My All-Time Best Ebay Flipping So Far

If you have not started experimenting with Ebay flipping or Craigslist flipping, then what are you waiting for?  You can make a ton of easy money with very little effort involved!  If you are new to Ebay flipping – check out my flipping for profit section.  Read on to see what my all-time best Ebay flip so far has been – I made 4300% profit!

Ebay Flipping – Source of Goods

The usual mission objective here is to get your materials to flip from the cheapest place possible.  In nearly all cases, this is yard sales!  You will be very hard pressed to find something cheaper than what you can bargain for at your neighborhood yard sale.

In this case of my all-time best Ebay flip so far, I found my item for $0.50.  No negotiation was required in this case.  The only downside here was that I got the item at about 7am  I many cases, if you are going to flip on Ebay or Craigslist for the highest possible profit you have to be the early bird!

Ebay Flipping – Highest Profit Items

You can flip just about any item on Ebay or Craiglist if you can find a good enough deal.  The basic premise is that you’ll buy low and sell high – just like investing in the stock market.  The key to identifying a good deal is knowing the item in question and what you can normally sell it for.

I have had luck with some of the following items – some times items are priced so low it is a pretty minimal risk to give the flipping of it a chance.  I have placed them in a relative order with the best profits at the top of the list.

1. Video Games – Wii, PSP, Xbox, etc.
2. Guitars
3. Guitar Amps
4. Vera Bradley and Thirty One Purses 
5. Soccer Cleats
6. Pokemon Cards and Other Tradeable Cards

As you can see, video games can fetch some of the largest percentage profits.  In terms of overall most money in your pocket, larger items such as guitars and guitar amps tend to do the best.  These can also be flipped on Craigslist since they are so big!

My All-Time Best Ebay Flip So Far – 4300% Profit

I have flipped hundreds of items on Ebay over the years.  So, what has been my all-time best Ebay flip so far?  I was able to make a 4,300% profit by finding a PSP Dragon Ball Z game for $0.50 and selling it for $21.99 on Ebay.  That is a profit of ~4,300%!

It took all of about 10 minutes of work to buy the item and list it on Ebay.  That is the equivalent of making ~$130 an hour.  Not too shabby

Ebay Flipping – Final Thoughts

If you are on the fence about Ebay flipping – why not give it a try?  Find something around the house that you no longer use and try to get rid of it.  This will give you the hang of listing items quickly.

After you have a bit of experience listing items on Ebay, you can really start to expand your enterprise.  Next it is time to go out and find cheap items to flip on Ebay for a profit!  Do you think you have what it takes to beat my 4,300% profit all-time best?

If you are looking for more info or a Ebay flipping master, check out the following website: thriftstoreflipping.com  –  Happy flipping!

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Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games

I mentioned in my earlier Yard Sale Arbitrage series on Vera Bradley Purses that I absolutely love arbitrage!  This is the process of buying an item for a low price that you are almost guaranteed to sell at a higher price.  One is able to do this well if they are familiar with the  “market” for the good in question and have a buyer “lined” up to purchase the product.  If not, you run the risk of over-paying or getting stuck with the item if you cannot move it.

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games – Background

One item that is guaranteed to move are Video games.  If you can fetch them for a good price at yard sales, they sell like hot cakes on sites online auction sites like Ebay.  I’ve sold more than 100 video/PC games on Ebay, and I’m constantly surprised at how much some of the rarer games can go for.  Check out this post on how I sold my old used Zelda Gameboy game for $80!  Other very popular games will not net much money and can actually end up losing you money if you’re not careful (over pay for the game).  It pays to have a little bit of knowledge (or a smart phone with Ebay :-)) on which are the rarer games when looking for games at yard sales.

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games – The Find

We were at a community yard sale this past Saturday bright and early when I hit the jackpot.  The person was selling some really popular Wii games for $3 each.  I happened to know specifically about several of these games as I’ve sold several of my own personal copies for $20+ each.  This seemed like a great opportunity to make a quick buck, so I jumped on it.  I bought eight out of the nine he had for sale right then and there.  I tried to bargain him down on the price since I was buying so many, but he wouldn’t go any lower.  I think he was a little suspicious that I was buying so many of them without much thought…  Here are the games I bought and the prices I have listed them for on Ebay (green ones have already sold):

• Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – $31.99
• The Sims 3 – $14.46
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl – $22.99
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – $14.99
• de Blob – $4.99
• Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity – $10.99
• Wii Play – $4.50
• Wii Sports – $19.99

I kinda hit duds with the “de Blob” game and Wii Play, but the others will hopefully make up for it.

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games – The Flip

So, how to I plan to get top dollar for these Wii games?  Why, Ebay of course!  I can set the prices pretty high and leave them as a good ’til canceled auction.  It may take a couple of weeks to sell them, but I should average $15 for each of them.  Because they are small and easily fit in a cheap envelope, there are ideal for Ebay selling.  After all of the Ebay/Paypal fees, I stand to make about 440+% profit.  Not too shabby

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games – Final Thoughts

In the end, I should make somewhere around $80  profit for selling the Wii games on Ebay.  I figure it should take me maybe two hours of my time to post all of the games to Ebay and ship them.  That should work out to be roughly $40 a hour.  I won’t get rich quick doing this, but it’s not too bad if you ask me

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How To Save Money On Shoes

Temperatures are rising, Spring is in the air, new styles are being introduced, and folks are hungry to buy some shoes!

