Rob and Melissa Stephenson recently did an interview with the eBay for Business podcast, talking about sourcing high value inventory.
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ebay for Business Podcast Interview
Griff: I'm Griff, and this is the eBay for business podcast, your source for information and inspiration to help you start managing grow your business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 283.
Our guests this week are Rob and Melissa Stephenson of Flea Market Flipper.
And the topic is mainly about sourcing higher ASP items and shipping them via freight. I'll also ask them about their side business as eBay coaches on their social media channels, because they have quite a following. One of the things I love about eBay is that it's not just one type of seller. There are all types of sellers selling on eBay. Some people have inside connections with manufacturers or liquidators and they find product that they can skew. And that's great. That's a whole business model. But most of us here have a one of a kind kind of marketplace where we may occasionally find mass quantities of a single item, but most, mostly it's just, you know, the one offs that we find while we're out sourcing as we do, whether that's at flea markets or estate sales.
Or online or offline or at thrift stores. Our guests this week are returning to the podcast. You may know them as flea market flipper. They also have a podcast called the pro flipper show. They've been featured in many publications, including Forbes magazine. Flea Market Flipper, Rob and Melissa Stevenson.
Welcome back to the podcast.
Melissa: Thanks for having us. We're so excited to be here and talk with you.
Griff: Since the last time we talked and I did a little online research as I want to do, and I find that, wow, you guys have really grown since we've spoken last.
Melissa: Yeah, constant growth and work for sure.
Griff: I ran across your page where you have a paid product that you can get coaching from, and you're still selling on eBay.
Where do you find the time? How can you do all this? I know there's two of you, but still!
Melissa: That part does help that there's two of us, and he's more of the eBay, find the stuff loves to do it. We'll never stop. We'll do it into retirement till he can't move anymore. Like he'll be finding items and flipping them.
And then I am more of the tech stuff on kind of behind the scenes.
Griff: A lot of the people to tune into the podcast follow and they admire different, for lack of a better word, influencers. What do you call yourselves?
Melissa: I have no idea. I, I wouldn't say like we ever set out to try to be influencers. We had a passion.
You definitely had a passion for flipping and selling on eBay and we wanted to share that with others and help them be able to grow a side hustle. So like that was our business. We just wanted to grow that. We never really set out to be influencers.
Rob: I guess I think we've been doing it for so long now.
Yeah, I've almost been in it for 30 years flipping and then when we started coaching people about nine years ago We're just trying to help people help people grow and grow an income.
Griff: With all this business going on You also have a home life. You guys have kids
Melissa: Yep. We have three kids, 11, nine and seven.
And, yeah, we have this busy. They do keep us busy.
Griff: Do you keep them busy with the business?
Melissa: Yes, they're actually our seven year old. Well, all of them are excited to sell on eBay, but we open an account that we run for them, but they find stuff and sell stuff. And it's been fun. Our seven year olds, the most like, I want to make more money.
Griff: Oh, you're teaching them well. Yeah, Rob, how did you start off? You said you've been doing this for 30 years. How did you get into this business?
Rob: Yeah, so I grew up in a big family. I have six older sisters. I'm the youngest and only boy in my family coming from a big family. My parents had a side hustle.
They'd go to yard sales on the weekends and they come home and they would find stuff from the yard sales. And this was their part time gig side hustle where they would buy some yard sales, bring it back and then sell it in the classified section. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I got modeled this resale business at a young age as a side hustle.
And then as eBay came out, that's where my mom jumped into it and started selling baby clothes on eBay. And I got an introduced into that when I was 16 years old. And ever since then, yeah, part time, we went full time into it, nine years ago, but from 16 to 30 something years old, I, I did a part time and had a blast doing it.
It was just so much fun to be able to do it. So were you doing this when you met Melissa?
Melissa: Yeah, he did it on the side. I think that's all you were doing at that point. So it was full time for you then. So yeah, I tried to explain to my mom when he met my mom for the first time. She's like, wait, he just sells, he sells on eBay.
What, what is like, you know about it. You hear about eBay. I don't think I had ever bought anything on eBay at that point, but I was like, that's a real thing.
