Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what they sold in January to make over $17,000 in eight sales on eBay.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - January's Numbers Are In And Over $17k In 8 Sales
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, January's numbers are in, and we're gonna go over them, but guess what? We averaged over $2,000 per item sold.
Melissa: And we're gonna dive into all the costs, the fees, and of course the profits.
Rob: All right, guys. So on today's episode, we are talking about January's numbers.
Super, super stoked to kick off the year with these high numbers. I'm very, very excited about it, and we are gonna dive into the nitty gritty and let you guys know all the numbers on what we bought and what we sold.
Melissa: And of course, all the shipping costs, the eBay fees, all that jazz. And of course the profits, because profits are the most important number.
If you're not making anything, you can't sustain your business so we need to be making, making sure that you're making money for your effort spent. So, absolutely. We are gonna start off. You wanna start off with the first one? Well, our total was, I don't think we said the total.
Rob: We did not.
Melissa: $17,994 in total sales.
Rob: Woohoo. $17,000 in sales. I love it for January. So the best part about that whole number is there were only eight sales in that, in the month of January. So it's not like we had to sell thousands and thousands of items to get to that $17,000, we only had to sold eight. We only had to sell eight items, which is awesome.
Melissa: And there wasn't even eight transactions because we bundled a cup couple together. Yeah. So, let's dive into the first one. So the first one was those Stryker cots that you got. Four of them.
Rob: The stretchers, if you guys remember, we actually bought 12 of these in one shot from one of my contacts who I buy tons of stuff from. Met him years and years ago at the flea market and then built a relationship with him.
And now he always is giving me sending, well, not giving me, but sending me items that he not giving, sending me items that he comes across throughout the week and I make a decision while he sent me a picture of these stretchers. I went over and worked a deal with him later that night and yeah, we ended up paying $183, I think is what it broke it down to per stretcher.
Melissa: Per stretcher. It was $2,200 for 12 stretchers. Yeah. And I have to say that I was not for this at first. I would, did not want him to purchase them, which is usually the case on a lot of the bigger stuff. I get nervous going out that much money. I, and I, I think that is a lot of money to go out.
And I'm like, okay, well, are we gonna turn it around quickly? Like what is gonna happen, but normally you don't make an, you don't gamble a lot. Yeah. So you're making an educated guess. So.
Rob: Yeah. And that was the case on these, I actually worked a deal with him that I told him I wanted to take one from him for a week before I, so I gave him a hundred dollars right there.
That's all the money I had in my wallet. I gave him a hundred dollars and I took one stretcher with me. This guy's, like I said, we've known each other, we've done deals for the last couple years, and he said, absolutely. And I told him I paying the, the remainder of the money, $2,100, the following, no, sorry.
I, yeah, I paid him $100 and I told him I'd give him another $500. The next day I'd go to the ATM and get him another $500 and then I'd paid him the remainder of the next week. So I was hoping I could take that one stretcher, clean it up, get pictures that night, get it listed, and have it sold before you had to pay them before I even had to pay anything for them, or pay the rest of the money for them.
So, But it didn't work out that quick. It ended up taking us about a week and a half. Yeah. So I ended up paying him, picking up the rest of the stretchers, but then paying him, the rest of the money before we actually sold any. But the cool thing was the first I, the first sell of January were four of them.
A local person saw them on eBay and bought four of them, all four of the cheaper models that I had. So I had four of the cheaper.
Melissa: And you took an offer.
Rob: I did. Four of the cheaper and then eight of the more expensive ones. So, he took the four cheap one or the cheaper models, which I think it was the Stryker mx was it, it was a 650 pound capacity. The bigger ones were the 700 pound capacity. So we sold those first. I did take an offer. I think I could have sat on him and made a little bit more money, but turn that stuff, moving 'em quick is the big thing. So we moved 'em quickly and it was a, a sweet flip on that. And yeah, that was a number one flip of January paid $183.
What did that average out for four?
