Back in the saddle, FBA is amazing

I've been flipping more or less consistently since my last post, but for about 6 months or so was solely drop-shipping as I moved into an RV and didn't have the storage space. I still am, but am now able to use my parents' shed for business and have gotten back into ebay,and more recently (should've started a lot sooner!), Amazon FBA, and holy shit, FBA is great. While you end up paying more in fees for certain items, the time saved is more than worth it. Their consumer base is also enormous, and for books, there's really no comparison. I've made $1000 in sales in my first two weeks and by reinvesting most of the money, it's relatively easy to quickly put together a semi-passive income stream. For anyone interested in FBA, a bluetooth barcode scanner and offline database for your phone is mandatory. I use the CT-20 with FBAScan. You'll be wary about dropping the $50 or so on a scanner and $30 on a database, but you will literally make that money back in a day at a place like Savers by scanning through the books for a few hours. It's really pretty ridiculous how simple it is, and I find myself with not enough time to buy all the books I could be. 

My method is as follows: FBAScan (ASellerTool) through the education, non-fiction, history, biographies sections, pull out the good stuff (decent rank and profit margin, you'll get the hang of this as you continue to scan), then double-check with the Amazon Seller app, as the database is not always completely accurate. Sometimes it'll bring up a secondary listing for a book with a crazy high price. You can usually tell this is the case if it has a poor (very high number) ranking. You should double check by barcode/ISBN and with the Flow image search. You'll save yourself a lot of money. At $2-3 a book, I generally only buy those with an FBA price of around $12 or more. If there are no FBA sellers (FBA scan doesn't show the FBA price/s if they're not within the lowest 20, another reason to double-check) and the rank isn't too terrible, it could be worth buying just because a large portion of buyers only search items with Prime offerings. 

I've been shipping multiple 45-50lb boxes of books and other goods to FBA each week, and if everything sells for what I think it should, then things will be looking good. My best find so far in that niche, while the ranking is very low, is a book of movie reviews from the 80s with only a couple of other sellers, listed for about $300. More commonly you'll find books in the 20-50 dollar range, with maybe 2 or 3 $100+ each week. It's exciting work, wondering if you'll stumble upon a gem worth thousands of dollars. 

Those camera lenses in my last post STILL haven't sold. I don't even know why I still have them listed. I've lost about $16 in insertion fees. Yeah, I think I'll just drop the prices to a ridiculous low and re-donate them if they don't sell in a month. 

Finds of the week

Pickings are a little slim this first week back but I did only source on two days. Picked up the 4 CDs houdini magic deck, On The Dot, Oyo Sports lego knockoff figure, and the Donald hat for a total of $12 on Sunday. The bare minimum I'll make on the CDs is $5 profit each, but I expect it'll be more if I don't impatiently drop the prices. The toy isle is one of my favorite sections to scour through as everything is typically very reasonably priced if not dirt cheap. I guess it's a combination of a large supply, all toys generally looking the same to an adult, and the employees not wanting to overcharge children. The Oyo Sports Football champions figure, On The Dot game and Houdini deck were all in a $2 bag. The figure is sealed and should go for at least $10 on ebay, paying for the bag. The houdini deck is probably worthless, and I might make a buck and a positive feedback on the Dot game. The Hat was $2 and judging by similar listings, I should make at least $5 on it. 

The rest of the haul was from a different Savers, one I hadn't been to before. It was a little farther away than I would normally consider driving, but someone told me they had a lot of CDs and that they were cheaper. Made my way through a couple of shelves of CDs before I accidentally unpaired my scanner and found it wouldn't reconnect. Looking around I found a $2 bag with the two decks of playing cards. The only similar listing for the Crown deck is in green and is listed for $40. Threw mine up for $25 and we'll see how it goes. I think I could pull in $10 at the very least. The Spaniel deck doesn't seem to be worth anything.

The best finds were when I was getting ready to check out with nothing but a vintage deck of cards and decided to give the display case a closer look. The camera lenses were $15 and $6. Not wanting to look them up in front of the clerk, I decided to take a risk on them as they felt like quality lenses. I might make $5 on the smaller one and $10-15 on the larger. In a bin full of gameboy games for a buck a piece I picked out Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, Spider Man, and Tom and Jerry. Considering the Savers I usually frequent prices these at $3+ each, this was an exciting find. I picked these up for my collection, but I could easily make $10 on Kid Icarus. Haven't been able to get Spider Man to boot up, but Kid Icarus makes up for it. That's all for this week.

Time is Money

When first starting out flipping, especially if funds are limited, it's hard to justify any purchase that isn't directly flippable, but the sooner you fork over the cash for certain tools, the faster you'll make more money. The first thing you'll want is a decent scale. USPS gives discounts for printing your own postage, and you'll save time and gas money on top of that. I use the American Weigh Scales Table Top Postal Scale which has a capacity of 55lbs, more than enough for most anything. In addition, you'll want an efficient printer to print your postage on, and some adhesive labels to save time and tape. I've currently using an old office printer with these labels but I'm going to be switching over to a compact thermal printer that won't take up as much space in my RV. Once you have everything you need to print your own postage, you can schedule pickups during your normal mail deliveries on the USPS website and have it all taken care of for you.

