Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about how they made $12,000 last month with just seven flips.
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
Last Month’s Numbers Are In, 7 Sales For Over $12K
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about last month's numbers and over $12,000 in income!
Melissa: And, of course, we're gonna break down all the cost of goods, the shipping cost, our eBay fees, and, of course, the most important number, the profits.
Rob: All right, welcome back. It has been a little while since we jumped onto the podcast, had a lot of stuff going on in the last month, but we're excited to be back with you guys and let you know what happened and how our last month's numbers actually win.
Melissa: Yeah, we, I know we're a little bit late for December and we do, we will do a full recap of last year. We've got our numbers and we're excited to share them with you, but we've just, yeah, it's been a crazy month, but we're excited to be back and back at the podcast. And hopefully, you enjoy these and we enjoy doing them, so we've definitely missed doing this. And, hopefully we can help you learn something and to grow your flipping business.
So.
Rob: Absolutely. So let's break it down. So we are talking about last month's numbers, how many items we sold. Just the numbers of what actually went into our sales for last month. So let's kick it off. Let's do it.
Melissa: So our total sales was $12,424, sorry, $12,425. Yes, and that was seven items.
Rob: Seven items for over $12,000.
I absolutely love it. Had a blast with this. And I think we had one or two of these sales actually came in on marketplace, not just eBay, just one. One sale on marketplace. And the rest of them went through eBay. So, let's talk about what they are kind of a little story about them. And then let you guys know the biggest and most important part is the profit. What did we profit on these items?
Melissa: Yeah, and only one item was under a thousand dollars. Wow. That was Brody's item. So.
Rob: Cool. Our son sold a, a mosquito magnet, a mosquito. We can start with that one.
Melissa: That wasn't on first, but we can start with that one. So he sold a mosquito magnet. We got it on our road trip this summer. If you followed our stories or followed our road trip, we gave the kids a hundred dollars to go spend and see how much they can make from it. So that was one of his items.
Rob: Yep. And he picked it up. I think we negotiated the guy. What is $15? Negotiated the vendor or the seller.
Melissa: No, it was a garage sale.
It was a church garage sale. They had a whole bunch of stuff out there, so.
Rob: And we negotiated it down to $15. He got it for $15 and then we sold it for $175 on eBay. Which is killer! A good, a good markup on that $15 investment.
Melissa: He was super excited. He was. He even cleaned it up and and then shipped it out for you, with you.
Yep. So learned how to ship it out. So the cost of goods were $15. eBay fees on that were $24, shipping cost was $39. So his profit was $97. So.
Rob: $97, it was a hundred dollars for this item that we picked and sold on eBay. I love it.
Melissa: For a seven year old. He was super excited about that. He's like, I got all this money now, killer, killer money.
Yeah. And he hasn't spent it. So that's good. I'm proud of him. Absolutely. All right. The next one, which is actually our first one of the month was the commercial convection oven.
Rob: Commercial convection oven. We actually picked this up on a road trip, believe it or not. I think this was like two or three years ago.
Sitting in the back of my shop and I had it priced, competitively, and I knew I didn't really have to drop the price, but, yeah, so it's been sitting in the back of the shop. We actually got pictures of it on the road trip. I got it posted shortly after that and it took, took a little while to sell it.
Actually this one sold three or four times. Every time it sold, the buyer messaged me back before I shipped it and said, I want to cancel the transaction. I don't know why it happened, but that was the deal. It was this item for some reason. That was the deal with this item. And that's not something that normally happens to me.
Usually we sell an item, they pay for it, I ship it out, that's it. But this one, it was three or four times. And the surprising part was, this guy bought it and did the same exact thing. He emailed me and said, hey, I want to cancel that transaction. Like three or four emails immediately. Hey, I want to cancel it.
Don't ship it. Don't ship it. And then I got to the last email from him was, go ahead and ship it. I'm like, this is crazy. So we got it shipped out. He actually got it. He loved it. No problems with it. So it worked really well.
Melissa: But his was a more of a language barrier though, than anything else. So.
Rob: Yeah, he wasn't English.
So he. But he got it, and killer deal. $42 on this one, sold it for?
