In this post, I’ll show you how I casually was able to make $886.97 profit by selling $2548.24 worth of goods on eBay this year. Not only will I show you how to make money selling on eBay, but what you should sell to minimize your efforts while maximizing profits. I’ll cover what the risks are so you don’t get caught off-guard when trying to flip on eBay.

I was able to do this with very little effort.

Selling stuff on eBay to make money a great alternative investment and helps you diversify risk away from the stock market or real estate. In the examples I’m about to show you, you’re basically going to hold an asset and you’ll have plenty of time to sell it – your item won’t “expire,” and you’re not going to purchase a bunch of stuff to ride a fad since it’s inherently much more risky. You’ll buy stuff that’s mostly evergreen and won’t go away in the short-term.

The only thing is: make sure you only put in discretionary funds to buy these goods to flip. The reason is because you might not be able to sell or get rid of the goods for a very long time. As such, you shouldn’t depend on your flipping income to put on your table.

Read through the whole post and I’ll show you:

• What to buy, and how to see if something’s worth buying
• What the risks are
• What sorts of profits you can expect to make

What To Buy And Invest In To Flip On Ebay

What you want to be buying generally falls into 2 categories: collectibles, and art.

And you’ll want to buy stuff that is $100+. The reason why you wouldn’t wanna buy fidget spinners or some other low-ticket items is because it might not be worth your time to flip 200 things for a measily $500 profit. The trips to the post office would be enough to offset the pleasure of a $500 profit for example. For this reason, I highly disagree with Gary Vee promoting garage sales. You’re driving around for 6 hours on the weekend to maybe make $200, flipping 20 items. That’s retarded. I’d much rather just buy 5 pokemon packs, sell them all in a week and make $500 without leaving my home. Doing extra work for less money isn’t “hustle” or “work ethic” – it’s stupid.

Your goal isn’t just to make money selling on eBay — your goal should be to make money selling on eBay while maximizing profits for minimal time invested.

For collectibles: my favorite to flip are pokemon cards. The reason is because this “fad” probably won’t be over anytime soon, and pokemon is as popular as ever in Japan. It’s a world-renowned name and it’s unlikely pokemon will just fall out of the mainstream any time soon.

With pokemon (and any other collectibles), the research is more of a gut feel. Go through YouTube videos of people reviewing the collectibles and get a general sentiment of what people think about the new drop. If the sentiment is very favorable then it’s a fairly safe bet to pre-order the collectibles. If the sentiment is neutral, then I’d probably avoid that specific drop.

Side note on pre-ordering: Some stores allow for pre-ordering for some pokemon sets, some of the time. If you can pre-order on a good pack (or any other favorable collectible), then you should do it. Pre-ordering is more risk since demand isn’t proven yet. But it’s more potential reward as well (since it’s cheaper). If there’s no option to pre-order, then go ahead and make sure that the collectible is priced well on eBay. Example: say you wanted to flip “Pokemon Set X” – go to eBay and type in “Pokemon Set X” to make sure that the sellers are selling it at a much higher rate than you’d be able to buy it at. If you’re late to the game, go ahead and filter out the results to “sold” so you can see what sorts of pricing the market is absorbing.

As an example:

I was searching for Spring by James Jean to see what the going rate was for it. It varies from $443.31 to $725.00 in the screenshot. You’ll have a range of what people are willing to buy it for here (which is much more important than what sellers are currently selling it for as it can be extremely optimistic and not grounded in reality at all). If your item is still in the “pre-order” stage, it likely won’t yield any relevant eBay search results. But it’s still worth a shot to see if any transactions are made to see if you can dig up any extra intel.

Anyway: Once you buy your collectible, it’s time to flip it on eBay. Listing it on eBay is intuitive and won’t be covered here. Just take good pictures, fill in the categories, and write a fairly decent description. Generally, the collectibles sell themselves since everyone knows what it is. You’ll want to take some original pictures (instead of copy and pasting the photos on the seller’s website) so people don’t think you’re a scam.

And if you don’t have an eBay track record, people will trust you less, which means for the first few sales you’ll need to sell quite a bit lower than the market asking rate to get reviews. In the below section where I show my numbers, you’ll see that I sell my initial pokemon cards at ~$150 a pop. Once I garnered enough reviews, I started selling them at around ~$200 a pop.

OK, so that covers it for collectibles. Let’s move onto art.

