Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share what they sold to make $6,260 in sales in February.
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How We Made $976 At Our Yard Sale
Reseller Hangout Podcast - Rob & Melissa February Income Report
Rob: What's up, guys. On today's episode, we are talking about last month's sales and what we sold to average $894 per item.
Melissa: So we'll dive into the cost of goods, the eBay fees, the shipping costs. And of course the profits.
Rob: That's right, stay tuned!
Rob: All right, guys. So we got our last month's numbers in, super stoked. It was a decent month. Did not have to do crazy crazy amount of work. We sold seven items and that is what on average we sold, it was $894
per item, which we love those high profit items. We love when we're able to make that much money on a single item. So, you guys probably want to know, okay, what did you guys sell? Seven items? What did you guys do? What was the cost that you paid for these items and, what were the eBay fees? What was our total profit on everything that we sold last month?
So let's jump into it.
Melissa: So I wanted to add, before we jump in that we started doing these income reports, probably like five or six years ago and really showing people just what we sold for a couple of reasons. Like you can go find those things that we're looking for, or that we're selling. You can see like a big part is what you're buying it for.
So your money is made in the purchase. So if you can get that item for that low cost purchase. Like we will pass on items if the profit's not there. So, so we want to help you guys get those profits.
Rob: And we'll talk about actually these items, these seven items that we actually sold last month, talk about what we paid for them.
So you guys get an idea, you know, we're not paying tons of money for these items, the profit
Melissa: That's a huge piece of our business.
Rob: Absolutely. The profit has to be there for us to buy an item. So we'll pass on maybe 10 items before we find that right item that we want to actually invest in. So, like I said, to get those high profits, you have to get these items at the right price. So you definitely need to be shopping around to find those high value of flips for your business. For sure. So let's jump in, let's get into it. Like I said, it was seven items on average, once we averaged them all out, it was $894 per item that we sold. So grand total, right there is over, I think it was over $6,200.
So over $6,200 total for last month, that was our gross on the items. And it averaged out, like I said, $894. So, first item that we actually sold was the Miller paint mixer, the paint mixer. So we actually picked this up on a road trip. We got it on, it was either Facebook marketplace, or OfferUp, while we were in another state. This one actually came from Colorado.
Melissa: I remember that.
Rob: Not even a mile away from us. I found this paint mixer from an actual, like an ACE hardware that was closing down. They were trying to liquidate some of their rental equipment. I got it for $15. So killer deal on that. We picked up two things there. One was a wallpaper steamer, yeah, but we sold this one on the road trip. We ended up, I don't remember. We paid hardly anything for that, $15 and sold it for $700. Yeah. Made crazy profit on that. Shipped that out on the road while we were on the road trip. So that doesn't have anything to do with this, but we bought both of those items at the same place at an ACE hardware that was going out.
Melissa: You probably could have bought more from him.
Rob: But yeah, it might not be an Ace Hardware, it might've been a different hardware store, but they were going out of business and closing down. So they're getting rid of their rental rental equipment. And that's where we got this paint mixer from. It was a portable paint mixer actually sits on top of a five gallon paint bucket.
And then it has two different panels that go inside. It was a..., don't quote me on it. It was commercial. So, but that's what it was. Retail on it, if I'm not mistaken, it was like $800, $900. And we sold it for $400?
Melissa: $400.
Rob: $400, including shipping. So killer deal on that. We sat on it for a couple months, not a big deal.
It wasn't very big. So, total
Melissa: Oh, the fees. EBay fees were $50, shipping costs were $44 for the shipping label. We paid 15 for it. And so the, profit was $291.
Rob: $291, sweet killer deal on that. I love that. And like I said, it wasn't super big. I didn't have to go freight anything like that. So still almost $300 of profit, we love that when we can get those.
So second, a square D panel square D panel. So we bought a whole bunch of these, I think I bought like 40 of these, a couple.
Melissa: That was a big sale we just had recently too. That's next month.
Rob: A couple we bought, I think 40 of them paid $10 a piece for these. I bought a big, like an enclosed trailer full of them. Tons of these jokers, paid $10 a piece for them, sold the first one.
