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Last week, Greg published a post called Increase credit card spend (and get most of it back): What still works September 2017. Some readers might be surprised to hear that I’ve never bought a gift card or made a Plastiq payment to meet a minimum spend. That’s not to say that I don’t buy gift cards and use Plastiq (I certainly do), but I don’t usually have any trouble meeting the opening spend requirements with actual purchases because I’ve long been comfortable with reselling. In today’s post, I’ll highlight a few things I’ve resold lately with the hopes that I encourage those interested in reselling to think outside the box a bit when considering what to resell.
Note about sourcing
Unlike collecting signup bonuses and shopping portal points, reselling is a competitive business. When you have more competition, whether on the sourcing end or the selling end, it gets harder to make a profit. For that reason, I try to focus on things with low competition in both areas. For the same reason, I’m not going to list sources for all of the things I’m including in this post. The point of this post isn’t to be a guide to exactly what to buy and where to buy it — truth be told, that guide wouldn’t be useful as both are constantly changing. Rather, the point of this post is to highlight the fact that there are a world of things to resell — opportunities abound if you’re willing to take a little risk.
That out of the way, here are just a few things I’ve resold over the past month.
Item 1: DuroMax 10,000 watt hybrid dual fuel portable generator
This first one was an easy call for me as I bought one a year ago on a whim and flipped it quickly and locally. I don’t know a lot about generators, but I know that as we come into the winter months, someone is always looking for a generator to have for a hunting camp or outdoor event or to have “just in case”. Over the summer, Factory Authorized Outlet put this generator on sale for $599.99.
Lucky for me, they did so on a day when I had a bonus offer for 10% back in Ebay bucks. If you look closely in the screen shot above, you’ll see that it says I would also earn $60 in eBay bucks.
Last winter, they put this generator on sale for $100 less and I sold it for $700. This time around, that would only mean a $100 profit, but combined with the $60 in eBay bucks that seemed like enough of a margin to justify the $600 cost. On top of that, I had recently opened a card with a $2K spend requirement for the signup bonus. This generator would get me almost a third of the way towards the $2K in a single purchase.
I didn’t expect this one to sell quickly, so I knew I would have to store it for a bit. However, sure enough, I resold it last month for $700 after holding it for about 10 weeks. Many places (Factory Authorized Outlet included) are selling this generator for $1500 right now, but Home Depot has it for $980 before any sort of discounts. The buyer was willing to pick it up himself, so my time cost was low on this one. It was an easy win-win as he got a great deal at $700 and I moved it out of the garage.
Item 2: Heatcraft Hermetic 3/4 horse power condensing unit
I’ll be honest, I still don’t really understand what this thing is. I saw an opportunity to buy it from a liquidator for $300. I Googled the make and model and saw that somebody on eBay was selling it for more than $1500. Similar to the generator, I expected to have to float this one for a while before getting paid off, but I hoped I’d be able to get somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred dollars, making the wait worthwhile. I listed this one on every Craigslist within a distance I’d be willing to drive on a weekend (about 4 hours). I also would have been willing to sell it on eBay. Many people get intimidated by the idea of freight shipping, but I’ve found that it is not nearly as expensive as you’d probably guess. I’ve used Uship.com many times for items including motorcycles, boats, kitchen appliances, pellet stoves, and more. I’ve been happy enough with the results not to shop around much. I’d guestimate that I could have shipped this thing coast-to-coast for about $300.
All that said, I found that I grossly overestimated the existence of a market for everything. I held onto this unit, gathering dust in a family member’s barn, for more than a year. I had one interested buyer sometime last year who traded a few emails on Craigslist and talked on the phone before falling off the face of the earth…and then radio silence. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email about it and spoke on the phone to a guy who owns a refrigeration business and was interested. He asked if I’d take $800 for it. Yeah, I would. It took more than a year, but I more than doubled my money. I was glad to unload it and make a buck doing so. Of course, being in the business, the buyer was planning to resell it as well — he said, “You know, I might sit on this thing for a year before I find someone who wants to buy it.” Tell me about it, buddy.
While I’m happy to more than double my money in a year’s time from a financial perspective, I’d rather take a smaller profit a bit more quickly. I’m not sure I’d buy another one of these.
