Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share what they flipped in March to make $9,600 in sales on eBay.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - March Recap And Sales Totals
Rob: What's up guys, on today's episode, we are talking about March's numbers. They are in, and almost $10,000 in sales with just four items,
Melissa: We're going to dive into all of the eBay fees, the shipping costs, and of course the profits in just a minute.
Rob: All right guys. March's numbers are in and almost $10,000 in sales and only four items to sell.
Melissa: So we're going to dive into our numbers so we can talk with you and show you what we sold.
Rob: Let's dive in! Sale number one.
Melissa: The vintage Sony.
Rob: Cool. This is a radio. We actually got this for $20. I don't remember if it was Facebook Marketplace or OfferUp, one of those apps we bought it from, they listed it.
I was the first one to respond back. I ran quickly and picked it up because I knew I could make some money on it. The cool thing about this was unique. Now they sold other, if you guys remember it was from the '90s. So if you remember when they had those stackable tape deck, CD changer, equalizer, all that kind of stuff.
Back in the nineties, they had that, well, this was all that whole unit inside a Sony cabinet along with matching Sony wooden speaker. So, very unique for something that old to still be together in really good condition, they even had the original owners manuals with it. So I snagged it for $20.
Brought it home. We did some, I cleaned it up. It was very, very dusty, probably sat in the same place for the last 27 years, almost 30 years. No, I think it had a CD in it, but it did not have a tape. So I didn't get a tape to test it, but, so anyways, we got it listed. We sold it for $800. Now this was cool.
All the other comps didn't have the cabinet or the matching speakers or anything like that. All they had was the stackable unit that all went together. And I think the closest comp was like $300 or $400. I added a lot of money to it because of the uniqueness of this. It had everything. It was like I said, the manuals, the cabinet, the cabinet was labeled Sony on the cabinet.
The speakers were labeled Sony. So I added money on top of it for that. I sold it for $800 plus another $200 for shipping. Killer, killer deal on that. So total of a $1,000 on this flip, we paid $20, sold it for $1,000, including shipping, and now let's get to the nitty gritty.
What did we make profit?
Melissa: So the fees were: eBay fees were $98 and then we had an ad fee of $28.
Rob: So sometimes we will do a promotion on listings, which is kind of cool. If I can't get something, this one actually sold fairly quick, but I think right off the bat, I put a promotion on it for a little bit of money just to see if I could get it moving better.
And eBay sold it with the promotion. So sometimes I'll do that as well. And it'll still sell, but it doesn't sell under their promotions and I won't get charged for it. So this one is the only one this month that we actually got to charge a promotion fee. It was an extra $20, $28 on top of their eBay fee of $98.
Melissa: So, that's what we paid in fees. Shipping costs was $163.
Rob: $163. This actually did go on a pallet. So I was debating whether or not to throw it in a couple of different boxes. I actually asked the buyer if he was willing to pick it up, oh, well, if he was willing to take freight shipment, instead of having to ship it through FedEx. I said it's safer to go freight.
It probably won't get damaged. And if I do it through FedEx or UPS I'll have to take apart the cabinet and you'll have to put it back together. So I gave him that option. He said, yes, he would do freight. We did freight and that was awesome. So, that's how we got it shipped for that.
Melissa: Total profit $691.
Rob: $691, so a $20 investment, and then we turned around and it turned into $691 total profit. Love those flips.
Melissa: One thing to note too that if there's not comps, sometimes that's not a bad thing. Like it, you can, if it's a unique item, it can still be worth money. So it depends on obviously your item and what you're, what you're doing.
But if there's no comps, sometimes it's not always a bad thing.
Rob: It's a good thing for sure. Cause I love that. I love that. Absolutely, they don't make those anymore. You can't find them until you can only find one that's in really good condition and that's really easy. The only place you can really find those and buy those, so killer, killer deal.
And love that one. So flip number two, let's save flip number two for last. Let's jump to flip number three. Number two is pretty impressive.
Melissa: Flip number two?
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: That one?
Rob: Oh, nope, you're right. Sorry. Flip number two.
Melissa: The belt.
Rob: The belt, we got this bad boy got this from, one of my contacts. I actually bought two of these.
They were.
Melissa: You sold them both.
Rob: I did, this was the second of the sale. We got it for free. Sometimes my, my contact has some stuff that he doesn't know what it is. I don't know what it is. And he just lets me pick through a lot of his crap and I can grab it and take it. These look expensive. So I grabbed two of them.
