Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about how to stop feeling overwhelmed when you're sourcing items for your flipping business.
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How To Stop The Overwhelm When Sourcing Items To Resell
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about how to stop feeling overwhelmed when you're out there sourcing items to resell.
Rob: All right guys, so today we are talking about how to overcome that overwhelm. That sounds a little weird, but how to get past that overwhelmed feeling you get when you're out there sourcing items to resell.
Melissa: Yeah. Have you ever gone to a flea market, even yard saleing or a thrift store? You walk in, you know, people are out there making money on items that you know, like they're finding this stuff to resell. But you go to one of those places and then you're like, ugh, this is a lot. I don't even know what to look at.
Like, or even maybe in the apps can give you a, a feeling of overwhelmed. I'm sourcing on the apps cuz we do like to source on the apps a lot. Like I am not finding anything. How am I going not finding anything and how like I just feel like overwhelmed. So we're gonna talk deal with some of those.
Rob: First of all, you're not alone.
That is a very common, real problem that people deal with. And it is, it is one of those things that you can totally walk into a room of a lot of stuff, a flea market, a lot of stuff, and be like, well, what do I concentrate on? How do I know what is worth money and how do I do this? So totally, totally.
You are, you are feeling the right thing. That's totally something normal for somebody to feel who's new to the business.
Melissa: But don't let it make you quit.
Rob: No, we want to help you bypass that and really, gain some traction so you can really start to build your resale business.
Melissa: So I think the first thing to know going into like helping you not feel overwhelmed is I know like you could go say, I know, okay, well I can look everything up because I don't know what it costs.
I can look everything up, but if I look everything up at this thrift store, I'm gonna be here for years. Like, you know, and that's obviously not possible. So the first thing we suggest starting with is going after, like looking for stuff that you already know, like stuff that you have, hobbies or interests or your career.
Rob: So absolutely. So stuff that you already are familiar with and you will bypass the time of having to go look it up. You find something, maybe you are a hair stylist, maybe you are out there looking for items to sell. You get overwhelmed. Look for some, concentrate on some of those things that you deal with on a daily basis.
Curling irons, flat irons, blow dryers, any of that kind of stuff. When you go to a place, look at those first and see if they have any of those expensive brands for them, like commercial ones too. Cuz you would know that. So absolutely. That's where your expertise lie right now. So it can be your profession, it can totally be a hobby.
Something that you know more than the average person about. And that is the starting point, to really conquer this overwhelming fear. Fear that you have or overwhelm, not fear, but just this overwhelmed feeling that you have of where do I start? Start with something that you know that you're comfortable with and then go from there and not, not to say that even something that, you know, you still wanna go out and look at comps, you still wanna look at eBay, right?
You wanna look at Google and have a, a better understanding, but you already have some type of knowledge about that item that will totally help you start, just get started.
Melissa: And it might not even be something that you're in right now, but maybe it's something you want to learn about. So maybe. You know, you're, into fashion, but you don't really like, you know, fashion.
But like, I'd like to learn more about what brands really sell. So maybe that's, you gravitate towards the clothes or the jeans or jackets or whatever that is that you enjoy and you wanna learn more about. So that can be something cuz it's worth your time and you enjoy it. So you wanna be able to, you, this is a fun gig.
You just wanna, you know, you gravitate to stuff you enjoy, then you can learn more about it. So, absolutely.
Rob: And then once you, you know, you look around at the place that you're at, whether it's thrift store, yard sales, flea markets. Once you look around for those items, that's when you can expand your horizons and maybe pick one or two.
Start looking for something that looks expensive. Something that looks like it could be commercial, it could be industrial, it could be, commercial, any of that stuff. Totally start looking for those items after you've already searched out and sought out the items that you know or you're comfortable with.
Look at, maybe pick one or two of those items and then just do a quick, don't try and look up everything that will totally overwhelm you, but pick one or two of those items. I'm thinking maybe even at the flea market. Maybe you're at a vendor who has a whole bunch of different things. Pick one or two of those items, make a mental note, walk away, check it out on Google, check it out on eBay, and see what they're selling for what they sold for, what they're actively listed for.
That will totally help you build not only what you already know, but it'll start to help you build this library in your mind of other items that are worth some money as well. So, maybe you'll look something up and it's only selling for like $10, and you're like, okay, that's not enough money. Well, you know, next time you see that item, you can walk away from it.
