Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share how you can find more inventory to sell on eBay without spending any money.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast – How To Find More Inventory To Sell Without Spending Any Money
Rob: Are you looking for a way to get your inventory up without having to spend any more money?
Melissa: On today's episode, we are talking about how to find free items to resell.
Rob: Free. So check it out, guys. We love free items.
Just last month we had four sales and two out of those sales were items that were either given to us or we found for free. So this is a huge portion of our business. Now we're going to give you some key points throughout this episode that you can capitalize on free items. So let's dive in.
Melissa: I added up to like seven items, the last two or three months that we got free so.
Rob: Those free items. So yeah. Do you want to go through them or you want to?
Melissa: Well, let's talk about the like ways to find free items, so we can dive through some of those too.
Rob: The best way I find those free items or one of the best ways is to tell people around you what you're doing, friends, family, everybody around you.
If you let them know that you're reselling items to make extra money for pay off debt, to pay for the kids' college, whatever it is that you're reselling some items, you'll have people come out of the woodwork to give you stuff to resell.
Melissa: Yeah. So we used to shy away from really telling, we didn't really tell people for a long time, because like, I dunno, you kind of feel like, okay, well, I, yeah, I resell.
Like, it's not, if I'm telling you that, then you just go resell, but that's the it's so the opposite of the truth, because so many of our friends would be like, look, I'm cleaning out this. I don't need this. Will you come take it? They just want it gone. They don't want to mess with it. They don't even want to mess with listing it on Facebook Marketplace.
They just want you to have it.
Rob: And I don't have time for this.
Melissa: I don't have time.
Rob: If you want it, you're welcome to have it, or I'm going to send it to Goodwill. I'm going to send it to the Salvation Army.
Melissa: Right.
Rob: So, which is really, really cool for us. Like I said, once you let people know that you do this, you will have people trying to give you stuff all the time.
And that's the boat for us. Like, one of the ones that I just shipped it out, actually this morning, I dropped it off. It was one of our sales last week, was a water valve, a two and a half inch water valve. And what happened was where my buddy stores his trailers, his stuff, the guy on that lot had a whole bunch of pipes.
Some of these pipes are like 12 inches big, valves in some of them were all the way down. This was the smallest one that I had, actually, I might have one smaller, that's an inch and a half valve, but this was a two and a half inch valve and the guy who owned the property, said, hey, get rid of all this stuff. I don't want, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
My buddy knows that I resell stuff. He says, hey, do you want these? And I said, absolutely. Let's throw them in the back of my truck. I'll list them and we'll get them sold. So we sold that thing for $400, and it was just free. It was given to me, I didn't have to pay a thing for it. Somebody wanted it out of his, off of his yard and I took it and yeah, we were able to sell it.
So, that's just one of the flips that we did last week that we got for free.
Melissa: Yeah. And a lot of times that's what people, friends, friends of friends or whoever like, oh, I know that the they'll want it and resell it or whatever. And they, they just want it gone. Like, that is the biggest thing. And sometimes we will, like, if we make a decent amount of money and it's a friend, like we'll give them like a gift card or we'll like, you know, take them to dinner just as a Thank you.
Like, you know, thanks for letting us sell that or whatever. I mean, not if we sell something for like 50 bucks, but if it's been a couple of hundred dollars or something. Of course. So it's just something nice, nice to do. And then they might send some more stuff your way.
Rob: Definitely show him a little love that way you guys, they will keep giving you stuff when they're ready to get rid of it.
It's always a good practice to do that. So, yeah, for sure. So what are some of the other ways that we can find some free stuff?
Melissa: Trash day.
Rob: We love trash day. Melissa and I have a regular routine where we walk from our house to our downtown area. It's a mile walk. We do this at least five days a week. And you will be so surprised at what people throw away that is not really trash, it's stuff that they don't know what to do with. And they'll just put it out on the side of the road and you go by and I mean, we've been pulled probably hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of items that have just been sitting on the side of the road. Yeah, just to sell.
That's really, really cool. So you can take advantage of that. The other cool thing is that you're keeping it from going to a landfill when it's not really doesn't need to go to a landfill. It can be sold and somebody else can enjoy it versus it just getting trashed. So, that is definitely a great way is check out your local trash, your large trash days, or even just your local pickups.
You might be able to drive around and find some really cool stuff that you can turn around and resell.
Melissa: Yeah, our walk alone, we've made hundreds, if not a couple of thousands of dollars, just from our walk on, like our big trash day is Thursday. So Wednesday night people start throwing out stuff. So Wednesday night and Thursday we find stuff it's kind of crazy. So find what day is your big, large item, trash day in your area. And then maybe even in some of like, some nicer areas go and drive around those areas on the trash day, on the big item. Cause there's a difference between trash day, usually and big items days.
Rob: The other place you can look, if you have multiplexes around you, whether are apartments, condos, townhomes, they usually have one central location that everybody brings their trash, their items and stuff like that.
Melissa: People move out at the end of the month.
