Interestingly enough, I just got out of the art of the re-sell a few weeks ago. Sadly, some of my key issue was with Meh.
Long story short, as many know, I spent the better half of 1.5 years buying and selling, much of which was gathered from Meh daily items.
The problem was that some of the items, specifically electronic items, I received from Meh ended up not working. Excellent example would be the RC Helicopters and drones. Would buy them, sell at a slight uptick and boom, profit....until they failed or malfunctioned. The fallout was rough for several months and since I sold the majority of the products locally through Buy/Sell Facebook pages I was on full display. Suddenly people would blast my pages and items with tons of hate stuff about selling people junk.
I always refunded people their money if an item didn't function as intended, but the damage was already done. Eventually it ended up not even being worth the time or the money. My average purchases at Meh have dropped from 8 or 9 a month to about 2 or 3 a month since now I only buy for myself.
In the end, I profited about $2800 on stuff purchased for the sake of the flip over the course of a year and a half. Never took much time or effort but after getting out of the game for the past few weeks now, it really is a bit of a relief.
Occasionally, I jump on a great deal that's just too good not to profit on, but my margins and overall profit have to be pretty on point for me to make the jump.
Watched a few friends buy what they thought they could resell and make money on the sale. The only one who did bought a car for next to nothing, found an easy to fix glitch and made 2K. Everyone else got stuck with their great deals or lost money. I buy great deals for the family and friends for gifts. Everyone wins.
Yes... a few times. But then I never follow through and actually sell them. Final straw was a case of "juicebox" video players with included sd card adapters.I was going to make millions...or at least tens. They're still in my attic if you want one...I've accepted my limits
@DaveKnowsAll Yeah, same. It's just a massive pain in the ass TBH. Selling stuff is time consuming and the margins you'll make doing it just doesn't feel worth the time and effort.
@DaveKnowsAll I had to hit up Amazon just to find out what the hell that thing is. Now selling for $9.08. What did you pay for them? Best part is the very first review is from 2004. The last one was in 2008.
I buy stuff so I can KEEP it. Every once in a while, I buy something, and then quit liking it. I give to friends, I donate it to local charities, or I throw it out. Buying stuff to sell later on sounds way too much like work, and I'm retired.
I loved today's write up ("It's Complicated"). In my heart, I was applauding.
I've occasionally sold an item for a profit (e.g. a 10' HDMI cable that cost me $1 including shipping for $5) but fairly rarely.
I generally give away about 20-50% of my BOC and Fuku/fuko items to people at work (you can usually find someone who will actually be really happy getting crap, especially if it is totally free).
I do buy candy bars and the like in bulk at BJs to sell at work for $1 (making 30-50 cents each), but this is not for personal profit but rather to raise a bit of money for the high school robotics teams that I work with. (I started this when my daughter was doing the same kind of thing for the same reason, as a team member.)
I almost got in trouble skimming this post. Starting with double caps and at the beginning of a line on mobile, the phrase "BJs to sell at work for $1" stands out from the rest of the text. Had to stop and re-read to make sure what was being resold.
@cinoclav Years ago, a guy I used to work with used to joke with another guy around lunchtime. He'd ask him where he was going for lunch, and when the other guy asked if he wanted anything he'd say "not from there, but stop off at Sprague St [known for prostitutes] on the way. Get two BJs and bring me one back."
Buying just to resell always seems like a racket. But then there are always people or robots who are willing to pay so it seems to go on based on all laws of economics
I sell parts for industrial equipment, so yeah, I buy a lot of stuff only to turn around and resell it at a 60% margin. It is a hell of a racket, tell you what.
The (ex) wife did. Didn't work. Was still sort of early in ecommerce, so everybody thought they could get a pallet of Chinese-made waste and suckers on the internets would log in to ebay and bid on this to satisfy their predatory capitalistic instinct after they missed an actual good deal. Like I said, didn't work, she spent too much on the crap radios and they were giveaway crap to boot. People don't want to pay good money for stuff they throw away after receiving for free. Personally, I'll stick to my 45-hr work week and decent income.
College football tickets. I was able to sell certain football tickets to people and make the cost of the tickets back. And a couple of years I made enough to fund a spring break trip.
My ex-wife and I used to run a booth at a flea market. We'd buy our inventory at local auctions. Funny thing was, you'd see lots of inventory at other booths that sold at the same auction the previous weekend.