Melissa: And so, some people asked about this on social. How'd you get it for $42? Like, that's just a random number. It's because I think we got six items, I think it was, for $250. So, you bundled this in with a whole bunch of stuff that you bought from this lady.
So, it wasn't like a random I'm going to pay you $42. It was just what, that's what the total was with the bundle that we bought.
Rob: And she had a whole bunch of actually like 18 wheelers that her husband had. He passed away. He had stuff stored in them. I went in and I started picking stuff out that I wanted.
And then I just put everything together and said, hey, I'll take all this. Tell me how much. And like Melissa said, I think it was like $250.
Melissa: I think it was $250 for like six items. Is that the math? I don't know, but it came out to $42.
Rob: We calculated it. So we sold a couple of them. This is, I think, our last one that we had from a couple years ago.
Yeah, this was the last one that had not sold, so it was $42, all the other ones that we sold. That's how we kept track of it.
Melissa: And it was a was it a bread maker one or no?
Rob: It came from like a Subway. So it was actually an oven and a proofer together. And that's what it came, came through, or came from was a Subway store.
So, like I said, killer deal on it. We got it $42, sold it for, what was it?
Melissa: Sold it for $2,000. $2,000. So cost of the item was $42, eBay fees were $267, shipping cost was $347, and the profit was $1,386.
Rob: $1,386. Still over $1,000 for this flip. Was not super complicated to buy. We stored it for a little while, because it did sit in the warehouse for a little bit, but I pushed it in the back of the warehouse.
Not a big deal. It wasn't in the way, until it sold, and sometimes they do that with stuff, but to make $1,300, love it. Totally love it.
Melissa: We already talked about Mosquito Magnet, the next one was the Total Gym.
Rob: Total Gym! Got this one on, this was some road trip. This was this summer. Was it? Yeah, it was in Michigan.
Cool, so this one was really, really cool. It's funny how you remember where they were. I know, I found it, I knew we were on the road when we bought it. But it came from Michigan, so we found it, when we were staying at one of Melissa's uncle's house. And it was close to, actually, what was that little
theme park we went to?
Melissa: The, yeah, I know what you're talking about. In Holland. Dutch Village.
Rob: Dutch Village, yeah. Dutch Village. So, in Michigan, if you guys are from Michigan, we love when we go up there to see Melissa's family. We go to Dutch Village. And this one was within, like, ten minutes of Dutch Village, so.
Melissa: We take the kids once, like, when we go visit. We always take the kids up there.
Rob: A lot of fun. So, anyways, we ended up, setting it up to where we went to Dutch Village. On the way out there, I stopped, I set up this appointment because I found this Total Gym. I picked it up and it's not really called a Total Gym. It's the, it's the, it's a Pilates commercial Pilates machine, right?
Medical. It's a medical version of the Total Gym. They use them in rehab facilities. Super expensive, I think retail on it, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, something crazy. Just a really, really cool one. Got it, got it. For $40, he had it listed for $40. You didn't even try to I didn't him down 'cause I knew the price on it was ridiculous.
So I ended up, setting it up with him, to go pick it up. We picked it up.
Melissa: Yeah, and because we were staying with family, you had dropped our trailer, so we didn't have the trailer with us, so we had to get this thing in the back of the SUV, and that was a lot of fun.
Rob: I didn't think it'd be a problem, but it was a little tricky getting it in.
Melissa: It was a little tricky. Yeah, especially because we had the kids in the back. We made it happen and got it back so you could put it in the trailer. So, that was $40. eBay fees were $313 on that one. What was the total sale price? Oh, sorry, it sold for $2,500.
Rob: $2,500 from a $40 pick. I love those! Those are so much fun.
Melissa:
So eBay fees were,, $313. Shipment cost was $295, which brings our profit to $1,852.
Rob: So $1,000, almost $2,000 in profit on this bad boy, which is awesome. We love it. We are on the road trip. So that definitely paid for that road trip.
Melissa: Just by that one flip. I also have to add that, that one, that's, that's exactly what you do.
Like you knew we were going, we were driving an hour to go to Dutch Village. So you're like, okay, well, let me see if I can find something around that area. So you're not going out of your way. Like you already knew you were going there. Oh, and I found something. I'm going to go pick it up. So like you like to do that pretty much everywhere we go.
