Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper debunk the reseller comment "This item won't sell in my area."
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Debunking "This Item Won't Sell In My Area"
Rob Stephenson: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, it's time for a debunking. This item won't sell in my area. We get this comment a lot, so we're gonna talk about that on today's episode. Alright. Welcome back. Today's episode we're doing a debunking, I don't know if we've ever done a debunking before.
Melissa Stephenson: Well, talking about some, like, myths that people say, or comments that people have. One that we get kind of often, a little more often than I would expect is that item will never sell in my area because of where I live or I live in a rural area. Like it will never sell. And, but that is the whole purpose of our business model of selling on eBay.
It doesn't matter where you live. So we're gonna kind of dive into that. It does matter a little bit for sourcing, but still not really. We'll dive into that too. But it does really does not matter where you live because it only matters where the buyer lives and you can get that item to them.
Rob Stephenson: Absolutely. So you don't have to worry about if you live in a rural area, if you live where nobody is in the middle of Timbuktu, it doesn't matter because the people who are buying your items, we're taking them from the local market and then we're throwing them on eBay, which they're gonna get shipped to the nationwide or global market.
So even if you don't think it will sell in your area, you're right because you don't have enough people in your area maybe. But that's why we are able to make the money, make the flips that we make because we sell them to nationwide or global market and that's how we're able to make great money and get stuff sold quickly.
Melissa Stephenson: So if you're new around here, we'll just kind of explain a little bit. The business model basically is you're taking something from a local small market and you're bringing it to a larger market where somebody really needs it. So this could be even start as like when his parents or your mom did it. Yep.
Back in the day. They took stuff from yard sales so they'd find great deals at yard sales and then throw it in the classifieds. So you're taking it from a smaller market where how many people go to a yard sale in a day to, you know, a couple hundred or a thousand people that could see it in the classified section back when they were a thing.
So I don't think, they probably think they have them online classifieds? I guess it's just all the online apps now. So.
Rob Stephenson: Yeah.
Melissa Stephenson: Or you know, now it would be the same thing, kicking it from a thrift store, yard sale, throwing it on marketplace. But that's still your local market. You're still limited to your local market.
Rob Stephenson: And it's hard to sell some things in the local market because it's a smaller pool of people. Like Melissa said, with my mom back in the day, buying stuff from yard sales. If you're in a rural area right now, that's a great place to source is yard sales, in your local area because they're gonna deal with the same thing.
The amount of people that are gonna see that item at a yard sale that somebody's getting rid of is very, very few compared to posting it on eBay, a global market or a nationwide market, to where the right person will be able to see it and pay what it's actually worth, versus the local market where they're gonna keep dropping the price.
A lot of the items that we buy in the local market, they'll start out at $2,000, they'll drop the price down to a thousand dollars, they'll drop it down to $500, down to $250. They keep dropping the price thinking that that is why the item is not moving. It is not why the item is not moving. The why the reason that it's not moving is the right people aren't in the local market.
You gotta get it to the nationwide or the global market to be able to sell it.
Melissa Stephenson: Yeah. So, and one example of this, if you've, you know, been around here for a little while, you probably heard this story, but, kind of one of the reasons we got into selling the bigger items is because we, he got this, we would always sell our bigger items on marketplace.
It was like smaller items that go in a box, go on eBay, larger items that, you know, couldn't, we would just sell a marketplace 'cause it was just an easy flip. And then you had a, a table in share set that you bought for $350 and you tried to double your money, sell it for $750. And on Facebook, right, it was Facebook and Craigslist.
I think you had a cross posted on Facebook and Craigslist and no, nothing, it wouldn't sell. So, that's right, you know, around the time you're like, okay, well let me figure, I'm gonna figure this out if I can get this sold on eBay, I will figure out the shipping part of it, and then you sold it in 30 days for $2,200 or $2,250 with $500 shipping.
Rob Stephenson: Not even that $750 that I was willing to take for it. We actually sold it on eBay for way more than that. $2,250, $500 for shipping. Killer, killer deal. But it's because of the local market. Sometimes the right buyers, and this isn't always the case. But sometimes the right buyers aren't in that local market to where you have to bring it to the nationwide, where you're willing to ship it and make the money that it's worth.
Melissa Stephenson: Yeah. And furniture is something that you can do in the local market and do fairly decent on marketplace, you know, if you have a good area. But once you learn the shipping part of it, I mean, man, game over, you're, you're just open yourself up to a whole new amount of people that can see your item and are wanting to buy your item.
This is also good, like it's good for the larger items. Also great for like collectibles, like that's another thing that you can find in the local market, especially if you have an eye for that, like we don't really look for those, but we have people in our group who do and do amazing at it. You find them in the local market for next to nothing, and then you bring it to eBay and it's worth a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars to somebody who, a collector who's looking for that kind of item.
Rob Stephenson: Prime example, sitting right behind this camera. We bought our kids dolls from the local thrift store.
Melissa Stephenson: We didn't buy them for them. We bought them for them to sell.
Rob Stephenson: They help, yeah, help them flip some items. So, these dolls are collector's dolls. They're, porcelain. Porcelain?
Yeah.
Porcelain dolls. We bought these things for them to actually take pictures, take them to the nationwide or even global market and make the money that they're worth.