YouTube is a great resource to do research on collectibles. What about art?

A lot of artists nowadays are on Instagram. So you could just Google around and find some artists whose style you enjoy and see when they might be dropping their art. In general, you’ll want to only purchase stuff from artists with a big following and high engagement. You don’t want to buy from an artist with only 100 followers in the hopes that “one day” they’ll be massive. As an example, Beepl has tons of followers and if you had purchased any of his NFTs, you’d have made a killing anyway – so buying from an unknown artist in the hopes of making a killing is introducing unnecessary risks to the operation.

Once you’ve researched and found a bunch of popular artists you like on Instagram, go to each of their pages and sign up for their email subscription. This saves you time and lets the deals come to you, instead of you needing to have to check Instagram everyday to see if there’s a drop coming.

When a drop is coming, you can do basic research to see what the comments say and what the sentiment is. Art is much more subjective, so you’ll also only want to buy it if you personally like the art. This helps hedge against the case where it takes a very long time to sell the art – you’ll at least enjoy it while it’s in your home.

There are 2 kinds of art drops: Limited-editions and time-limited editions. The former basically just says the first X people to buy will get the art. Everyone else needs to buy it in the secondary market. These drops have a very high return, but are very hard to obtain since everybody is trying to buy them. Time-limited editions just says “we’re selling these for 24 hours, and that’s it.” These still have good returns in the secondary market, but generally take much longer to sell since they aren’t as hard to get.

Anyway, once you do your research and purchase the art, flip it on eBay like you would with the collectibles. Again, be sure to include original pictures so people don’t think you’re a scam.

Risks

The main risk is time. It might take you a very long time to sell the art, or you might not sell it at all.

Art and collectibles can depreciate, which is why you want to pick something that’s very hype and very unlikely to depreciate.

Your max loss is what you paid to purchase the item (assuming the market will only do a transaction with you for $0, which is unlikely). This actually is very good because if you look at stuff like flipping houses, you can lose a lot more than what the property is worth due to hard money loans and rehab overruns.

Because you can still lose all your money trying to flip on eBay, my recommendation is don’t put money you can’t lose into flipping stuff.

My Profits And Numbers Selling Stuff On eBay

So like the post title says, I’m a pretty “casual” flipper, meaning I don’t spend much time doing this stuff. I only did 2 things to make money selling on eBay.

1. Buy 10 packs of the Vivid Voltage pokemon set. I went YOLO here because it was really hard to find websites that were selling these and I was afraid the website I bought from would sell out.
2. Buy a piece of art by James Jean that I enjoyed the look of. The reason why I bought from James Jean is because his drops are time-limited, meaning I don’t have to fight with other people to get the art. My purchase experience is a lot more predictable and it doesn’t have to be like Pokemon cards where you scour 20 websites and all of them are sold out.

Let’s talk about my expenses first, and then what I sold everything for.

Shipping expenses: See below for a sample of my shipping expenses. Initially, I just paid for the postage at USPS instead of a discounted rate on eBay. Coast-to-coast, the pokemon card costs about $14 to ship. The art cost about $11 to ship. I did 11 transactions this year, so as a worst-case estimate I’ll just say I spent $154 on shipping.

Cost-Of-Goods: My pokemon cards cost $949.9 for 10 packs, and the James Jean art costs $557.37 after taxes because California is a crooked state.

My sales are as follows, which amounts to $2548.24 gross revenue:

Consolidating all this info into a spreadsheet, here’s what I made throughout:

As you see, I didn’t engage that much with the market with only 11 transactions. I was quite casual and ended up with $886.97 profit, or 34.8% margin.

My margin was dragged down by James Jean artwork, as I made $751.87 in profit on pokemon cards at a 40.8% margin. James Jean was a 21.1% margin.

I wanted to buy more stuff too, like James Jean’s Spring artwork as I alluded to above. But I didn’t really enjoy that piece of artwork as much as Forager 3, and Forager 3 took 2 months to sell. Compared to pokemon cards where it’d take 2-3 days to sell, art seemed a bit riskier to me. Turns out my gut was right because like the screenshot above shows: the resale value is as low as $443, while the purchase value was $500. If I had bought this, I may not have made money selling this on eBay.

Side note: You should never allow for eBay auctions on artwork you’re trying to sell to start at a bid lower than your COGS. That makes no sense and gives you unnecessary risk. Better to not sell at all, wait a few years until appreciation and try again.