What did we sell it for?
Melissa: $800.
Rob: That includes shipping on it. That was the total price. Actually sold for, $699 plus a hundred dollars on shipping. So I added that into it. And then total fees on that were?
Melissa: $102 and the shipping cost was $140.
Rob: $140 on that. That actually did go freight. So not a very difficult freight one.
I could pick that pallet up myself because these boxes weren't super heavy. The electrical box, it was a square D electrical panel for a triplex. So it had three spots in it for meters, that you put on the side of a triplex that you could monitor the electric out of each unit. So it was made for a triplex.
So, that was the first of those that we sold.
Melissa: You sold a couple and some of our stuff has been selling. We've talked about this before, is that there's a lot of backups in shipping right now. So, even somebody you talked to recently said, look, I can't get this for six to eight, 12 months. Yep. I need it now, if you can get it shipped, I'm willing to pay you, like whatever, you know? So, so there is something to note that some items are really needed and they can't get them.
Rob: Yup, for sure. And that's another one of our items we'll talk about in a minute.
Melissa: That profit was $548.
Rob: $548. Awesome deal on that.
Like I said, $10 invested. Come on, guys. That is amazing if you don't, I mean $10, but we had to buy. I spent a hundred dollars total, but the profit is there. Next month wait until you see what these things sold for on next month's income report. We actually just, those actually are shipping out tomorrow, but anyways, a little teaser don't miss next month's income report because we have one of those in there.
That was a killer killer deal. So $500 what'd you say? $548. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What's our number three sale?
Melissa: That was a fun one. That was the steam room.
Rob: Steam room. This was cool. Bought this from a local. Thrift store. We actually bought this from Goodwill pay $200 for it. It was a steam, personal steam sauna room.
Stepped inside of this thing. It was very, it wasn't very big at all. It was all fiberglass, had a door on the front of it. So you stepped into it, shut the door. Your head was the only thing that stuck out of this sauna. Turn it on. And then it just steamed you inside of this room. So, cool, cool deal. Sold that one for $1,700?
Melissa: $1,700.
Rob: So we sold that one for $1,700.
Melissa: People on social media did not think we were going to sell it.
Rob: They did not. Retail on this thing was probably $3,000 to $5,000. Really, really cool. A unit. I loved this unit. It was cool cause we got some cool pictures and videos with it. Just, we love those unique sales.
We love those. And especially when they pan out to be high-profit so $1,700 total. What was the eBay fees?
Melissa: EBay fees were $210. Shipping cost was $196 and the cost of goods was $200. So your total profit was almost $1,100 at $1,094.
Rob: Over $1,000. I love it. So that is awesome. Love that one. Yeah, we paid a little bit more for this when you don't typically invest that much money into it, but I knew that the retail was $3,000 to $5,000. I knew I should be able to get at least half of that. So we got $1,700 for it. Killer deal. Love that.
Melissa: You did offer less for it at Goodwill, you did. We did offer. And the girl at the cash, the cash register said, well, hopefully you get the good manager, the nice one.
We didn't get the nice one.
Rob: Nope, we got the one who would not come down to the price, but it's okay. $200, not bad. We made some good money on it. Overall profit, over a thousand dollars. Love it when we can do that. This did go freight as well. Very, very easy one to ship. Threw it on a standard size pallet and we're able to ship it that way.
Melissa: One tip or I don't know, to note too, is something you almost forgot to do, which is it could happen to anybody is you had pre-packaged it cause we use it in a demo. We demoed it for our members as a freight shipment we were doing, I think they were doing the bootcamp and we did it. We demoed it.
And so you wrapped it up and you put it on the pallet and then you had to move it or something. So we ended up unwrapping it, but had you not, and had you sent it like that, you had left the price tag on it, so make sure you check your items.
Rob: Make sure you pull those price tags off before you ship stuff.
If you're buying stuff at thrift stores, I put this one, had paperwork with it and I put the price tag inside of the paperwork just for my own records.
And the only reason I wrapped it up, really, for moving it around, I didn't want it to get scuffed or scraped. We did that before we sold it, I made sure I unwrapped it, cleaned the thing out really, really good again, and then wrapped it back up. Got that price tag out of it. So definitely a good key tip.
