Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about whether selling on eBay is worth it after all the fees.
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Is Selling On eBay Really Worth It After All The Fees?
Rob: What's up Pro Flippers, on today's episode we are talking about eBay fees, and more specifically, is it really worth selling on eBay because of all the fees?
Rob: Alright, so guys, today we are talking about eBay fees. Is it really worth selling on eBay because of what you have to pay in fees when you sell your items?
Melissa: And this could go a couple different ways, so we're going to talk about it.
So nobody loves eBay fees, right? You don't like any fees that you have to pay. It's for any platform you use or any, what is it? Payment processor use anything. It's not fun.
Rob: Nobody like nobody likes extra fees for sure.
Melissa: Yeah, so but are they worth it? So you have to kind of look at different things in your business. Like obviously numbers are super important so you have to see. Like it is important to keep track of what you're spending on inventory, what you're making on the item, and then take out the fees and the shipping costs and is it worth it?
You have to really do that evaluation in your own business. Like we can't tell you yes, it's always going to be worth it. It depends on what you're buying. It depends on your business itself.
Rob: Yeah. And for our type of business, when we're doing higher profit, larger items, the reason it works for us is because we can't sell those items as quickly as we can on the local market as we can on eBay.
We can find them in the local market and people are willing to take a huge discount because you don't have that many buyers in the local market. So it's going to eBay. We are, when we're selling it on eBay, yes we are having to pay fees, but it is totally worth it in our business model to be able to do it.
So let's break it down. Let's, talk about one of our, our sales that we've done, and kind of give you the, the, what the fees were, shipping and all that kind of stuff on top. And then you guys can make the decision yourself if it's something that you and your business model, if it really works for you.
Melissa: And you will try to cross post on Facebook if you can, if you think it's something that might move locally, you'll still cross post and sometimes stuff does move and then you don't have the fees, which is great. But the likelihood of somebody finding that exact item in your area is a lot less than if you post it on eBay and you're willing to ship.
Rob: So yeah, nine out of 10 times with those items that are cross posted on marketplace, we sell them on eBay versus marketplace. Just because you have to remember eBay is so much bigger than marketplace. It's nationwide. It's worldwide. We've shipped stuff out of the country before, it is so much easier to find people looking for that specific item when you have a bigger audience.
And that's why, for us, it is, it does make sense for us to be able to pay the fees, pay a little bit more money, and you can actually just allocate that towards to what you bought the item for, and you, that's how much you bought the item for when you add the fees into it, and you're still making good profit on the overall when you do high profit flipping.
Yeah.
Melissa: So I just pull, I went, scrolled back and just looked at one of our flip, flips, I grabbed the one from the, Total Gym. Yep. What was it? The, it's a commercial one though. That's why it was worth so much more money.
Rob: Rehabilitation. Yeah, so it was a commercial total gym. They use it in rehabilitation centers.
So it's bigger, it's heavier. One of those things that we actually got it in the local market, but we actually bought this on a road trip, when we were traveling across the country.
Melissa: We always have to look at marketplace.
Rob: Absolutely. We found this. I was super excited when I found it. We paid $40 for it.
Melissa: Yeah, so it was really low.
Rob: Really really really low.
Melissa: You didn't dicker or anything.
Rob: No, because I've sold a couple of these and I know when I see them that they are the commercial models. They didn't have it listed as that or anything. It was just a total gym. So we were able to find it $40 didn't try to negotiate the price on it. Just ask the guy if I could come and pick it up. We went and picked it up and then we sold it for was this $2,500? $2,500. $2,500. So forty dollars to twenty five hundred dollars now, you got to remember in the local market if, if I listed this, and I don't think I did cross post this on the marketplace.
Just because, like I said, it's a little bit harder to find somebody who will pay the money. Not impossible, but a little bit harder to find somebody who will pay the money that this is worth. And this is roughly five, six thousand dollar unit, new. So we got, you know, less than half of what it was actually, retailed for.
Melissa: That's why the business model works for that.
Rob: Absolutely. And that's one of those things that, yeah, we got it posted, we sold it for $2,500, and after all the fees, so what were our fees on that?
Melissa: So, eBay fees were $314, and while you, you look at that, like, $300 for fees, that is a lot, but, after shipping was $347, the profit was $1,800, $1,799, so the profit was $1,800.
Would that be worth paying the $314 in fees, absolutely, in that situation.
Rob: Yeah, and you think about how it did sell in the local market, and believe it or not, this one, the guy had it listed for probably months in the local market, where we bought it from, and he had it listed for $40. So it sold in the local market for $ 40, and then it sold on the nationwide market, which is eBay, or worldwide market for $2,500 still way under what retail is, but having to pay a little bit more money, even if we allocated that $315 towards what we paid for it, if I spent $350 on this to make $2,500, is that worth it? Absolutely. So that's kind of how you have to weigh out the fees. Now, if we were selling something, we bought it for $40 and we sold it for $50 or $60, yeah, not quite worth the fees on eBay.
