Could I Make a Partial Living Flipping Items on E-bay
 

Dueller's post regarding a client whose daughter flips stuff on ebay has given me pause to think.

As many of you know, due to the vagaries of politics, I lost my job. I am now working part time and have lots of time on my hands.

I have sold a number of things on ebay, including my Bugeye Sprite, so I know now to sell. But, the things I have sold are things I already own.

So, with all of that in mind, what do you guys think, seriously, would be easy items to buy and then flip? Not really thinking Porsche stuff, but things the masses on ebay are looking for. cheap jewelry seems like one thing.

I know of a few folks who are acting as cosignors to sell other folks stuff on ebay. They get a fee whether it sells or not and a percentage of the sales price.

That might be a way to get in without too much overhead or having to sell all your own chit.

I really think you can, it's just a matter of finding something popular, and that you can buy in quantity for cheap.

It's all in findng the right item, though. I think if you hit on the right thing or things, there's a lot to be made.

can't count the number of times i've wondered about this. would you warehouse the items or try to work as a 'middle man' who simply handles the financial transaction while the manufacturer handles the actual shipping? wonder how much volume you'd have to sell on an a particular 'average priced' item to gross, say a grand or 2k or 3k, etc. per month. i'll bet a number of folks on the board are doing this. my job actually just went from full to part-time, so i hear your pain, kurt..

Find the storage rooms around Jeff City. Find out when they are doing their sales of people who have not paid and are being evicted.

I have done a few and made some descent money while doing so. Just takes some luck and a bit of storage space.

IMO, one could do well selling close outs, overstock, contents of failed businesses...etc. You could advertise in local rags and Craigslist to source the items.

Other interesting money makers are instructional "pamphlets". This comes in the form of paper booklets, CD or downloadable PDFs. For instance, one gentleman sells his advice on what to look for when buying a metal lathe. He sells the info for around $10. Another sells instructions on how to build phase converters...either rotary or static. The beauty is that you have an easily replenishable item to sell. Build once sell many times.

Some items like cheap jewelry seems to have way too much competition.

I think you'd enjoy it a lot more if you bought/sold something you were interested in.

Look at what someone like Jason Cullen is doing; making some money, supporting his hobby and provinding a service to others in his hobby. Sometimes the classifieds in BBS boards is better (read: less hassle) than ebay.

I've found a nice little niche I'm taking advantage of for "fun" money, mind you ona smaller scale. I buy used VW diesel engines locally for $50-$400, and part them out. Takes me 2-3 hours to tear an engine down and photograph it, and I get minimum $500 for core parts, and much more if I get good turbos, pistons, cranks & heads. I make 300-600 off each engine, plus I get lots of spare parts for me. I usually do an engine every month or so; I'm picking up two this weekend. Good timing, the turbo on my samurai is sucking oil.

You have any hobbies that you could buy/sell in?

i would guess that MOST large vendors on ebay aren't warehousing anything. drop shipping can make a one man operation appear to be a monster store.

Lots of good ideas so far.

I really don't have a hobby that would translate well to ebay sales. I also live in a city that doesn't have a lot of storage sales to find things to flip.

I also don't really want to do drop shipments or that kind of stuff. At least not yet. Thought I would start off small and try to grow. I'm good at putting thoughts into action, just limited on ideas is all.

The drop shipping gig is probably no more than you sending an email to the distributor when you receive an order. Probably EASIER than packing and shipping yourself.

Whatever you do don't go into used trailer sales :) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070307/ap_on_re_us/fema_trailer_sale

Could I Make a Partial Living Flipping Items on E-bay?

You most certainly can. I have been doing this for 2+ years , it takes experience/knowlede and alot of hard work.

I would recommend starting here:
www.whatdoisell.com

download the audios and worksheet, spend 1/2 a day and learn the basic material.

My only other suggestion is don't have your business solely on Ebay. start your own dot com and market your products to existing customers. Ebay is an excellent customer acquisition tool. Don't think of every sale as a way to make profit. think of it as gaining a customer. Use a customer list and send out newsletters. I prefer and use ymlp.com . let me know if you need specific help and I can assist you in some of the problem areas with Ebay and ways around them.
best of luck...and get ready to pay some SERIOUS FEES

:D

"used trailer sales"...boy is that ever the truth! i'll bet trailer sales guys are fuming!

My wife makes great money on the Bay. When she started out it was just for some extra spending money for vacations and the like.

