Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper interview Jeff from Ebay Addicts about how he makes $800-$1,000 a month flipping vintage media items.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast – Rob and Melissa Interview Jeff with Ebay Addicts
Rob: What's up, guys? Today we are stoked to be talking to Jeff with Ebay Addicts, super excited to get a little taste of his business and his business model. So, Jeff, thanks for jumping on here with us.
Jeff: Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate you guys for taking time out of your day to invite me and hang out with me today.
Melissa: Yeah, and we actually just did a live on a Jeff's YouTube channel. So check it out. You'll probably be when this goes live up, probably be last week, but you can check that out it's a lot of fun. So, so thanks for having us.
Rob: Absolutely. Well, let's dive in Jeff, kind of give us a background. Give us how did you get started flipping?
How did you land in this business?
Jeff: Well, oddly enough, I was working a corporate job. I was working for general electric at the time and I worked there from 2006 to 2016 working my corporate job in a nine to five, like everybody else does. And I got to the point where I would hustle, bro.
You know, I'd be working 10, 12 hour days driving a forklift and you know, you, and you would get your gross paycheck. It would say like $1,800, $1,900. And by the time they started hitting you with, you know, state, local, federal taxes, you know, your health insurance, or life insurance, your 401k, you know, union dues, you would get your paycheck and your take home pay would be like a thousand.
And I'm like, man, I am driving a forklift working in this big, hot muggy warehouse. And my job was to load up appliances general electric appliances in the back of semi trucks. And then they would get shipped off to the retailers like Sears, Lowe's, Home Depot, things like that. So I was actually, you know, sometimes just to help pass the time I would have one of my cell phones and I would have it like right here on my shoulder and I would be listening to podcasts like this or YouTube videos while I was at work, trying to figure out, man, I've got to do something.
Either increase my income or decrease my expenses because running around in circles, you know, I don't feel like I'm making progress. You know, they will come to you and say, hey, you made a 50 cent raise per hour, but all that did is put you in a higher tax bracket and you would end up bringing home less money from getting a raise.
So, I came across the YouTubers, their name is Gil daddy. I don't think they make YouTube videos anymore. And it was him and his wife, Gill daddy and Gill mama. And they would go to these Goodwill bins and they would load up the back of their van with all this stuff they got for pennies on the dollar.
at the Goodwill bins, and they would say, hey you know, we spent a $100, $150. Our whole back of our van is full of merchandise. Cause it was at the weigh and pay. They charge you by the pound and then they would say, hey, we're going to turn our $100, $150 into a thousand, $1,200 on eBay. And I was like, no way, because I'm thinking, you know, I'm working in this hot and muggy warehouse, driving a forklift for 10, 12 hours a day to bring home a thousand dollars at the end of the week. And these guys are able to do it part time, taking an hour or two, go into the bins and they would get all type of random items. They would come across remotes or hoses that go to the vacuum cleaner. They would get a blender and then they would pour it out the motor and poured out the little, you know, the drink dispenser and parted out.
And I was just amazed. And I was like, bro, you know, I have bought stuff on eBay, but it never, a light switch never went off in my brain to think like, man, I could go buy stuff and resell it for a higher price and make money on the side. So ever since I watched that YouTube video, I got pumped, I got excited.
I sent the link to my friend, family and my brother. I was like, hey dude, we got to try this. You know, we got to go in there and spend $5, $10, $15, $20 get started in this resell business and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you know, we're out $15, $20, but if this thing works, now we have this extra stream of income coming in month after month after month for the rest of your life.
So I was like, and you got no boss, you got no uniform. You got no time clock and you could do it in your spare time and still keep your regular job. So in a nutshell, that's what happened. And I've been hooked on reselling ever since.
Rob: I love it. One of the coolest things, one of my favorite sayings and you alluded to it.
That's what I was looking for the point of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. And you got to that point of, okay, something's got to give, so that's a really, really cool story. How long have you been doing it now? How so you saw that video?