Melissa: $732. And it was the average if you round up and then the Stryker cots were $6,000 sale, $732 item cost. eBay fees were $405 on this one.
Rob: Beautiful.
Melissa: And no shipping cost cause it was local pickup. So our total profit was $4,863.
Rob: I love it. So one thing to add on this one were the eBay fees. When they averaged this, I mean, when they took this transaction, it was one transaction for $6,000, $1,500 per item. They took this transaction as a $6,000 transaction. The problem was they actually showed it in their form, which I'm sure this is a computer, it's not somebody doing it.
But the computer broke it up into four transactions, which was $1,500 per transaction, which didn't meet the standards for when you sell something on eBay.
For us, when you have a store, when you sell something over $2,500 it, the fee caps at the 12%, 13%, whatever. You're paying caps at $2,500, it's 2.35% and then after that it drops to 2.35%.
So this should have been the 12% at $2,500 and the remainder of the money should have been dropped down to the fee at 2.35%. They didn't do that since they did four different transactions. I called 'em up, talked to 'em. It actually took me two calls, I think, to get it actually done. But they refunded, yeah, I think it was an extra three or $400 they had ended up refunding us back on fees that they took out because of how they did it. So if you are selling multiple items and it is going above that $2,500 threshold or that cap, make sure you're checking your fees to make sure they're not charging you over on the fees cuz they charged us 12%, whatever, 12% on that total $6,000. And that's how we got, we got charged more money for that. So just a little side note.
Melissa: And it does vary per category, but it, for the most categories, that cap is $2,500. If you have a store, it's $7,500 if you don't have a store, is that cap for? Yeah, so which we would've ended up paying the full fee price.
Rob: Absolutely. So if you are selling a larger profit items, higher dollar items, you wanna make sure that you do have a store, even if it's a basic store. You definitely want to have that. So you can
Melissa: wasn't it over like $300 that we got back?
Rob: Yeah. $300 or $400 because they did it on two of our transactions, back to back.
Melissa: Oh, yeah.
Rob: And I had to call them and have them process them both at the same time. I finally got to the right person the second time. I called her the third time and he did it for me, like lickity split. He did it really, really quick. Got it back into my account.
Melissa: It's just something in the system. It automatically does it. So it's not like they're doing it on purpose, but it automatically triggers it even though it was one transaction. So, but they haven't had a problem with get getting it to you as long as it's.
Rob: No, it was, it was pretty quick doing it. So make sure you're keeping an eye on your fees, especially if you are doing higher value items.
You wanna make sure that those fees are right when they're actually charging the fees. So I want, that was number one for January.
Melissa: I wanted to add one more thing to the piece that I thought of is there's a couple of people that had commented, well, if you sold sold at local pickup, then why did you not go outside of eBay?
Like you should have gone outside of eBay.
Rob: Bad idea.
Melissa: Which is not a good idea. Like we, you can, there are ways around it, but if you're, this is like our bread and butter. Yeah. Like if you get flagged and you, they shut your eBay account down, like it's not easy to open another one. You can't. You can be banned from eBay and then you're done.
Yeah. And like that's not in our best interest. So of course nobody wants to pay eBay fees, but we did sell it on eBay, pay the fees, $400 for a $6,000 sale. I mean, not that big a deal. It was, it was worth it. So.
Rob: So what is a legit way to sell outside of eBay if you guys are wanting to do that locally?
Don't try and get somebody on eBay's platform to give you your phone, their phone number. Don't do all that stuff. Legitly, how to do it is make sure you're multiple listing, you're listing in Facebook Marketplace, you're listing on OfferUp and you're listing on eBay. The same item if the buyer is local and they actually find you on Facebook Marketplace and reach out to you on Facebook Marketplace, awesome. You can save your fees, but this buyer didn't, he reached out through eBay, and he actually did the whole process through eBay. There's a certain layer of protection that people do really like about eBay. Yeah. Versus the other markets. And we're not gonna screw up our name on eBay or go outside of eBay when they're the ones who captured that buyer.