Rob: I was just, I was doing house flipping. That's right. You didn't eBay flipping and I was doing some stocks as well. So that was what, when we first met, that's what I did.
Yeah. But full time, we jumped in nine years ago.
Griff: Melissa, what was your plan for your life before you met Rob?
Melissa: I don't know. I was a horse rider, so I love to ride horses. So that was my passion. And hopefully we'll get to get back to that soon. But I didn't really, I don't
Rob: know. She worked at a local dinner show here when we first met.
Yeah. And she was riding horses, standing on horses, doing jumps on horses and really cool stuff. And then she went into personal training shortly after we got married and she did that for a while. She has a bachelor degree in health science.
Melissa: And then we, once we had the three kids and they were three and under, I was like, I can't go, I can't do anymore.
Like I got to be home with the kids. And then his job was cutting health insurance at the same time. And so we're like, well, do we just go all in on this eBay business? I mean, if we put more time to it at that point where we had recorded, we at part time we were doing $42,000 a year. So we're like, okay.
And that's in part time hours. I can help out a little bit. I got these kids, but what if we both do it? Like we could probably make it work. So that was kind of
Rob: jumped full time in and on our first year full time, we had $130, $130,000 working together with it.
Griff: What were some of the obstacles or roadblocks that you ran into that first year while you tried to ramp the business up that, to that amount?
Melissa: Once it's not your side money anymore and it's your full time money, you have to be a little more, like, you have to pay the bills, so it's a little more stressful. So, you're not, it's not just like before, it had always been our extra money to go on vacation because he likes to do vacation and he would come to me and be like, hey, I found this cruise.
Let's go on it. I'm like, okay, great. Go flip something and pay for it. And we did that multiple times. But now it's like, okay, we got a pair of mortgage. Go make some money. Go flip something. So it's just a little more stressful. But I mean, the flexibility is, is our still our favorite.
Rob: Our dynamics also, husband and wife working together.
That was something that we threw into the mix. It's challenging in some aspects of it, but for the most part, yeah, it's been really, really fun and great for our relationship.
Griff: What started the idea that now we're going to coach others and building us ancillary business doing so. How did that work and where is it now?
Melissa: Our friend actually was the motivator behind that. She started teaching people in 2014 how to proofread as a side hustle. And she came to the flea market with us a couple times and she loved thrifting. And she's like, you're good at this. You should totally teach people how to do this online. Like, and she taught us how to start a blog and we bought our domain in 2015.
So she kind of motivated us to start this thing. And it was just kind of a fun, like, side project. And then it's grown since then. Absolutely.
Griff: Absolutely. And I went to the website, by the way, we'll put a link to the website, but if you go to fleamarketflipper. com, you can see the page where they provide coaching and other services.
How big is that business as a, well, as a percentage of what you guys do now?
Melissa: As far as time, it takes up a lot more time than the flipping does.
Rob: On average, we probably spend between 5 and 10 hours a week on the flipping aspect of the business. The rest is between our kids, videos, coaching, all that other stuff, that's where the majority of our time comes in.
Griff: So how important has that aspect of your business been in driving sales?
Melissa: Our like social media and our online presence really has nothing to do with our eBay sales, and we don't even we don't promote any of our stuff on eBay. They're pretty separate, actually, because we don't do close. We're not doing stuff like we could do a pop up live show.
So our following really doesn't have anything to do with our eBay sales. We're selling more commercial equipment and stuff that people are just going on. They want shipped to them. So.
Rob: Yeah. We have a little twist on our style, what we do. So we do higher profit items and lower volume. So like last year we sold a total of like 46 items, but it was just under $100,000.
So that's what our real niche is, is really going after high dollar, high profit items, and that's what we like to sell on eBay.
Griff: Are these easily shippable items or are they tend to be industrial or electronic and big?
Rob: Typically, that's what our, our market is, is going for something that's going to go into a pallet and then we ship it across the country on a pallet.