It kind of got you hooked. How long have you been in the resell world?
Jeff: Well, man, I think, I probably think it was probably around 2015, 2016. I saw that YouTube video and I've been kind of reselling ever since, you know, kind of off and on. And I would just hustle and hustle and hustle and, just kind of doing that resell game.
It's always, it's, you know, it's a great entrepreneurial venture. You can kind of work at your own pace at your own time. If you're, you know, I'm a night owl. So if I'm up at midnight or one o'clock in the morning, I could be cranking out some listings and then I'd do all my shipping in the morning when I get up and get that out of the way.
And then, you know, it's fun going out to, you know, be able to go to yard sales or thrift stores or flea markets, pawn shops, and you're just out casually looking for merchandise to flip to resell on eBay.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: I love it.
Melissa: And how long ago was that, that you really started? Did you say?
Jeff: Like I said, it was around 2015, 2016.
So it's been a while. Yeah.
Melissa: Okay, awesome. And are you doing this now part-time or full-time?
Jeff: Well, I have a, I guess a full-time job. I work at night, so then I work as a courier, a medical courier, and I deliver big boxes and packages. Eyeballs, limbs, blood what people need for surgery in the morning.
And believe it or not, I make six figures a year doing that. In January I made, over $10,000, picking up boxes and delivering it. And it's a nice gig at the same type of setup. You only get paid on commission. I get paid 60% of every delivery I do. And then the courier company keeps 40% and it's just an app on your phone.
And whenever I want to work, I text my dispatcher and log in and whenever I want to be off I can log off and I'm off from work. So, but I typically do it on nights and weekends and holidays when there's no traffic so I can get in and out real quickly. But yeah, right now I have over 6,600 items on my eBay store.
And so I'm growing my goal as a product grow and scale my eBay store to 10,000 items by the end of the year, and then my YouTube channel, I have right around 6,000 subscribers and I'm going to try to grow and scale that to 10,000 by the end of the year. But, you know, as you know, everything takes work, you know, whether you're running a YouTube channel or you're posting stuff on eBay there's work involved, you know.
Melissa: It's not get rich quick, but it's worth it.
The work is worth it.
Rob: Absolutely. For your own schedule and your own time, it is definitely worth it. So that's really cool. So you're a carrier, or courier, like body parts, medical, that's pretty unique. I've never heard that before, but it sounds like it pays very well. That's exciting. So, and it sounds like you can do the same thing with that business.
You can work when you want that. Or you don't have to work. So that's a really cool gig for sure.
Melissa: Now with your business right now with getting that many items, do you have anybody that's helping you? Like, do you have anybody helping you listing? Are you, is it all you?
Jeff: No, I do everything on my own.
Yeah. With the courier business, you can kind of make up your own work schedule. Work when you want to work you're off when you want to be off last week. For example, I only worked four days last week and still net it $2,100 last week. That was your gross, but just driving around. But with my resell business, I do a lot of media items. So I'll get items kind of while you guys sell big bulkier items, I sell smaller items. So what I tried to do is buy stuff in bulk and I kind of specialize in selling CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays video games, VHS tapes, audio books, items like that, because on eBay, if you get the basic starter store for $20 a month, then it gives you 10,000 free listings in those select categories.
So at the end of the day, You know, you start off at the end of the 30 days. If your item doesn't sell it'll auto realist and you pay zero insertion fees. So I have a lot of items that I typically try to look for items like this that's new in the shrink-wrap. I don't have to do a lot of cleaning, a lot of testing.
I can just scan the little barcode on the back, take a picture front and back. Sometimes I use the little stock image and then boom, onto the next listing. I can probably crank out if I hustle, I could probably crank out a hundred listings. Just doing it, you know, in my free time, cranking out listings and yeah, that's kinda what I do.