Rob: I like to try and play a pay for our vacations when we're doing something, when we're going out of town, I love to be able to pay for it by finding something while we're away, bring it back, sell it, just, that's just so awesome to be able to do that. That's what our, the potential of what we do is just insane for being able to do that.
And we typically do that almost everything that we do, we're able to pay for it, buy why we're away, we get something, bring it back and sell it.
Melissa: And it doesn't hurt to write off some mileage. All right. So the next one is the JennAir that we picked up in Boise.
Rob: Boise. Another on the road pick. It's crazy all around.
This one is cool. So we're staying with some friends in Boise at a mastermind. We were going to.
Melissa: And note that we did not drive here. We flew. And you still found something. I did.
Rob: I found something and the profit was there. So I definitely figured out how to do it. If there's a will, there's a way. That's the biggest takeaway this.
We couldn't bring this back. I couldn't fly it back with me. So what I ended up doing was while we were at our friend's house, I palleted this up. I put it on a pallet, got it all ready to ship. I got it listed. We sold it within a couple of weeks, after we left and I had my friend, take care of the shipping, for this item.
So, where there's a will, there's a way. And we paid $150 for this one?
Melissa: You paid $150 and sold it for $2,250. $2,250 plus $150.
Rob: Plus charged an extra $150 on shipping top of it. So yeah, we sold it for really, really good money for what we, ended up spending on it. Sold it in a couple weeks.
Melissa: And you put it on the pallet before we left.
I
Rob: did, I did. So my buddy, yeah, he took care of the rest of the shipping on that aspect of it. So it worked out really, really well. What was our total?
Melissa: eBay fees were $306 and shipping cost was $378.
Melissa: Yep. So then, I may bring our profit to $1,566.
Rob: $1,500. Love it for that $150 investment. That's the best part. And I will add on this cool, the cool part about this is. We're spending $150. That's all we're spending out of pocket. The rest of the money that is spent for eBay fees for shipping. Any of that other stuff doesn't come until we get our money.
So that's a very, very important part about this business. I could be investing, you know, a thousand dollars to make $1,500. We're not, we're investing very, very low amounts of money, and then we don't pay anything until it actually sells and we get our money from it. That's when we pay the rest of the fees out.
So it's really like that money was never ours anyways. Yeah. We just build it back into the price.
Melissa: And, because I was gonna say this at the end, but we didn't do any promoted listings. So we did not, no promoted listing. Oh. I guess it's not a front end thing anyway, so we didn't, do we Yeah, there's no front end.
Rob: Well, you still have to pay it on the back end. It's a lot more money.
Melissa: I know on the backend, but on the, I was thinking like front end investment before it sells. So we don't do any, like we don't pay eBay any insertion fees or anything because yeah, we don't want to pay them more than we have to.
Rob: We're constantly experimenting with it as well for promoted listings right now.
I started seeing that a lot of our stuff was getting seen more and better and selling without promoted listings. So I took it off of all of my listings. I don't do promoted listings right now. We'll see if that changes. I might have to switch back to do a 2 percent
It's
Melissa: different for different business models, but for us, we haven't done it.
So it is so all right.
Rob: Next number five, the pole saw. Pole saws. These are cool. So I bought, I think it was eight of these in one hit. These were not on the road trip. These were out of Orlando. I bought eight of these on one hit. I think I still have three left.
Melissa: I feel like it was an Offer Upper, Craigslist listing that you got them from.
Rob: It was. And I bought them from a lady who, yeah, I don't know, she got divorced or something like that. These were things that were left in her garage. She just sold them. What did we pay? Two hundred dollars?
Melissa: Yeah. You paid, I think, twenty five each is what we paid. Okay.
Rob: What we said. So, I bought a lot of, I bought a lot of them.
She just wanted them gone. She did. And we sold a couple of them and then I put them in the top of the shop. When I do this sometimes, I hate when I do this. And I was in the shop the other day and I'm like, man, those are up in the top end. Why are they not listed? Why don't I have them listed? I pulled them down, sold them within a couple of weeks, really, really quickly sale.
