Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper discuss what they flipped in 2021 to make over $90,000 in sales.
Flipper University: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-universityevfrifccsszi1kwi
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Reseller Hangout Podcast: https://the-reseller-hangout-podcast.simplecast.com/
Sourcing Workshop Replays: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/sourcing-wkshp-wgdfwi3t
Shipping 101 bootcamp: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/shipping-101-bootcampcvstj8
Jack and Joan Podcast: https://fleamarketflipper.com/retired-couple-makes-12k-mo-flipping-items/
Reseller Hangout Podcast - Rob & Melissa 2021 Recap
Rob: All right guys, 2021's numbers are in. And in today's episode, we are going to discuss it. Over $90,000 in sales.
Melissa: For a dive into all of our cost of goods sold, our shipping costs, our eBay fees, and, of course the profits.
Rob: All right guys. So check it out. And over $90,000 in sales, 56 items sold that's right. Only 56 items. And guess what? We only spend an average of five hours a week to make these types of sales.
Melissa: So we're going to dive in.
So the total sales were at $90,000, $90,058.
Rob: Just over!
Melissa: Now, the first two sales I want to talk about, cause we're going to kind of take them off the totals because there were two vehicles that we sold. So we had two cars that we sold, this year that we don't pay a lot for our vehicles. We buy a lot of used vehicles and use everything, but we wanted to include them because everything that we purchase. We also know that we can resell it and either break even, or even make some money.
Rob: This is an important part of a flipper's life. At least for our lives. Everything we sell is an investment. So anything that we need, whether it's a vehicle, whether it, well, I'll give you an example. We just bought a bed.
We bought a sleep number bed. Now we've sold probably over a hundred sleep numbers, sleep number beds in our past, but we needed a new bed. So we found a sleep number. The reason why we do sleep numbers is because you can take them all apart, you can wash them, sanitize them and do all that stuff, put it back together.
And you have almost a brand new bed. So we needed one, a new bed. And I went out and I found us a sleep number. Now this sleep number is like a $5,000 bed. I paid $200 for it. It's got the cool foundation on it that lifts the head up and puts the head back down. You can do all that kind of stuff. You set the, the sleep number on it.
It's just really, really a cool bed. But all that being said is we, when we do need something, whatever it is, we look for a good deal. Knowing that if we need to upgrade in the future, we can always sell it and make money on it. That's what we do with these vehicles. That's kind of what we do with everything that we buy is look for the best deal, the cheapest that we can find so we can get use out of it and it makes some money.
Melissa: Cause we were gonna sell it if we didn't like it, but we might keep it for a little bit and then we can sell our old sleep number that we got before. So it, it works. So the vehicles, we sold one for $5,800 and one for $3,500. So, and we paid roughly about that one, like one was $2,700 and one was $6,000.
Pretty much a wash for what we paid for them and what we sold them for.
Rob: But we got to use them. The Escalade we drove for I don't know how many years, three or four years we had that sucker did not lose money on it. The van, the same thing. We bought a big passenger van to do a road trip with two of my sisters.
My nieces, had a blast with it, used it for the summer drove. I don't even know nine or 10,000 miles on it. And then we sold it after that once we were done with it and we did not lose any money. So, that's kinda how we, that's how we roll. We buy that stuff. We try and get the use out of it and then make our money back or even make some money sometimes on it.
Melissa: So, and we did, we did forget to mention that our goal last year, we did set a goal in the beginning of the year, you can grab it. So we made a board. You can't see it on the podcast, but if you're watching on YouTube, we made a board of $100,000, we hit $90,000. We didn't make quite make it. It didn't quite make it to $100,000.
So.
Rob: But that's okay. Because guys, we only spent an average of five hours a week on this. So this is considered still a side hustle. We're doing all kinds of other stuff with trainings, with our courses, with all the other stuff. Flipping. We love it. We'll always do it. We love doing, we stay up to date on all the stuff that's going on because we flip on a weekly, we do it every day.
