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In my neck of the woods it’s hard to figure out the good stores from the bad ones without potentially missing out on a store that suddenly gets a drop of good stuff. Some are filled with trash for MONTHS on end, then suddenly start getting incredibly good merch. The only way to win is to visit them all as frequently as possible, so I aim to hit 10-12 on sourcing days.
As for why this happens, it’s a combination of factors: Goodwill realizing they’re leaving money on the table, more people reselling, and regular shoppers looking to save money.
At least in my experience, each of these things comes in waves: GW realizes they can’t price everything up without piling up excess inventory, so they drop prices and rely on volume again. New people jump into reselling until they get burnt out and quit. Regular shoppers do come and go, but they might be the only true constant.
Regardless, GW realizes they can’t handle all the stuff coming in and can’t build the infrastructure to support a true reselling operation like individuals can. Even the regions that operate eBay stores do it poorly, and the auction site they have where I am has transitioned to just an online store with Buy It Now-style listings in addition to the auctions.
I think the best way to make money from GW are the Outlets. I’m tempted to spend an entire day in there sometime.
Why just iPhones? They’re the most expensive phone and the margins don’t seem great. They also seem to be a big target for scammers – even the listing you linked has a warning about not selling to inexperienced buyers, so presumably they’ve canceled the last dozen orders or so.
From an old post I read on flipping phones, it’s best when phones are sourced locally and resold online. But you need to be able to do a bunch of checks to make sure the phone can be resold to begin with (see IMEI/ESN check), which isn’t always obvious when sourcing them.
I briefly explored doing component-level repair of mid-range Android phones since they can be bought cheap as Parts/Repair, but the time spent repairing them and sourcing chips was not worth it.
Think beyond police tracking and consider that some people will buy phones with interchangeable batteries for cost-saving reasons. Regardless, no iPhone has ever had a user-removable battery, and the same goes for all flagship phones today – they are glued in and need a hot air rework station to remove.
Telling someone you’re reselling is just going to put them on the defensive. Try stuff like “Any chance you’ve got any old radios you didn’t put out for sale?” “Any video games you might have laying around somewhere?” “Any extra books inside you were waiting to bring out?” etc.
I got a load of mobile CB radios one time doing just this. They’d put a few out and I’d struck up a conversation about them and asked if they had more. No need to mention I’m reselling, and they’re happy to let the stuff go to a “collector.” Win-win.
Someone posted about something similar to this a while back. It started off at $5/item, then got cheaper throughout the week. What you found is the best way to make money from these pallets.
Depending on where you are, there’s warehouses that sell return pallets for a few hundred. You have the task of hauling them, but it probably breaks down to around the same margins depending on contents. Some of these places also have YouTube channels where they “unbox” a “random” pallet, where of COURSE there’s three 90″ TVs, ten PlayStation 4s, etc. I would just avoid these places or find someone who can vouch for them.
For good margins with lots of volume, nothing beats the Goodwill outlets, AKA the “bins.” Stuff breaks down to <$1 a pound. They are SWARMED with clothing resellers and people hunting for cheap clothing in general, but most of the other stuff is plentiful.
They seem to be rampant this time of the year for whatever reason. I wouldn’t mind them so much if UICs would close in like 2 or 3 days instead of 5.
I’ve always done free shipping by just subtracting away the shipping cost based on their zip and sending an offer that way. Is there an advantage to doing it via the invoice? For other shipping options, I’d just revise the listing and let them purchase it that way. I see best offers as bartering over price and price alone.
All I care is that the buyer pays. I couldn’t care less if they cancel, as it would at least give me the ability to resell the item again. Instead it’s locked down for 7 days while the buyer goes AWOL. The buyer in the OP is the exception – the rest never communicate and let the UIC close.
I require immediate payment. It should be applied everywhere.
December was my worst month, but not catastrophic. I’m not sure what I should have done differently – I think it’s just the stuff I’m listing not exactly being gift-worthy.
As luck would have it, my biggest sale in December ended up getting completely destroyed in shipping. Never quite seen something so clearly mishandled, but FedEx made it right and refunded me in full yesterday, so props to them for taking responsibility.
Unless the type of inventory I’m listing changes next year, I think my strategy will just involving spending less in Q4 and riding off savings a bit.
I love “paying to make the problem go away.” I also remind myself that I’ll forget about the situation in just a handful of days, so best to just get on with it.
The other day I saw a list of all the returns I’d handled in the last year. Mind-blowing. Couldn’t remember 90% of them despite knowing that a certain percentage were tough/bothersome buyers.
“It’s only business.”
Obvious feedback extortion and glad you got it removed.
No returns/NIB/For Parts & Repair doesn’t make sense to me, but without knowing what the item is it’s hard to say whether it was the right move. I’d just assume I’m getting scammed at that point. There’s no shortage of ambiguous For Parts/Repair listings in Consumer Electronics that makes it a minefield of potential problems for buyers, and it’s commonly used by sellers trying to avoid taking responsibility for problems. Not implying this is the case for you since you clearly described the product, but this may not have been the buyer’s first time going through this.
I think allowing returns is the easiest way to prevent these problems. From creating a forum thread, getting a negative, to having to call eBay, the real question is whether or not it was all worth the effort over $18.
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.
Buying or selling “new” (as in, latest model or near-latest model) Apple products is asking for trouble. Friends of friends would get in contact with me after hearing I sold on eBay and 90% of the time they wanted advice on how to sell their phone/laptop or had already gone through with it and were getting hit with a flurry of messages from their buyer about changing address, not receiving it, or getting an INAD.
It’s the worst product to buy or sell on eBay by a mile. I’d like to say a huge majority of the seller protection stuff has been put in place thanks to this category alone. At this point, someone could give me a crate of NIB iPhone Xs for free and I’d still refuse to sell them.
Another side-effect of this is that now people think buying/selling any kind of electronics off eBay is a huge risk, when it’s been relatively trouble-free for few years I’ve been doing it.
Good rule of thumb: If someone needs to constantly remind you how good of a person they are, it’s time to start digging for dirt.
There are approx. 10,000 reselling channels on YT and maybe a small handful of them are actually good/interesting. The rest are painful to watch and give off scammer vibes. It’s just a weird move in general to broadcast your entire life to anyone willing to click a link, but I guess it’s no surprise that people will do anything for some $$$.
From PayPal community forums:
“Payment holds occur because:
You have been selling on eBay for less than 90 days
You have an eBay feedback score fewer than 100 and have not yet established a record of good performance
You have received fewer than 20 Detatiled Seller Ratings on eBay in the last 12 months or your eBay seller performance is below standard
You have a high rate of customer disputes or a low eBay feedback percentage
You have been a PayPal member for less than 6 months and have limited selling activity
You have a sudden change in selling activities (e.g. suddenly selling expensive items, selling large numbers of items, etc.)
You happen to be selling in a high risk category such as tickets, travel, gift vouchers, computers, electronics, mobile phones, etc.”So yes, it’s because you’re new and selling in a category eBay/PayPal deems to be risky.
Back when I joined, you couldn’t sell more than like 5 items in electronics for the first 90 days of being on eBay.