And not very many sellers are willing to do that. But the catch 22 on this is typically these items in a local market don't sell as well because you're limited to that local market. Now, when you provide that on an eBay, a large nationwide or global market, it opens up the market. The buyers like insanely you get a lot more buyers who will pay more money and what the item is actually worth because you're willing to ship it to them.
So that's what we've honed in for the last nine years is, I mean, we've done hundreds of free shipments and really learned how to
Melissa: furniture, ovens, cooktops, like lots of different stuff.
Griff: Does part of your coaching on flea market flipper or even your social media free short term videos, do any of these address that particular aspect of shipping freight?
Rob: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we do a lot of posts. We do a lot of, stuff showing freight items that we're shipping. So yeah, that's, that's the majority. Like what we have kind of like what you were saying about time. There's only so many hours in a day. What we found out is if we go after these higher profit items, I can do one item and make $2,000.
Last year, our average was $2,000 per item. I can do one item at $2,000 or I can do 200 items at $10. When you're doing 200 items at $10, your profit, it. On that, you're having to find 200 items to source them, you're having to picture 200 items, you're having to fulfill and ship 200 items. When I can do a $2,000 item, typically Like 3 or 4 hours.
That's it, it takes me 3 or 4 hours to totally, from finding, picturing, listing, and then even fulfilling shipping on that, 3 to 4 hours is what it usually will take me to do that. And that, for us, we need that time to be able to spell with each other and spell with our family.
Griff: What about facilities if you're taking possession of these items and then reselling, reshipping them?
You have to have a place to put them.
Rob: We have a warehouse and we didn't start with a warehouse. I started out of a spare bedroom that I had and then I moved to a shed and then I moved to one storage unit and then I moved to two, three, four storage units and then finally we're like, all right, it's time for a warehouse.
But yeah, so that's what we'd use for our workshop of where we bring stuff, picture stuff and do stuff. It's out of a warehouse.
Griff: When I talk to sellers who are interested in getting into the high ASP, low volume merchandise, that is the big obstacle for them is how am I going to ship this stuff?
Rob: Is it that difficult to figure out?
We've been honing in our skills for nine years now, and we've dealt with tons of different freight carriers. There's freight carriers that have come and gone. So it does take time and effort. Like I said, out of, after hundreds of shipments, it's still worth learning. It's worth learning. And it's not super difficult if you're willing to move something around.
And I'll give you like another example. Some people think when you're dealing with a shallow, a pallet or free shipping, you have to have a forklift and you don't have to have a forklift out of those 46 items we sold last year. I do have a forklift cause I've been in the business for a long time. I might have used my forklift one time out of those 46 items, the rest of them, I'm using a dolly, I'm picking the items up, putting them on the pallet, and then moving the pallet around with a dolly or something like that, so these are items that are unmovable for somebody, and sometimes Melissa and I might move an item together, an extra body helps sometimes, but the majority of them, they're not monsterly big items that you can't handle by yourself or with one other person.
Griff: What was your biggest sale in the last year?
Melissa: I, well, I just ran the numbers for the last year and it was actually one lot of items that you bought.
Rob: Yeah. It was a single sale, but those items that brought in the most money. What about the turbo chef? That was a single item. I got a real quick, funny, a fun story for you if you, if you're all right with it.
Oh, yes. So I found a cruise a year and a half ago. I found a cruise and I brought it to Melissa like I always do. I say, hey, this looks amazing. It's going to be an epic cruise. And she goes, okay, we don't have the money for that. So if you find something to, to flip or find the money through flipping, we could do it.
So it was a Hawaii cruise.
Melissa: That's happened.
Rob: Yep. It was a Hawaii cruise. It was going out of LA over to Hawaii around the islands. We stopped in ports and came back. I said, okay, I'm going to do you one better instead of finding enough items to flip. I'm going to do it with one item. We found a turbo chef item locally.
It's a turbo chef is an oven, like a oven that would be inside a
Melissa: They're not big, they're still on the counter.
Rob: A sub shop. Yeah. Just a countertop oven retail on them. It's like 30 some thousand dollars. We ended up finding that item and paying $150 from a guy who was redoing a kitchen that he had a commercial kitchen, a brewery or something like that, and he didn't want to deal with it.