I'm either looking for stuff or we're not, we're shipping stuff out. So that's one of those things that we're, we're still in the game. We absolutely love it and we'll do it. The rest of our lives. We just had to spend a little bit of time to make that amazing income. So we're very thankful, blessed, and excited about that income for sure.
Melissa: So I'm gonna be making another board for this year. Cause I want to hit that a hundred thousand. Like that's my goal. We're going to do it. Got to get some stuff listed. So our total, without the vehicles was $80,758. And of that, the, our cost of goods was $5,100.
Rob: This is important, guys, $5,100 is all we had to come out of pocket to make that $80,000 because the cars, we didn't count that in.
$5,100 to make $80,000. That's amazing. That's all we had to invest to make that. And our goal typically is 10 times our investment and we crushed it here for sure.
Melissa: And without the cars our average sale price per item was $1,442. Pretty cool, this year, so, and out of that, the sales tax was $3,615. So the easiest way for us to keep books is get the total sales that includes, we do a lot of free shipping, so that includes the shipping in it. But then we charge for some shipping. So it's hard to like, count it, like partly shipping, probably not. So we just include everything in the totals and then subtract it all out.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: So the fees were $5,380, and that is final value fees were $4,978.
This is the breakdown of it. The store, our store subscription costs us $335. You promoted three items, I think. That was $44 total.
Rob: We actually promoted more than three items, but only three items sold from the promotion. So meaning that they only those items sold with eBay promoting them to that person.
That's how it works. So we only got charged three promotion fees.
Melissa: You did have several times that you would promote it and then it would sell right after the promotion was over and you didn't get the fee, which was pretty cool. And an international fee of $23. So that was that breakdown, the shipping or total shipping cost.
And this is including all of our freight shipping. Freight shipments $5,539, which brings our total profits to $61,124.
Rob: $61,000! That's total profits guys. We still did that 10 X on the investment of $5,100 and, you know, that's awesome. That's super excited. We're excited about. I did want to, are our shipping fee, you guys can see is a little bit higher than most people.
But it's because we do the bigger items. This is what our model is. This is what allows us to work five hours a week and make $60,000 in profit a year. Because we sell the bigger items, our average cost of items sold is over $1,400. That is amazing.
That is so much fun for us to be able to do that and get to that. And we've honed these skills for over 20 years. We've been, been grooming this and working towards this, and it's really, really cool that we're able to do it. That gives us more time to spend with each other more time to spend on making videos and content.
To help other people do that. And it gives us more time to spend with our kids as well. So that's really our goal.
Melissa: You are more picky now, too, of what you buy, because you're only buying the stuff that is going to make you more money.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: Yeah. And now, so let's talk about what about returns. So what of those 56 items were returned?
So nobody wants to talk about the returns. They're not fun, but we did have three of them. And, but two of the three of them, and we actually just talked about one in a recent episode, episode 22, we talked about the shower pan that got returned, and how we were able to still get our money back from that.
That was a $700 one. And then the other return was the escalator cleaner.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: And we were able to get the money back from that one as well.
Rob: Both of those were high dollar ones. $1,100 or $1,200, I think it was $1,200 for that. It was a duplex escalator cleaner. So electric like a vacuum for an escalator.
That's what it was.
Melissa: The guy ended up doing a fraudulent charge, but he had signed for the item, which doesn't work out in his favor.
Rob: Communication back and forth. through eBay. Ebay had all that stuff so it worked out in our favor. We did not lose any money on it. It worked out in our favor on that one. The only one that did not work out.
Praise the Lord. It was a small one and I probably could have fought it, but I didn't. I chose not to. And it was actually a baby scale that we paid $10 for and we sold it for $130, $145 somewhere around there. Yeah, just recently I just got it back the other day, actually. So, that was the only one.
And only reason it came back was because it would not read in pounds. It only read in kilograms and the guy couldn't figure out how to change it over to pounds. When I got it back, I couldn't figure it out either. Ebay, they told me they recommended me doing it. I did not try to fight them.