You don't have to look it up again. So it's just about creating that library in your mind, in your memory, that you know those items that are gonna be worth money, and the ones that you can walk past and you don't have to look 'em up again.
Melissa: How would you describe something that might look expensive versus something?
Is it just something like you have a feeling like maybe that's worth more like it, it looks like it's built well, or like how would, I don't know. How would you describe something?
Rob: Great question. I'm typically looking for a stainless steel item, something that looks more expensive than just something chintzy or something like made, Chinese made something like that, that you can tell was expensive.
And some things might be deceiving. They might look like they're expensive, and then you do a research on 'em, and they're like, no, not really. Yeah. Antiques. Antiques usually are worth some money. I, I don't, I and my eyes will hone in on some antiques and stuff like that. Where we're at now, we actually look for the larger items.
I know I can get a large item at any market I'm at. Flea market, yard sale, thrift store. I, it's harder to sell the larger items, so I know that's what I'm looking for and I can get 'em fairly, fairly cheap and then I can turn around and make, make a lot of money on.
Melissa: It's harder to, for them to sell the flea market, right?
Rob: Yes. And they sit on 'em longer. Every place, every place is harder to sell the larger items locally. So that's where you're gonna find a better deal. Now, you don't have to jump into the larger items, just try to seek out those. I mean, even commercial, once you start really honing in and looking for them, you'll start to see 'em everywhere.
You'll start to see commercial brands on exercise, equipment, on what else? Commercial tools you'll start to Matco, and, what are some of those other expensive brands? Matco.
Melissa: Is this tools? Are we talking about tools?
Rob: Yeah, just tools.
Melissa: DeWalt is that expensive?
Rob: DeWalt is a good brand, but not, not like a super commercial brand.
I was thinking of like more manual tools that like a mechanic might use, but every field has this. They have those items in their profession that are more expensive. That are more expensive. They're, they're the higher line. They're, they're made to last. Those are the really the ones you wanna concentrate on, to actually start looking at values of them.
If you don't know them, start looking them up and really get an idea in your mind of what these things are worth.
Melissa: That's kind of the example too, of commercial. I mean, any commercial equipment versus like home equipment, either, whether it's appliances or exercise equipment, the commercial stuff can be worth like 3, 4, 5 times more. Absolutely.
Than a residential exercise machine. Yep. So, or maybe even more, but.
Rob: No, you look at a, proform treadmill. I mean, this is, I'm giving you examples from us. These are bigger stuff. Yeah, exactly. A proform treadmill versus a life fitness or a life cycle treadmill. Those are like five times the value of them, but they're, they're doing the similar thing.
So one's a residential model, one's a commercial model, same, that goes for almost everything out there. You'll have residential models and commercial models. Then you're gonna make a lot more money on the commercial models. Yeah.
Melissa: I also wanted to add, but also the stage of life that you're in, it might be like you are learning of if you have kids, like they're going through different stages.
If you just had a baby, I learned baby stuff. When we started having babies, I had no idea. That some of this stuff was so expensive. Like I, I started selling a lot of different baby stuff. You have to be careful with some safety stuff. So like any like rockers and some stuff gets recalled. You have car seats.
Car seats. I don't really mess with car seats, but strollers can be amazing. Like they. Super high in brands. A thousand dollars. Yeah. And sometimes you can even just get parts of them and if you find them for cheap, like those little, what are the backboards of some of the, like the standing boards have sold for you know, a good money and, but we've sold lots of strollers over the years, so absolutely.
Rob: You can still stay in some smaller baby items and really a higher brand and make a really, really good money.
Hundreds of dollars on those, totally can do that. Strollers.
Melissa: That, that was just a phase of life we were in. And then as I started learning it, As we were, you know, doing our registry and like, oh man, this stuff's expensive. Then I started learning what brands to look for and so we just kind of, I gravitated towards that stuff cuz it was just where, what we were doing at that time.
And now we're kind of going into the sports. We just sold a whole bunch of baseball bats with our son and do it. They're, now they're in a Pokemon card, so we're trying to teach them how to learn like the value of those. So it's just different phases of life. Yeah. You know, that you might be in, could also be another, aspect for learning a whole new niche.
Rob: So. Yeah. That's such a great point. Like, our son was got, got into t-ball and I went to the flea market to find,
Melissa: I asked, I asked you to go find, go buy a bat at the, at the flea market. Go buy one bat.