Item 3: Pellet stove
I buy a lot of things I find that are being liquidated for one reason or another. I found a store sitting on old stock of a pellet stove that they apparently weren’t moving and I was able to buy a few well below sticker price. Oddly, I’ve found pellet and wood stoves very profitable — I haven’t yet found a metal box in which to burn wood that I can’t sell for a profit.
In fact, a pellet stove was how I first got into buying larger items. My wife convinced me to pay about $900 for a pellet stove with a retail value around $3K, her argument being that we must be able to at least get our money back out of it (and even if we lost a little bit, how much of a loss could be it?). I listed it on Craigslist in both the “for sale” and “barter” sections. Someone offered to trade a used Honda Shadow 1100 motorcycle for it. In the end, it turned out that the bike had these really cool custom handlebars….that were too wide for to get it inside his storage space. Winter was coming and he was looking to make a trade. I sold the Shadow on eBay a few months later for $3600 and shipped it to Texas. After fees, I pocketed more than $3,000 (the buyer paid for shipping).
Not every stove is such a big win, but when it gets cold I can usually find a buyer without much effort. I paid $410 each for the stove pictured above. I listed it locally for an asking price of $1100 (which happens to match what the big-box stores charge for this stove before tax). I didn’t expect to get that much, but wanted to start with a high anchor knowing that it’s the right season. I sold the first one about a week ago — the buyer offered $900 and wouldn’t go any higher. Sold. One down, couple more to go. Here’s to a cooler fall.
Item 4: Kindle Fires
I don’t focus much on consumer electronics these days, but sometimes a deal is too good to ignore. That was the case with these Fire tablets. Last month, we posted about the opportunity to buy the Kindle Fire 7 for $15 plus tax or the Fire 8 for $25 plus tax. At those prices, they seemed like an easy item to resell. While I have long resold larger items via Craigslist, the market there has been gradually drying up. I find it to be almost a complete waste of time for small items like this as I get a million emails from unreliable people and get stood up, wasting my time. Instead, my wife and a family member sell things like this via local Facebook marketplaces. I find that buyers are much more comfortable with Facebook. However, I also find that most Facebook buyers are looking for cheap things. These Fire tablets seemed to fit the bill.
We’ve only had them for a couple of weeks and haven’t tried very hard (figured demand will probably increase closer to the holidays even if Amazon releases a newer model), but so far we’ve sold:
4x Kindle 8 for $180 total ($45 each to the same buyer)
2x Kindle 7 for $75 total (also one buyer)
So far, my total cost for those six tablets with sales tax was $140.40 and I’ve sold them for $255. As it was only two buyers, time cost was low. A family member met these buyers for me and we split the profits for about $52.50 each so far. That’s not a killing, but it’s also not a bad return on investment. With items like this, I generally wouldn’t make a special trip to meet anyone. But if they can meet me somewhere that is already on my route, why not make a few bucks? I honestly didn’t plan to take $45 each for the Fire 8’s, but getting rid of four at once reduces the time spent messaging and meeting with other buyers, so I took the offer. I have quite a few more to go here.
Item 5: Marshall speaker
This was my dumb impulse purchase of the post. When I’m on the road for one reason or another, I’ll sometimes keep an eye out for a store that sells liquidation items. Whether it’s a chain like Ollie’s / Big Lots or a more local box store that sells bargains, I’ll keep my ear to the ground for opportunities. At some point last year, we were driving through a city and already had a pickup truck and enclosed trailer with some other items we were picking up to resell. We caught wind of such a store and figured we had space. We bought a variety of items that day, including cookware, Mikasa china, small kitchen appliances, and two of the above-pictured Marshall Acton Bluetooth speaker — all of which were open-box items. The speaker was marked at $84. At the time, the speaker was going for more than this, but today’s Amazon price for a new one is $169.99.
I bought two of them, and with the volume that we purchased, we got a small discount. Still, my cost on this speaker was in the $80’s after tax. I finally (after about six months) sold one of them for $100 on Craigslist last week. Luckily, the guy came to meet us at the doctor’s office where we had an appointment. He was late, so I did have to walk out from the office visit for a minute, but it was a simple and quick exchange. Still, not worthwhile for the small profit margin on this one. If there is a win in this, it’s that I love how these sound, so I won’t be terribly disappointed if I keep the other one.
