Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what they sold in 2023 to make over $90,000 in sales.
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Over $90k In Sales Last Year & What Was Our Biggest Flip!
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about last year's numbers. They are in and over $90,000 in sales in part time hours.
Melissa: We're going to dive in, of course, to all of our costs, our eBay fees, shipping costs, and of course the profits. What do we get to take home?
Rob: All right, guys, we are excited about this episode. We get to kind of recap the do's, the don'ts, how we did a last year, our numbers, everything going into it. So excited to just, you know, go over that with you guys and let you know how we did.
Melissa: And it is already March and we realized that it's been a little while I've been, we've been meaning to get these numbers together and do a quick podcast about it. Because we like to be transparent with our sales and what we're doing, because we jumped into this full time back in 2016, but now it is gotten more part time. So we do more of the content, the coaching, that kind of thing. But we're still very much into the flipping game. So yeah.
Rob: Absolutely. And we're averaging roughly last year, roughly about five to 10 hours a week, sometimes less, sometimes maybe a little bit more depending on if we had a couple of sales that week. But the majority on average, five to 10 hours is what we did per week to make?
Melissa: $92,341.
Rob: It's kind of breathtaking. Took my breath.
Melissa: Was our total for last year. But the cool part about that, of our sales, was it was 46 items. So, less than a hundred, half of, less than a hundred items, less than 50 items to make that. So we're gonna obviously not go into all the items, but we wanted to highlight a couple of them. Yeah. So that brought our average sale price to $2,007 per just over $2,000 per, per item.
Rob: So imagine what if you did that in your business? How much, the reason we do it, if you guys are new around here, we do it because it takes us less time to sell one item, than what it usually takes resellers to sell 200 items at a $10 profit when we get to that point. So that's what we really, really strive for is really less time in the business more profit on the back end.
So we can spend more time doing, Melissa and I together and with our families, to be able to do that. So that's what we're really, really striving for.
Melissa: And we didn't start here. Like we've gravitated towards this business model because for us it just makes sense because we can spend a lot less time thinking about how many you still have to find items, you still have to take pictures, you have to list items. And when you can do that for one item for a thousand or two thousand dollars, it it motivates you a little bit more than absolutely staring at a death pile of hundreds of small items. At least to us like there's nothing wrong with either There's so many different ways and we brought on and so many amazing guests on this podcast who have done things so different than we do them.
And there's just so many different ways to do this business, which is so cool. It is. But this is the way that we prefer works for us. It works for us.
Rob: So absolutely. So nothing wrong with the other ways, it's just what we found out works the best for us to spend the least amount of time in our business and make the most amount of money out of it.
So let's jump in.
Melissa: One of our goals for our flipping business is to 10 x our investment. So we strive to, if we're gonna spend a hundred dollars, we're not looking to sell that item for $200. We wanna sell it for a thousand dollars. So.
Rob: I'm pretty sure we averaged that last year. I mean, we'll go into the numbers, but overall, like Melissa said, 46 items sold, over $90,000 created in inventory.
I mean, it created in sales. You want to know how much invested, how much invested into to make that? This is a really impressive number. So how much did it take us to be able to make that $92,000 in sales?
Melissa: $7,359 in inventory.
Rob: $7,300 throughout the year to invest for that inventory to be able to sell on over $90,000, which is pretty dang cool.
Melissa: Which is 12.5 X our investment. So we overshot our goal just by a little bit. So which is pretty cool. So that because that number is important to us because that allows us to have enough room wiggle room for shipping costs, for eBay fees so that we still are able to bring home some profits.
Rob: Absolutely. It's huge.
Melissa: All right. Do you want to dive into any of that? Do you want me to dive into the eBay fees and shipping costs or did you want to talk about a couple of the items?
Rob: Sure, we can talk about a couple of the items. So what was the biggest needle mover for us last year? Okay, you want to wait for that one?
Melissa: I was gonna wait.
Rob: Cool. Let's wait. Hit me up. What you got?
Melissa: I was gonna say our largest in a single item. So, okay largest flip single item. One single item was the Turbo Chef.
Rob: Turbo chef. Which one was this?
Melissa: This was the second or the third Turbo Chef we sold. The other two were last year. This year it was $6,250.
