GETTING STARTED FLIPPING ITEMS FROM THE FLEA MARKET
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The whole basis of this side hustle is to buy items at a low cost at second hand locations, and sell them for a higher price online – our favorite source being eBay.
Rob’s absolute favorite part of the whole thing is finding the treasures he can resell online. My favorite part is when they sell and we put the money in the bank account.
I do have to admit, I enjoy scoping out yard sales on a Saturday, and checking out the flea market on a regular basis as well. There are always interesting things to look at, and the hunt for finding valuable items at low prices is pretty fun.
How exactly does this work?
The whole thing is pretty simple.
- You find a few local thrift stores you like, or a local flea market, or weekly yard sales and scope them out for valuable items.
- You need to be able to purchase the items at a lower cost than they are worth, which typically isn’t tough to do, then you buy them.
- Next you take them home, clean them up if needed, take some pictures and post them on an online selling platform like eBay, OfferUp, Facebook, and Craigslist.
Different items sell better on certain selling sites, and like I mentioned before eBay is our biggest source of sales. (We made over $100,000 last year in eBay sales!)
How many hours per week does this take?
We now do this full time, and Robbie probably spends about 20-30 hours per week buying and selling.
When we were doing it as a side hustle-part time, it averaged 5-10 hours per week.
In 2015, we were part time for those hours and had $42,000 in eBay sales.
Figure on spending at minimum:
- 2-4 hours per week looking for items,
- another hour cleaning and posting items,
- and another hour or so packaging and shipping (depending on how many items you sold that week).
Some weeks will be more, and some will be less, the key is to keep CONSISTENT!
Have you read the other posts in the 'Side Hustle Series'?
How much money do I need to get started?
We recommend to our Flipper University students, take $50-$100 to invest in items when you start.
You definitely don’t need more than that, and you should be able to make $200-$500 with that amount to start. We will never buy anything we can’t at least double our money on. But we normally do way better than that on our returns.
However, you actually can get started for FREE as well with our online webinar.
You won’t believe our weirdest flip and some of our favorites are on the next page!! Click Read more…
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Melissa Stephenson has been flipping items for a profit for the past 10 years since marrying Rob Stephenson. He has been buying and selling items on eBay for over 20 years now. Together they own, write and manage the website/blog Flea Market Flipper , where they help others make money selling used items on eBay (and other sites and apps). Check out their free download of some of the BEST places to get items to flip! .