Here are some money saving tips on how to save money on shoes.

How to Save Money On Shoes – When Buying New

1. Don’t buy “one use” shoes – This one should go without saying.  The more types of “niche” shoes that you buy, the more money you will end up spending over the long run.
2. Buy shoes that will fit multiple styles and options – This really goes along with tip #1 above, try not to buy shoes that will just be the style of the year, otherwise you won’t really get more then one year out of them.
3. Buy at the end of the season or into the next – Similar to new car sales, shoes sell on clearance at the end of the season.  The best time to buy sandals?  At the beginning of fall.  The best time to find a great deal on those winter boots?  Check out those Spring sales!
4. Buy shoes on Wednesday – It’s true according to research.  For some crazy reason, shoes seem to be on sale on Wednesdays more than any other day of the week.  Who would have thought?!?
5. Outlet malls – Most of us live within a couple hours drive to an outlet mall.  While it will cost a bit to actually get your butt there, if you can plan in advance to make one or two trips a year to buy your shoes you will save a bunch of money over shopping malls.
6. Don’t buy kids shoes new – Because kid’s feet are constantly growing and they are so rough-and-tough with their shoes, it doesn’t make much financial sense to buy brand new shoes for kids.  See some of the used ideas below before you break the bank on kids shoes.
7. Zappos – Try Zappos for your online shoe purchases.  They have a huge selection, great prices, and awesome customer service.  I have used them multiple times, and I’m a happy customer.  If the shoes don’t fit or you’re unhappy with them, you can return them free of charge!  It’s no wonder it’s such a good company to deal with – they’re owned by Amazon.

How to Save Money On Shoes – When Buying Used

1. Hand-Me-Downs – Why buy new shoes at all in the first place?!?  If you are getting kids shoes, try hand-me-downs from brothers, sisters, cousins, etc.  You’ll save a ton of money and ensure the shoes get used until they fall apart.
2. Goodwill / thrift stores – Not much to say here other than you can find some awesome deals on gently used shoes for 20% of the new price.
3. Ebay – I haven’t bought shoes from Ebay before, but I sure do sell a lot of them on Ebay.  You can generally get good condition used shoes for 50% – 90% off.  Hard to beat that!
4. Yard Sales – This is my personal favorite.  You can usually find 7/10 through 10/10 condition shoes for pennies on the dollar.  Don’t believe me?  Check out these awesome Sketcher shoes I just found last Saturday for only $0.25!!!!!!

How To Save Money On Shoes – My new $0.25 shoes!!!!

How to Save Money On Shoes – Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are tons of ways that you can save money on shoes today!  I’m sure that there’s at least one idea from the “how to save money on shoes” article that you can put in use this year to save yourself a bundle on shoes.  Anyone think they can one-up me and find better shoes for $0.25 or less?  Have I mentioned lately that I love yard sales???

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Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay

One of the suckiest things about being in MBA classes every other weekend is that I miss out on all the great yard sales with my wife and kids.  Just this past week, I think my wife struck yard sale gold!

Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay – The Haul

My wife was at one particular yard sale with a couple Pokemon young reader books for sale.  My son had a quick look at them, and they decided to buy them.  Shortly thereafter, the man at the yard sale pulled my wife to the side.  “Would you be interested in buying this box full of Pokemon cards?” he asked.  He didn’t want to offer her the box where my son could hear.  He was going to give her an entire adult sized shoe box full of Pokemon trading cards for only $5!  My wife decided to buy them because she knows how much he likes Pokemon.

Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay – How Much Are They Worth?

She showed me the box when I got home and I could hardly believe my eyes.  Someone probably paid more than $1,000 at some point for all of these cards.  They are about $11 for a pack of 40 on Amazon.  My son has a handful of hand-me-down cards that his friends have given him over the years, but we’ve never bought any new cards for him because they’re so damn expensive.

So we called our son over to the table, and I told him to close his eyes.  I brought the box over and set it in his lap.  I then told him to open up the box.  He almost had a kids excitement attack when he saw the box full of Pokemon cards in front of him!  As we were looking through them, my brain popped into MoneyAhoy mode – “I wonder if any of these are worth anything?” I thought aloud.

Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay – Learning to Value Pokemon Cards

A Google search and about 30 minutes of study later, and my son and I knew what to look for in terms of rare and valuable cards.  We spent the next 3 hours sorting through all of the cards looking for all the rare and valuable Pokemon cards that we could sell on eBay.  We made a deal that we’d split any profits 50/50 – I thought it would be a great way for him to learn how to make some money.