So it definitely depends on your business model, what type of business model you have to see if it is worth it to be paying the eBay fees.
Melissa: And a big thing with the fees. Like people tell us all the time we put, we comment and they're like, oh, those eBay fees are so high, but it's because we're selling, you know, like we're thousands of dollars worth of stuff.
And to us, it's worth it. It would not move in the local market. So, it is worth it for us. And I had something I was going to say about that and now I can't remember what I was going to say.
Rob: Well, the local market, if you think about it, the, the reason that stuff does, you can get it very, very reasonable in the local market is because it's big.
Typically we're selling stuff like this total gym. It actually got shipped on a pallet. It didn't go in a box. It was a bigger, heavier unit that I shipped on a pallet. That type of unit, in the local market, if you can't find the buyer for it, the seller will keep discounting, the price of it to get rid of it because there are not enough buyers looking for that in the local market.
That's why you will find sellers that they'll have the price at $200, drop it down to $100, drop it down to $50 because they can't find the right buyer for that in the local market. When they take it to eBay, in the nationwide worldwide market, you can totally find the right person for it.
Melissa: And another thing that you could do also, which is kind of what I was going to I wanted to say, but I forgot was you can also create your own website and sell stuff or create your own like Shopify account and sell your own stuff and then your fees are going to be a lot lower.
You're going to pay like monthly for a store, for there, but then you still have to pay for advertising. So that's where eBay really helps out. Because they're such a big platform, you're paying the fees for them advertising for you. So, and yes, there is other fees you can pay. There's, different kinds of promotions.
There's several different kinds of promotions you can do on eBay. They are optional. You don't have to. You know, we go back and forth whether we use promoted listings or not. So each, it changes often. So, sometimes you have to use them to get your items with, especially if you have a lot of competition, for your items.
We don't typically have a ton of competition for our kinds of items, so we don't use them as much, but we still go in phases where we do use them.
Rob: Yeah, this is pretty huge. Like what Melissa was saying on the marketing portion of it. If you think of what eBay, so right now if I went onto Google and I searched for total gym, chances are you're going to find some stuff off of Amazon.
Google, I mean, eBay is one of the main search engines that Google. One of the main, things that websites, thank you, that Google will push. So if you put a specific model of something that you're looking for and the, Google will search all over the internet and typically Amazon and eBay are the two main ones that will come up for that.
We're not paying to get it on Google. That is where eBay is paying out that money for marketing to be able to do that and make it a, one of the high searches. If you have your own website, you have to pay to get it ranking. You have to advertise, you have to get that bigger,
Melissa: some other strategies, SEO and stuff, a lot of.
Different things to get your items sold. So if you have, we've talked about this before, if you have a niche thing and you're known for selling that one thing, it might, it could work for you for sure, but we kind of sell all different random stuff. So, having our own store website, it just wouldn't be worth the headache of listing it all on there and keeping the inventory and it's just easier on eBay.
And so it's worth the fees for us. So.
Rob: Absolutely. That's bringing it back full circle. Is it worth it in our business model? Yes. Your business model might be different. So you really have to weigh out if it is totally worth it in your business model, to be able to pay those fees on top of it. Because like this $300 is a lot of money in fees, but you can't look at it like fees.
You have to look at it that eBay is doing the marketing. They're providing the platform. They're bringing all the buyers to you around the world that might be interested in that. And if you look at it that way versus just fees, absolutely for us, it is totally worth it.
Melissa: And they are saying, I don't, this is still like, out there in the,, I'm not, don't know if it's true or not that the new promotions that they're doing for eBay.
That's what's going to get you to Google. But what we've seen, our stuff is still on Google when we've checked it on different browsers and stuff. So we'll see, we'll see how that goes. Yeah. And it's going to happen or not.
Rob: And remember the stuff that we're selling, we don't have thousands and thousands of competition for a lot of people that are selling on eBay, whether it's shirts, whether it's knickknacks, whether it's cell phone chargers, whatever it is, you're competing with thousands and thousands of sellers. We are not typically. That total gym was the only total gym of that type on eBay. So that makes eBay want to push that to Google. If somebody searches for commercial or rehabilitation, a total gym, they'll push them to ours because that is the only one out there available that is used and on the market. So you just have to think about that as well.
Melissa: Just found two more when you were sourcing for somebody that you did.
Rob: We did, actually in Tucson, Arizona, we actually found two more of those total gyms, that were the exact same model that we sold for $2,500. So, yeah, they're out there. These deals are all over the place.
They do not sell, and the ones that I found were actually a hundred dollars a piece. So a little bit more money still worth it. They're still worth it. Totally worth it. And paying the $300 on fees, still totally worth it overall. Because we're able to get it to a bigger market that is looking for that across the country so.
Melissa: So if you are interested in learning a little more about how our business model works, we have a free workshop. You can check it out. It's freeflippingworkshop.com. And you can check it out and see if it's a business model that you would enjoy doing too.
Rob: You guys are amazing. Have an awesome day and we'll see you on the next episode.