I did have that illusion with some hard to find action figures one year, but after shipping costs I ending up barely breaking even or even losing a little.
A few times. Some of my early purchases here (Kindles) made me enough profit to cover the next several months of meh boxes that came to my door. Usually though, I end up waiting until my BoC/Fuku stuff piles up and sell that. When I'm on my game, those sales cover Christmas... Completely.
@Thumperchick That was one of my favorite things about the flip game. Let's say there were Bubba Mugs for sale...I'd buy the max and sell of most which would not only give me additional profit but also enough to cover the cost of giving myself a Bubba Mug. My Fuku hauls have always been less than stellar and never worth the flip unfortunately.
I've only done this with sports tickets. Back when the Rangers made their two World Series runs a buddy and I went in on season tickets together and they were pretty good seats. So when the run happened, we were able to make a nice profit by selling off a few marquee games here and there. Then once the playoffs started we were able to sell our seats for way too much money and still buy ourselves some decent seats to attend all the games. In the end, I was able to attend all but 1-2 of the playoff games for 2 years without spending a dime.
I worked in a resale shop full time from 2008 to 2010. For 44 hours per week, I made a lot of money for the store owner, not so much for me.
A local law mandated that we held everything for 30 days before we could resell it. This meant that we had to set prices based on what we thought the market would be like in a month.
The resale market is continuously changing. In the beginning, we made a lot of money on used iPods. I had to adjust iPod prices almost monthly. The value of electronics drops faster than Moore's law would suggest.
We only made money in markets we understood. We had a tool specialist, who priced tools without gas engines, someone else that was a small engine guy, two people that could price jewelry. I did most electronics, but not automotive. Etc...
The staff was diverse. When we bought cars, someone would have to go pick them up. Someone else would have to give them a ride there. They drove the used cars incredibly conservatively, still all of the black drivers got pulled over many times for driving while black. There was always a witness, since the other driver was always in the next car. It didn't matter which driver was in the lead, nor whether the black driver drove the store car, or the used car. All that mattered was the neighborhood they were driving through.
We didn't do online sales, because you need to dedicate an employee to that, or it isn't cost effective. If an employee got good at it, they wouldn't need the store, so they would go off and work for themselves. That way they could keep all of the profits.
Family is in a wholesale perishable market. Paid for a lotta decent lives and college degrees with it.
Ballbusting work. 80 hours weeks, no vacations can be a normal life, depending Markets vary, but sourcing is often the secret, and most difficult, ingredient. Doing the balancing act with CS, expenses, cash flow, trust, credit, also v difficult.
I buy a few things online to resell as a part of "real work", mostly for clients where it's easier for me to buy little (or odd, or refurbished, etc.) things than for them to do a PO to do so. Most of what I buy at Meh is for me, or gifts.
Back in the early-ish days of eBay (I know, I'm ), I could buy stuff at local auctions, close-outs, or clearance and resell them online. Data from completed eBay transactions helped to show the real, national (or international) market value of these items. The key was to find things that were easily recognizable and had limited availability. Finding product was fun, but researching pricing levels & creating auction descriptions wasn't. After my kids came along, I ran out of time & energy for resale. There's a bunch of leftover stuff still in the garage: electronics are probably mostly worthless, tools & collectibles might still be worth something
I used to do it a lot six or seven years ago with gadgets and video games, but lost interest as I got better-paying jobs and available free time diminished. Every now and again I still dabble, but I typically end up remembering why I stopped (mostly due to flake buyers).
On more than one occasion I've been tempted to get into the LEGO resale speculation market, with various sites claiming it's a better return than the stock market. I always come down to Earth though and remind myself I have to store that stuff AND successfully sell it to another person. Plus banking everything on the continuing success of a toy company who is gradually starting to sell more an more products aimed solely towards collectors (like beanie babies) sounds like a big risk for the long term.
I buy and sell items from Retail Stores and Retail Store's websites to flip on Amazon. I have been doing quite well making $30+ per hour. I usually buy Toys, Video Games, and Shoes. I stay away from electronic due to the low margains, higher return/defeat rate. I also pretty much sell only new items, with the exception of books. I am only doing it part time right now becuase of school. If you want to learn more I recommend you check out Jamison on the app Periscope, user name (Jamison Philippi) no (). Also Raiken Profit on YouTube. If you guys have any question just ask.