Now, it's grown so much that it's become a full time. She's pulling in anywhere from $300-4 per day, sometimes a lot more.

Yep, my sister does it about 30 hours a week (that's full time in France :D) and makes decent money...maybe $40K per year. She gets to work at home, set her own hours, and take care of the kids while she does it.

FWIU, clothing (Both new and used) sell very well....especially for kids and women.


Related question: I have tons of things I want to list on Ebay. Are any of the "turbo" listers good? I find the process of listing multiple items quite tedious.

Net or Gross...

I've done 8K Gross in a month on the Bay before with no problem.

Joe has it right buying the contents of Storage Rentals. But don't stop there...Yard Sales, Estate Sales, Thrift Stores, Consignment shops, local auctions, even Antique Stores. U can even buy stuff on the Bay and resell it...but that is for something 3 million pair of enquiring eyes have missed.

Let me clue U, Missouri is a good place to look for stuff. I found a Carlos Gove -Denver City- Plains Rifle in a little auction down in So Missouri, turned out I was the only bidder..bought it for $500 and sold it through a Large Auction house and cleared $1500 on it. For a profit of $1000, and it was a piece of junk. How hard was that.

This last weekend I picked up 3 items for $3700 with a value of between $6000 and $7500. This coming weekend I have 4 more items to go after.

The area where absolutely the most money is left laying around is Art...it only takes one piece to make U well for a long time. I have been able to buy pieces for $500 that are worth 10K no problem. Now what is really easy are the $200 or $300 pieces you can turn for $1500, thats all over the place.

All U have to do is look on the free web site www.findartinfo.com to check if the artist is listed, is the paintings style roughly the same as whats pictured on the site and what his values are. Jeff Moran of Morans in Pasadena showed me a little painting that was bought for $10 at a yard sale, it was so dirty you could hardly make out what it was, turned out it sold for $9800. What do U have to know..have a brain, be willing to look things up and think well does this thing look interesting, does it seem to have life to it..

You can literally make money on Cast Iron Pots and Pans...or how about Womens Designer Purses, Belts and Shoes...I was standing in lie at Fed-ex one day and a gal told me that she MADE $500 a week selling Designer Womens stuff on the bay.

So its there if you wana look.

BTW: When I was living in LA and going down to Abels off Garfield every week... if U think only people with limited means do this your a retard... there were people with 8 and 9 figure net worths going through there every week looking for a bargain. None of these guys ever pays retail for anything.

Tabs you are a veritable treasure trove of information!

Here is a painting that I bought for $330 out the door and was immediatily appraised with an auction estimate of $2500 to $4500 with an offer to buy from Treadway Gallerys. This is a painting done as a WPA piece in 1938 in Chicago by Norman MacLeish. People would kill today to get this painting the genre has become HOT...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1173308991.jpg

Tabs i'm guessing your mental inventory of artist names and styles is relatively massive to manage to spot deals like this?

Net.

I think I'll suggest she start flipping Art though. Wow.

The list started with one name..after awhile it builds, and for what U don't know WWWfindartinfo.com or other subscription sites fills in the blanks...that site even will show what the signatures are supposed to look like where available.

One thing about pricing art, just because its by the artist it doesn't mean top buxs...if an artist is known for harbor scenes and gets big money that doesn't mean a landscape will pull the same.

Also you want to sell a piece of art in the geographical region he is popular in . East Coast Harbor scenes don't pull the same money on the West coast.

Frames have a life of their own and if made by a well known maker can be more expensive than the art that is in them.

So start beating the bushes..
Also for art under say $3000 E-bay is really the best place to sell it.

With the Norman MacLeish I saw it down at the junk pile end of Abels warehouse at a Thursday sale. I looked on the back and it had an Art Institute of Chicago Art Show Label dated 1938 on it. I looked up the artist, his records weren't that strong, but the piece looked good to me, as thats what caught my attention in the first place. So I left an absentee bid of $350 on it, it came in at $300 plus the 10% comission...$330.

Took it home sent pics off to the auction house where MacLeishs work had been sold before. They said $2500 to $4500 and that was back in 2001.

I can pull out another 15 or so paintings that have a similar story or are better than that. For an amateur I got to be pretty well respected by the Dealers who went to Abels as having a good eye for things and knowing their value.

Its all about applying expertise. About 5 years ago I used to hang with a bunch of ebay full time sellers, who all pretty much followed the same pattern, buy whats cheap here and expensive someplace else, and vice versa. Trouble is everybody knows about the internet these days, and its easy to get "reference" prices, which are often horrible inflated or just plain wrong for the item in question. I was never that much of an ebay seller, and got really tired of shipping issues.

