Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about the items they flipped last week to make $12,000.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast – What We Flipped To Make $12K Last Week On eBay
Rob: What's up, guys? On today's episode, we are talking about how we made $12,000 in the last week with four sales on eBay.
Rob: All right, guys, today we are talking about an amazing week. Last week we had $12,000 in sales and only in four items.
Melissa: And so it's been a little bit since we've had sales, but you just really started picking up your listings, which have helped. So some of these are ones that you just got listed, which is exciting.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: And yeah, so we're gonna dive into all the numbers because that's what everybody wants to know. What are the profits? Because you can spend $10,000 and make $12,000, but that's not what our goal is. So our goal is to make at least 10 x on our investments and make our profits.
Rob: So, yep. Spoiler alert guys. This is over 20xing our investment. We will break it down for you guys, but this is awesome, awesome profits on these items that we sold.
Melissa: Just gave them the answer. No, I'm just kidding. All right, so let's go into the items that we sold. So, yeah, so the first one,
Rob: kicking it off.
Melissa: Was the biggest one or?
Rob: Well, that's how I did my paperwork, so. We can put that one last. So the first one is a jackhammer. This is a commercial jackhammer one that you see as you're driving down the road and you might see a guy on the side of the road breaking up concrete. The sucker weighs a ton, two people really to pick up the handle and move it around, and it will not operate on a normal compressor.
It's gotta have one of the compressors on wheels, that you see on the side of the road. I see 'em a lot of time on construction sites. The big cranes on the construction sites pick 'em up in the air when they're not working on the construction site. They have 'em lofted way up in the air so nobody can steal 'em.
So that is the type of jackhammer this is. Picked two of these up, man, this was one like two or three weeks ago, right?
Melissa: It was a couple weeks ago. And it was because they weren't even something you were looking for.
Rob: No.
Melissa: So they happened to be at this place. You were going to get the cappuccino machine.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: Which you're still listing I think?
Rob: It's listed.
Melissa: Oh, okay. You listed it, so you went to go get the cappuccino machine and it turns out this guy had a lot of other stuff cuz they're trying to clear out a, a warehouse or a office or something.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: And they, they like to sell too, so, And they, yeah. So anyways, they had a whole bunch of stuff and he looked at those and said, how much for those?
And you got 'em for two of 'em for $120.
Rob: So actually spent all the money in my wallet other than $120, and the guy showed him to me and I said, okay, how much for everything?
Melissa: I think he said, $200. And you're like, I, this is what I got. I don't have any other cash on me.
Rob: And, and he was ready to get rid of it.
Yeah. And that's all the cash I had. So he took $120 for it. And yeah, so we got two jackhammers and a concrete, which I didn't even add that into it. So the concrete vibrator that we got, is not included in that price.
Melissa: So it's actually actually less than $60.
Rob: But we'll keep it at that because that's how he did the numbers.
So we bought two jackhammers hoses, a whole bunch of jackhammer bits.
Melissa: Does one of the hoses go with for the jackhammer?
Rob: Yes. So the jackerhammer, that's how I split 'em up. So two hoses, two jackhammers. That's how I sold 'em with two bits. That's how I ended up listing this last one. We listed this thing and I sold em two days.
So it was an amazing, amazing deal. But we paid, ended up paying $60 for one jackhammer, cuz we paid $120 together. We split 'em that way. $60 for it and sold it for $999 with $100 shipping. So $1,100 total.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: On this sale. And like I said, not even 48 hours, it was listed, sold like that.
So awesome, awesome sale. I love it when they sell quick like that. So, great, great deal on that. Are you gonna break down?
Melissa: Yep.
eBay fees were $142. Did you promote that one?
Rob: No, that one was not promoted. Only one of these was promoted.
Melissa: Okay. And shipping costs were $212, so.
Rob: $212 on shipping, and that actually has not been shipped yet, but I did get the quote.
I went back and forth on this one. This one was close because I can still ship it in a box. It doesn't weigh too much to go over, FedEx and UPS's, their weight limit on their boxes. So I could do it, but I think it's gonna weigh out to be the same amount if I do it in a box versus throw it onto a pallet, it'll be a lot easier for me just to throw everything onto a pallet and ship it that way.
So I'm pretty sure that's what I did. So I got a quote on both. And on a pallet, it's gonna cost me $212 to ship this.
Melissa: So talk about the fact that you charged 'em a hundred dollars for shipping. Yep. But you're spending $212 now.
But there's, because there's enough profit in there.
Rob: The profit's in there, it does not matter.