Rob: One t-ball, bat. And I came back with, I think it was like 30 or 40 bats. Yeah. One of the vendors had brand new t-ball bats, ended up spending, I don't know what it was, $2 or $3 a bat.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but.
Melissa: I think you ended up spending like $60 and we sold 'em for $300 something. Yeah. The lot of them.
Rob: And we gave away multiple bats to our friends who were on the t-ball team that we were able to give them away for free and that kind of stuff. So really, really cool.
But that was just the stage of life that we were in at that point. Another one, I, I found that baseball glove, this was around the same time. Yeah. The baseball glove that I, yeah. Cuz we were into in t-ball baseball. Yeah. And one of my local vendors who sells tons of toys had this baseball glove with you.
Melissa: And you probably wouldn't have looked at that if we weren't looking for the gloves at that time.
Rob: Paid $5 for this mitt, this baseball, mitt. And, what did I sell for? $300. $300 or $400? $300. $300 or $400 we sold that thing for, because it was a high end brand of mitt and I didn't even know buying it at the time.
I just bought it because we were in there looking for baseball bats and gloves and stuff like that that we could upgrade our son's stuff. And then when I saw how much it was worth, we sold it and made some great money. So that's just showing the different stages of life. Absolutely what Melissa's saying, the different stages of life that you're in, really hone in on that, that portion of your sourcing as well, cuz that's where you'll really, really shine on that.
Melissa: It's funny you say, I didn't know what it was worth. And then we looked it up and then, oh, it was worth a lot, so we gotta sell it. We can't give it to our son. Like that's the, that was for strollers forever. I wanted a double bob jogger, stroller cuz we run all the time and we were running with the kids and you know, they're just really nice strollers to run in and they push so nicely.
We get 'em for like $15, $20 and I could sell 'em for $300 and every time I would get 'em I'm like, ah, I would like, I'd. I, it was me. You weren't pushing me to do it. I'm like, okay, well let's just sell it. Then finally one time like, no, we're not selling this one. We're gonna keep it. And we got, we used the heck out of that thing we did.
Like it was rip by the time. And the funny part is, is we still sold it on Marketplace. It had rips and tears, which totally disclosed. I think I sold it for like, $30 or maybe probably what we paid for it. $50. No, I think we sold it for more than we paid for it, but it was like, yeah, it was but of years of use, we got out of it.
Yeah. Just like underneath. And, but it was, it definitely was well loved. Yeah. And we described it accurately. It was well loved and, and sold it for super cheap.
Rob: But still had plenty of life left in it.
And Bob Strollers, if you've never, if, I mean if you're in that phase of life, Bob Strollers push amazingly when you're running down a trail.
They're just built very well and that's why a double Bob stroller costs upwards of $700, $800, $900, to buy one of those, at least it did back in the day. I don't remember. I don't know what they're going for right now, but super, super expensive. Bob Strollers and they pushed so nicely, so.
Melissa: And do you remember the time you brought back, the triple stroller?
Yes, the triple red stroller, we only had two kids at this time. He brought back the triple because doubles sell really well. And so a triple like that's worth a lot more money. So he brought it back and I don't know if you listed it. Yet? No, I, we kept it for a little while. I think, well, I know we kept it for a while, but that was because we got pregnant again.
But I was like, wait a minute, did you buy the stroller? Knowing that we were gonna have a third, so it was a, it was like pre, it was a baby jog, a baby jogger. It was a baby jogger. And then we ended up selling that afterwards. We did. That thing was huge. Side by side, side by side three. But I want, I used that thing all the time until finally, yeah, we got the kid on a bike or something.
So going back to the Bob Stroller double stroller. The double, but that thing got got some use out of it. And man.
Rob: So not only can you find these items to sell, you can use them in the stage of life that you're in as well. And then, totally make money after you're done with them. So a really, really cool perk about this business.
But.
Melissa: I wanted to add something too that once, you know, a lot of times people will ask you, you know, well, because we do this with some of our members, like they'll see, that you're finding stuff in their area, but why can't they find it? And a lot of times it's just practice. So it's practice over and over and then.
Now you've sold so much. You have a bank in your mind. And so it just makes it faster. It's not that you can't ever make that bank in your mind. You totally can do that. And you go to the flea market and then you just gravitate towards certain items and your eye spots 'em so much faster if you've sold 'em once before.
So even just selling 'em one time before, you tend to just gravitate toward those items. And I couldn't tell you how many people in our group now sell still Sleep Number beds and NordicTracks, like those are the things we've sold years ago. But like people are constantly like, Still selling, still making great money.