Do not leave price tags on stuff, especially when you're selling them for a profit. You do not want people to see the price tag. So anyways, so we are now number four flips for the month. Another one we picked up on the road trip guy. So a snag this on the road trip paid $75. I got two of them. One was a steamer and one was a deep fryer.
We sold the deep fryer. The steamer was not working and I haven't looked into it that much. I hooked it up and it was not getting hot. So that one is not working yet, but anyways, we sold this one. We sold it for, we paid $75 for it, sold it for $350 and sold it for $350. Killer deal on that.
What else?
Melissa: And the shipping cost was $196 and oh, sorry, sorry, wrong one. Fees were $43. Shipping cost was $48 and, the cost of it was $75.
Rob: So $40 shipping. This was not freight. It actually went into a box, not a very big box, like. $40 for shipping on that with FedEx and eBay fees, $43.
So total profit was $184. Not not going to break the bank with that, but still $184 for one item flipped. Not, not a big deal. It wasn't a huge item. Wasn't super a lot of time invested into it. So The ballast still we'll have those, we'll take those profits. So number five,
Ballast. Seven of these suckers sold. And this is again because of what we're going, what's going on right now with backups. I guarantee it, these were brand new led ballast systems for lights, for commercial lights. I got a whole bunch of them, from one of my contacts. He actually had pallets full of these and at the time, I took one box of 'em to see if I could sell them.
And he didn't actually charge me anything for them. So I took that one box. I think there were probably 20 in that box and I sold seven of them. And what did we sell those? $560. I didn't have anything into this. Like I said, my buddy gave these to me because he had a whole bunch of them. And I only took one box of them, multiple there's multiple different ones.
I took a whole bunch of single boxes that had, you know, 20 of them in them. And he told me, just see what I could do with them. So, sold them for $560. These were very, very small shipping on this FedEx. $33, like I said, small box, very, very easy individually packed, a killer deal on that. eBay fees were, that's a double one because we actually promoted this.
So on this one we paid $40 promotion fee. And then we also paid $73 for eBay fees. So, I paid a little bit more on that to get it sold. We had these listed for a little while. But now what's going on with, everything on backorder and you can't get stuff for 6, 8, 10 months out, these are the things that are actually selling.
So I probably didn't have to have that promoted but I did. No matter what, it's still, when we sold it for $560 and $40 is not a big a price to pay to get them to promote it. For sure. So total profit on that one?
Melissa: $414. And that was the only one you promoted out of those items.
Rob: Yeah, that was the only one for this month that we did, where it was promotion was at.
So $414 on that love those, like I said, very small box, not a lot of time invested in this either. Quick pictures took a picture of one item and then somebody bought seven of them, shipped them all together. So awesome. Number six.
Melissa: Outdoor camp cover.
Rob: Outdoor camp cover? Now what is this?
Melissa: Lamp cover.
Rob: Thank you. Couldn't read my handwriting. This was actually a streetlamp. I pulled like six of these out of a dumpster on a job that I was doing with one of my contacts. We were I forgot what we were doing. We were moving a piece of equipment or something. Got a whole bunch of those. Yeah, I think I got six of them. So these are big, like you would see on the side of your downtown area, big lamp, cover.
And it was like plexiglass so clear. I think I got, like I said, I think I got six of them. This one sold for $200?
Melissa: $200.
Rob: Yep. So this one for $200 have nothing into it. Got all those for free. I just pulled them out of the dumpster. Went home, took pictures of them and listed them. So, nothing invested into this.
And then what do we have for eBay fees?
Melissa: $26 for eBay fees and shipping costs was $44.
Rob: That one was cool to ship because I used a sheet of styrofoam on that to keep it around the side. So that was pretty fun one to ship. But yeah, so total profit on that one?
Melissa: $130.
Rob: $130, not bad for something out of a dumpster.
Love it. So and to round it off at number seven, the flip.
Melissa: It was a fun one. That was the chiropractor table.