That was the one you got on Marketplace.
Rob: Marketplace, paid $150 for this Turbo Chef. The guy was asking $300, bought it for a restaurant or a brewery that he was doing, went in different directions, threw it on marketplace. We actually snagged this for $150, got it sold. And the cool thing about this one was it paid for our Hawaii cruise over the summer.
So this was a really, really near and dear to our heart. We did this one flip paid for our whole cruise from, that was your goal. LA to Hawaii and then back to LA. So 17 day cruise, for our family, to go on that. So really, really cool. But that was our highest flip of last year that we did. $6,250.
Melissa: That was your goal is to pay for the cruise with one flip, and you came pretty darn close to with that one. Yep.
Rob: It was pretty awesome.
Melissa: So, what are some other, we actually had a couple of good Facebook sales too. You had a couple of your pieces of equipment that you sold on Facebook. So that helped a lot too.
Cool. I was trying to think of any other fun ones that stood out. We got a couple from the road trip that you sold that cooktop, the, the white cooktop. That was a fun one you got for $65 and sold for $1,500.
Rob: It was a cool one. The guy was going to take it to the scrap yard that day. If we didn't pick it up.
He actually looked at my Facebook cause he had him listed on Facebook. He had Facebook marketplace. He had it on there and he saw that I was from Florida. We picked that up when we were on our way to Niagara Falls. So I don't remember what state it was in on our way there. Was it Ohio? So in Ohio we picked that up and the guy said he looked at my Facebook and saw that I was from Florida and he's like, this guy's not legit.
He's not real, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt or the benefit of the doubt, is that the right word? Yeah. The benefit of the doubt, and waited for us to show up. I responded to him the whole time we were on our way, set up a time with him, picked it up and he was so excited that we were able to get there. He did not want to scrap it.
He would have made less money and it was a really, really nice cooktop, that we got. We paid $65 for it and sold it for 1$1,500. $1,500. We sold it for, and fairly quickly. I think this one sold really, really quickly within two weeks I believe it was. So killer, killer deal on that one. You just got to get it listed.
That's the biggest thing. They got to get listed and they'll sell quickly once they get listed.
Melissa: Moral of the story is get it listed.
Rob: Should we talk about the most profitable flips? Cool. So this was a fun one in this. Hip happened in the beginning of 2023. These actually came from one of my contacts, at the flea market, a guy that I bought tons and tons of items from, but met him at the flea market years and years ago and just kept in relationship with him.
He's always gotten new and cool items. He sent me a picture of, 12 stretchers. These are ambulance stretchers, that he got from one of his contacts, sent me over the picture of them. And Melissa told me no. Do not buy these. Do not do it. So she didn't want me to do it.
Melissa: I said no.
Rob: I negotiated a deal with him.
We actually got them for $2,200 is what I negotiated to for 12 stretchers. What did that break down to be? Around $180 some dollars? $183 I think is what we figured. Okay. Around $180 per stretcher. Those were the biggest hit of 2023. We ended up making.
Melissa: And I said no, but you did it anyway. And you, you do.
So as a like marriage, you don't want to go against what your spouse is saying, but there are some times you just know, like I'm saying no, because I get nervous of the investment. He's like, I know they're going to sell. It didn't cause a huge fight, especially once one sold, then we're good to go. And you're like, all right, keep selling them.
Rob: Yeah.
The first ones that we actually sold on that, we sold four together and I sold them too cheap because I was a little bit nervous. I was nervous, that we had $2,200. That's a lot. If you guys are new around here, we don't invest that kind of money lightly. I, if I take out $2,200, I have to know that I'm going to really, really, you know, 10 X my investment.
And this, it actually did 10 X our investment on the $2,200 that we made. I mean that we spent, and it was a little scary at first. And I sold the first four of them to one person locally. And I sold them way, way too cheap. I think I ended up selling them. Was it like $1,500 a piece? Yeah. $1,500, four of them, four of them,
$1,500 a piece.
Melissa: You didn't have shipping costs.
Rob: Nope, we didn't have shipping on that one. So I sold those, but I still sold them fairly quickly. I think it was in like a week or so. Yeah, it was very, I, within the first, you know, two weeks, that we bought them. So I, that was my real goal. My goal with this was actually I picked up one after I made the deal.