I did some a few years back. I got frustrated with the stupidity of people and rising costs. I also have a large stash of stuff that needs to leave my house. I used several online listing places. My area does not seem to do well on the local listings. I work Saturday's at my day job and scowl at setting up tables and haggling on my one day off.
I was purchasing a little, carved, wooden elephant figure in a thrift store when the man behind me picked it up and began smelling it. He then offered to buy it from me for $2, which would give me a profit of $0.94. The cashier and I stared at each other for a moment. Then I decided the man wanted it much more than I did. He got the elephant; I walked away with $0.94 and a weird story.
All the fucking time... I've been selling in ebay since 1998. Sometime I sell a lot, sometimes a couple of things a month. It depends. I just pulled a couple of baseball cards out of a pizza box from Walmart. I got $18 for 2 cards I got for free. I hate nickel and diming, but I need to make money sometimes to pay the bills.
When the Nintendo Wii first came out they were selling out and hard to find. My job has me driving around the state so I'd stop in at all the Walmarts and nab one if they had any. They'd only receive one or two at a time but I collected 10 in my travels. Sold them all on ebay just before Christmas when people were desperate and paying 2 to 3 times the retail price. I listed them at retail and let them bid up the prices. It was a good holiday season for me that year.
Paging @studerc
@Pavlov Hey! That's me!
Interestingly enough, I just got out of the art of the re-sell a few weeks ago. Sadly, some of my key issue was with Meh.
Long story short, as many know, I spent the better half of 1.5 years buying and selling, much of which was gathered from Meh daily items.
The problem was that some of the items, specifically electronic items, I received from Meh ended up not working. Excellent example would be the RC Helicopters and drones. Would buy them, sell at a slight uptick and boom, profit....until they failed or malfunctioned. The fallout was rough for several months and since I sold the majority of the products locally through Buy/Sell Facebook pages I was on full display. Suddenly people would blast my pages and items with tons of hate stuff about selling people junk.
I always refunded people their money if an item didn't function as intended, but the damage was already done. Eventually it ended up not even being worth the time or the money. My average purchases at Meh have dropped from 8 or 9 a month to about 2 or 3 a month since now I only buy for myself.
In the end, I profited about $2800 on stuff purchased for the sake of the flip over the course of a year and a half. Never took much time or effort but after getting out of the game for the past few weeks now, it really is a bit of a relief.
Occasionally, I jump on a great deal that's just too good not to profit on, but my margins and overall profit have to be pretty on point for me to make the jump.
@studerc $2800 over 18 months might mean $2 an hour or $200 an hour. What was your hourly return?
@hamjudo Conservatively speaking, I probably dedicated about 2 hours a week toward the flipping endeavor. 52 weeks + 26 weeks =78 weeks
$2800 / 78 = $38.90 per hour. Not too bad.
@studerc That would be $2,800/156 = $17.95 per hour. Still not bad for side income.
Yes, but don't know how.
Watched a few friends buy what they thought they could resell and make money on the sale. The only one who did bought a car for next to nothing, found an easy to fix glitch and made 2K. Everyone else got stuck with their great deals or lost money. I buy great deals for the family and friends for gifts. Everyone wins.
Yes... a few times. But then I never follow through and actually sell them. Final straw was a case of "juicebox" video players with included sd card adapters.I was going to make millions...or at least tens. They're still in my attic if you want one...I've accepted my limits
@DaveKnowsAll Yeah, same. It's just a massive pain in the ass TBH. Selling stuff is time consuming and the margins you'll make doing it just doesn't feel worth the time and effort.
@DaveKnowsAll I had to hit up Amazon just to find out what the hell that thing is. Now selling for $9.08. What did you pay for them? Best part is the very first review is from 2004. The last one was in 2008.
I find it rarely ends up being worth the effort unless you replace the word "bought" with the word "stole".
I buy stuff so I can KEEP it. Every once in a while, I buy something, and then quit liking it. I give to friends, I donate it to local charities, or I throw it out. Buying stuff to sell later on sounds way too much like work, and I'm retired.
I loved today's write up ("It's Complicated"). In my heart, I was applauding.
I've occasionally sold an item for a profit (e.g. a 10' HDMI cable that cost me $1 including shipping for $5) but fairly rarely.
I generally give away about 20-50% of my BOC and Fuku/fuko items to people at work (you can usually find someone who will actually be really happy getting crap, especially if it is totally free).