Rob: Great story on this bad boy. Offered the guy, found this on OfferUp, offered the guy, I actually did it while I was updating some of our videos for Flipper University, going through showing people what to look for.
I came across this bad boy. I knew Melissa would not want me to get it. I took a chance. I offered the guy $350 on it. He had it listed for $700. Did not respond back to me, until a week, week and a half later responded back. You can have it for free if you come and pick it up. So I said, I will be there tomorrow morning.
Let me get a trailer. I went and picked it up. The only thing that was wrong with this was when he moved it from his old office to new office, he broke one of the little hydraulic lines, piece of cake fix. I went to ACE hardware and got the, fitting to actually put the lines back together. $3 is all we had invested into this, got this bad boy for free.
And we sold it for.
Melissa: $2,250.
Rob: And this one sold really quick in less than two weeks, he sold this bad boy. So, absolutely loved those flips, nothing invested into it, other than the $3 to fix the little hydraulic line. The guy told me that nothing was wrong with it. It worked perfect. And I tested it actually put a video into this listing when I sold it so people could see what was working properly.
And that was it. So what was our total costs?
Melissa: Our fees for that one were $280.
Rob: $280 to eBay.
Melissa: It cost $125 to ship.
Rob: That was a killer deal. We got that on a pallet and it shipped it for $125. Sometimes we ship, they cost me more than that to ship stuff through FedEx. And this was a big, I think I estimated to say like 1,500 pounds.
Killer
deal on that one. Absolutely love when we get those freight deals that we are absolutely, just stoked about being able to get them so cheap. So total profit on this bad boy that we got for free?
Melissa: $1,842.
Rob: $1,842. And that is awesome. Amazing. Love it. So for that item, that's what brought, our averages up, and to average out $894 per item.
So, and that's all well, we've got a couple of other things too.
Melissa: There was one other sale on our kids account. So last spring you had found, or I sent him to the flea market to go. Why didn't I send you. You love you at the flea market, but I said, could you find a baseball bat or T-ball bat for our son? Because he was doing T-ball.
So I'm like, I'm sure they have to have them there. If you can find one, that'd be great. So he went, you took him with you and they found a tee-ball bat.
Rob: Not just two T-ball bats, but the vendor had like 30, or I don't know how many was.
Melissa: It was 29 that you ended up buying.
Rob: Well, no, I bought the two. I came home. We looked him up when I got home, because they were brand new and figured out that they were expensive.
T-ball bats were expensive. So I was like, this guy had a whole box of them. I'm going to drive back and see if I can get them. We drove back Brody and I drove back and we bought the whole kit and caboodle, which was cool. We got to give some of them away to our friends had. Yeah, it had a they'd needed T-ball bat.
Melissa: So he gave away like five or seven of them. And then we sold a total of three of them, 23 of them. We sold, for $350, $2.54 of that is what we averaged.
Rob: I paid $2.54 and then we sold them. What was the average?
Melissa: So it was $54 is what we ended up paying for those 23 bats. We paid $46 in fees, $40 in shipping. So your profit was $210,
Rob: $210 on something that my son needed, that we actually went capitalized on it, found some other cool things to lump together. Got a killer deal on it and made some money in the whole ordeal. So that was cool.
Melissa: That's one thing cool, another thing that we talk about a lot too, is knowing, like, looking at the things that your stage of life, like we never once looked at kid items or baby strollers, baby stuff until we were in that phase of life. And then now like you kind of see, okay, well, what are the expensive brands in that? Whatever my kid is interested in or whatever phase of life I'm in, like, or your hobbies, like what are the expensive brands? And you look at those, then you start to find them.
So it was good.
Rob: I would have never bought these. It got us, you know, $200 worth of profit that we actually got by buying these suckers and Brody got his bat and our friends got their bats for free. So awesome deal on that. So I didn't include that in our total. Nope. That was just on another name. The kids have a different name that they sell on, so that was totally different.
But, another sale in this month, and then we also had a busy month because we had a yard sale. And an awesome, great. It was fun. It was a good time. We had a great yard sale with what was it? 900 and?
Melissa: $976 was our total.