I, I paid my contact and sometimes he lets me do this. I paid him, I had a couple hundred bucks in my pocket, paid him a couple hundred dollars towards it, took one of them and I took it home, got it listed that night. I was hoping to sell the one single one and pay for all of them. And it didn't work out in this time.
I had to pick them up like within a week and I ended up paying him the rest. And then we brought them back, sold the four of them were the first bunch that we sold and it was like $6,000 for four of them. And then after that they started going, we got higher and higher, higher, higher prices on them and ended up making, what was the total?
Melissa: $35,650.
Rob: So over $35,000 on a $2,200 investment. So love that. We absolutely love when we're able to do this and we probably could have hit closer to $40,000 or $50,000 if I had not got a little bit nervous in the beginning, and sold the, a couple of them. I could have got more money for them if I sat on them and just a little bit longer.
Melissa: Just a note. And I know we've talked about this before, but almost every year there's one item that we get a deal on a lot of them, like a lump sum of them. And then we're able to sell them off and off and which is really cool. Like we've done that. I think it was two years ago was those, because of the COVID and the backups was those,, electric panels sold like hotcakes.
We made lots of money on those and you bought those for like. Was it $10 per panel or something?
Rob: It was very, very cheap. I don't remember exactly what it was. But I bought a trailer full of them.
Melissa: Yeah, we made thousands of dollars on those.
Rob: Tens of thousands. Yeah, yeah. Definitely.
Melissa: I can't remember what the actual number was, but I know we talked about it.
But, but yeah.
Rob: We look for that. We look for those items that we can buy in bulk. But they're high profit items.
Melissa: Because you can get them for super cheap, yeah.
Rob: Absolutely. So we're looking for high profit, the 60 sleep number mattresses. We bought, we should dive into that story one time too. Sometimes that's a really fun one.
But 60 sleep number king size mattresses that we bought from a hotel. This is not last year. This is a couple of years ago, eight years, nine years ago. Wow. You know, because of our middle child was born, Lexi was born, right around that time.
Yeah. Cause you left the hospital to go pick them up. We'll have to do that story.
We'll do that story on another podcast, but right now, last year's.
Melissa: But that was $30,000 too. So and lump sum. So.
Rob: Well, let's break it down. So between that, I think the majority, our top twenties were all over a thousand dollar flips. And it averaged out with everything that we did, it averaged out to be over $2,000 per flip for those 46 items that we sold.
I love it. Let's talk about that. This is important. So we only had to invest seven and a little over $7,000, to make the $92,000 that we made on sales in this last year.
Melissa: Cause, which is important because the nets comes out after you make the sale. So we don't do a lot of upfront. We don't do any, you don't do any, upfront, promotions on eBay.
So we don't pay for insertion fees. We don't pay for the promotions up front, the ads or another trying to promote those right now. Maybe that will change this year. We'll see. Cause they want their eBay's trying different things with promoted listings, but right now we're not doing them. Yep, and we haven't done them.
So nothing upfront other than the initial investment. That's it. All right. So eBay fees, $7,694. So do remember some of these were on Facebook, so, I think we had $19,000 was on Facebook and $73,000 was on, eBay. Yep. That is eBay fees. And sometimes people are like, well, it's like, isn't it around 13 percent or more, 15%?
It really depends on your category. And then one thing that's super cool. It is cool. Is once you get over $2,500, the initial, percentage, so say your percentage is 13 percent of that category. If you're selling something that's over $2,500, then it drops down to about 2.9%.
Rob: 2.3 it is.
Melissa: I think it depends on the category. But, yeah, 2.3, 2.5 percent for the remainder. So say that Thermador we sold for $6,250. We're, we pay 13 percent on the first $2,500 and then the rest is the 2.3, 2.5%.
Rob: It's awesome, so that helps us. Years ago, eBay capped it and this was really even awesome. Better when they capped it, they used to cap it at $350, when you had a store.
So they, any sale that you did, it was $350 flat. If it was underneath that, it was at the, the fees, the rates, the percentage. But then once it got up to at least $350, that's where they capped it, and they would not go over that. Now, we had to pay a little bit more on some of our stuff, but still. It's still worth it for those bigger items.