That's the best thing I, I love about this business is, when we're getting the, the items cheap as we possibly can, there's plenty of room even, some of these things I'll even like, I think all these other ones I did free shipping on, so I included the shipping into it. This one I just added an extra hundred dollars cause I knew I could and I thought I could get it, shipped for about a hundred to $125.
It cost me a little bit more, but no big deal. Like I said, there's still plenty, plenty of profit in that. So yeah .That was
Melissa: $686 total profit.
Rob: So yeah, almost $700 in profit after all the fees, shipping and everything is said and done. I love that. I absolutely love that. A $60 investment for almost $700.
So that one did, did 10 x.
Melissa: Then what is the brake actuator?
Rob: Brake actuator is something that we pulled from one of my contacts. I got, both of these actually came from the same contact that I got these. I paid $20 for this actuator. It's a brand new. It goes on a like a commercial school bus.
It's the brake actuator, a component that runs the brakes. This thing was brand new, still in the package, still labeled. And I got it from a buddy who he gets so much surplus of stuff. It's just crazy. He doesn't even know what half the stuff is. I don't know what half the stuff is, but it did have a name, it did have a model number, so I was able to go check it out.
And it was a break actuator, paid $20 for it. Like I said, it's just a not that big of a, a component. Paid $20 for it. Ended up selling it for $700?
Melissa: $700.
Rob: Yep. So $699.
Melissa: Whenever we, we round up for, to the penny because he does like $699.99. So it's really just one penny under, so it's just easy to round up.
Rob: So, Yep. So all these numbers I rounded up in pennies. That's it. And since we did so, but sold it for $700. What was the breakdown I paid? $32 in shipping?
Melissa: $32 in shipping, and $82 in eBay fees.
Rob: One thing to note on the shipping that this was $10 in insurance on this, so I could have had this shipped for a little under $20, around $20, but I always pay for insurance when I'm shipping something, especially high value, something that is worth a little, quite a bit of money. Then we want to make sure that is insured, if it's lost, if it's broken, whatever it is. I don't wanna self-insure that. I don't wanna have to pay it outta my pocket, so that is why we always pay the extra for insurance. Always. Yeah.
Melissa: Always, always, always.
Rob: An extra $10 for a $700 item is nothing.
Melissa: You always want insurance. Even if, and I know we've talked about this a lot before, but even if you don't think the item can break, we sent out a mattress. We shipped out a mattress a sleep number.
We sold a lot of them at one point. And they cannot break. It's a mattress. It folds up. We air seal it tight into the box. They lost the box. It was a $500 or $600 sale. They lost the box. And then we were out the money because we didn't get insurance. Cuz this can't break. It's not a.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: Yeah. So always get insurance.
Rob: If you don't have insurance, even if they lose it, they're only have to pay you $100. That's what you're insured for on FedEx, on UPS and on USPS priority. All those you're only insured for a hundred dollars. Everything over and above that, you have to pay extra for it. So make sure you're doing that. This one, like I said, it cost me an extra $10 to insure it for the extra $600 on top of the a hundred dollars that they already had.
Melissa: And because of the price point, eBay requires a signature. A signature, right? Whenever you, they, you print the labels.
Rob: I had always assumed that it was $750, but after taxes, this guy actually did pay over $750 gross taxes. So they automatically require me to, put a signature confirmation. So he cannot give the, the, shipping company cannot just drop it off on his doorstep like a lot of shipping companies can for regular boxes, they'll drop 'em off, off, off on the doorstep.
And that's all you need is the proof that it made it from your location to their location. And you have a tracking number to prove that in the,
Melissa: event?
Rob: Event, thank you that it is a, yeah, I think it's $750, including taxes. So whatever the full charge is, they require you to put that signature confirmation on there.
Melissa: It's not a bad thing.
Rob: It's not.
Melissa: It can be annoying to the buyer sometimes, but it's not anything we can change.
Rob: So, no. And if you do it through UPS, it's an extra, like $5 or $7 extra for the delivery confirmation signature. If you do it on FedEx, it is free because of the price of insurance or how yeah, how high the insurance is.
So when you insure it, for over $750, then it is, or it's $700, it is free. It's added in with that so you don't have to pay extra for it. So it saves you a little bit of money when you're using FedEx for that.
Melissa: Yeah. But that did come in handy one time whenever we had, I don't know if we did. We might do a podcast on that sometime, but, we did have somebody that tried to claim that it wasn't delivered and he signed for it.
So I was like, just shot yourself in the foot.
Rob: Yep. So , and that's why they do it, is they wanna prove that whoever received it, so for our security, we wanna prove that somebody did receive it. You can't actually.
Melissa: He tried to go to his credit card is what it was. He tried to go to his credit card and prove that he, cuz he couldn't win in eBay and yeah.