And we sold the first one. And I spent a lot of money with this contact so, I think, and this is not, it's a belt, so it's not really worth anything to him. So, but I got this one we paid, it was free.
Melissa: It was free.
Rob: Yeah. And we sold it for?
Melissa: $400.
Rob: $400, $399 I think it was. $399.99 is what we got it for, sold it for, so killer deal on this. This was all profit, but then eBay fees were $54, no promotion on this. So just flat out eBay fees, $54 and shipping fee was $17. Total profit?
Melissa: $329.
Rob: $329! No money invested $329.
Melissa: What is that belt used for?
Rob: I don't know what the belt's used for. So that's a great question.
Some of these things look expensive to me and I don't know what they are. So how do I sell them? That's what you guys might be asking. There was a name on the belt. It was a continental something, a name and a model number. So it actually had the model number, no serial number on the belt, just a model number.
So somebody who is looking for this exact belt could throw it into either Google and eBay might've thrown it up to them, or they could have went into eBay and looked and typed in the name and the model number because theirs was broken, they needed to replace it. And that's how they would have found it on eBay.
So I think retail on these things were over a thousand dollars. So I figured $400 when the right person saw it, they would jump on it with, you know, no questions asked. And this one actually I think, went out of the country. I think it was a global ship to where we shipped it to eBay global hub, and then they forwarded it onto wherever it went out of the country.
So killer deal on that. $300, what'd you say? $329 in profit for no money invested, a killer deal on that as well. We love that.
Melissa: The next one you have no money invested too. The GE ultra Max what was that one?
Rob: So these are actually the same, same kind of ordeal. It's a ballast for a led light. And don't quote me on this. I don't know anything about this one either, but my buddy, my contact actually got a ton of these pallets full of these boxes.
He gave me a couple of them and said, see what you can do. We actually sold last month, I think we sold seven of them last month. And then this month it hit again. I think because of the shortages right now, going on, what's going on in our economy where it's kind of hard to get, manufacturing's all backed up and that kind of stuff.
So I think they found it here and they jumped in, they bought three of them, a total of $240 is what we sold. Like I said, I didn't have any money invested in this. I got, I think I got 20 or 25 of them. And he gave me a box though. And just to see what I could do. And that's what we got. So no money invested into it.
What are we paying eBay fees?
Melissa: $30.
Rob: $30 in eBay fees and shipping?
Melissa: $29.
Rob: $29. So, you know, on, even on the belt and on this, these are very small items. So not, not very big. They went into small boxes. They didn't weigh a lot. Very very easy to ship. We love high profit flips like that. Sometimes we have to throw them on a pallet and sometimes we do not.
So this one, total profit was $181. Love it, love those profits.
Melissa: So it's worth mentioning to create context too, like we, one thing going to the flea market every single weekend, you start to get to know a lot of these people.
Rob: Consistency.
Melissa: So then eventually, like we talk about this all the time. Again, it's important to just be friendly with people.
Eventually you buy from the same people, then you get to know them like, hey, come to my storage units, come see if you can find anything that you want there. And so just building those contacts really helps.
Rob: Absolutely. So this is the doozy you guys are like, all right, you sold three items and the profits aren't super, super big for you to end up in almost $10,000 in our sales.
So guess what it is. So this was a killer, killer one, excited about this one.
Melissa: Just a little excited.
It's for these panels that, you even said, Melissa wouldn't want me to buy these.
Rob: Absolutely, so I've had these for a while. I bought a trailer full of these from one of my, this is a, this was a different contact, but, he had, I think, 40 of these of, I don't, if I remember correctly. You said that we went back and looked and it was less than $10, but, I told everybody else, so we'll keep it at, I paid $10.
Melissa: I think it ended up being $7.
Rob: But we'll just say $10 because for our numbers, that's what I figured out.
That's what I thought it was. So $10 a piece. We sold 10 of these in one shot. So what these are a breaker panels that go on the side of a house, actually not a house. It's going to be a fourplex, a threeplex. Maybe threeplex, it actually has three different like round holes where they can put meters in and detect three different power sources to whatever that building is.
We sold 10 of these in one shot. I bought 40, we sold 10 at one time. I paid $10 a little bit less, but $10, we'll say. And then we sold them for $699?
Melissa: Yes.