Look over all the good and bad, and decide if it suits you. As a "job" I'd say in general it sucks and doesn't pay that well, but its ok as a hobby that puts money in your pocket from time to time.

What I'm talking about goes beyond the Net or E-bay...the Bay is just convient for people to sell their ***** on. Its all basically the same hustle though...use your knowledge to find something that underpriced and turn and sell it in a more specfic selling venue where its real value can be reflected.

There is a guy who buys and sells art on the bay...ARTFORME17...he owns a bunch of those single story business/office buildings that U see down in Irvine, CA...he has his secratary do the listing and shipping for the bay. He keeps the kinda stuff I hang in my house in his office and the good stuff in his home in Newport Beach.

I have to agree that your not gona get rich on selling Antiques for a living. However to suplement income, a hobby job or just to aqquire some nice things that increase your wealth its very doable.

Here in Vegas I have a competitor who is a Chiropractor who hits 4 guns stores 4 times a week for the past 30 years. In the one that I go to he spends about $40,000 a year on buying used/collectable/antique guns. He only sells to Dealers, one of his customers is the gunshop in Houston called...Collectable Arms.

Kurt, if you'd buy 500 worth of pertinent yellow zinc'd metric nuts and bolts, you'd have your hands full selling them onsey, twosey.

Milt is right. Small quantities of stuff sold at low prices, but with a fixed shipping charge that covrs the actual cost of the item, shipping and minimal profit. Then anything bid for it is pure profit.

Having said that, imagine if you will, 40 sales a day of $4 items sold for $8 to 9. You have eBay fees, packaging, labeling, a tracking system you need to carefully monitor in order to manage your shipping and feedback. Don't forget offering PayPal, which will take 2.9% of your sale. Of course, you will have to consider the gas to get to the post office, and the time to deal with them.

It's a hard way to make a living. Higher ticket items will not sell at the same pace, and you'll be running around more.

If you had an area expertise -- hobby related, or whatever -- you might be able to buy low and sell high. I've done that a lot with Porsche items and have a robust rating. When you have a strong rating, your bids and profits will be higher.

Lots to consider. The good thing is, you can try it and decide.

I bought one of these and so far it has turned out well. My problem is I bought a unit full of 69 and 70 Mustang parts and really had no idea of the value. The nice thing about E-bay was I didn't have to know the value so much as listing it properly and letting the bidders decide. I was pleasantly surprised at the prices some of the parts have brung. I got lucky though.

And it is a part time job handling and shipping the stuff.

You could always buy rusted out sports cars and part them out.

You guys have given me some great ideas. Fortunately I don't have to make a living at it. I think I will start first with stuff around the house and keep my eyes open for storage unit sales.

A friend of a friend bought a storage unit's contents a year and a half ago. It turned out to belong to Steven Spielberg and contained the first movie he had made. Last I heard, she was trying (without success) to get a quarter million for it.

Unfortunately for you Kurt I don't think you are near this type of location but but a friends office worker makes pretty good money (so I am told) by going to the downtown Los Angeles fashion district (think blocks and blocks of small shops selling designer and designer knock offs) buying up belts, purses, etc. and selling them on ebay.

Hi Kurt,

Check out the community portion of the Ebay website. It is sort of like here at Pelican I think... You can learn a lot from the people who are successful on Ebay. The coolest thing is that you can get started with a small amount of capital and get it rolling into something much bigger.

I think it also helps to specialize in something, because after all, Ebay is a market place. Buying low and selling high requires some specialized knowledge when buying and adding value somehow to fill a need.

There are some franchise systems that are setups to sell stuff for people. Becoming an expert on using ebay itself adds value. People drop off their old stuff and come back a week later to get the cash. Of course, you can just study the franchise and come up with your own concepts if you don't want to play by their rules and pay royalties, fees etc.

tech - i could have gone the rest of my life without hearing a story like that! :( lol.

I used to buy and re-sell electronics on ebay. I could double my money. The ad one posts means allot. Got tired of dealing with all the nutty people. Have some car parts I need to sell also...

There is a large pick-your-part here in my area that scraps hundreds of cars a month. While the cars are in the yard, parts are sold very cheaply at flat fees. $5.00 for a carb for example. A local retired guy makes $20k a year by going to the scrapyard every couple days and buying the small easy to ship parts from these cars and throwing them on ebay.