab it and I ship it out. So not that much invested in it, but I don't.
Melissa: Do you have any left or they almost gone?
Rob: No, I think I still have about eight of them. Six or eight of them left in that box.
So I'll, I'll still even sell more of them for $80 when they sell it's very easy to package 'em up. So, but that being said, yeah, I don't have any time invested into sourcing. I didn't actually have to find these things. So now let's jump over to our high profit. The high profit we're talking about is the turbo chef.
Some of you guys might have seen some posts we've done. Turbo Chef was what we sold last month. We paid $400 for that, so right away we had to come out of pocket, $400. Not totally feasible for everybody to come out of the pocket $400. But if you can, and.
Melissa: That's on the high end though. It is what we like to spend.
You don't usually like to spend that much.
Rob: Typically for a high profit item, we like to hover around a hundred dollars. We don't like to be, and you might drop it down to $60 to $100.
Melissa: Unless you know that it's gonna make you, that which you knew for this one.
Rob: Exactly. And that's one of those things that I knew the potential was there and that's why I did it.
I actually bought two of 'em. The guy had three of 'em, and I was able to buy two of 'em because that's all the cash I had on hand. Longer story. We were driving through an area, picking it up on a road trip.
Melissa: Is that on OfferUp or Facebook?
Rob: I don't remember of which one it came off of, but that's one of those things that we had $800 cash is all I had on the road trip.
I could have went to the atm, but we were driving through fairly fast just meeting the guy, picking it up, putting it in the trailer and then keep going. So, one of those things, I wish I would've bought all three, but I bought two of 'em. $400 a piece. I invest invested $800 out of pocket. But for this one, $400 is what we invested.
We sold it for $10,000. Now a lot of people are like, who's gonna pay $10,000 for this? That's where it goes back to retail. The retail on this is $25,000.
Melissa: So somebody got a pretty great deal.
Rob: An amazing deal, and that was actually goes into some of the time that we spent on this. We'll talk about that as well. But $400 invested into make $10,000 now. What about our fees? What about shipping on this? So shipping was $125 when I sold it. So I had to ship it and spend $125 and then on top of that.
Melissa: And that went on a pallet and it's not, it's not super huge, but it's heavy. Yeah. So it's a, like, it's a oven that goes on the counter. So.
Rob: But I will add, this was no extra equipment. We picked these up, put it into the trailer. I picked it, Melissa and I picked ,it up, put it onto a pallet, and that's how we actually did everything. So I didn't have to have a forklift. I didn't have to have any extra, I mean, a screw gun is what I used. I don't know if I used my nail gun on this.
No, I think I used my battery powered nail gun instead of the screw gun is how I built the pallet, or built the box around this thing. And that was it. No special tools, no expensive tools. I do have a trailer. If I didn't have a trailer, I could have lifted it in the back of a minivan and delivered it that way I could have lifted it in the back of a truck.
I have a truck that I could have done that as well. So I could have had that. So no extra tools needed for this flip, other than, like I said, nail gun, screw gun, whatever wood. And I had to cut the wood, so a saw as well. So I used that kind of stuff in that as well.
Melissa: To save money on the pallet that could make a smaller pallet. You could use a standard pallet.
Rob: Well, I did use a standard pallet, but I had to build a box around is what I did. So I two by fours to protect it in shipping. So, that was part of that. Now we'll break down the time that we spent in this. I spent, when I was finding this, so like Melissa was asking about the sourcing of the smaller it.
I didn't have to spend any time. I probably spent 30 minutes finding this item. We found it on a road trip on our way through somewhere. I was laying in bed at the hotel after we all, where are we going tomorrow? Exactly. After we all settle in and we figure out, where, I mean, we got our hotel, we got settled in, and I'm laying in bed just looking up what's in the area.
Melissa: That's how he relaxes at the end of the day. Looks for items on the road trip.
Rob: So I found it fairly quickly. It wasn't like I spent hours and hours doing it, probably 30 minutes invested into that. And then we had to meet up the guy. We ended up not being able to get it on that trip. We went further west.
Yes. Further west, northwest, and then had to come back there and then came back through seven days later. But the whole time I couldn't meet up with a guy the next day when we got up. But I kept contact, communication open with him, let him know we were coming back through in about a week if it would be possible.