I just did it. It was only $145, not a super big deal. I'll resell it and say that it's in kilograms and it cannot be changed two pounds, and somebody else will buy it. I mean, doctors offices they use scales like that. So it's, it's a commercial baby scale is what it is. So, but only one return that we actually had to facilitate, through all of our sales this last year.
Excited. We don't, if you guys don't know us very well, we do not take returns. We say all of our items are sold as is. We describe them. Well, we take good pictures. And in this case, like I said, this baby scale, I had no idea you couldn't change it over to pounds who would have ever thought. So I didn't really see anything about it.
I tested it to make sure it was working. It weighed, but it was in kilograms. I didn't think it was a big deal. So that on my, it is all my fault. So that's why we took it back and we'll just resell it and make our money back, with it. But will the buyer, the new buyer will have to know it only reads in kilogram.
So.
Melissa: Sometimes taking returns might make sense for your business, but for us, we sell all used items. We describe it as accurate as possible. We take the best pictures that we can and make sure the buyer knows and understands the condition of the item that they're getting. And we even sometimes maybe make it sound worse than it actually is.
So what they get is even better conditioning than they expected.
Rob: So it's accurately describing it. If you can't test it, we say this has not been tested. It's being sold as is, in that kind of instance, you know, people are taking the chance on it. We're giving them a great deal.
Melissa: On average at 50% retail is what our average prices.
Rob: Exactly.
So it's a really, really good deal for them, for sure.
Melissa: Unless it's some kind of collector or lately vintage items or vintage from our childhood.
Rob: Yeah. They're hot right now. So, well, let's talk about some of 2021. It was a killer year. We had a great time with our kids, with our family, with our members.
Yeah. So let's give you a couple of highlights of the year from our eyes. And hopefully you guys will appreciate it for sure.
Melissa: So we got to do our five week road trip across the country, 11,000 miles, and we saw many national parks. We went from Florida down around to Texas, to Arizona, up to Colorado to see some family then back down and around to California, up to Washington, to Michigan and back down to Florida.
Rob: So we got to see sequoias. We got to see redwoods. We got to see Zion. There's quite a few highlights. What else?
Melissa: Mount Rainier was one of my favorites.
Rob: So really, really cool. A fun road trip with our kids. Not only that we got to see some of our students, we probably hooked up with, eight or nine of our flipper university students.
So had a great time meeting with them around the country, meeting up for dinner. For a lunch, whatever it was. But just got to hang out with some people. It was a lot of fun. It was really, really cool. So definitely enjoyed the summer.
Melissa: And of course we brought our trailer. So our plan, we had planned to end with the 127 yard sale in Michigan, and then head back down to Florida with the 127 yard sale.
But by the time we got to Michigan, we had a full trailer. So. Yeah, we didn't really see the need. We actually did go one day and then we just went home. We were ready to be home at that point and we just went home. So we didn't really do the whole 127 yard sale. Although we did stop the first day you were thinking about, oh, maybe we should, you were getting excited again.
Rob: Once you get into it. So we had a good time.
Melissa: We bought 14 items on the road worth about $17,000, $17,150. And we spent $850 on those on the road. We sold four or five of them already. So they're in those totals that we already talked about.
Rob: So killer, killer road trip had fun visiting other people, got to visit these parts and pick up and work while we were on the road.
We found some really cool stuff all around the country. Brought it back actually on this road trip, we listed a lot of the stuff when we found it. I took it out at the hotels. We stayed in hotels. I took it out of the trailer at the hotels, got pictures, and got it listed. One of the items we sold like within 24 hours.
And I'll call attention to that. It was a $35 steamer commercial wallpaper remover. I think we sold it for like $750. So we paid $35 for it, sold it in 24 hours on the road for $750. And that almost paid for all of our items that we bought on the road. Cause we only spent $800 and some dollars. So killer deal on that.
Excited about that. That is our goal this year is to try and find more items, and be able to list them on the road, ship them out if we have to, so super, super excited for this coming year as well.