You don't wanna do that. It's just not the right thing to do. So that's why we don't do that. And we get a lot of comments on social media. Ah, you overpaid. Or you, you shouldn't have had to pay fees. You could have went outside. It's like, no, that's not how we, that's not how we roll. That's not what we do. So, just know moving forward, if you do try to do that, eBay will see it and they can ban you. They can totally.
Melissa: They might not see it the first time or they not, but it's just not worth it for the big picture.
Rob: Sooner later, it will catch up to you and yeah, you will, you will pay the consequences of that.
Melissa: And we have done, I remember the mower we did last year, the year before the buyer found you on Craigslist.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: And then he was, but people, so say you're, think of yourself as the buyer. You're looking up items, you're gonna look like we check Facebook Marketplace, we check Craigslist. Like if we're looking for a specific item, we'll check multiple different to see what's cheaper, eBay, we'll go on all of them.
And if you find the same item, then he reached out through Craigslist to do the local sale. Yep. So that's how you do that. So if it's listed on multiple, like you've said, but, and that happened with that guy. So, and he ended up going locally cuz he found us locally on Craigslist. So, yep.
Rob: Side note. Anyways, let's get to number two for January sales. Number two was the generator. So generator, the Miller generator sold for $4,400. So.
And this was a local one. We actually had it listed on eBay. This was Marketplace, right? It was, we had it listed on eBay, but we also had it in the local market. And somebody reached out through Marketplace. They actually came, inspected the generator. I actually told him the lowest I would go was $4,500 and it was not doing something exactly right when he was testing it. It was a small part that he had to fix a, a regulator. I don't remember what exactly what it was, but it was something small and he asked if I'd take a hundred bucks off of it and I said, yeah, I didn't know and I didn't disclose to him, that it wasn't idling right at low speeds when you weren't using it.
And he said it wasn't a big deal. So anyways, we sold it for $4,400.
Melissa: Did you end up taking like five, you said 500?
Rob: A hundred dollars off? Yeah. So this one was kind of cool. The way I figured out what we paid for this, do we have the, the, how much we paid?
Melissa: $800.
Rob: $800. Yeah. So I bought a truck, one of my trucks a couple years back.
I bought it from an auction, paid $800 for it, drove it for a couple years and then we traded this to a buddy who was starting up a tree business. He's a close friend. He needed a truck. And I said he actually traded this generator out for some tree work from somebody that he did work for. He traded it and got the generator and then I traded him the truck for the generator.
So we had $800 into the truck, and he had, I don't know how much he had into the generator, but anyway, so he swapped it and that's how I figured out what I paid for. It was really $800 and then we sold it for $4,400. So.
Melissa: The barter system isn't dead.
Rob: I love it. I love it. It's cool when you can barter and barter.
For sure. So, that's what we did on this one.
Melissa: I didn't realize that was a local one too.
Rob: Yep, a local, no, no shipping fees, no eBay fees. Nothing on that one.
Melissa: So, so our total out of minus $800 for the cost was $3,600 for profit.
Rob: Woo-hoo. Love it.
Melissa: And yeah, the warming drawer was a fun one. So big drawer for $400.
Rob: Found this one on a road trip over the summer, I believe it was.
Melissa: Yeah. Near my mom.
Rob: So paid $5 for this bad boy at a thrift store and picked it up and brought it home. Actually got two of these. We bought a lot more from that thrift store, but
Melissa: I have to say I spotted these at the thrift store.
Rob: Yeah, she did.
Melissa: I was like, these look like they should be something. Are they something? And then he looked them up. So.
Rob: Really cool. So we got two of those $5. Sold it on eBay. That one sold fairly quickly after I got it listed. I think it was within a week or two, well, a couple weeks, I don't wanna say exactly, but a couple weeks it sold and shipped it.
It sold on eBay, shipped it what were our total cost and fees on this one.
Melissa: Item cost $5. eBay fees, $52 shipping costs was $88, so that brought our profit to $255.
Rob: $255.