And we're not paying this. Remember, we're not paying this up front to sell this. We're not advertising these items for sale, hoping that they sell for a lot of other platforms that you have to actually advertise for sale, and then if they sell, you, you did a good job. If they don't sell, you wasted some money.
So, eBay's not like that. We list almost everything we do for free, and then we don't have to pay until it backends. So, we paid a little over $7,000 in eBay fees. What else whatever.
Melissa: I don't. I should have calculated how much that that was promoted, but we didn't do a ton of promoting.
Rob: No, we did a couple because we experiment every once in a while.
Melissa: There were a couple but I should have counted out.
Rob: That's alright. But the majority of what we do we try not to do promoted. I know in December I made sure I took all my promotions off and we still did $12,000 or $13,000 in December.
Melissa: But we know that is up for debate right now. So that is definitely something they're always changing. We're constantly testing like at this point, do I need to promote at this point?
Do I not need to promote? Like what is it going to be right now? So what's the new thing? So right now we're still playing around with it. So just need to promote.
Rob: So what about shipping? So you guys know we do high profit items. What did we spend on shipping last year?
Melissa: All right. So shipping costs in a box were $1,090.
So everything that went FedEx and UPS, we don't really do a lot of USPS. Maybe you had one item that was $20. Everything else was over, $100. $100 for shipping? No, no, no. $100 for sale. Oh, okay. You had that one cleaner. The cleaner that I've had? Yeah, you've had that forever. Ah, they throw our numbers off. You sell one off every once in a while.
They throw our numbers off. $20. Everything else was over $100. But, so shipping cost in a box was $1,090. Freight shipping was $3,259, which brings our total shipping cost to $4,349.
Rob: So we spent $4,000, just over $4,000 last year on freight or shipping in a box, no matter where it was. Cool thing about it is when we use eBay for shipping, they save us usually 50 percent on, creating our listings through our, our shipments through eBay, using their platform to create those.
And now even. Way cooler is even our freight stuff right now. We've joined forces with a broker who can give us the cheapest freight shipments anywhere, the cost on free shipments, which we've just done that. We've dreamed about that for the last nine years. So we could give that to our members.
Yes. Finally, we have joined with a broker. So. Now we are, double dangerous, doubling down on what we're able to get for our discounts.
Melissa: That was a huge thing last year. If you guys knew, when YRC went out, that was definitely a, a huge hit to everybody because they're one of the biggest, was that one of the biggest?
I mean, they're a huge company.
Rob: Yeah, I think they're in the top five of the country.
Melissa: They were who we used the most. And, and when, so when they went out of business, we had to be like, all right, what are we doing now? Let's figure this out. So, so yeah, that was a, it was a transition, but we, you know, we did it.
Rob: And now we're better off because we actually have a broker in our back pocket that we've joined forces with, to get even cheaper rates. then what we were getting with YRC when YRC, we used them, that was what it was. So super excited about this and moving forward for this year. Last year we joined in, yeah, so a hundred percent we're excited about shipping moving forward into 2024 and 2025.
Melissa: All right. So the next part that we need to talk about is refunds. So refunds are always a part of business and I'm always amazed. So if you ever follow like Amazon sellers. We've never sold on Amazon, so that's not our thing. But I'm always amazed at how big their numbers are. Their numbers are huge. But when I had somebody, a friend that I'm with on Facebook, he started breaking down numbers of like all the fees and everything and then refunds and fees and everything and it like, it was crazy.
Rob: You read me one month and they were at a hundred thousand dollars in one month. But guess how much money they made. They went in the hole with their Amazon business.
Melissa: Because of refunds and we're not this is not not to knock Amazon or anything. No, it was just like to be like wow, it's really important to look at your numbers like to know what are you actually bringing in. Because all those fees all those extra things so you have to really end the return high volume on Amazon because we don't like returns.
So, if you've been around here, you know we don't accept returns. Of course, eBay can force some things in some instances, but we don't as a whole accept returns. And that's because our items are, people want, they just want them and they want them to work. They're not like.
Rob: That's the cool thing about higher value, higher dollar items is typically if
Melissa: you're not trying them on and returning. They want them to work. They they know the model.