He said it would. So I kept open communication with him. We set it up. We were able to pick it up less than 20 minutes, literally loading the item up, meeting the guy, loading the items up in the trailer, and then keep on moving. We have, we were going back east.
Melissa: You were so excited when you had a second one.
Rob: I was.
Melissa: And a third one. And you really wanted the other one, but you grabbed two.
Rob: I did. So anyways, we got those now, roughly about an hour invested into that. Then timewise, this is one of the keys to this sale, I spent probably two hours, maybe even a little bit more cleaning this item. I wanted it to look like brand new.
I wanted, I knew what the potential was on a $25,000 item. If I could get it as close to new looking, I was gonna be, it was gonna be that much easier to sell it. So we actually did that. I spent a lot of time with chemicals. I think I used, wiping it down. Yeah. Bar or something. Anyways, steel.
Melissa: Yeah, to clean the steel.
Rob: I did a lot of work to get it looking good and that was a key in this. So like I said, that probably accounted for another two hours, maybe a little bit over. And then pictures. All I did after I got done cleaning it, took beautiful pictures, took a video of it, working, all that kind of stuff. The, a little bit more time invested into it.
And then the same thing on the back end, when after it sold, I got it listed. Didn't take too long doing that, but after it sold, took me a little bit more time building the pallet for this. I would roughly say another hour into the pallet. So averaging roughly about five hours is what we figured out that I spent total time to finish on this and five hours to make $9,175 was our profit on this.
So we spent $400 on the item. We spent $300 in fees, and then we spend another $125 on shipping. Brings our total up to, what is that, $825? $825 in total cost on this item, minus from the $10,000, $9, 175 is our profit. Right.
Melissa: I do have to add on this one, the fees people are gonna ask, well, how are your fees so low?
We ended up having to do something a little bit different on this one, and we're going to do probably a whole podcast on this event soon. But just to quickly talk about it, we had a, you sold it, and then eBay wanted to hold your money for 30 days or more?
Rob: 30 days. At least 30 days.
Melissa: So we had to get on the phone with him and talk to them, and he's like, look, I can't have you hold this money for this long because I have to, you know, be able to pay whatever.
So you can't hold the money for if you, I'm fine with you to release the money once the people get it and they're happy, that's fine, but they're saying no, it could, we could hold it longer. So, you, you said, if you can't come to resolution or whatever, yeah, I am gonna have to sell it on another platform.
And so that's what we ended up having to do and just went and had to sell it on PayPal. So those are the PayPal fees.
Rob: So yeah, PayPal fees on top of it was for $10,000. It was roughly three, I think it was exactly $300, $299.
Melissa: Well it's like 2.99% is what they charge.
Rob: So roughly $300 is the PayPal fees on this. And then the shipping fees, I shipped it for $125.
Melissa: Yeah. So there will be some more fees, on some other larger items if you saw 'em through eBay. But there also is, we do have lower fees than you normally get because once you hit over it's $2,500. So $2,500, it drops down to two point something. That's a great point percent.
Like normally you're thinking, okay, I sold a $10,000 item, now I have to pay them 13% of that. No, you're gonna pay, you know, your 10 to 13 depending on your category, what you're in on that first $2,500, and then it drops down to two, like 2.5%. I think. It depends on what your category in, but it's like two point something percent, so you're not paying that full.
Rob: So everything over $2,500, you're only paying the two point, whatever percent on that. So they're only getting you for the first $2,500 for that 13%. After that, it drops it way, way down and it's not near as much.
Melissa: So, so yeah, just a little point in that. So your fees will be a little higher than this one was if you're selling it on eBay, but they're still not gonna be as high as they would be on an item, a smaller item.
Rob: Yep. So this where, this is where it gets exciting because this is what I like to see. I like to see the numbers of breaking it down on what the potential is, what we actually spent. So like we said, we made $60 on the small item to make that same profit on the small item.
And I rounded on this, so, yeah, bear with me. There are even numbers, but to make that same amount of profit on the smaller items, because a lot of people smell. Smell, a lot of people sell smaller profit items where it's not uncommon for somebody to make $30 to $60 profit on their items, but to sell that same amount of profit at $59, $60, to make at an hour invested exactly and hour invested to make that $9,000 plus in profit, you'd have to actually work 155 hours, 155 hours to make that nine.
