I’ve started selling unwanted items around the house on ebay. We have the normal amount of extra stuff accumulated over the years that just builds clutter and gathers dust, so I started posting things just to see if they would sell. Some have and some haven’t but I’m intrigued by the prospect of being an ebay reseller as a way to make extra money.
So far I’ve sold a couple of McDonald’s toys, wooden puzzles, homeschool curriculums, toys, and one unique Pokemon plush. It’s definitely unpredictable at this point, but I’m enjoying it! You can see my store here. I’ve decided to keep going to see what I can move out of the house and make a little money on.
Of course, now I’m diving into the youtube videos and blogs to see how the professional resellers are doing it and there are a mixed bag of methods to produce optimal results. Doubts are forming as to how much I will actually be able to make in profits, but I do love a good side hustle experiment and I’d love to continue to move out unwanted stuff from my house so I’m going to give this a try.
My phase 1 plan is to sell items I already have in my house. These are items I’ve already invested in and gotten use out of so they are sunk costs. Examples are old toys, clothes, and electronics. Sales from these specific items are just profit. My only expense is the packaging and shipping which if done correctly is paid for by the buyer. I’ll go into these costs in a minute.
In phase 2, I plan to look at stores for clearance items that have potential profit if sold online. It’s referred to as reselling arbitrage and some resellers only do this style of online business. This will require additional investment so I’m going to move into this phase slowly. I’m not 100% sure if this will be profitable for me or not so I don’t want to lose any profits I made from selling my phase 1 items on purchasing phase 2 items. Planning is critical.
In both scenarios, there are shipping and packaging costs. I’m not sure about other reselling platforms because I have never used them before, but on ebay the buyer pays for shipping if you choose for them to. This is how I am going to begin. I will sell on ebay and let the buyer pay shipping. Hopefully this will result in time and expense efficiencies. This is a side hustle so I don’t have much time to spend in addition to creating the listings and putting the items in the mail.
My other expense with ebay is the percentage of the sale they keep. This percentage varies per category. You can read about the fees here. My initial thoughts about the fees are that I will have to pay attention to them if I move into phase 2 of my plan but for phase 1, they are manageable.
This is a look at my listings and profits, so far. As I mentioned, the investment has been minimal because I’ve only posted items from around my house. You an see that my sales were $247.04 but my profit was only $124.92. This dashboard does not take into effect any packaging I purchased, but it does reflect shipping costs that I’ve elected to take out of my profits through ebay. The $124.92 is my take home after I’ve shipped the items.
As you can see I’m not going to retire anytime soon, but I’m enjoying the experiment and its serving a double purpose by helping me clean out my clutter. I do see that investing in additional items to sell can quickly eat profits if I chose to do phase 2, so planning and budget will be critical.
I will keep you posted on this to pass along anything I’m learning along the way. Maybe there is a future for you in reselling!
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