They want that model of whatever we're selling and they just want to work so well. So we had no refunds last year. So that's exciting. We had one that was almost a refund. She started a refund request, but it was something when she got it was jostled and she couldn't get it was a one of those. What was it, the telescope?
Rob: It was a telescopic hood.
Melissa: You sold it for $1,000. You bought that for $30 on one of our road trips.
Rob: I did. And then we sold it for $1,000. And when it got to her, it had jostled. So it actually went through, it was in a box. It wasn't on pallet. It jostled around. And for this hood to work properly, the filter inside of it has to be inside the little container.
If you pull the filter out, it's made not to work. It got jostled a little bit. I got on the phone with her. I actually troubleshot it with her on the phone, telling her that everything was perfectly fine. And then she got in there and saw that the filter was loose or out of its slot. She pushed it back in, worked perfect.
We did, we did not take a return on that. She was very happy with it. So that worked out in our favor.
Melissa: That goes onto to customer service too. Absolutely. And you do have to read your people. 'cause there are some people that'll say, hey, they wanna return and they're trying to get something for you. Or they're trying to strong arm you into a partial return and you kind of just have to go back and forth a little bit and read them.
But just having good customer service really helped you with that one. Absolutely. You actually ended up getting on the phone with her and talking to her. So.
Rob: I did. It worked out really well. It worked out well. Cool.
Melissa: For that one, but we, so no returns, but we did have some cancellations, which we don't usually count in as returns because we didn't do anything for them. We didn't ship it, we didn't do anything. We didn't ship it. They, I can't. Either we canceled it. So three of these were from that, you couldn't find them. Yep. They were smaller items that you couldn't find. And so they, you canceled 'em. I did. We didn't, they didn't cancel 'em.
So.
Rob: So that's the problem with what we do, we sell bigger items that are higher profit. And sometimes I'll go into a listing challenge with our group and I'll list some things throughout a month and I'll try and list steadily and sometimes I'll list some smaller items just to get the listing done and then I can never find those small items when they sell.
This happened, I think three times, it was three times throughout this last year that I actually sold something like an owner's manual to something or something small. And then I could not find it anywhere. So I had to refund the listing or refund the, the item, which it's not the end of the world.
We don't do this a lot. And typically we definitely don't do it on a higher profit items. It's more of the lower, lower cost, lower items that we have smaller stuff that I might put into a tub, put it into the shop and then I can't find it.
Melissa: That TiVo remote? And then the one was the manual. So I think it was two items.
Rob: Yeah. So those were items that I put in the shop, could not find them. So when I do clean out my shop someday, I will find them. And then we'll list them back. And hopefully I'll remember where I put it.
Melissa: But remember this, one of our words for this year is to organize. Simplify and organize. So that is what we're working on this year.
And that's one of our goals this summer is to get organized. And this whole year we're working towards it. And we're making progress. So, and two of the items you also canceled, which you don't want to make it a pro, like a thing to keep, to cancel. That's not good for your store. But two of them you ended up cancelling because the shipping cost was going to be too high.
They were right on that border of of, it being too big. You thought one of them would fit in a box. You thought they both would fit in a box.
Rob: I thought it would come apart. So I had one extended carrier that I bought and I thought it would come apart and go into a box and to be a piece of cake to ship after I sold it.
Then see, I still make mistakes, guys. This is not something you will make mistakes in this business. This is, I've been doing this for almost three decades and I still do stuff like this and I'll make a mistake. I sold this and thought it would come apart. I thought I could just unbolt it, stick it into a box.
And I thought that's how it was originally shipped from the manufacturer. But it wasn't, it would not come apart. It was actually pop riveted. So it wasn't stuff that could come apart. So I ended up having to cancel that one and then I had to re list it knowing that it was going to go on a, a pallet, on a, and then we sold it on a pallet, I mean we sold it and shipped it on a pallet, not a huge ordeal but you don't want to charge more for shipping.
Exactly.
Melissa: That was a $700 item so you were going to eat up a ton of. Yeah. You wouldn't have anything left in shipping.