And you know, we sold them how many years ago you started with the NordicTrack? 20 some years ago. Yeah. 25 years ago doing that. So, but that's stuff's still selling. Yeah. So, and it's, I don't know, it's just developing the eye for things and then you, you spot them. Yeah. And can spot better deals.
Rob: But not even the stuff that you sell.
You will totally, like I said, look up some things and you'll be like, this looks expensive. You'll see. It's not, you know, the next time to walk right past it, you're done with that. That's in your library. You know not to look it up again because it is not worth the money. It's not worth your time for that.
So, yeah, you totally will. As you get better and better at this and you do more and more of it, the repetition, you're gonna get better and better at spotting items. You're gonna get better and better at walking away from items and not even messing with them, cuz you know what they're worth, you know, that they're not worth your time.
Melissa: So one last point I wanted to talk about too is sometimes we'll sell something and I'll say, what is it? And you're like, I don't know. And I'm like, well, how do you not know? And that's a question people, how do you not know what you're selling? It's like, well, I looked up the brand and the model and this is what it told me it was, but I don't really know what it does.
Like somebody out there knows what it does. I don't, you don't have to know all the functions of everything. You can know the name of it. And the model. I mean, how I can't, there's so many things that you've listed that you're like, I think it does this, but I don't have to know all this stuff about it.
If it's something that does power on, then you can try to power it on. If it doesn't, then you sell it for parts of repair and the people know that it's for parts of repair and you still don't know what it does. So absolutely. How many times things have you sold like that?
Rob: Hundreds of items that way that I have no idea what they are, but we still can look up the brand and the model, and then we can go and do research and figure out what it does or similar to what it does, but, and you can get the description from the website and everything.
So when I'm finding something, I sometimes, I have no idea what it does, what it's used for, but I just look it up and that's how I know that it's worth a lot of money. So, that's what we really try to hone in on.
Melissa: I was thinking about those, what are those? They were those big silver things that you bought for like $10.
They sold for like $800 or $900. They look, they were some kind of?
Rob: Oh yeah, it was a gas valve. Valve. It was a valve, yeah. And got them, so two of 'em, I think we paid either $15, was it? No, it was $10 each. $10 a piece. Yeah. For them. And then we sold them, yeah for $800 or $900. And they were gas, valveless steel.
Melissa: You, you just you looked, no idea what it was. You glanced at them and, you saw that they were stainless, right?
Rob: It was all stainless steel and I knew the ball joint. It had a ball joint on top of it. The ball joint alone was like a $20 or $30 ball joint, so I could have taken the ball joint off and totally sold it and made the money back.
But the whole unit, it was a larger unit about this tall. But it was like a, bell shaped and it was some type of gas valve, that we bought. We bought it cheap and, sold 'em. Yeah, once I was. Super excited once I looked them up. Saw the retail on 'em were over $2,000. And they weren't that big.
It was a piece of cake. They went in boxes, but we sold those things. Yeah. $800 or $900. Crazy, crazy. But it was me trying to look at something that was expensive. I still don't know what it does. It has something to do with a natural gas. So water. Oh, I thought it was water. No, no. I think it's a natural gas.
It let, something wasn't something you tested or anything. No, but I don't think anything could have really broken there, right? No, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was all manual stuff. So it was something that was totally, yeah, that it was used and that's how we sold it. But at the same time, it was a stainless steel, very heavy stainless steel type of construction.
So I knew it looked expensive. And then when I looked it up over $2,000. Totally, totally. Something we wanna do. Yeah.
Melissa: So next time you go to the flea market thrift store, don't get overwhelmed. Go look for some kind of items that you're interested in or that you know about, and pick one or two things. And gradually over time, grow, expand your niche.
Like some people still choose not to expand and that's fine. But if you wanna grow and learn another category of items then, you know, you know, this category. Let me go dive into this category of items and learn a whole new niche. Absolutely. It can help you grow and you don't have to be so overwhelmed when you go.
That's it sourcing. So, we thank you so much for listening to this episode. We would so appreciate it if you took a couple minutes to leave us a review as we try to grow this new podcast name out there. We are doing a drawing, afford a hundred dollars gift card at the end of May. So if you leave a review, screenshot it, send us, send it to rob@fleamarketflipper.com with review in the subject line, and we will enter you in the drawing.
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