I'm like yesterday, for example, on my way, home from work, I hit four or five pawn shops. And if you go in there, you can pick up brand new DVDs new in the shrink wrap for 25 cents 50 cents, things like that. And then you turn around and you can resell them on eBay for $10, $15, $20. So we have a similar business model we took off earlier when you're on my show that you try to look for at least a 10 X.
So I kind of do the same thing. Like I picked up video games, X-Box one video games for the pawn shop for a dollar, a piece. And if I can't sell them for $10, $15 or more. I just leave it on the shelf, but my goal is to try to get a 20 X on, on my investment. So, if I grab, let's say the CDs, I'll buy them a bulk lot and I'll buy a thousand of them, have them shipped to my door where my buy cost essentially is 50 cents a piece.
And then I'll turn around and sell them for anywhere from $15, $20, $25. And if something was to happen to the item, it's not the end of the world. I've got 50 cents tied up in it, you know?
Rob: Right. That's awesome. For sure. Now you said you, you roughly have 6,600 items listed right now. Does that require you to have a storage or where were you keeping the items that you have currently, your inventory?
Jeff: I have a place, the house that I'm renting and in the backyard of my house, I have a big shed in the backyard and it has a big five car garage. So it's kind of one of those strategic things, because I was like, man, it would cost me an arm and a leg to try to spend money, to get a warehouse. So I have like the little shed in the backyard.
I'll plan to shoot a video this week kind of showing the viewers of my channel, how I go about, you know, listening and storing, 6,600 items. It sounds like a lot. When you're you have items like this, that's really small, it's lightweight. It doesn't take up a lot of space. You know, it, it, it's not as difficult as you think, as far as storing the items and then whenever they sell, I just you know, box them up. Throw them in a 6x9 padded envelope, put a shipping label on it and drop it in the mailbox. You know? So definitely even if you guys have a full-time job, you can still do resell even on the side and make a good living doing it. Being honest with you guys, it just depends on, you know, if you're willing to hustle, you're going to get out of it
what you put into it.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: It still
boggles my mind. Maybe. I don't know, like that, all that vintage, media stuff is so hot. Like I like so many people want it and we've been selling some of the players, like the CD players.
Rob: We sold two weeks ago, what was it? The Sony, a 1995 Sony.
Melissa: But people want that stuff.
Rob: It's a stack like a cassette player, a five DVD player, stereo and all that stuff in the original cabinet with the original speakers, we paid $20 for it. Somebody just got it out of their house has been sitting there for what, 30 years. And they got it out of the house.
Melissa: We pulled out a whole bunch of our cassette tapes. Like we had cassette tapes. We had no, did we have to buy some like, yeah, it's fun, but it was fun.
Rob: But yeah, we sold that for $800 and then they paid an extra $200 to ship it. So vintage stuff is hot. We know that for sure.
So that's really cool.
Jeff: It's crazy. I had a guest on my YouTube channel a couple of weeks ago and they paid 50 cents for this DVD, or it was a VHS day, but it was new in the shrink wrap and then sold it like a couple of days later for $800. So if you guys are out here and the whole idea is a lot of this vintage electronics or media stuff, they don't make it anymore. So if the person goes to Best Buy or Walmart or Target, and they're looking for the specific.
And it's been discontinued, then it can only get it on eBay or Amazon. That's the only place they can get it. And if you just happen to have it on eBay and it's brand new in the shrink wrap, you kind of name your price. That's one of my little tricks that I do on eBay, is, you know, I get items and maybe there's two or three other sellers on eBay that has the same item as me.
Maybe they have their item listed for $10 or $15. I'll just wait for them to sell out. And then my item moves to the top of the list and then maybe I'll sell mine for $20, $25. And if you can buy stuff in bulk, like, like I said, that's what I do. My business model. I'll try to buy 500 or a thousand items having these big box stuff.
And then what you do is you take the stuff that's in these big bulk, lots, you chop it up and sell it off individually. So when you're getting stuff, when you know your buy cost is low enough where you're getting the stuff for 50 cents a piece like. There's no way you can't flip it and not make a profit, you know?