These actually went to Canada. Somebody in Canada bought them. Yeah. And shipped them over to Canada. So we paid, what was it, $75 for the three that we sold in one shot. Yep. And I'll, I will add, I also upsold this guy. He wanted one. And then I asked him, I told him I'd give him a better deal if he bought three of them.
And we, I worked at the deal and giving him a little bit of a discount to buy three, and it was $2,500 for three of them, which worked out really, really well. We made instead of $700, $800. Yeah, we, we made $2,500 on that. So think about that as well. When you are listing items that you have multiples of, make sure you're reaching out and letting your buyer know that you will give them a better deal if, if they buy more than one.
And that's what I did. We ended up selling $2,500 for a $75 investment.
Melissa: And eBay fees were $352, shipping cost $119 which brings the profit to $1,954.
Rob: Another almost two grand in profit. I love that after everything's said and done $2,000 is awesome. We love it. We'll take it all day long. So. Cool. Then.
Melissa: The next one was the ice merchandisers, so that was on Christmas break.
Rob: This one's cool. I've had these for quite a few, I would say at least two or three years. I had them at the shop and I had great intentions, so I've sold quite a few ice merchandisers. My contact would get them for me. Some of them would work and some of them weren't. These were not working when I got them and I had the intentions of, doing some YouTube research and fixing them.
I think there's a timer or something went bad on them, but they sat for so long I lost interest and it's like, all right, forget this. And they're big. Ice merchandisers are pretty big. That's where you store bags like companies, businesses, like a gas station store bags of ice in there to sell them out of.
So I had four of these and they're fairly large and finally I was like, all right, clean out the warehouse. We're getting rid of these bad boys. put them on, we ended up paying a hundred dollars a piece for them and we sold them for $1,100, $1,100 is what we sold it. But this one we sold on marketplace.
So no fees, we didn't pay anything on the back end of this. So it was $400 to $1,100.
Melissa: And so that was our highest buy in though.
Rob: But it was four different items. It wasn't, I didn't pay $400 up front. I bought four of these, so still $400, but for a thousand dollars, or $1,100. And like I said, no fees on this one and what else was I gonna say about this one on Marketplace?
I don't remember. Anyways, you sold it on Marketplace.
Melissa: So $700. $700 profit. Pretty sweet. And you didn't have, it was, you took them on as a project and then you just didn't have time for a project. Sometimes I do that. So sometimes you just gotta let it go. So, and you still, and that is one thing, you buy your items knowing that if you, you could don't have time to fix them or you don't like you're still not gonna lose money. So that is the one thing like you you know, you buy like I'm still not gonna lose money. It's just can I get it working or do I have the time to do it?
So projects have not been you know, you haven't had a huge time for projects.
Rob: So we had to get rid of it. So last but not least is number seven.
Melissa: The beer can I don't know. Is it a seamer or a sealer? What is the difference? Pretty cool.
Rob: I have I actually have two of these. Well, I had two I sold one of them. Is the other one listed yet?
It is listed. So this one is, it actually went overseas somewhere to, yeah, I don't want to talk too much about it, but anyways, it went out of the country, which is cool. I, it was kind of a, a weird situation when the guy bought it, because it was a, yeah, anyway, that doesn't have anything to do with it, but anyways, it went out of the country with it.
The, what it is is a. seal, a can sealer, so you think of how they make beer cans or soup cans. They have a machine that seals the top metal around the can. Once everything's poured into it. That's what this machine was. So I think it's called a seamer. A can seamer is what it was, was called. And this thing was like brand spanking new.
The guy reached out. I tried to upsell him as well cause I had two of them. He said, all I can afford is one. And I said, okay, no, no big deal. So we ended up selling it for, I took an offer on this one actually. He reached out, I sent an offer and he saw one of my other ones and he asked if I would take, or it would match the offer for it and it was $1,750.
I think originally I had it marked at $2,500, which is a pretty significant one, but the one I sent an offer for, I think I had it listed for a thousand. I'm sorry, $2,000 and I dropped it down to $1,750. He saw the other one that I listed for $2,500 and asked if I would do the same deal on that one. And I like money.
So I took the offer and $80 into it into $1,750. Like I said, those are no brainers. I want to do that. I want to keep merchandise moving so I can get more. And that was the big deal with this one.