Rob: Total price $699, a piece which ended up being, roughly $7,000. Plus another $1,000 for shipping. Total price on this, the sale price was $7,990 is what we actually made on this one sale with these 10 breaker boxes.
Melissa: $100 invested.
Rob: $100, $10 a box, $100 invested.
So this is cool eBay, and this is another note, we'll make in a second, but, so what were our eBay fees?
Melissa: $279.
Rob: $279 in eBay fees. Shipping fees?
Melissa: Were $295.
Rob: $295. This one actually, well, definitely went on a pallet. These were bigger units. Probably actually there are 48 by two foot. So that's how, how big each one was.
So I stacked two on the bottom and then I stacked two on top. That's how we did the pallet. So nice big size pallet, killer killer deal on this, but one of these notes is, eBay instead. Now this does won't happen to everybody, but it does happen on occasion. EBay has their breaks in their fees at $2,500.
They came in and charged me the fees per single item which was $700, $699 per item. Plus eBay had tacked on their taxes and my shipping fee and they charged me 12% per single item. And the total of the eBay fees was over a thousand dollars. I went back and looked at that and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
This is one sale. One buyer, they should not be charging me per single item for the fee because the breakdown is once it hits $2,500, the fees come way, way down.
Melissa: So 3.5%?
Rob: Less. With a store it's like 2.35%. So instead of the 12% that they typically charge you on those sales, it dropped all the way down after $2,500. All the money after that was 2.35%. So it's ended up being over $700 worth of a refund back. So instead of a thousand dollars, I was only paying $200 or $300 in fees. $279 in fees is what, oh yeah, I did the calculation. So $279 in fees instead of paying that over a thousand dollars. So very, very big, the cool part about.
Well, I don't know if it's cool, but you need to keep track of some of these listings when you're doing higher profit flips, you need to make sure that eBay's charging the right amount. And like I said, this is not a normal situation because we had to sell 10 items to get over that $2,500 threshold.
And it happened here. So I had to call them, they had to go back and get it approved and all that kind of stuff. So definitely keep track of your fees if you're selling high profit stuff. Cause this could happen.
Melissa: Anything, I think keeping track of your fees.
Rob: It's a lot harder to do it if you're selling hundreds of items though.
Melissa: But it's still good to, bookkeeping is important.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: It's good to go check because they do make mistakes and you know, some things, and this was a $700 and that you kind of lost had you not been.
Rob: And to be honest on eBay's end of it. It's not really a mistake. It's more of them doing a courtesy to me, to be able to give that money back to me because of the whole situation versus it was, and it was one transaction.
Now, if I had sold this to 10 different buyers, I totally get it. They, they need to charge me that 12%, but they only had to process one transaction for that $8,000 instead of, you know, each individual $700 transaction or $800 transaction, whatever it was. So cool. So our total, sales for the month of March.
These four, actually with the 10 items, it jumps up to 14 items, 13, but we only had to ship that those 10 items to one spot. So we just counted as one sale. Kind of like the same thing we did with eBay. So for four sales, almost $10,000 total to be?
Melissa: $9,630.
eBay fees were $489.
Shipping cost $504. And this is a really cool part, cost of goods was only $120.
Rob: $120 guys, invested into this $9,600 in sales, which is amazing. That's what we preach here. It's all about high profit sales. That's what we really, really want to jump into is getting to those higher profit sales. So you're working less.
Now I will put the caveat on this, typically you all these other ones that we sold, they didn't take me any more time than a $20 flip in these couple of hundred dollars flips that we had. They didn't take me any more time, but the boxes that I did, they did take me a little bit of time. I probably invested at least three or four hours, which is not bad for my profit, but probably three or four hours into palleting these up because exactly it did take time.
I had to clean each individual one. I wrapped each into individual one with that shrink wrap, to make sure that they were going to arrive safely. So yeah. The three or four hours total invested. Absolutely. I'll do that any day for that type of profit. So if I wanted to give you that caveat of typically we do high profits and we don't have to invest that much more time into them.
This one we did because it was a bigger item, but it was a lot more money too.
Melissa: $8,517 is our total profits.
Rob: Total profit! I love it. Over $8,500, guys. That's why we love the high profit flips.
Melissa: Yeah. So if you, want to check out and see if maybe this kind of business model is good for you, you can totally check out our free workshop.
We'll put the link below and check it out.
Rob: Don't miss it! Go check it out, guys.