All this stuff. So.
Rob: So you can actually make a direct. signature. So whoever ordered it, their name is on the shipping documents, they directly have to sign for it, or it's just an adult signature. You can do that when you're actually filling out and creating the label, you have those two options. But like I said, eBay just requires you to get a signature for that, showing that somebody received it at the house and then you're out.
You're not responsible for it anymore. It did make it safely to them. They signed for. That's all that they have to prove.
Melissa: That's been new since managed payments. Right? I don't think you to do that.
Rob: I think it has been fairly new since managed payments. I don't think they required you to do it. They recommended it always.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: But now they, they physically require you two to be protected under seller protection.
Melissa: Yeah. Which isn't a bad thing.
Rob: No, it's definitely good. So that was the bus actuator. $20. Paid for it, sold it for $700, fees and everything. What was our total profit on that one?
Melissa: $566.
Rob: $566 love it only paid $20.
So we 20xed, over 20xed that one. Love that for sure.
Melissa: So, the $200 one, what was that?
Rob: The $200? What was this? This was a tool, so it was some type of molding tool. Didn't know anything about it. Bought it with the bus actuator. Didn't know anything about it, but it did have a manufacturer's plate on it.
It did have a couple little specs on that manufacturer plate and a model number. That's how I was able to look it up and figure out that it was worth quite a bit more money than what I was selling it for. It was a used tool. It had rust on it. Not anything spectacular, but somebody needed this exact tool, sold it for $200.
Same thing. I paid, my contact $20 for it. He had no idea what it was. I had no idea what it was. So I actually pulled it out of his stuff and yeah, gave him $20 for this and the $20 for the bus actuator. He was happy with it because he gets his stuff for next to nothing. But when he buys big, big, lots of stuff, so, happy about that one.
Yeah. So we paid $20, sold it for $200.
Melissa: Yep. Fees were $40 and shipping costs were $20.
Rob: And fees were a little high on this one to me, I was thinking that yeah, we paid quite a bit on fees, but this was the one that I see believe sold promoted. So I think it was $25 and some change for eBay fees. And then on top of that we had to pay the promotion fee.
Yeah. So it was a little bit more for that, but still $120 for a $20 investment. Yeah. Not bad at all. No. I'll, I'll take it all day. No.
Melissa: Yeah. That's awesome.
Yeah. So then next, and the last one, next one,
Rob: which, this is the one that brought our totals up. Absolutely love it. You guys might have already heard about it.
We sold a turbo chef, a turbo chef oven. Now these are one of the ovens that you would see inside of a Subway, a Starbucks, something like that. One of those quick ovens that you pull down the door, shove something in it real quick. Press a button. It cooks, yeah, pizza slices. I mean, it does that kind of stuff in a matter of minutes really, really quick.
So we got, one of these, got this on our road trip last year or through the summer, when we were on the road. We got it for $400 and sold it for $10,000.
Melissa: $4,000. And people were like, well, how can you sell it for $10,000? And the reason like, when you got like, it doesn't make sense. Why would somebody not sell it for that. Like, and we talked about this the other day. Like we, we did one on this one, completely. Like we talked about this actual
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: One, but it's because they don't, the person selling it doesn't wanna bother with shipping and they're not putting it on eBay where they can offer shipping.
And we're selling it for about half price. So the retail value is there. Like we're not trying to sell something that's worth $5,000 for $10,000. Yeah. We're selling something worth $20,000 for $10,000.
Rob: Yeah.
The retail on this is, if somebody was gonna go buy one of these new, it's gonna be like $23,000, $25,000.
They got this for $10,000. Another really, really good point to this sale is I cleaned this thing really, really well. So I got a couple, probably a couple extra hours into making this thing look like it was brand spanking new, and it paid off. It totally paid off because when somebody actually looks for a brand new one for $23,000, $25,000, They see mine with the owner's manual that looks like it's almost in brand new condition.
They're gonna go for the one that they can get for less than 50% off, and that's what they did. And I put a video in of it showing that it's worked. So I hooked it up, tested it, made sure everything was working on it, the components, all that kind of stuff. So, it's kind of a no brainer to save almost 50% on that first small business.
Yeah, to do something like that.
Melissa: The videos really help out a lot.
Rob: Huge for higher value items for sure. So we're using that on any of our higher, higher value items. We wanna make sure we're doing videos.
Melissa: Yeah, so eBay fees were $290.
Rob: $290!
Melissa: And then shipping costs were $125, so.
Rob: $125.
Now this is a unique sale. We're not gonna go into it in this podcast. So yeah, and I don't think these were actually eBay fees $290 in fees and then $125 with shipping.