Rob: So you just have to be careful on that, when you do that. So I thought it was going to go in a box. I thought I had it for shipped under a hundred dollars and ended up costing me a couple hundred dollars to ship it, which I just had to cancel that transaction, let the buyer know that it was going to cost too much cause they couldn't ship it in a box.
And then I actually did it with a pallet and believe it or not the original seller that our buyer that I, that I sold this item to, he was willing to pay the extra money on top of it to get it shipped. And then right before I shipped it, he said he found one locally and he didn't need it. So we ended up selling it to somebody else.
We did. We refunded that one to him and then relisted it knowing that I was going to have to pallet ship it. And we resold it like that and still made good, good money on it.
Melissa: Is that the same thing that happened with the Cadillac door?
Rob: Cadillac door, the same thing. So I had it listed and what happened.
This was before we actually had our partnership that we have with our broker now. And I was gonna have to pay, I think it was, I had it quoted out at $200 for shipping. No, I think I had it quoted out at a hundred dollars for shipping. And I knew it was gonna have to go on a pallet, and it was gonna be like $300 for shipping on it once we had not had our new partnership with our broker,
Melissa: and the item's only $400.
So it just, the numbers didn't, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense.
Rob: So anyways, we refunded that. I relisted it. Now we can ship it still, for about a hundred bucks with our new broker that we have the partnership with him. So, yeah, excited about that. But that is kind of the ins and the outs of what happened with any of the returns.
We didn't really have returns, but we had some cancellations,
Melissa: but they were mostly your fault.
Rob: They were, they were. And I'm, like I said, I'll make mistakes in this business still, but I constantly am learning and figuring stuff out.
Melissa: The only one was the bike. I don't know if you canceled that or somebody else canceled that or they can,
I think they canceled it.
The bike.
Rob: But we resold it again.
Melissa: So I think they're the only ones that cancelled that one. So the total cancels were $1,859. Cool. So, but those are items, we resold them. We resold them.
Rob: Was not a big deal at all. So those just slashed themselves and cut through those, so. And then our total profit for the year?
Melissa: Alright, so our total profit for the year, $71,080.
Rob: Just over $70,000 and we only sold 46 items for the year. And I'm curious, I should have had you check this out, but out of those 46 items, I think only a handful of those actually went freight. I think the majority of them actually still went FedEx, went in UPS, went on, in a box.
But we just know how to ship stuff in a box. 10 items freight?
Melissa: Well, like, that's, one of those is counting all the stretchers, but you sold sold them at like two at a time three at a time. Yeah, and four of them were locally. So yeah, so ten.
Rob: So roughly 10 items out of those 46 items went on pallets. The rest of them were just high profit items that we were able to ship into in a box, which is really really cool. For sure.
Melissa: Yeah So, I do want to make a one quick note. I know we're going a little longer on this one, but, that that is before taxes. We didn't include taxes in that. People ask us all the time, what about taxes? I don't include sales tax in these because eBay collects it and remits it on our part. I just include what we sell it for.
Just because I didn't include like the sales side just because they already do it. So it's already in there. So I just don't include that in our numbers. But as far as income taxes go, they, they're not straightforward. So because they're not straightforward, it's not easy to just be like, okay, well, it's straightforward a percentage of your items you're paying taxes for. So we do this as our business. We have two parts to our business. We have the content and the coaching. So there's a lot that goes into taxes. So we do have a CPA and we're not CPAs. So, so there is taxes involved.
Rob: And we do pay them. You don't have to write us and say, what about taxes?
We do pay taxes.
Melissa: So, but there are a lot of different things that we can write off because we're self employed. So, it's not just a cut and dry number. So, just to let you know, that is before taxes. So, but it's after fees, after shipping costs, and yeah, so we're excited about that.
Rob: Yep. So, what's the biggest takeaway?
Start flipping if you are not flipping. Guys, this is so much, we had so much fun in this last year. So many cool, weird items that we were able to get a hold of. And then bring them to new owners. We love being able to help people find amazing deals. At the same time, we love hunting for those amazing deals.
So, if you're not flipping yet, get in, get involved. It's so much fun to be able to do what we do. And hopefully you guys will love it as well.
Yep. So we'll, we'll, we'll see you next time. Thanks for hanging out with us. You guys rock. Have an amazing day and we'll see you on the next episode.