Melissa: So I think that's it. So eBay fees were $216 shipping costs were $114. That brings the profit to $1,340.
Rob: $1,300. Love it.
Absolutely love it. So what is our grand total? So $14,000, was it $12,000 or $14,000, a little over
Melissa: $12,200 or sorry $12,425.
Rob: That's the total money generated last month was on the sales was a $12,000, a little over $12,000.
Melissa: To create that before fee, like what we had to, this is the exciting part. What we had to put up upfront was $802, $800 and $400 of that was those ice merchandisers.
Rob: Yeah. Which is really, and I've had those for a while too.
Melissa: So Yeah. But $802 to generate $12,425. That's it. So that's pretty exciting. eBay fees were $1,478 shipping costs, $1,292, which brings our total profit to $8,895, almost $9,000.
Rob: I love it. In. seven sales. That is the exciting part. Seven sales to create that almost $9,000 in profit.
I will make a real quick note about a lot of people get hung up on eBay fees, that you got to pay eBay to do this. Now I agree. I don't want to pay eBay to do this, but the majority of these items, six of these items would not sell locally. I had to get it to a bigger market. That's why it's so important to really know how to utilize eBay and don't get hung up on it.
When you're buying these items for the right price, you can afford to spend a little bit more money to get them to the right people and sell them as quick as possible on that, on that, on that platform. So just, yeah, quick note on that. Don't get hung up on eBay fees. They're here to help us. eBay has got to make money as well.
They're a business. Not that doesn't mean we love it, but no, and we don't get paid by eBay. I wish we got paid by eBay by to tell people that that's where we sell, but we do not get paid by eBay. But I'm telling you right now until another platform comes out, eBay is by far the best place to be selling the items that we sell.
Melissa: These kind of things. Absolutely. And the reason why our business model works is because you can find these items locally because people won't ship them and they're, you can find them for next to nothing. People just want them gone. They're moving, they're cleaning out, a restaurant went out of business.
There's so many reasons they don't want exercise equipment anymore. There's so many reasons why people get rid of them. They just, they want them out of the house and you can get them for next to nothing. Like that total gym for $40. Like he just listed it for, he just wanted it out of his garage. It was, you know, in his garage.
It's nice guy. Like he just wanted it gone.
Rob: He probably got it for free and he started it out like a hundred dollars. Couldn't get anybody to buy it $60, got it down to $40 and finally we came along at $40 and bought it. So that you'll find stuff like that all over the place. So speaking of that.
Melissa: We just put together a list.
Yeah.
Rob: This is a great opportunity to really find out what is selling, what is working well on eBay. So let's give you that opportunity.
Melissa: So just this last month, we created a resource of our 10 high profit picks of the month. So Rob has been putting them together each month and we just started, last month and we're really excited about it because we're going to send them to your inbox each month.
It's only $9 a month, so go check it out at highprofitlist.com. If you want that list sent to your inbox each month, you can cancel it anytime. No problem. But it's the stuff we're selling, the stuff some other people that we know are selling. And, and it's just, it's, it's a pretty cool, resource that you put together and you've been having a lot of fun with it.
It's a blast. You even started adding a bonus weird high profit flip.
Rob: Something that you're not gonna believe that actually sold on eBay for high profit. I will add, so these are items between $500. Oh yeah. And $2,000. And believe it or not, I think month two is where I went into and I did a nine out of 10 of those items.
Didn't go freight. Don't go freight. They actually go still in a box. So a lot of people get hung up on freight as well. You can still find high profit items that do not have to go on a pallet that we'll ship in a box. So we're having a lot of fun with this. If you guys want to check it out, like Melissa said, there's no, no contract.
If you guys want to jump in, grab an episode or a volume, a volume, whatever it's called an edition, whatever. If you just want to check it out and see what it is. I'll encourage you to do it and it will open your eyes to what is possible, what is out there for you to be able to be looking for and what is possible to really make some good money on.
Melissa: And we'll put the link in the show notes for you as well.
Rob: You guys rock. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully you guys had a great time with this episode. I know Melissa and I love doing these things. So you guys are awesome. We are back. You guys are awesome. Have an amazing day and we'll catch you on the next episode.