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Is it possible to *buy* stuff on eBay and flip it?
or is eBay good only for selling when it comes to flipping?If buying is an option – what will be considered an item that is worth buying? what criteria should I look for?
I’m looking for something I can scale, so no broken items which needs manual repairs 🙂
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Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, but with some caveats.
First and foremost, anyone underpricing an item likely doesn’t have the knowledge to ship the item fairly/properly either. There’s no shortage of GREAT flips going completely uncontested that have insane shipping costs for something that could fit in a small flat rate box or something. If the price is right, there’s still the non-zero chance of them tossing it without padding into a box and then shipping it out.
When it works it’s hard to not get super invested in doing it on a bigger scale, but if it were that easy many of us wouldn’t be leaving the house.
There was a thread here a while back where I detailed a few “buy on eBay, flip on eBay” items, and the end result was underwhelming – while I made money, I found that the same money could have been spent on regular inventory for a faster ROI.
However, it IS worth looking into for the sole purpose of creating watched searches for highly-specific items that you can swoop up. I have a few, and I know others do also.
To get started, I’d find an item you sold recently, search for it, sort by newly listed BINs, then sort by auctions ending soon. This is just the limit I place on myself – you COULD scroll through dozens of pages worth of listings, but you’ll just be wasting your time. After a month of doing this, you’ll (theoretically) have seen every item listed under that search term.
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i have had that issue buying on ebay as well, someone has something i want for cheap, could be shipped 1st class or media mail and they have $40 expedited on it. what the heck. and there is no convincing them to change the shipping method. had someone cancel a sale on me when i asked for a better/cheaper method. newbie sellers can be a blessing and a curse.
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I’ve done it, but haven’t made a practice of it, for a few reasons:
1. Already have a lifetime’s worth of stuff to list, and real world sourcing brings in plenty.
2. As mentioned above, even when shipping price is reasonable, the combination of item price and shipping price (and now sales tax)can cut to deeply into the margins
3. Sellers who don’t know how to price often don’t know how to package securely either. So I’m leery of fragile items in particular.
Still, there’s definitely money to be made buying on ebay, etsy etc for online resale.
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We’ve been a pretty quiet little corner of the web. Hopefully everyone who keeps joining the forum is coming with some realistic sense of business.
Welcome Beloko. I cant imagine someone building a whole business just buying stuff on eBay to resell. It would be a grind if you didnt really specialize.
This guy suppsoedly was buying gold coins to resell:
Scavenger Life Episode 138: How To Make Money Selling Items On eBay That You Bought On eBay
No idea if he still does it. But he was spending hours each day searching online. -
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I’ve seen people do it and make some money, but only under very specific circumstances.
For instance, there are various pop culture collectibles where the name of the item is often misspelled. I’ve seen it happen with some anime characters, certain brand names that don’t exist anymore, etc.
You can do eBay searches of some of those common misspellings and occasionally find auctions with no bidders that you could win for very little and likely flip for many times what you spent. It’s just not something you could do consistently, and you’d have to be really familiar with the particular collectors market.
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