And then, another little trick I'll tell you, you guys is, if you can do a multi-day quantity item, like for example, I have this one DVD that I bought. You know, instead of me listing 600 individual items on eBay, that would take forever. So I able to go in the app, take a picture front and back and then type in, okay.
I have a quantity of 600 of this one DVD. Right? And so the DVD, I paid a quarter for it. It's still one on eBay for 20 bucks. So 20 bucks doesn't sound like a lot of money, but when you multiply 20 bucks, times 16, Now you're making what, $12,000 on the deal. And it took two minutes for you to make the list name.
And because you put multi quantity of 600 in the listing, as opposed to listing 600 individual skews, that has kind of gives you a little shortcut. So those are just a couple of little tricks that I learned from being a reseller.
Rob: I love it. What an amazing hack. That's awesome. A lot less time spent, which that's our business model too.
We want to spend less time and make more money on it. So that is an amazing hack. I love it. For sure.
Melissa: One thing you said about, you know, people, you can't buy vintage items anymore, you can't, you can only really find them on Amazon, or eBay. And, people will sometimes message us or comment on our stuff and say, well, if you can get it for that cheap, why don't people just go to the thrift stores or go whatever and get it?
I'm like they can, they totally can. But most of them don't. They just want to go on their phone order it, have it shipped to their door and that's where us reselling it. That's where you come in and you provide that service for them to get it shipped right to their door.
Jeff: Everybody's into this click and ship model.
And so they don't want to go out in a hundred degree heat. They don't want to go out in the pouring down rain and hit, you know, 10 yards sells 10 flea markets looking for this one particular item that they're looking for. They can just scroll on eBay and say, hey, this is the here's this VHS tape that I've been looking for. Hey, they quit making it 20 years ago.
They have it new in the shrink wrap. They click cart and, you know, have it shipped to their house. And like I said, you can pick up items, where else can you pick up an item for 50 cents and sell it for $800 in a week, you know, and your cost is next to nothing. And it's really easy. I ship most of the stuff, ships media mail.
So, you know, you're talking $3.19 cents of the customer pay shipping, and it's very easy to ship. I just drop it in at 6x9 padded envelope, put the shipping label on it and drop it in the mailbox while I'm out running errands. So it's a lot easier than what you think. So if you guys are in a situation and you're like, yeah, but Jeff I already have a full-time job.
All right. Well, what happens when you get laid off? You know, I was working at my corporate job, like I said, 2006 to 2016. And one day we just showed up to work and they said, hey, guys, you know we just sold this whole company. And this company was called Harrier, and they're like, we're outsourcing your position.
So you can go work on this assembly line and make, you know, we were making $80,000 a year and there's like, you can go from making $80,000 to $30,000 and then go back onto the assembly line. Or you just had to find new jobs and that can happen at any time. They can just show up and say, your whole department's outsourced.
So you need to have multiple streams of income. If you don't listen to nothing else that we talk about today, you need to have multiple streams of income coming in. So if something does happen, you know, your transmission goes out, you get a flat tire, you know, you're sick for two or three weeks.
You have a relative that passed away. You have this extra stream of income coming in to help offset some of your expenses. Like what you guys do, you know, you take that extra income and travel, right.
Melissa: Yeah, no, we totally like the extra income is
Rob: that's how it's always been. Even when this was a side hustle, that's how we got to go out and travel and do stuff as a family, it was, cause it was our side income. We weren't expecting it. We weren't relying on it, but it was that income there. And then when it came down to it and we had to kick that up to the next. It was there. We could do it. We had the skills, we could do it, we could bump it up to the next level.
And we were able to do that for sure.
Melissa: Great advice, because everybody should have multiple streams of income.
Rob: Value bombs. I love them. This is awesome.
Melissa: Now you've dove into YouTube too, to help other people. And then that's another stream of income and that you want to grow right?