While not as essential as a good scale and printer, anyone looking to flip DVDs, CDs or any other media should absolutely pick up a barcode scanner. The CT-20 bluetooth scanner is the cheapest on the market and works perfectly. I use it in conjunction with a prepaid Android Tracfone which costs a minimum of $20 every 3 months (though the best value for your dollar is the $10/mo plan) while the phone itself can easily be found for less than $30. The barcode scanner has already paid for itself many times over. Without it, I wouldn't be able to look up the prices of the hundreds of CDs at thrift stores. The Savers I frequent is a little stingy at $2 per CD so I don't pick them up unless they're going for more than $10. I've found many that go for $20+, and even a signed copy of Bobby Rock's "Out of Body." The money in CDs is usually in foreign, classical, or any type of spiritual/religious stuff, but there's plenty of money to be made outside of those genres, so the sooner you get a scanner, the better. 

Believe it or not, there are even VHS tapes worth money. Anything that wasn't transferred to a later medium will hold its value. Exercise and wrestling videos often fall into this category. My best find in the VHS section, which I wouldn't have bothered to look in without a scanner, wasn't a movie but a VHS to VHS-C adapter which I paid $1 for and sold for $30. 

More Keyboards

Sometime in December I stopped by the flea market where I'd found the previous stash of vintage keyboards. Turns out I missed quite a few. All but one of the seven keyboards pictured above are mechanical, and I decided to take a chance on the non-mechanical (third down on the right) as it looked unique. I've since sold it, as well as two or three others for $30-40 each. While not anywhere near as valuable as some of the previous pickups, I'm still making profit. The jewels of this lot are the two DELLs, which are easily $50+ a piece. I've already sold one, though I don't remember for how much. 

I think I've just about cleaned that place out when it comes to valuable vintage keyboards. I might look into some of the other non-mechanicals that are left but I'm trying to avoid bigger items like this if the margins aren't high enough as I'm not going to have the space for them all. I've still got six boards left to sell. If anyone's interested, I'm willing to negotiate on prices. You can find them at ebay.com/usr/portableplatypus

Craigslist Board Game Haul

A few months back I came across a Craigslist ad offering a bunch of board games for $40. Did some searching on ebay sold listings for a few of them and found there was some money to be made. The Monster's Inc Scare Factory alone would all but cover the investment. Offered $45 if they'd deliver and they took it. Later that day I had a nice pile of games delivered to my doorstep and was pleased to find the majority of them to be complete. The lower end games like Bingo, Chinese Checkers, and Don't Break the Ice aren't worth shipping, and Battleship, Operation, Harry Potter Levitation Challenge and the Small Soldiers pinball didn't work, but I was able to sell the game pieces separately.

Board games are one of the more annoying things to ship. The free USPS boxes don't always cut it, and it often takes two non-flat-rate boxes to contain one game. There are large flat-rate board game boxes available, but they're not thick enough for a lot of games and aren't cheap to ship at $15. Fed Ex might be a better option for some games. I've already sold most of these, including a set of dominoes that I forgot to include in this photo, for a net total of around $93, so I've already doubled my money. I can probably make at least another $40 profit from this lot as the Monster's Inc set has not yet sold.

If you're interested in purchasing any of the remaining games, you can find them in my ebay store.

Vintage Keyboard Flea Market Haul

It's hard to imagine old electronics being worth anything what with them being obsolete and all, but certain items can bring in a staggering amount of cash. Keyboard bundled with modern day PCs are good enough to get the job done so most aren't aware of the wide array of options available to them. Most vintage keyboards are referred to as "mechanical" because each key has a mechanical switch of its own responsible for its input. There are a variety of different switches, most of which are no longer produced. The infamous IBM Model M uses what's known as a buckling spring, and is probably the noisiest of them all, but extremely comfortable and lasts for years, and individual springs can be easily replaced. Keyboards bundled with today's computers use membrane and/or rubber dome to detect key presses. These don't last nearly as long and lack the distinct tactile feeling of a good mechanical keyboard. Once you try one, there's no going back.

200+ DVD Craigslist Haul

Selling media is a great way to quickly raise your positive feedback count and reduce your defect rate. I paid $100 for this lot of a little over 200 DVDs, half of what the Craigslist ad was asking. 50 cents a piece is about the maximum you want to pay when buying large lots like this. Listing at $4.50 a piece minimum for the more common titles will net about a buck each after shipping and fees, so selling these at a yard sale or flea market for $2 each might be the way to go, but if that's not an option then it only costs 5 cents each month to keep a DVD listed. There were a few seasons and sealed titles in this lot which tend to bring a few bucks per sale. Cyberscape in the bottom right stack is probably the least common DVD of the entire lot, but there also don't seem to be a lot of buyers. Maybe I'll be able to get 10 bucks for it, even if I have to sit on it for a while.

So far, I've made 31 sales off of this lot, for a net total of $64.98, so I'm fast approaching the break-even mark with plenty of DVDs left to sell. I might be able to triple my money if they all sell. This isn't fast money, and more reselling than flipping, but it helps to have a bread and butter source of consistent sales, and these are easily shipped with DVD-sized poly bags which are dirt cheap.

UPDATE: I made my $100 back plus an additional $85 from ebay DVD sales but things were slowing down. With over 100 still listed, I was eating more than $5/mo in renewal fees, and at roughly $1 profit each I wasn't even breaking even. After digging through and picking about a dozen to keep for myself, I threw the remaining 109 up on craigslist and priced to sell at $75 for the lot. Couldn't have been more than a week before I had a buyer, putting my total profit from this lot at $160.