Melissa: Yeah, that was fun. I remember we, we didn't have reception for a little while we were driving through the desert, then all of a sudden it popped up. Cha-ching!
We did a lot of driving through some deserts over that trip. So that was a fun trip and we you want to do something like that pretty much every summer, if we can. Do some kind of road trip and yeah, it's fun.
Rob: So let's call it some attention to some of our students this year. Some of our students had some cool, cool stuff going on and, let's do a shoutout.
Melissa: Jack and Joan we got to talk to a couple of times. They're close to us, distance wise. So we've gotten to see them and talk to them on our podcast before.
So Jack and Joan are students that jumped in just over, just about over a year ago. And they had their highest 90 day total of almost $30,000.
So cool. And they're doing this in retirement together, which is so fun.
Rob: And they're having so much fun. It it's really, really cool. It's cool to see their journey for sure. Well, that's awesome. $30,000 in 90 days, that is killer.
Melissa: They actually got to show us some of their flips. We got to go to their place. They're not that far from us.
So that was pretty cool to see. So yeah, so that was awesome. Joanna bought a camper for $9,000 cash all from her flipping money, so that she'd been saving up. And she, even when she talked about it, like you could tell, like, she was like, okay, this is a big amount of money just to hand over. And she was a little nervous, but then she's like, I'm going to make it again.
It was so fun to hear her talk about it.
Rob: Joanna had a killer year and she's already jumped off the new year and she's making good money, good sales, so super excited for her growth as well.
Melissa: Some of these people we've talked to so we'll link to all, to any of their interviews in the notes for sure. Yep. Adam was averaging about $5,000 a month before he had his newborn.
Rob: But this is a side hustle for him as well. He's got a full-time job and he's still on the side hustle of flipping, which is awesome. $5,000 a month on the side. That is awesome. That's really, really killer.
Melissa: And at the beginning of the year, last year, Dena had posted that they paid for her daughter's wedding dress with flipping money. And then after that, she was able to quit her second job.
And she's like, yes, I know I said second job, but I don't have to do that anymore because of flipping now. It's covered with my flipping money. And she said it was the first Saturday that she hadn't...
Rob: Didn't have to get up at 5:00 a.m. That's so exciting for us to hear that kind of stuff. So absolutely love it for sure.
Melissa: And one, I remember one conversation we had just recently with Amy, that chess set that she sold.
I can't remember what she picked it for her, but it was something super low and she looked it up and it was some very rare. Oh. And it was during the time that the Queen's Gambit was really popular. That's what it was. So like knowing some of the stuff that is popular right now. She sold it for $900. It was some glass chest set.
Rob: So it was crazy, crazy.
Melissa: And she's averaging around $4,000 a month on vintage items. So I still get a kick out of that vintage items. Some of the times it's from childhood.
Rob: We're vintage now. No, it's pretty cool. It's cool to see that stuff. It's really cool to find that stuff and be able to flip it on the vintage items, which are usually from the eighties right now.
That is what's hot. So, and that's when I was a kid. It's awesome. But yeah.
Melissa: We did that CD player just recently.
Rob: That was manufactured in the nineties, early nineties, a CD player.
Melissa: You bought it for $30 and sold it for $500.
It's crazy.
Rob: Killer killer killer.
Melissa: So people are liking that stuff.
Rob: And then we had a couple of cool things happen in flipper university.
Our flea market flipper this year, that we got off the ground and had some cool, some good results with. Our well, our sourcing membership, this is the first year ever we've actually done this, to where we had people come in on a membership, and then we would help them source in their local areas.
So we've sourced all over the country, helping people find amazing deals that they can buy and then resell make good profits. So this is our first year on that.
Melissa: One of the biggest motivations was because you don't really need to be looking for it inventory. So now you can still get that thrill of looking for inventory.
Rob: But I absolutely love it.
I love finding those deals. That is what I'm really, really good at. So I love, I love helping other people do it. So, yeah. Yeah.