Yeah. Put it on Facebook marketplace for $300. I offered him $150. He took it. I went and picked it up. We sold it for $6,200 and paid for our whole entire family cruise, 17 day cruise with one flip off of eBay.
Griff: Well, if that isn't an incentive to get into this business, I don't know what is. And how was the cruise by the way?
Melissa: Best trip we've ever done.
Griff: It was awesome. It was amazing. When you started out, I'm assuming that you didn't start off with high ASP, low volume items. Rob, what kind of items were you looking for in reselling when you started on eBay?
Melissa: Your first eBay sale
Rob: was a NordicTrack, a NordicTrack ski machine, one of, like an exercise machine.
Yeah, but that's not small. It's not. That's the crazy part, but it did ship in a box, so it wasn't free shipping. It actually, and since then I've done hundreds. They still sell. They still sell really well on eBay, but I got modeled kind of from my mom. My mom started with baby clothes. She had a passion for like finding high end baby clothes and dolls.
She liked dolls. And then she started moving into like a car seats and strollers and doing some more stuff like that. And then that's when I jumped into exercise equipment. Previously, like through my years of doing it on the side, I would buy bigger pieces of equipment because I liked the profit on those, but I would sell them locally.
I didn't do free shipping back in the days when I was, uh, really learning eBay and doing stuff. I did them locally and I made really good money doing that. Uh, I high profit on them cause we'd get them cheap and then sell locally. But then when we learned how to do free shipping, it just opened up the doors to a mass amount of buyers that were willing to pay the money for the items.
Melissa: It was really that one flip that started it and it was the, there was a dining room table set he bought at an auction for $350 and he listed it on marketplace for $750, I think you wanted to double your money. Yeah. And then it didn't sell for a month. And so then he's like, I'm going to list on eBay. He looked at some of the other stuff that was listed.
He's like, well, there's stuff on there that's listed. And if it sells on eBay, I'm going to just figure out how to. Ship it like I'll figure it out. And so in less than a month after it listed on eBay, it sold for $2,250 with $500 shipping. So he's like, all right, we're gonna figure out
Rob: this is it. And that was our all in on free shipping.
And then we got better and better and better. We've just done our skills since then and found the best companies to work with the best way to ship items. And that that's just been an ongoing process for years. And
Griff: finding the best company is dependent upon where your business is located, I assume.
Rob: Yeah, there are different, definitely different freight carriers are out there, and it's also not just where you're located, but where your item is going.
So they might have closer freight hubs to the buyer's address that's going to throw it to a different, uh, cheaper rate from a different company. So yeah, it definitely depends on where you're at and where your buyer's at to get the best rate.
Griff: So sellers ask me all the time who want to do this, how do you figure out what the shipping's going to be?
So you're listing this on eBay, say it's the dining room table set, if you had to redo that now, How would you include shipping?
Rob: So the cool thing about where we're at is I kind of know if I'm shipping something from where we are in Florida to California, typically on a standard size pallet, it's going to cost me about 200 bucks.
Uh, and that's what I would average. Now I flip around what I'm going to do. Sometimes I'll throw free shipping in there, which is pretty much unheard of for somebody shipping free, but I know because I've done it so much, I know I can build $200 into my price. And I know it's going to go from us. Over to, and it's one less obstacle for that buyer to come through.
But I know if that's the case, if I put free shipping in it, the buyer's going to see it and say, free shipping. Look at our feedback and see, we have a hundred percent feedback and we sell high profit items normally. So he's going to jump in. They're going to buy it without any hesitation. And then we get it shipped out to them.
So. Um, but previously knowing that I charged $500 flat rate because I had no idea how to do it. And I saw other, what I did is look on eBay and saw the other tables and chair sets like that and what the, uh, sellers were selling them for. And I thought if they're able to do it, I, I should be able to figure it out.
And we did, we, we shipped it for, I think it was $400 for that table and chair dining room set that we sold ever since then. Yeah. It's just really trying out different companies, really Figuring out which are the best companies handle the items the best and don't break items and stuff like that. So it's just been an ongoing process
Griff: with something like a dining room set that you sold when you first started.