Melissa: And I think it was like two hours worth of work. Cause that's one thing we try to monitor too, like how many hours did it take us to make that?
So it was about two hours. Did you wanna say like when you say, okay, it was our summer road trip, but it didn't take that long to sell, but that was several months ago. The, the key factor in there is the time to get it listed. So that's what you've been working on and you're doing really, like, you're getting a lot of stuff listed now, which is really cool.
But that, like, sometimes people like, well it seems like it took a long time to sell. Well, no, we just had to get it listed.
Rob: Yeah. And I still have a Thermador set that I have not pulled out of, well, I have, we moved it around, but it's still not pictured and listed. That's what I'm working on this week, is getting those things pictured and listed. Beautiful Thermador set.
Melissa: They're more of a vintage set though, right?
Rob: It is a little bit vintage. I think it's from the nineties, but it's a matching oven, a double oven, microwave, cooktop, warming jar has all that stuff in it. So a really, really cool set, that we'll be getting that, that going too.
But anyways, onto the next one. Number three third sale for the month.
Melissa: The third sale for the month was actually, we attributed our yard sale. So it's not just one sale. But it was our yard sale and most of the items we sold, we actually got for free.
Rob: We did.
Melissa: So, our yard sale totaled $994 for two days, which it's a lot more work than it's worth.
Rob: It is , it's a lot of work, but it helps us get rid of some of the kids' toys, the kids accumulate stuff. If you have kids, you know what we're talking about. If you don't just be aware, kids accumulate toys, they accumulate all kinds of stuff. And it's a way for us to actually get the kids excited about selling stuff.
Our kids love doing a yard sale. They love selling cookies. They love doing that kind of thing, so, which is fun. It is just a lot of work for Melissa and I. It's two long days of yard sale, so more.
Melissa: Yeah. But, and then it's getting the stuff ready and we let them, we give the kids the choice if on the Friday before school, if they want to go to school or if they wanna stay and work the yard sale.
And we pretty much make them, and they usually always choose the yard sale. Yeah. We do it once or twice a year, but they, they, we make them process all the, the money and now we're making 'em do the math in their head. And, give change to people. So they, they're working through that and then they try to ask us, well, what's the answer?
Like, well, what do you think? And so, so that's been really good for them to learn that. And then we did give them a pretty good cut too. So we gave them each a hundred dollars. They worked the yard sale. They got rid of a lot of their own stuff they did. So, we gave 'em a hundred dollars each. And we opened a green light account. Before we've always done cash in envelopes, but just so they can see it, which I think is really good. But everything's so online now, and so we opened a green light account, and we're playing around with that so you can have a checking, a savings. They even play with investing, which we haven't done yet, but the kids can see it.
They see the money there in both accounts, so their spending, what they're saving and it's, it's pretty cool. So we'll put a link below if you're interested to check it out if you have kids. Absolutely. So it was a pretty cool little cool little thing.
Rob: So, so that added an, almost an extra thousand dollars to our top line from the yard sale. Just something we did in January. So we put it in here with it. And then what was number four? I think we are on number four.
Melissa: The last one. The last one, yeah. Yeah, fourth one on eBay if you don't count the yard sale. Cool. So yeah, fourth, was the Stryker Cots, the two.
Rob: So this was the higher one, the higher model cots and I didn't take an offer on these.
I did have it set up, which I was a little bit upset about. I had it set up for if you bought multiple ones. So I had four listed on eBay and I had it to eBay, kept putting on my app when I opened it up. Hey, offer discount for multiple sales. Which I did that, which the only bad thing about that, which is cool when you're selling small items, but this was a, and we didn't lose money, don't get me wrong at all, but I was a little more upset about them charging one shipping fee.
So we had the prices at $2,999 for the cots, and then I think it was an extra $299 for shipping, or $399. I don't remember exactly what it was, but, they didn't get charged that extra fee and they got a discount on the cot itself once they bought more than one. So that was kind of irritating to me. I should have looked through it a little bit better before I did it.