What do we end up figuring out? It was a less than $3.50 a doll
Melissa Stephenson: per doll. Yeah.
Rob Stephenson: For this collection
Melissa Stephenson: of over a hundred,
Rob Stephenson: a hundred dolls. A hundred plus dolls. And they'll hopefully be able to 10x that $3. And make $30 per doll, because some of these dolls were in the $60, $70 range. Some of them probably were in the $30 range, but we're hoping to sell them as a lot and make roughly $30 per doll on the set.
But it couldn't sell in the local market. The people in the local market were very, very happy that we wanted all of them because they couldn't find the right buyer in the local market. But then we put it on eBay on the global or the nationwide market to where we're able to bring it to a bigger market and actually make what these dolls probably even less than what they're worth, but bring them to somebody who really wants them, who needs them, for a reasonable price and sell them for a reasonable price.
Melissa Stephenson: Yeah. So if you have been, you know, listing in the local market and you're wanting stuff you know that you think it's worth more, but it's not getting sold, it's probably not the pricing. You don't need to necessarily drive the price down. You might just need to get it onto a new platform with a lot more people like eBay and like, that's just still our favorite.
There's, you know, Mercari came out, there's Poshmark for clothes, there's, you know, Depop, there's a lot of other ones. We still, eBay works for us. It's just has, it's the most trusted and it just has the most eyeballs for us. If you are one of a specialty seller, like, you know, some of those other apps might be more applicable to you.
But for us it's still, we go back to eBay. So, and I did wanna touch real quick on the, I mentioned the sourcing. So, you know, some people tell us they're in a rural area, so again, the selling doesn't matter. Like that does not matter where you live. You can do that anywhere from any zip code. You just have to be able to ship it out.
For sourcing it can matter a little bit, but we found some great deals in the rural areas as well. So we've traveled the country for the last, you know, I think we did four summers in a row. We went across the country. All different areas, and we don't actually travel to big cities usually.
Rob Stephenson: No, we don't.
They're smaller.
Melissa Stephenson: We try to stay away from the cities. So, they're usually rural areas that we can find great deals in the, in the market. So.
Rob Stephenson: But it's for that reason, people can't sell them in the local market. When you're in that local market and there's not a big population, you have very little competition to be able to buy an amazing item, turn around and sell it on eBay for the money that it's worth, or the money that.
Somebody's willing to pay for it who really, really needs that item in the local market, people might not really need that item, so you can't sell it. So, yeah, absolutely. Like Melissa said, we did for four years in a row, we traveled the country, went to some of these smaller towns, found some amazing, amazing deals.
We averaged over $20,000 in profit coming back from these road trips that we would do for about a month with the kids, traveling the country, amazing, amazing trips. But came back with roughly $20,000 in profit that was sitting in our trailer. Once we got back, we were able to sell it and make the money.
So, just goes to show you that there's stuff out there everywhere, no matter if you're in a big town, a little town. Big towns, you'll still have, there's a lot more people, so there's probably a lot more deals. But you might have more people that are willing to pay more money for those deals.
Small towns, absolutely. You can find some amazing deals in small towns.
Melissa Stephenson: And if you do live in a small town, just a quick tip for sourcing, like make, like if you have to go, you negotiate an item, it might be 45 minutes or an hour away from, you go to get, maybe it's a bigger city, and so maybe make a day out of it.
Go see if you can find other items in that same area. Go to a couple thrift stores in the area, make the day worth it. And then it's, you're not just picking up one item, you're going and that’s kind of your sourcing trip for the day. And you can group it all together.
Rob Stephenson: That's one of the other reasons why our business model really, really makes sense.
Because if you are in a rural area and you can't find anything on the local apps. Whether you have thrift stores, whether you have yard sales and stuff like that, but you just can't find anything, you can't seem to, you can travel the town over. The cool thing about it is when you're sourcing items that you might be selling for $10 or $15.
That hurts. That hurts to go a town over hit thrift stores, find some stuff off the marketplace that hurts. But when you're sourcing items that are worth a $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 per single item, you go over there and you buy one of those items. You spend, say you spend a day, an eight hour trip going over to an adjacent town, that you bring back one or two items that are worth $2,000, $3,000, that's a good payday. That's where our business model really, really makes sense. If you can't find the stuff in your local area, but you're willing to travel 45 minutes for us, we're in the central Florida area. Sometimes I'll travel to the other end of Orlando, so takes an hour and it takes me an hour to get over there, but it's worth it.
I'm bringing something back that I'm gonna make a thousand, 3000, $5,000 in profit, and that's where it really, really makes sense on this business model that we're doing the low volume, but the high profit is what we look for.
Melissa Stephenson: So if you have been thinking about getting started on eBay, this is your call to action to do it.
Go finally, get started. It's definitely worth it. It's scary at first for some people. I mean, it's scary. Anything new is scary, can be scary, but this is your encouragement to go open the app. Open your account, get started. And we are excited to hear your journey. And we did just actually just launched our eBay launch lab, not that long ago, and there's still some founding members prices open if you want some more step by step, how to get started on eBay. It's very beginner, very basic, but it is step by step getting yourself started, getting yourself, getting your stuff listed so you can start making money at this business.
Rob Stephenson: Absolutely. You are amazing. Have such a great day, and we'll see you on the next episode.