Melissa: There were payPal fees.
Rob: Exactly.
Melissa: So we're go dive into that in another future podcast because we had to do something interesting to.
Rob: Yeah, this is definitely a unique situation with the sale of this item.
So, yeah. We will break into that at another podcast because we'll give you guys a whole breakdown of what actually happened with the sale. And then go, but this is the, these are the fees associated with it. So $125 for shipping and $290 for the processing for the fees that we had to pay on it, and we paid $400 for it.
So overall profit on this bad boy including the $400, the shipping, everything?
Melissa: $9,185.
Rob: $9,000. So we only had to put $400 out to get this item. All the other fees we incurred after the sale. So we definitely 20xed this one. And when you do a 20x on something like this, It's amazing. So it's awesome.
Melissa: I, I remember what I was wanting to ask you whenever you were talking about things, the, the two items that you got that you didn't know what they were.
I mean, that happens a lot. People like, how do you sell what you don't know? Well, you don't know what right away, but you can look it up by
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: All of those things that you found. You have found all the serial numbers and whatnot, but how do you know when you are like looking at all this stuff? What like catches your eye that it could be worth something.
It's worth looking up. And are you looking it up while you're there?
Rob: Yes. Sometimes I do. And sometimes for a $20 investment, if I see something that looks like it's expensive that I, sometimes I'll just grab it and do it. I know that my contact doesn't charge me a lot for smaller items, bigger items.
He charges me more money for it. Yeah. But small items, like I said, he gets 'em for next to nothing. He's happy just to get, you know, some lunch money one day for it. And that's how I buy them. But these definitely looked expensive to me, not super big, but they look like they were expensive components. Expensive. It was a tool and a component, and then.
Melissa: You didn't have to know what exactly it was or what, but just kind of had looked like it could belong to something that could be worth money?
Rob: And I totally had time. I honestly think I probably did pull 'em up because I, I enjoy doing that as well. I believe with the, the, the make and the model number, I probably plugged them in, couldn't really find them in eBay, but probably found 'em on Google and found out the retails of them.
The bus actuator was well over $1,500 $2,000, that I got $700 for it, well over that price. And I found a spec sheet, showing that. And in the eBay listing, I actually listed a picture of the spec sheet of what it did in the component, all the stuff about the component, so yeah, that's one of those things that all you gotta do is jump into Google or jump into eBay and do some research with the brand and the model, and get a good idea of what the retail is, and then you know what you can sell it for.
If you can't find the comps on eBay, you have a good idea that you can get a 50% retail, maybe a little bit more depending on condition.
Melissa: All right, so grand totals.
Rob: Grand totals for last week. So what was it all said and done?
Melissa: $12,000 in sales.
Rob: So $12k.
Melissa: Minus, like four pennies. Shipping costs were $689.
Rob: $689.
Melissa: Fees were $554.
Rob: $554.
Melissa: And total invested $500.
Rob: $500 to make $12,000.
Melissa: So the total profit was $10,257.
Rob: Ten thousand dollars. So we cleared over $10,000 in these four items. This is why we absolutely love high profit items. This did not take a lot to fulfill all of these. It did not take that much time in a week's worth of work.
Yeah, you're talking minimal, minimal hours on this, to be able to clear over $10,000. So we love it when we're able to do that.
Melissa: So we wanna just break down those numbers for you. We're excited that we're getting some more stuff listed. Like we haven't really done a lot lately, so we're excited to be getting all the stuff in the trailer.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: Ready to go. And it's, some of, it's selling pretty quick, so it's pretty fun to see it is. And you only promoted one of those right out of the four?
Rob: Yeah. Just the one tool, the rest were not.
Melissa: So, yeah, so we play around with promotions. Like sometimes we will, sometimes we won't. If it's been sitting for a little while, we might promote it.
So it go, we go back and forth and always testing.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: Like always, you know, try and test. There's not gonna always be forever. One way you have to promote it, 3% or five, whatever it is. Like, there's never gonna be like, this is how you have to do it. You're always gonna have to be testing and trying different things for your items.
Rob: So, and I definitely promote less when I have sales coming in. Yeah. So when I'm listing new stuff and I already have sales coming in, money's coming in, I probably will pro promote less than they are asking me to promote. Sometimes you click on it and they're recommending you promote 5%. I might jump it out at 2%, and do it that way just because I have sales coming in and I just to keep the momentum coming.
I might throw a, a small promotion on it and then I can always go back and alter it if I need to. But that's just an extra tip for sure.
Melissa: Yep. So let's go for another great week, right? You guys are awesome. Thanks so much for listening and we love you guys.