Rob: Check out those places. They have furniture out there. They have all kinds of exercise equipment, all kinds of stuff that maybe they moved out. They can't take it with it. So they had to put it over at the dumpster, good stuff you can find that way. So definitely don't overlook the trash. You can find some really, really cool stuff. And like I said, we've sold awesome, awesome items that we pulled out of the trash, and been able to make some really, really good money at it.
So what's another way?
Melissa: On apps. So you can find free stuff on apps.
Rob: Multiple ways to do this. You can type in free into the search bar and anything that has in the title free or, in the description itself saying that it's free, it will pull up and you can see it that way. A lot of the apps also have categories.
Melissa: Yeah, categories of free. Like I know on Facebook, you can search the free category. You have to scroll down to find it sometimes, but, and there's free, like apps specifically for free items, like free cycle. And you can find free stuff like on NextDoor sometimes they'll, there'll be throwing stuff out.
So yeah, you can use the apps. The apps is actually how you found that wasn't in a category, but it was just listed.
Rob: The table.
Melissa: Oh, no, it wasn't listed for free, but you gave him an offer and he ended up coming back and he gave it to you.
Rob: Might remember our chiropractic table that we just recently sold $2,200, $2,250, we sold it. We got it for free. The guy was asking $600 for it. I offered him $350. He wrote me back. He didn't write to the $350 offer and then wrote me back a week later and said, hey, I got to get this thing out of here today. If you can come pick it up, I don't want any money. You can take it for free.
So never underestimate the stuff that you can find for free. He gave it to us for free. We were able to, we had to fix one part on it. It was a $3 part, able to fix it and then resell it for $2,250. Killer deal on that. We love, love free items, for sure.
Melissa: How'd you get the Zenith, oh, that's the Zenith?
Rob: That's the Zenith, the chiropractic table.
So one of the things that you can type into the apps, a lot of people will snap a picture of curb alert. So you can type in the search bar, curb alert and see everybody who has posted, you know, there's something, they saw something somebody was throwing away for trash. They might post it on Facebook Marketplace because they see good stuff in it and they do not want it to go to the trash.
So they'll put alerts on Facebook Marketplace.
Melissa: But they don't want to mess with it.
Rob: Exactly. OfferUp something like that. So you'll have people who actually own the stuff, doing that, and people who drive by and see it. They'll snap a picture and do it that way. So they're trying to keep stuff from going to the landfill. Typing the word curb alert into your search, your search engines and free all that kinda stuff that you can think of.
Definitely be searching for it. Cause you can find some really good deals.
Melissa: And if you're worried about getting stuff on the curb, like sometimes if some people are like, oh, can I really take it? You can always go knock on the door. We've done that before. There was a really nice, power chair out by the curb and you went up to the door and asked the guy, if you could have it.
So, and he's like, yeah. And he wheeled it, but we helped him wheel it back til we could come back and take it. Yep.
Rob: And we sold that for $600, it came out of the trash, but there were a lot of, I think originally it was like a $22,000, $25,000 wheelchair, a power wheelchair. And the guy got a new one and he didn't want it anymore.
Something was broken on it. So it had a, had a lot of good parts for it and somebody bought it for the parts. We sold it for $600. So that was something sitting on the side of the road that we were able to create $600 and keep it out of landfills. Somebody else could use those parts and, it still had some good use to it for sure.
Melissa: And you just asked him.
Rob: If you're worried or you're ever at question about what's out there, if it really should be out there, go knock on the door and say, hey, are you guys throwing this away? I'd love to take it if that's all right. And a lot of people say, absolutely, please take it, keep it out of the landfill.
So, which is awesome.
Melissa: There's a ton of free items out there. Lots of our stuff that we sell we've been able to get for free just for people knowing what we do now. And it kind of snowballs the longer you do it. Like you just tell more people and then people think of you. And we now are at the point is a lot of times you have to say, no, sorry, we too much, we can't handle it. So.
Rob: That's a good, that's a good thing.
Melissa: That's a good problem to have.
Rob: Especially if you get that inventory up so you can make more money and you don't have a lot of money to invest. This is the way to do it. Really take advantage of all the free items that you can get out there.
Melissa: Another way you can get free items is to like you it is telling people what you do.
But, another way you can do that is even creating ads. Like you could like on, what am I trying to say, like, unclassify was the classifieds before, but like on Facebook and say, you know, if you're clearing out your stuff, like I haul stuff.. And yes, you will have to sift through stuff that way, but if you're really just starting out and you really don't have any money to get going, that's one way to do it.
Rob: Absolutely. And those places like junk removal and places like that, they get so much good stuff. There's nothing wrong with it, but people don't know what to do with it and they're ready to get it out, clean it out and they'll just throw it away. Yeah, there's so much good stuff that gets thrown away, so you can definitely find some cool deals.
Melissa: Don't let not having any money to get started stop you from getting started because there are plenty of ways to go find some items for free, that you can resell locally or on eBay and make some extra money so.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: Awesome, guys.
Rob: Have a great day, cannot wait to see you on the next episode.