My Thoughts On Making Money By Selling On eBay

Ultimately, I’m currently too busy with e-commerce to focus on making money selling on eBay. But I’d say across listing stuff on eBay and driving to/from the post office, and buying all the stuff online…probably took me 3-4 hours in total to make these 11 transactions. So I’d say, worst case it was around $200 per hour.

If you’ve read my other posts like driving for Lyft or trying to sell SEO services to businesses, this tactic is by far the most money I’ve made for the least amount of time spent. So I’m probably an idiot to not focus on this a lot more.

That said, if my e-commerce business becomes more passive, I’d likely concentrate hard on selling goods on eBay for money. The reasons are because:

1. This is a great way to diversify and to make gains that are beyond your cookie-cutter S&P500 portfolio.
2. The risk is acceptable for me due to how fast you can sell these assets relative to how long it’ll take for these things to become irrelevant. Pokemon could go out of style, but probably won’t be out of relevance for the next few years. Given how these only takes a few days to sell, not being able to sell pokemon cards at all is a very remote risk. Likewise, artists with a big following generally gets bigger, not fall out of relevance. If they do fall out of relevance, it might take a decade plus. Art maybe could take 6 months to 1 year to 3 years to sell, maybe. This is an acceptable timeframe for me.
3. Max loss is just what you spent buying the stuff. Compare this to leveraged real estate where you can lose a lot more than your all-in. You could pay $200K for a house and end up losing $300K due to bad market forces. Likewise, with eBay you can start by flipping small stuff. The smallest house you can flip is probably still in the 5-figure zone, so you’ll have big risk even as a beginner. Anything goes wrong with eBay…you might lose a couple hundred bucks.
4. The profit-to-effort ratio is very high when selling stuff on eBay for money, which make this very scalable. I’m a beginner at this stuff honestly and made $200/hr. Maybe beginner’s luck. But maybe there’s something here.
5. Katamari Damacy is a Japanese game where you consume small “things” to become a bigger “thing”. As you get bigger, you compound your size by being able to consume bigger and bigger “things”. This is the eBay game as well. You make $800 profit on your first 10 sales, and you can compound it to a $5000 profit in your next 30 sales. Soon enough, you can flip much bigger ticket items like used Rolexes to target the wealthy or people who want to pretend to be wealthy.

There is a big downside though, which is while you can scale, it can be very slow and hard to scale. The reason for this is because high-value things are generally hard to buy. Even if you’re aware of all the opportunities, you might only be able to purchase 1 thing out of 50 things you wanted to buy due to the nature of how a lot of these drawings work, and how the demand works for these items.

As an example: I used to buy Yeezys with the Adidas app, where it’s “first come first serve”. I won 3 times out of 10+ times only. Each shoe I was able to flip for a ~$600 profit, but Yeezys aren’t a reliable source of income. You will reliably make money on each sale, but you can’t reliably buy the item in the first place.

Therein lies the second biggest downside: unreliability. Just because you won your Yeezys or won an art drawing this time, doesn’t mean that you’ll win next time. To minimize unreliability, you’ll need a large deal flow. Example: you get 10-20 purchase opportunities/day for rare drops in the hopes you win one.

Lastly, the downside is time risk: you don’t know how long it’ll take for your stuff to sell. Vivid Voltage sold in a few days but the next drop might take months to sell. You also don’t know what you don’t know. I know now that pokemon cards might take a few days to sell while James Jean takes a few months. But at purchasing time, there’s no way for me to know that. Same goes for you: as you try to sell new items you haven’t sold before, you just won’t know how long it’ll take for things to sell until you actually have the item on-hand and are trying to sell it.

That said though, a lot of these risks can be mitigated by using eBay sold listings and by doing your own due diligence.

In sum: I think this model is quite workable as long as you use eBay and other tools to do your own risk assessment in both 1) the probability that your item will lead to a sale, and 2) how long it’ll take to make a sale once you’ve bought the item.

As Jay-Z has said in Clique:

“Turn that 62 to 125, 125 to a 250 / 250 to a half a man”

My hope is that you’ll take use post to inspire you to do the same.

P.S.: This is a new blog and if you’ve found this helpful at all, it would mean the world to me if you were to share this post to someone that you think this post might benefit. It would also be immensely helpful to me if you could give me any feedback on the content at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com