Did you have to pack that? That's another question we get from sellers all the time. Well, how am I supposed to pack this and do I have to supply the pallet and It's just overwhelming. And what do you say to someone who says that?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. So you can find somebody who is experienced and pay them to pallet it or package it for you.
And for us, I enjoy that. It's kind of therapeutic for me to figure out how to put something onto a pallet, get it all into a pallet or build a pallet that it's going to fit on, strap it to it, make sure it's all done properly. I enjoy it. So if you don't enjoy it, you definitely can find And it doesn't have to be somebody like a specialized pallet builder.
It could just be a handyman. A handyman who knows how to package stuff or, uh, move stuff in and strap it so it's nice and tight on a pallet. That's all it has to be. So you can hire somebody to do it. It just will cut into some of your profits as well. Do any of the freight companies offer that service?
They might, but I never used one for that. So I'm not 100 percent sure. It would, wouldn't it? Yeah,
Melissa: that's like even like when people do FedEx or they go to FedEx or UPS to package their item and it's like, don't do that. They're going to charge you so much money.
Rob: But the cool thing about like when she asked about a pallet, there's so many pallets everywhere that you can get for free.
So we've Find pallets. We don't buy pallets. Sometimes if I have a weird item, I'll build a pallet out of just regular lumber, 2x4s and 4x4s or whatever I need. But the majority of the items, it will fit on a standard size pallet, a 40x48. I just go and get one the day that I need to ship something. I can drive around to multiple places and they'll just give you pallets for free.
Okay, the third question I
Griff: get from sellers when it comes to freightable items and going into that line of business, how do you handle returns? Love it.
Rob: This is a really cool question because I really love this one. Yeah, we got, you can, well, the cool thing about this is, so when you're thinking about freight items, typically the item has to be priced right for us to ship something freight.
The price has to be $750 at the minimum, about $750. It has to make sense to that buyer who is going to buy it. They're going to pay a little bit for freight shipping, which is Or roughly two, $250. It has to make sense. So if I'm selling an item for $750, retail on that item's probably gonna be more towards $1,500, $2,000 on retail on that item.
It has to make sense for them to do that. The cool thing about doing high profit items is, and a lot of people, this hangs up a lot of people, is I don't wanna take a return. Somebody might say, I've been selling items for years and 50 percent of my items that I sell come back in returns for whatever reason it is.
The cool thing about high profit items is that's not the case. When somebody spends $750, $2,000, $5,000 on an item, they're not a tire kicker. It's not like an Amazon buyer who's gonna buy something and then try it out and be like, uh, yeah, I don't like it. I want to send it back. When they're spending that kind of money on something, Typically, it's a qualified buyer who just needs the solution to their problem.
If it is a cooktop, if it's an exercise machine, they're not just trying this out. They're investing money in it because they're keeping it. So, even last year, we didn't have out of those 46. We didn't have any returns.
Melissa: No returns. We had one that you had to troubleshoot with her because she couldn't get the hood to work.
And it was just a, Loose wire or something that came out in the shipping. So, but it was just being, you know, having good customer service with the customer and a good communication and you worked it out.
Rob: Typically, we don't get a lot of returns, but there's one thing that I tell everybody. And if you learn this, I didn't learn this in my early years.
And it's something that I learned through all my years is if you are under promising. And over delivering on your items, then you shouldn't get return requests. People know what they're getting. You're giving them a better item than they thought they were getting because of how you described it. And they will be happy and they will keep the item.
Griff: That's a very good bit of advice, no matter what you're selling. But especially if you don't want to have to take back a freightable item. Well, you're convincing me I should move out of perfumes, which are really easy to, you know, store and ship. But they're definitely low. Uh, kind of lower profit margin, I would say, than what you guys are doing.
Where can people find you? We'll include all the links in the episode transcript, but I want to make sure people can find you.
Melissa: FleaMarketFlipper.com is definitely our hub, but we're on social, almost every social channel. Instagram is a good place to find us, Flea Market Flipper, and we're still working on growing our YouTube channel, so we're out there.