Still, we made some really, really good money cuz he sold for $3,000 a piece plus one shipping, which we didn't lose money in shipping. The guy was, I think, one or two states north of us. So shipping was not ridiculous on it. It wasn't bad at all. And it was a fairly easy pallet. It was just too on top of each other.
And yeah, got the pallets for free so I didn't have to buy any extra wood or anything like that. So, but like I said, it was just a little irritating that eBay gave the discount and didn't even charge for the second fee for shipping because it, it just, put 'em together. So anyway, something to note when you're doing multiple sales, just know if the eBay's asking you to discount it for the second and third and fourth sales, they might not give you the shipping price on that.
And freight is a big deal for that for sure.
Melissa: Yeah. And when you said about the pallets, don't ever, you should never have to spend money on your pallets. They're, I mean, unless you're building like some custom, custom pallet. Yeah. Custom, really custom pallet. But there are standard pallets out there everywhere.
Like some of our friends know now, like, you know, that we, what we do and like they'll be out and they'll see pallets on the side of the road. They send us a picture, but we get 'em from businesses that, yeah, if you're just go and ask people for pallets, they'll, they'll give 'em to you.
Rob: So it's not very difficult. You can go to a lot of strip malls or shopping centers around you and they'll be out back grocery. Just go in and ask if you can have 'em, if they're not gonna use 'em. And a lot of times they just give 'em to companies to get rid of 'em cuz they can't get rid of 'em. So, yeah, you don't have to buy pallets.
You can definitely find them for free. Yep. All right. So cool. So that's it. Those are all the sales for January, which, I mean, we had a total of eight sales, but two of those are, were multiple, yeah. Four items sold to one buyer and then two items sold to another buyer.
Melissa: So it's only four transactions.
Rob: Four transactions, which is better. We only had four transactions for that whole month of January. That was awesome. And then the total was over $2,000 per sale. So.
Melissa: $2,125 per sale if we take out the yard sale. Yep. So, right now our, the total sales were $17,994.
Rob: Almost $18,000.
Melissa: Item the cost of goods was $1,903. eBay fees, 9 $989, shipping costs $242.
And those two were not paying until the items sold. Yep. And then, so the total profit was $14,860. If you take out the yard sale, because some of the items we did give for free, some of 'em we paid whatever years ago. Yeah. Or whatever, but it's all of our items. But if you take out all of the money from the yard sale, $13,866, so.
Rob: Almost $14,000 in profit, I absolutely love it. Awesome when we can have a good month like that. Anything. Yeah. I mean, and not very many sales that we had to process.
Melissa: Four, four things you oh, four transactions and only two things you had to ship out. That's it. So you shipped out two things last month. That's that's pretty crazy. That's it.
Rob: So amazing. We absolutely love it for those months. I was gonna add one more thing, but I forgot what it was. Oh, that we only went out to make this much profit. We only had to go out of pocket just a little under $2,000, $1,900 and some dollars out of pocket. The rest of the fees came out after we sold. So, which is awesome.
That's a huge note in this business. We're not going out $10,000 to make an extra $3,000 or $4,000. We went out just like $2,000 to do this. So I love it. Absolutely love it.
Melissa: Yeah. And that's a, yeah, a big thing about when you do sell on certain platforms like eBay, like most of your sales are coming out after we talked about this, I think in one of our training groups the other day.
Yeah. Like and you're selling, you're trying to promote something, a Marketplace you're paying before and you don't even know if it's gonna sell, which is annoying. And I know there is another way you can promote on eBay and that's the same thing, but we don't do do that. But if you can pay after, like it makes so much more sense.
Rob: So, so what if you listen to this and you want to learn more, what is a great place that you can actually go pick up some more good tips? Where should they go?
Melissa: Freeflippingcourse.com. You can always check out. We have some great tips on there. It's a free intro course, if you're just getting started and we have a couple resources in the show notes, so you can check those out and see if any of those are helpful for you.
Rob: You guys rock. Have a great day. We'll see you on the next episode.