Rob: $976. $976 was what we did for, it was a half a day and a half.
So we did a half a day, Friday, and then we actually did a full day on Saturday. And we made, you know, almost a thousand bucks on that yard sale, so that all threw into our totals for that, for that month, for sure.
Melissa: We've definitely found that for yard sales, and we've talked about this too, but, for yard sales, we do the two days, and then we don't do Sunday.
We've tried three days before. It's not that great, but doing the two days really helps us because if we forget to get stuff out or we don't get everything out on the first day, we still have a whole other day and we're already set up to sell some more stuff. So we definitely, it's more profitable to do two days for us.
And you're already set up, it's a lot, it's less stressful. We just were able to sit there and enjoy it instead of, you know, the whole time you're setting up and tearing down. So, so it was really nice. And the kids sold their cookies and made some extra money.
Rob: They made some good money with the cookies, the bake sale.
So we like to do that as well. So, that was a cool month. February was a good month. We didn't work a ton on flipping. We sold seven items, a total of over $6,000 in sales. So, love it. Absolutely love it.
Melissa: So $6,260 in sales, total fees were $824. Before we get into that. So we had $303 total invested.
Rob: This is what we had to go out of pocket to make this income $303.
That's it. That's all we had to come out of pocket. And so that brings us to our, our huge point is your money is made in the buy. Make sure you are getting these items, absolutely the best possible deal you can. And that doesn't mean trying to rip people off by any means. Look for those items that are less than you can always offer people less money, but don't get stuck on an item that might have the high profit and they're asking a lot of money for it.
Don't get stuck on that item. If people are not willing to negotiate, go onto the next item, find another item out there. They're all over the place that you can get. I mean, that chiropractic bed that we bought. That was free. We didn't, we didn't even pay anything for it other than the part to fix it, which was $3.
So, yeah, definitely make sure you're buying stuff cheap enough that you can actually sell it and make good profit on it because that's what it's about.
Melissa: Awesome to note too, with the chiropractor table is, you know, you never know where people's situations, so you offered him something he's like, yeah. You know, he didn't even say anything, but you didn't, you don't know his situation.
Like he was waiting for somebody else to come by. Nobody else local was going to buy it. So he's like here, just take it, which we were surprised that he didn't say, okay, I'll take your $350.
Rob: $350, I was already offering half of what he asked.
Melissa: Right. So, and he, but he's like, just come get it. So you don't know, like people need it gone and he's like, if you need to come get it now, so they want it gone.
They don't want to mess with it.
Rob: And he was a cool guy. And he asked me, hey, you're are you reselling this? And I was like, yeah, probably we're going to try and fix it and then get it resold. And he's like, oh, cool. So he wasn't, it wasn't a big deal. We didn't try to hide anything from him. It was one of those things that we went, picked it up quick.
Told him what we were doing and he was perfectly okay with it. So that's awesome.
Melissa: He didn't want to mess with it anymore. It was heavy.
Rob: Yep. You'll find a lot of people who just want to get rid of stuff. They want it gone quick and that's what they want you to do is get it out of there. So they're willing to take next to nothing for them.
Those are the items that we love that we look for because that's where we can make the most profits.
Melissa: Which leads into we are, depending on when you're listening to this, we will be kicking off our sourcing workshop really soon. So on March 24 we kick it off and we're talking all about sourcing high profit items.
So these are the kinds of items we like, I mean, seven items last month for an average sale price of $894. So that's like, those are the things we're going for.
Rob: If you have not grabbed your seat, grab it. Now we'll have the link in the show notes. So do not miss out. We're going to have a blast.
It's going to be a four week.
Melissa: It's your favorite one to do.
Rob: Four week workshop one night a week. We're going to give you guys homework. We're gonna have some crazy, crazy fun. Guys do not miss out on it. If you are listening to this, try and grab your ticket.
Melissa: If you've wanted to dive into those higher profit items, like this is a great way we're going to be there live four times a week.
And if you miss it, we will be sending out the replays. Of course we want you to be there live, but we have a lot of fun. So hopefully we will see you there.
Rob: You guys rock, have a great day. We'll talk to you on the next episode.