Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about a recent $6,000 flip and what you need to know about high profit eBay fees.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - Our Recent $6,000 Flip And What You Need To Know About High Profit ebay Fees
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? We are excited about today's episode. We are talking about a recent $6,000 flip that just happened last night.
Rob: All right, so today we are talking about the $6,000 flip that we just had come in last night. Super excited about it. So we're gonna give you the nitty gritty, the down and dirty on what we paid for it, what we sold it for, all that cool kind of stuff. So let's dive in.
Melissa: All the numbers. And this was one that I did not want you to buy, so I'll be the first to admit that I don't always want you to buy things, but I do like it when they sell.
Rob: Absolutely. She loves it when they sell, so this is a pretty cool one too cuz we get a lot of questions. Hey, how long are you sitting on items, especially high profit items? How long are you sitting on 'em? And this is, it, to be honest with people, it ranges.
You never know how long you're gonna sit on this. I priced this very, very competitively, and I took an offer on it to try and move it a little bit quicker. So this one we sat on for a little over a week and a half, just under two weeks. We had it listed, and we sold four of them. So if you guys don't know what we're talking about yet, it is.
Melissa: We just did a video and podcast on this not that long ago.
So it was the stretchers.
Rob: Stryker Stryker stretchers, Stryker, MX Pro, I believe they are MX Pro stretchers, like, ambulance stretchers or cots, they call 'em. That's what we bought. We bought
Melissa: We didn't buy one.
Rob: We bought 12 of 'em, and this was the cheapest model. So I had four at the cheapest model and then the more expensive models are, I have eight at the more expensive model.
So, somebody, somebody actually locally wanted these, the cheap model, and the wanted all four of 'em. So they sent me an offer in, I accepted, I mean, I put these I listed 'em at first without accepting offers, cuz typically I don't like to accept offers. But I'm trying to move some stuff this year, in the beginning of the year I'm trying to move stuff.
And typically I have people always reaching out, sending me an email saying, hey, would you do this? Would you take less? Would you take that? So I figured, what the heck? I'm just gonna throw a couple of these things in with an offer and see what happens. And that worked for this, somebody sent me an offer for $1,300, per unit.
And I had them listed at $2,300 and I think they were low balling me, and I think they would've paid more than I countered them. Melissa told me to take the $1,300. I countered it. I countered her countered at $1,500 per unit and they took it like that. Like they, they bought it, they paid for it quickly.
So I probably could have gone up even higher. $1,800 to $2,000 per unit made a little bit more money cuz they still got a heck of a deal. So that's what we did. Four cots at $1,500 a piece, which was $6,000 flip.
Melissa: I was gonna add that there is a dance to the two, like the negotiation sometimes, which I didn't even really think of, but somebody will make an offer and there is a time where you just accept it and you get paid right away. But if you're just negotiating in a messaging, it's not an, it's not that it automatically pays you. So it's a go back and forth. Yeah. And you always say, well, if you accept it right away, then they have something in mentally like mental.
Rob: I could have got it lower.
Melissa: It's a, it's a mentality thing.
Yeah. Like, okay, well if they're gonna go that low, then I could have got it lower. And then sometimes they don't go through with it. So, it's interesting to that it's, yeah, it's a science, dance. So.
Rob: And I will, I will add one thing to this too. The, like I said, I went back and I accepted, or I allowed people to send me offers.
So, before this, people would send me messages with offers, and then I would send them an offer on back to it for the offer they wanted, or a hundred or $200 more, and then they would never go through with a deal. The downfall to that is when they send me an offer, they're not in the contract or the legal binding contract with eBay when they just send it through Messenger or not messenger through message, eBay message.
Yeah. So now when I accept offers, they can legitimately send me an offer that they are binding to, at that price that they offer me versus just saying, hey, would you take $2,000, $2,000 a piece on these or, and then I have to try and do it afterwards, and then they could have buyer's remorse or think, well, I could have got it for less or I could have got it, you know what I mean?
So this way, when I did accept offers on these, they sent me the offer and they were binding to that offer. If I did decide, hey, I wanna sell this, I wanna move this quick, I could have jumped on their offer. They would've been binding to it to have to pay for it, and this time I sent 'em a counter offer cuz I, they were really, really low balling me.