I do buy candy bars and the like in bulk at BJs to sell at work for $1 (making 30-50 cents each), but this is not for personal profit but rather to raise a bit of money for the high school robotics teams that I work with. (I started this when my daughter was doing the same kind of thing for the same reason, as a team member.)
I almost got in trouble skimming this post. Starting with double caps and at the beginning of a line on mobile, the phrase "BJs to sell at work for $1" stands out from the rest of the text. Had to stop and re-read to make sure what was being resold.
@djslack I've seen BJs sold, but BJs being resold? Oooh, nasty.
@cinoclav Years ago, a guy I used to work with used to joke with another guy around lunchtime. He'd ask him where he was going for lunch, and when the other guy asked if he wanted anything he'd say "not from there, but stop off at Sprague St [known for prostitutes] on the way. Get two BJs and bring me one back."
I retired an Apple TV (my first and only iOS device) after two years of service. Amazed I was able to make $50 more than I paid for it.
I once had a friemd who always bought low/fixed/sold high with vintage, barely running BMWs.
He always drove a classy car and got paid to do it.
I am still sitting on a treasure trove of neoprene cases... one day I will CASH THEM IN!!!!
@thismyusername dude. Got my 30 in the box right here..
@username we will rule the neoprene market... no one will be able to stop us!!!!
@thismyusername I was the Oprah of neoprene cases for a while.
You get a case and YOU get a case. ..
Buying just to resell always seems like a racket. But then there are always people or robots who are willing to pay so it seems to go on based on all laws of economics
An acquaintance of mine used to buy large quantities of stuff, separate it into smaller amounts, and sell it at an enormous profit.
Until the police shot him.
(he shot first, the police shot betterer.)
I used to work at Footaction USA, and I would buy shoes with my discount to then resell online. Sometimes, I'd make 130% profit.
I sell parts for industrial equipment, so yeah, I buy a lot of stuff only to turn around and resell it at a 60% margin. It is a hell of a racket, tell you what.
The (ex) wife did. Didn't work. Was still sort of early in ecommerce, so everybody thought they could get a pallet of Chinese-made waste and suckers on the internets would log in to ebay and bid on this to satisfy their predatory capitalistic instinct after they missed an actual good deal. Like I said, didn't work, she spent too much on the crap radios and they were giveaway crap to boot. People don't want to pay good money for stuff they throw away after receiving for free. Personally, I'll stick to my 45-hr work week and decent income.
College football tickets. I was able to sell certain football tickets to people and make the cost of the tickets back. And a couple of years I made enough to fund a spring break trip.
Sometimes supply and demand works.
My ex-wife and I used to run a booth at a flea market. We'd buy our inventory at local auctions. Funny thing was, you'd see lots of inventory at other booths that sold at the same auction the previous weekend.
I did have that illusion with some hard to find action figures one year, but after shipping costs I ending up barely breaking even or even losing a little.
A few times. Some of my early purchases here (Kindles) made me enough profit to cover the next several months of meh boxes that came to my door.
Usually though, I end up waiting until my BoC/Fuku stuff piles up and sell that. When I'm on my game, those sales cover Christmas... Completely.
@Thumperchick That was one of my favorite things about the flip game. Let's say there were Bubba Mugs for sale...I'd buy the max and sell of most which would not only give me additional profit but also enough to cover the cost of giving myself a Bubba Mug. My Fuku hauls have always been less than stellar and never worth the flip unfortunately.
I have an Echo and ordered an Amazon Dot when they were first announced. When I got it, I realized it was totally dumb for me and didn't need it.
Because it was limited supply, I saw that they were selling for 2x what Amazon sold them for on eBay. Yay!
@ACraigL ditto!
I've only done this with sports tickets. Back when the Rangers made their two World Series runs a buddy and I went in on season tickets together and they were pretty good seats. So when the run happened, we were able to make a nice profit by selling off a few marquee games here and there. Then once the playoffs started we were able to sell our seats for way too much money and still buy ourselves some decent seats to attend all the games. In the end, I was able to attend all but 1-2 of the playoff games for 2 years without spending a dime.
I worked in a resale shop full time from 2008 to 2010. For 44 hours per week, I made a lot of money for the store owner, not so much for me.
A local law mandated that we held everything for 30 days before we could resell it. This meant that we had to set prices based on what we thought the market would be like in a month.
The resale market is continuously changing. In the beginning, we made a lot of money on used iPods. I had to adjust iPod prices almost monthly. The value of electronics drops faster than Moore's law would suggest.