Jeff: Yeah. I have a YouTube channel and right now I do maybe three videos a week and we have different guests on every week. We had Jon on recently from Flippin Aint Easy. He has a different business model where he buys pallets of merchandise. We talked to you guys today. I had, you know, just different guests that we had guys like ATL flippers on and they specialize in reselling shoes. So the idea is, it's almost like thinking like, you know, I learned and got, you know, started from reselling from YouTube.
So maybe somebody will come across my YouTube channel. And if I can get, you know, kind of educate, inspire, motivate, you know, get you off your butt and get you moving. If that helps somebody else that happens to come across YouTube and help them make some extra income. And that's the main reason why I do it.
But yeah, I mean my YouTube ad revenue, it's not much, it's like a hundred bucks a month, so I don't depend on it or rely on it because I get to hang out and meet cool people like you. If I never had a YouTube channel, I would never get to meet all these cool people and I get to help out other people.
It's great. When you get an email, when someone says, hey, man, I watched your YouTube videos and you helped me make extra income, or you helped me get my car and paid it off. And you hope to change people's lives that they would never have got motivated to get off their butt if they didn't happen to come across your YouTube channel.
And like I said, we try to educate, motivate and inspire you to get up off your butt. I had this guy message me yesterday and he said he's 62 years old. And he was retired. And after seeing my YouTube video yesterday, he got motivated to kind of get off and button and do something.
Melissa: That's the best.
Yeah, that is definitely the best when you can help other people be successful and do something to get results like that.
I don't know. There's nothing better, I think. Do you, I mean, if you're comfortable with, do you mind sharing, like what your average monthly income from reselling is?
Jeff: Like I said, I mainly focus on my main job is my career gig. As far as reselling goes, I'll probably make somewhere between $800 to $1,000 a week in reselling, that's gross sales.
And, but I'm able to still do that while still making $100,000 working my full-time gig and that's my main eBay store. And then once I max it out and reach my goal of 10,000 items, I've been kind of working on launching the second eBay store and kind of specialize in shoes and clothing and things like that.
So you have to, like I told you guys earlier, you want to think about, okay, once I get this thing up and off the ground, whether it's YouTube channel, your eBay store, whatever it is, you have this extra stream of income coming in month after month after month for the rest of your life. Think about it. You bought a rental property and now you collected rent from that rental property every month.
Now you have this extra cashflow, this extra stream of income coming in month after month after month. So just start thinking more, long-term think about where you want to be three years, five years down the road, instead of this week or paycheck to paycheck, like 75% of the country, you know?
Melissa: Yep.
Rob: I love it. So powerful. That is awesome. Well, Jeff, this has been amazing. Can you please let everybody know where they can follow you the best place to get in touch with you if they want to reach out and send you a message or something like that? Let us know where's the best place to get in touch with you.
Jeff: Sure guys. Yeah, you can check me out. My name is Jeff. My YouTube channel is called Ebay Addicts. There's only one Ebay Addicts. So if you guys want to check me out on YouTube and Instagram, I have videos every week and we talk about, mainly reselling, but we throw in, we bring in another entrepreneurs as well. And so we'll bring in new guests every week and we'd probably shoot maybe three videos a week and a lot of it's filmed live.
So you guys can jump in and ask questions and we can respond to your question live. That's where you guys can check me out at, on YouTube and Instagram. I'm mostly active on YouTube under Ebay Addicts. So you guys can come by and check me out and hang out with us. And we love to have you.
Melissa: Yeah, we'll put the links in the show notes below.
Definitely go check them out on YouTube and Instagram.
Rob: That's it, Jeff. Thank you so much. We greatly appreciate your time. We greatly appreciate your information. You've given us a lot of great information for people trying to get off the couch and get started. Hopefully motivated them. You motivated us.
So we thank you for your time for sure.
Melissa: Time to go get listing.
Jeff: Alright, man. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate you guys. You guys have a great day and get out there and get after it.