Melissa: And we also, hosted our sourcing workshop and, that, that was a four week one, which was pretty awesome. And then our shipping bootcamp and you can find we'll post those links, you can get the evergreen replays in the show notes too.
So that was a lot of fun.
Rob: And we did our, our first summit last year, which we joined hands with a whole bunch of other resellers and flippers. And, we put on a killer killer summit where everybody got to come together and watch all these different presentations and got to learn some amazing stuff from other resellers.
Melissa: That was a big event to put on. Like we've never done something like that before. So it was, but in getting to know other resellers has been so much fun and out of that, because we did that, then we decided to kick off the reseller hangout podcast.
Rob: So we started a podcast last year and I think we're like 25 episodes into it.
Melissa: We'll put these up all these links in the show notes if you're interested. Oh, and the kids started their eBay store this last year. So we did a lot in the spring with them. We didn't really do that much in the fall with them.
We were working on the summit and, so we kind of didn't really help them that much in the fall. But in the spring they sold like 14 items for about $400, I think, was their sales. So, so they were pretty excited about that.
Rob: Funny how it happened with our five-year-old. So Melissa was telling him to do his chores, which yeah, we give them a little bit of money to do chores and she was telling him if you want some money to go to your chores and he looked at her.
Dead serious and said, mom, I don't have to do chores anymore. I can make more money flipping. Dead serious. And we were like, both of us just started dying, laughing because he was serious. Oh my goodness. It was just crazy, crazy, crazy. So our kids were picking up on some crazy stuff, but it was a lot of fun.
Melissa: I definitely said, well, I didn't know what to say to them. Like, well, you're not wrong, but you still have to do your chores. Now I'm not going to pay you to do anything. So you still got to do your chores, but, so that was really funny. So hopefully, and he just sold something recently, just one of his old toys for $50.
It's a big old toy set.
So he was excited about that as well.
Rob: So that's awesome.
Melissa: We had one of our biggest sales, not our biggest ever transaction, but one of our biggest for the last year and a huge pallet.
Rob: It was our largest item. Last year it was our largest item that we sold and it was our highest profit item that we sold, which was the bus wash.
If you guys missed it. We sold a big, it was I think, a 11 or 12 foot tall. I think the pallet that we had to put it on was like seven foot wide, six foot tall, something like that really, really big. Built a pallet. And that one actually took us a little bit longer. It took me probably three days. I didn't, I didn't work on it eight hours a day.
I only worked a couple hours a day on it, but it took us eight days to build and we sold that for three days. Yeah. Three days to build. And how much did we sell it 14? Was it $14,500? So we paid $500 for it. And then we sold it for a $14,500. So definitely a killer sale for last year. Super excited about that one.
And I'm working on a couple more bus washes right now. Trying to negotiate, trying to negotiate a couple of bus washes that I could, snag and then hopefully get them resold as well this coming year. So excited about that.
Melissa: That probably did take you a little longer.
Rob: It did.
Melissa: You normally like to get it done in a day.
Rob: And then, well, still a total day. It didn't take me quite eight hours to do it, but I split it up into a couple hours, a couple of days doing it because that's how we work. Sometimes we don't have a couple hours to work, beofre I go pick up the kids from school or before we go do something else. So I have the time freedom to only put a couple hours here and there until.
But it did get, it stretched across a couple days.
Melissa: So when we did say, when we say we average five to 10 hours, so that week was more, but there's other weeks that are a lot less. So we only had, we only sold three items that month. But we didn't need to sell any more than we had the bus.
So that was actually, I think the month we were on the road trip.
Rob: Yeah, it was right when we got back. An amazing we sold an ice cream machine for $8,500 that we didn't pay anything for lady gave it to us for free. And then we sold the bus wash. We paid $500 for $14,500, and then one other big sale as well. I don't remember what it was, but yeah, only three sales that month.
And we were over 20 some thousand dollars. So it was killer killer month for sure.