Now, these cards aren’t in the best of shape – it’s evident that they been used pretty heavily.  Out of all of the cards, we identified somewhere around 250-300 that were rare and valuable.  Checking Ebay, most of these rare cards have sold for anywhere from $1 – $5 each.  We’d get much more money if we sell them individually, but I’m not sure if it is worth that much time and trouble.  I suspect when we sell they’ll fall on the lower end because of their condition, but we could get $300-$400 buck for all of these in total depending on how much time we devote to listing all of them!  Or so I thought…

Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay – So Far, Not Too Much Luck

I’ve listed a handful of them so far, and they haven’t really sold at all.  The problem is the sum of PayPal, Ebay, and Postage fees comes up to about $1.  So, if we sell each card for $1.50, it really isn’t going to be worth our time.  I’m going to try and list a couple more of the most expensive cards to see if I can get any takers.  If not, we’ll have to mark this down in the history books as a waste of time  I was hoping we would be able to get $300-$400  for all of them combined (a return of up to 60,000% on our money), but it doesn’t look super promising at this point.  All-in-all, we’ve spent about 6 hours so far sorting through all of them.  I’d hate for it to be a complete waste of time, but I guess some times that’s the way it goes  I may try to combine some together into small lots to increase the chances of getting them sold if I continue to have trouble moving them individually.

Selling Pokemon Cards on Ebay – Final Thoughts

Selling Pokemon cards is just another example of yard sale arbitrage.  You win some and you lose some  The pic on the left below is of the box of Pokemon cards my wife bought for $5.  The pic below on the right are all the cards I’m hoping to sell for $1 – $2 each (fingers crossed).

Box ‘o Pokemon Cards – Whole box for $5

Hope to Sell these for ~$1-$2 each

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Yard Sale Arbitrage – Vera Bradley Purses

One of my all time favorite ways to make money is through arbitrage.  This is the basic process of buying low and selling high with little to no risk.  You may have also heard it referred to as flipping.

We’ve all probably participated in arbitrage at some point in our lives.  I’m not sure why I love doing it so much, but it feels great to make several hundred percent return for just a little bit of work.

In this first part of my yard sale arbitrage series – I’ll quickly cover how I make 300%+ returns on Vera Bradley purses.  Check it out!

 Money Making Breakdown – Vera Bradley Purse Arbitrage

• Difficulty (Super Easy/Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert): Easy
• Average % Profit (%): 319
• Average Profit per Sale ($): 12.77
• Time Required (mins): 30
• Profit for your time ($/hr): 25.54

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Vera Bradley Purses – Pros and Cons

Here are a couple of pros and cons to flipping Vera Bradley purses from yard sales that I’ve learned.  If you’re interested in giving it a shot, keep these in mind.

Pros:

• Can usually get for $3 – $5 at yard sales if you’re good at bargaining.  Package deals are the best and you can get larger discounts!  I found someone selling about 10 of these, I only bought the three detailed here below because I hadn’t tried to flip these before.  Now I’m killing myself for not buying all of them!
• Pretty abundant at yard sales.  I find at least one of these just about every week.
• Sell relatively quickly on ebay (1 or 2 weeks)
• Ship pretty easily and inexpensively

Cons:

• There are hundreds of types of Vera Bradley pattern/style combinations.  The biggest pain is searching through all the similar listings to find the style and pattern of the purse you bought so that you can accurately list it.  This took me 15-20 minutes per bag and sucked.
• If listing on Ebay, then the 15% fees will knock a bit off your profits.  Plus, you have to drive to the post office to ship everything.  If I can get the same prices on Craigslist, then I’ll make about an average of 475% profit vs. 319%.  I plan to test this for future bags/purses.
• Not sure how easy to sell on Craigslist – will give this a shot.
• Profit in $/hr is a little on the low side.
• I haven’t yet figured out how to scale this process to make a lot of money.  You aren’t going to get rich unless you can figure out a way to flip thousands of these things.

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Vera Bradley Purses – Profit Table

Below is a quick tally of how each of the three purses I purchased performed.  As you can see – the larger bags definitely do much better % profit-wise compared to the smaller bags.  I’ll use this knowledge in the future to load up on any of the bigger purses if I can find them for cheap.  These Vera Bradley purses normally sell on amazon for something like $50+, so resale for $15 – $35 is a pretty good deal for the buyers…

Yard Sale Arbitrage – Vera Bradley Purses – Pictures

Here are some pictures of the three most recent sales I’ve made.

Zip Tote – Retired Color – “Houndstooth Brown”

Kensington Large – Tic Tac Tote

Capri Blue (retired) Bucket Tote and Cell Phone Case

Final Thoughts

This was a fun little experiment and turned out to turn a pretty good profit.  I know absolutely nothing about purses, so it was neat to make such a high % of profit on a whim.  I think as I find more at yard sales I’ll try and make a couple changes to the process:

• List on Craigslist to avoid fees and get slightly higher prices
• Not spend time finding the purse style/pattern and just list it by color and size (this will push up my $/hr)
• Try to learn about other types of purses that have good arbitrage potential – we literally run across maybe 50 purses on a Saturday yard sale outing…

Anyone else care to share their good yard sale arbitrage finds or tips???

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