And they took it super quick. So, just something to note. And we don't, I typically,
Melissa: you don't usually like to put, offer offers on.
Rob: I don't, because when you put offers on your listings, you're showing right away that you're not at your height. You're showing right away that they can offer you less and you'll take less.
And we try to put our prices competitively and making very, very, good, good prices at what we're selling 'em for. So we're already at a great price that people can click in and buy. But I, like I said, I wanted to move some things in the new year. I'm trying to make liquidate more. Exactly.
Liquidate, make, make some more money. And that was what I decided to try out on these and see if it worked and it paid off on this one.
Melissa: And I would add too, when people ask us how long do we sit on stuff and it does vary. It's very, you know, can be a day, it can be a month, it could be, you know, it, it definitely takes, it varies, but the longest part that we have to wait for a listing typically is you getting it listed.
So that's, yeah, it's, it sometimes takes you a lot longer, so that's usually why there's some lag time. It's actually getting it listed, so it's just doing the work sometimes for sure. It, it's the longest part, so for sure.
Rob: All right. Let's get to the nitty gritty. What did we make profit on this? How much did we pay for 'em?
How much, the sale, you know, it was $6,000 for four cots, for the ambulance stretchers. So, that was the total price that this buyer paid. We paid a hundred, what did we?
Melissa: $183 per unit.
Rob: $183 per unit. So totaling?
Melissa: $732.
Rob: $730 invested into this. That's all we had to pay out of pocket to actually grab these cots.
And then they actually sold for $6,000. What else did we have into it?
Melissa: And then we had fees. So that was not a topic.
Rob: This is another great point too. And you have to keep an eye on this. So the only time I've ever had eBay do the fees the wrong way is when it's multiple items. So how eBay breaks down their fees, and you're only dealing with this also when you're, you're selling high profit items.
So how they break down fees typically is they have different thresholds that they change, the actual percentage that they pay or that you pay them for selling the item. Now this was a total of $6,000 and it was one transaction at $6,000. Now eBay's fees are regulated or they, they put 'em in at $2,500.
So once you sell an item that's $2,500 or above, they charge you that initial, 12%, exactly 15%, whatever it is for that category. The bad one, and this one was 12%. That's the rough one. But after that $2,500, they drop it for a, the percentage goes down to like 2.3 or 3.2 something. Some crazy, crazy number for the existing, the, the rest of the money coming in for that sale.
So this should have been charged at $2,500 at 12%, which, what did that work out to me? Did Did you do that?
Melissa: No. I, $300.
Rob: $300. So that should have been $300 and then $3,500 at 3%, roughly two, I did 3%. Just say so 3%. So it should have, it should have come out at a total eBay fees for $405. Like I said, they've done this to me in the past.
I call them up. They see it and they fix it. And that's the same thing I did last night after the sale, I called 'em up and said, hey, you guys charged me wrong on this, it's got probably a computer error because a computer doesn't really see this.
Melissa: It's doing four transactions, but really it was one transaction, so we should be charged for one transaction versus four, even though there's four items.
Rob: That's how they did it.
They're
Melissa: only processing it one time.
Rob: So they charged $180 per item. So they treated it like four different transactions of $1,500, that way they could get their 12% on all $6,000. Now, like I said, I think the computer does this, so it's one of those things that, whether they don't have it set up the right way, whatever it is.
So, ended up charging us $700,
Melissa: $750. She didn't have any pro or $720. She didn't have any problem changing it for you, right?
Rob: Well, she didn't change it. It's not something that you just go on and change it and they give you money right away. It's something that has to go in and go through her approval back office, whatever it has to do.
So she submitted that. She told me it would take up to, I think they said up to five days, five business days to do it. Like I said, I've had it done before. Those, electrical panels that we sold a while back, we sold 10 of 'em. The same thing happened. It was a high, high dollar amount on one transaction, and they charged me per transaction because it was under that $2,500 per unit.
And it made sense that they got their 12% on the full. Yeah. Whatever it was on that, that transaction. So the same way on this, but no, no big deal. I called them up. They said it would take 'em up to five business days to straighten it out. They put the request in there. Yeah, they put their request in there.