Melissa: Yeah. And one thing I do have to say about only having the 56 items. It makes bookkeeping a lot easier. So,of course the best way is to do your books meet either, at least every month or every week, if you sell hot, really high volume.
But I mean, even going back after the year and just totaling up the numbers, it was not that crazy because it's not that many items.
Rob: And eBay's back office is so awesome. Now, you can go in and download an actual chart or an actual Excel spreadsheet of everything that you sold, the price that it was.
So it's very, very great for bookkeeping. Very, very easy. We had to go back in and add our freight shipping because freight does, when you, when you buy our freight shipping, we buy off of your days website. And we have to go back and add that in for bookkeeping. What else do we have to added cost of goods?
So it was edited, so it's easy in one spot. So we have one full spreadsheet now, but like most of us at 56 items come on. That's, that's awesome to make the profits that we were able to make. So. Killer killer deal.
Melissa: One highlight for me, was in the spring of last year, we got invited to be in a reselling challenge, be interviewed with, by Chalene Johnson.
So she's somebody that I've been following for a long time. I dunno, since I got started in the fitness industry so many years ago. So, so that was pretty fun. And she does this once a year, usually a reselling challenge. And because it's a quick way to make money and clean out your closet, she likes the decluttering aspect of it.
So it's a quick way to make money. And so it was a lot of fun to talk with her. And, and beyond that.
Rob: And we jumped into the biggest coaching program that we've ever done before. We're not coaching, we're actually receiving coaching, so we're paying for coaching very, very big investment for us. We're strong believers in always growing.
So if you guys don't know that much about us, we are Melissa and I are listening to podcasts or listening to audio books almost every single day while we're exercising, we're doing that. We're constantly investing into ourselves so we can get better so we can serve better so we can help better. That's our goal is to do that.
Melissa: So we went to our first in-person conference this year in two years, which was amazing because you hadn't been around a whole bunch of people in a long time. So that was really fun to be in a room with all those people. How many people were in there? Like 3,000 people?
It was awesome. So much fun.
We listened to some Myron was speaking and he said something about Myron golden said, if you're not moving forward, then you're regressing. You can't stand still.
Rob: Most people think if I'm not coaching, if I'm not learning, if I'm not investing into myself that I'm just standing still, he said, you can't do that.
And he took, for example, like a car, you park your car outside somewhere. You park your car and leave it there in the elements for 10 years, that car is not going to be the same. It's going to have rust. It's going to have all kinds of other issues. Pull that back to us and said, listen, if we're not growing, if we're not constantly trying to better ourselves, with education with stuff, then we're actually going backwards, word regressing and that really touched home for us. We're huge advocates and believers in always trying to grow a that's, what we always want to do. And that's kinda why we jumped into this coaching is a year coaching program. That it is a sacrifice for us to do it. But at the same time we want to be growing.
We want to be able to help you guys better. Kind of where this podcast was birthed at was this event that we went to because we want to help people get better at the flipping.
Melissa: Yeah. And that was also when we listened to Nick Santonastasso, and that was a big mindset shift for you. He really challenged us and especially you, and you're like, okay, I need to be doing more.
So it was an awesome conference. So always like find people that you like to listen to. And yeah. Learn from them and listen and books. And we don't really read it that much, but we do like to listen to audio books. So we have a list, we have an audible subscription and we listen to those on the road and listen to podcasts, audio books, encouraging because the world is so negative.
So, and listening to the news and listening, we don't do any of that stuff. So, just fill your mind with encouraging people and people that are where you want to be. And so. Get to your goals. So that's it. Yeah. So that was a 2021 recap in a nutshell.
Rob: A killer, killer year, super excited for 2022.
Moving forward, we are going to hit that goal this year of a hundred thousand dollars. Hopefully we'll stay five hours a week, you know, rough estimate on our time invested into the flipping gig. And then, yeah, we're just super excited for the year coming up. So.
Melissa: All right guys, check the show notes for all the links, if you're interested in any of the stuff that we talked about and we will see you soon.