We only made money in markets we understood. We had a tool specialist, who priced tools without gas engines, someone else that was a small engine guy, two people that could price jewelry. I did most electronics, but not automotive. Etc...
The staff was diverse. When we bought cars, someone would have to go pick them up. Someone else would have to give them a ride there. They drove the used cars incredibly conservatively, still all of the black drivers got pulled over many times for driving while black. There was always a witness, since the other driver was always in the next car. It didn't matter which driver was in the lead, nor whether the black driver drove the store car, or the used car. All that mattered was the neighborhood they were driving through.
We didn't do online sales, because you need to dedicate an employee to that, or it isn't cost effective. If an employee got good at it, they wouldn't need the store, so they would go off and work for themselves. That way they could keep all of the profits.
Yes, for decades, boxes and boxes of things. They're still in those boxes. I'm much better at buying than selling.
Family is in a wholesale perishable market. Paid for a lotta decent lives and college degrees with it.
Ballbusting work. 80 hours weeks, no vacations can be a normal life, depending Markets vary, but sourcing is often the secret, and most difficult, ingredient. Doing the balancing act with CS, expenses, cash flow, trust, credit, also v difficult.
I buy a few things online to resell as a part of "real work", mostly for clients where it's easier for me to buy little (or odd, or refurbished, etc.) things than for them to do a PO to do so. Most of what I buy at Meh is for me, or gifts.
I think the question/poll is poorly worded.
Technically "yes" I have bought a few things to resell at a profit.
But, as I am also lazy, about half of those still sit in my basement.
Back in the early-ish days of eBay (I know, I'm
), I could buy stuff at local auctions, close-outs, or clearance and resell them online. Data from completed eBay transactions helped to show the real, national (or international) market value of these items. The key was to find things that were easily recognizable and had limited availability. Finding product was fun, but researching pricing levels & creating auction descriptions wasn't. After my kids came along, I ran out of time & energy for resale. There's a bunch of leftover stuff still in the garage: electronics are probably mostly worthless, tools & collectibles might still be worth something
I used to do it a lot six or seven years ago with gadgets and video games, but lost interest as I got better-paying jobs and available free time diminished. Every now and again I still dabble, but I typically end up remembering why I stopped (mostly due to flake buyers).
On more than one occasion I've been tempted to get into the LEGO resale speculation market, with various sites claiming it's a better return than the stock market. I always come down to Earth though and remind myself I have to store that stuff AND successfully sell it to another person. Plus banking everything on the continuing success of a toy company who is gradually starting to sell more an more products aimed solely towards collectors (like beanie babies) sounds like a big risk for the long term.
I buy and sell items from Retail Stores and Retail Store's websites to flip on Amazon. I have been doing quite well making $30+ per hour. I usually buy Toys, Video Games, and Shoes. I stay away from electronic due to the low margains, higher return/defeat rate. I also pretty much sell only new items, with the exception of books. I am only doing it part time right now becuase of school. If you want to learn more I recommend you check out Jamison on the app Periscope, user name (Jamison Philippi) no (). Also Raiken Profit on YouTube. If you guys have any question just ask.
I did some a few years back. I got frustrated with the stupidity of people and rising costs. I also have a large stash of stuff that needs to leave my house. I used several online listing places. My area does not seem to do well on the local listings. I work Saturday's at my day job and scowl at setting up tables and haggling on my one day off.
I was purchasing a little, carved, wooden elephant figure in a thrift store when the man behind me picked it up and began smelling it. He then offered to buy it from me for $2, which would give me a profit of $0.94. The cashier and I stared at each other for a moment. Then I decided the man wanted it much more than I did. He got the elephant; I walked away with $0.94 and a weird story.
All the fucking time... I've been selling in ebay since 1998. Sometime I sell a lot, sometimes a couple of things a month. It depends. I just pulled a couple of baseball cards out of a pizza box from Walmart. I got $18 for 2 cards I got for free. I hate nickel and diming, but I need to make money sometimes to pay the bills.
When the Nintendo Wii first came out they were selling out and hard to find. My job has me driving around the state so I'd stop in at all the Walmarts and nab one if they had any. They'd only receive one or two at a time but I collected 10 in my travels. Sold them all on ebay just before Christmas when people were desperate and paying 2 to 3 times the retail price. I listed them at retail and let them bid up the prices. It was a good holiday season for me that year.