And like I said, everybody has the same amount of hours in a day. You only have so many hours you can devote to make this money. Now if you even go a step further than that, so what if you took that $155 instead of investing it into the low profit items or the lower cost items? What if you took that $155 and invested it into finding these high profit items?
And like I said, this is pretty cool because we're, these are the exact numbers are gonna vary for profit on single items, but for these two right here, if I invested $155 into the higher profit items, hours, you mean a hundred, sorry, 155 hours into the high profit items, really focusing on that portion of my business, $284,000 is what I could make with the same amount of 155 hours on the high profit versus the low profit.
So like I said, these are numbers and I'm just, just two comparisons that we're doing back and forth. They're really, really cool. The potential is there. But some of our high profit items do not sell for $10,000, but there's still a lot more money, 2, 3, 4, 5, $7,000, profit on some of our flips.
That you can see if you put the hours into doing these higher profit, what the potential is for you to make more money versus less hours working. So really, really cool.
Melissa: And there's nothing wrong with either business model, but we are all for working as smart, smarter, but working less, you know, like and having less time cuz it is, I guess maybe now when we're at this stage of life, I'm almost 40 that, you know, you start to really realize how much time is a lot more valuable than you realize. Like it flies by, it does. It's getting a lot faster now. Like we're getting a little older at our kids and now you see it in the kids, like a year goes by and you're like what? How'd you get so big? Like what happened? And you're just in the hustle and bustle of every day and you're like, oh, and time is really valuable.
So you hear it like I've hold, heard it my whole life and it, but you don't really realize it, and then when you apply it to business, like, well, what can I do to make that same amount? And even if like, that is a higher profit, but even if you cut that in half, like that is, it's amazing. Like what you can do in a smaller amount of time.
So, that's why we've gravitated towards those kinds of items and it's cool to, to see the breakdown of that. So.
Rob: And like I said, this whole podcast, these whole things, these are actually our numbers. Yeah. We're not giving you.
Melissa: No, these are two of our recent sales.
Rob: We didn't pull these out of anywhere, but these are two recent sales within the last month.
One sold last night, one sold within the last, I think 30 days within, yeah, in the last month it's sold. So we're just giving you comparisons, high versus low and trying to give you guys, you know, what is available when you do step into trying to really hone in on your skills, on high profit flips, really focusing in all those high profit flips, so.
Melissa: So that's why we like to do that, that kind of business model.
So, and it, yeah, so then it, there's just so many different ways that you can do this business and this is what we've found works good for us. So that's why we like to share it. And we get excited about these numbers. And the cool thing about these kinds of items is you can still find them everywhere because people don't know how to ship them. So if you can figure out how to ship and you're willing to do that, like there's so much money to be made.
Rob: There is.
Melissa: And people just throw out, like the stuff that we like to do, which we tend to go towards appliances now, is because people, they redo their kitchens, they redo all like whatever, and they don't, they get rid of 'em.
And like that one business, the turbo chef was to firm somebody going outta business. Yeah. Like they're just ready. They need to make some extra cash. They're ready to get rid of it. And they're everywhere. Yep. Because people don't, they're just trying to either get rid of 'em in a low market and they just wanna give them away or give 'em away for really cheap. So.
Rob: By talking about this guys, we feel like we'd be doing you a disservice if we didn't let you know about our high profit appliance flipping course. This is where we have a honed in on these skills that we actually find these items. We test these items. We ship these items. All that kind of stuff is included in the high profit appliance flipping course. If you do wanna learn more about it, guys, check out the link below.
Melissa: Yeah, appliance flipping.com so you can check it out.
Rob: So appliance flipping.com, check it out, see if it is something that entices you, that it might be something that you wanna move your business towards.
Melissa: I mean, even adding one of those flips in a month to your business can really change your, the level of your business could really uplevel your business. Absolutely. And yeah, we're excited about it.
Rob: We love it. We absolutely love it. We love doing this. We love teaching. We love helping and seeing other people do the same thing in Flipper University. Yeah, we have people that are doing these, we get these weekly of these type of flips.
So we're super excited about being a part of other people's journeys, helping other people get to that next level. So, that's definitely part of what Melissa and I, Melissa and I thrive at. We love doing it. It rewards us. It's just amazing to be able to help other people do the same exact thing. So.
Melissa: So thank you guys so much and we can't wait to see you on the next episode.