So, right, as of right now, we paid seven hundred and twenty twenty seven. $2,720 on eDay fees. But I'm sure we will get back couple hundred dollars. This should be the $300. Yeah. A difference. Four. Four. Yeah. So we should get $300 back on that, which will bring our profit up. And yeah, that's kind of how it goes.
But, anyways, it's worth noting. So if you are selling higher profit items, you wanna keep an eye on that, especially when there are multiple items in one transaction. Yeah. Now if we would've sold this to four different people and it was at $1,500 a piece. Yeah. You can't do anything on that. They had to, they had to go through four different transactions and we would've had to pay that amount on that.
So, but on this case it was one transaction for the $6,000. So that's why it should have gone through the way that it.
Melissa: It always pays to check out your fees. Absolutely. And make sure you keep an eye on those. Absolutely. So, cuz you've noticed that right away. So that was pretty good. Yep. Yep. So, cost of goods was $732.
eBay fees, I went with $405 cuz we should be getting that $300 back, $315 back door problem. We are not shipping this one now. Yeah. So we actually, that was part of the deal is that it is a local, it's local, but you are at, you're gonna meet him.
Rob: On eBay. Yeah. And that's how I negotiated the offer back.
So he offered me $1,300 per cot. I offered it back at $1,500 and I said, hey, I can meet you halfway. I think the guy's about an hour and a half away from us, so we'll probably drive 45 minutes, somewhere in that area to try and meet him halfway so he doesn't have to come all the way to us, which is no big deal.
And so Melissa added $20 in gas, won't take very much at all to go 45 minutes to take us an hour and a half of our time to go meet him and deliver it. But that's one of those things that we did add in $20 in gas. So total profit after everything said and done was?
Melissa: $4,843.
Rob: $4,800. I love it. Love those cha-chings.
High profit. Sweet. So we only had to invest, what was it? Yeah, $700 and for the total, the cost.
Melissa: $732 is what the cost.
Rob: Yeah, so we only had to end, go out of pocket, $732 to make $4,000, $4,800, almost $5,000 on this sale. Super excited when that happens. We love these high profit flips. The best part is these are the cheapest of the Stryker cots that we got.
Now we have the other ones that are more, the other ones are a lot more expensive. Almost double. They are over double what we sold these for. So.
Melissa: So really we should be putting our cost of good to be a little lower and we should have made the other ones a little higher, but we just averaged out for $183.
Sure. But that's all right. Sure.
Rob: Yep. It's perfectly okay. Still almost $5,000 in profit. I'll take that every single day. That's amazing, amazing flip. So we love it. We wanted to share that with you guys. Super excited about that. Hopefully over the weekend, another cha-ching, we'll do another episode.
Exactly sold and, and some people might even ask too on this, hey, what if we did have to ship them? These were four, four stretchers. What would I have paid for shipping? Or what would it have cost? To be honest with you guys, just spitballing, depending on how far away they were, I would've, I would've expected to ship four of these.
It would've cost me between $400 and $500 is another expense I would've incurred on this sale had it had to be shipped and this one did not. So, yeah, because did you do free shipping on it? I did, yes, I did do free shipping on these. So a shipping is included. If I was shipping one of them. I, I would, I would anticipate probably $200.
I can ship one of these for $200 anywhere in the United States. When you do four, you're stacking them on top of each other. So I would get the rate cheaper and it's one single pallet, but it would be a little bit bigger than just shipping one. So like I said, four to 500 bucks is what I would estimate for shipping four of these.
One of 'em roughly $200 is what it'll cost me to do it. So, yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that helps guys. Hopefully, yeah.
Melissa: Take a couple tidbits away. Yeah. And we are just about to dive into our high profit four week training, which we're super excited about. We wanna help you guys make your first thousand dollars in a single flip.
So we do love these bigger items. We do obviously these bigger flips, and we wanna help you be able to do 'em too. So check it out.
Rob: So if you are pumped about high profit flipping, guys enrollments open right now, 1000flip.com. You can go there, enroll now for that we are kicking it off a little less than a week.
Live trainings for four weeks. We are gonna jump on, do some live trainings, some interviews, some trainings, and teach you guys how to take your first single item and sell it for a thousand dollars or more. Super excited about this one. So yeah, can't wait to see you guys, in the live trainings.
And you guys have a great day.
Melissa: We'll see you later.