Rob: And, uh, on eBay, is it Flea Market Flipper as well? No, uh, sorry, eBay name is actually Amazing Views Orlando. It's three words. With, uh, spaces or hyphens? No, uh, all, all straight. Amazing Views Orlando altogether. Do you find a lot of product in the Orlando area? Oh my goodness, yes. I feel like anywhere you are nowadays, well, definitely, you have to remember, I'm not really going after the low profit.
I'm not going after shirts, shoes, and stuff like that. But where we're at, like I said, the big thing about what we do is the items are big in the local market, and they get to the point where people try and sell them and they can't sell them because they can't find that buyer. So they start discounting those items just to move them because it's a bigger item.
Next to nothing pretty much. That's the thing. So the majority, like what we do is at least 10x are if I'm paying $100 for something. I want to make at least a thousand to $2,000 on that item. And that's that's standard what we do and a lot of times we go way way over that on our profit margins
Melissa: But we do get the question like okay.
Well, you're just in a great area. That's why you can find that stuff And so we're like, okay, we're going to challenge this question So for the last three years we've taken a road trip across the country Well last year we did the california cruise, but we take our trailer with us And he looks on it's just the apps you're on marketplace and offer up and sees what you can find and we fill our trailer Come back.
We've got 15 to 20 items of inventory. And yeah
Rob: as we're ranging about 30 30 some thousand dollars that we'll pick up all across the country Yes, bring it back and we only spend $1,500
Melissa: and this year you did it even better before we would have to like go off Our route. Oh, it's only 30 minutes out of the way.
I'm like, come on But now you're you made it really a lot right on the road. We're going you're like 10 minutes. All right Okay, we got it. We got it
Griff: Well, it's like anything. If you do it enough, you refine it over time so that it becomes more efficient. Yep. Yep. You have a road trip planned in the future.
Rob: We don't have one for this year. This is good. Drifter, are you ready for this? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. So we planned a cruise for 2026. It's a world cruise. It's going around the world. It's 30 countries. It is 116 days. And my income in 2025 is we're going to try to pay for the whole cruise just off of our flipping income.
So while we're doing flipping.
Griff: That's one third of a year you're going to be away. Yep. And who knows, you might pick up a few things. Yes, a little harder on a cruise. Can you get a agreement that you can tow a little barge behind you and fill it with containers?
Rob: That would be great. Hey, when we went to Hawaii, I bought stuff in Hawaii from the thrift stores, brought it back into our ship, into our room.
You did. So I could actuall.y You just got records. Well, they weren't records. They were, uh, laser discs. Laser discs. Oh, well, laser discs. Yeah. They were cool. So I found them in a, in a, uh, thrift store in Hawaii. So we brought them back as well. Okay.
Griff: So you guys will dip into the thrift store occasionally.
Rob: Absolutely.
Griff: Let's admit it. All right.
Melissa: Absolutely. No, we will. We will. Let's stop there.
Rob: Flea market is where we started our business and I started relationships at the flea market, but I love yard sales. I love, I mean, I love thrift stores, the apps, we find really good stuff on the app, so we're everywhere.
Wherever I can find a deal, that's where I'll be.
Griff: I understand completely, being a lifelong flea marketer and dealer, so. Good luck to the, to both of you on your cruise, uh, in 2026. Let's see you get there. If you want to help, uh, Robin Melissa, get to their cruise. You want to get right to their eBay store.
It's amazing views, Orlando. There may be a pizza oven or some other big piece of equipment that you just can't live without. You should go and get your deal there. If you want to learn more about their coaching business, you can visit fleamarketflipper. com and their podcast. And again, I recommend everyone who listens to this podcast regularly.
It's only less than an hour a week. There are other podcasts. We want you to listen to them. Visit pro flipper show. That's the pro flipper show. You can find it on any podcast app that you're using. Just search for pro flipper show, give it a listen, subscribe, and become a regular follower and fan of two of my favorite sellers, Rob and Melissa Stephenson.
Thank you so much to the both of you for being on our show. We love it when you're here. Thanks, Griff. That was so much fun. Thank you so much.