Item 6: Hunting Bows
Like the pellet stoves above, this one is about season. I was able to snag four previous-model hunting bows during the off-season for well under their original prices (I paid $375-$475 for each bow, with original prices in the $800-$1500 range). I sold them all for $700-$950. When I come across an item like this that I know absolutely nothing about, I’ll put the item make and model into eBay and select the “sold listings” check box on the left hand side to get an idea as to what people have been paying for the items recently.
Ebay will then show selling prices. Some of them are just a green number and others are crossed out:
When it is crossed out, as in the first of the two listings above, it means that the buyer made a “best offer” that was accepted. A solid green number (like the second one) means that there was a flat selling price (no negotiation).
That’s one tool I use to determine how much something is worth before buying it, and that helped me to know that I could make some money on these bows. Not an absolute killing on these, but enough to make it worthwhile.
Do you win every time?
Nobody wins every time. I recently took back a couple of returns from Amazon — including an Apple Watch and an expensive bluetooth speaker. I’ll lose something on each of those. However, if you spend more time focusing on those items which have low competition in both sourcing and selling, you’ll find that you win much more often than you lose.
Additionally, when you choose items with low selling competition, it increases your bargaining power. When you find the person who wants your item, you know that they don’t have many alternative options, so you can extract a good value while still giving them a good deal. Finally, scammers are much less likely to target a pellet stove or generator than an Apple Watch. I still have to check the Apple Watch that got returned to figure out whether or not the buyer returned the actual watch or a counterfeit and whether or not it has water damage, etc. I spend less time with those types of concerns when I focus more on oddball items like those above.
Where can you find deals like those?
Again, this post isn’t about where to source, but rather what to think about when you’re looking to source stuff. Now and then, it’s OK to jump on the bandwagon with a Kindle Fire deal like I did, but at $15 or $25 each, it’ll take a while to meet your minimum spend goals. Looking for an item that is out of season or overstocked or going to be in high demand soon would be smart.
Bottom line
Reselling can be a viable way to meet minimum spend goals and make a small profit while you’re at it. Some people would rather spread out risk by purchasing many smaller items, and there is wisdom in that type of risk management. However, I have found that low competition on both the sourcing and selling ends tends to provide nice profits — and I don’t usually struggle to meet a minimum spend. Keep in mind that you’ll need to start with an amount you’ll willing to float — that is, an amount you are willing to pay off even if you’re unable to make all of the necessary sales. But if you keep your eye out for interesting opportunities, you can find yourself on the right end of some big wins.
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Good post. When I sell stuff, I always make the buyer either come to my house (for small items) or a coffee shop nearby for expensive stuff. I find most buyers seem to have the expectation that they are expected to come pick up the item, but I think for you it’s different since you seem to live far away from your buyers. But for the other readers, you shouldn’t need to deliver things if you’re reselling.
Good point. I think most buyers expect to come out of their way a bit. But I do live in a rural area, so I’m used to having to drive a bit for anything.
However, I personally try to avoid having people come to my house. That’s not to say I never do (and in fact I noted the instance where the guy brought the gun in one of my comments above…..which is part of the reason I try not to meet at home :-). But I’m not driving two hours away to sell a Kindle Fire, either. I usually try to pair it with running errands. From there, which person is going to go more out of the way than the other usually comes down to how good of a deal it is. If I know I’ll get someone else to pay that much, I’m much less willing to go out of my way than if the buyer is offering something better than what I expect to get elsewhere (or on an item I’ve held for a long time, like the condensing unit in the post….I was willing to drive anywhere to meet that guy and unload it :-).
One thing I try to do is strike while the iron is hot. I’d rather arrange to meet sooner rather than later, because a lot of people change their minds when you wait too long.
[…] Monday, I wrote about Six Things I’ve Resold Lately. In that post, I explained my sourcing strategy and shared some recent wins. While reselling has […]
Nick, fantastic post. I’ve only dabbled in reselling, mostly in consumer electronics and kitchen electrics when it’s a pretty obvious win. Your post (and responses in the comments) have opened my eyes a bit. Thanks for the insight!
Interesting article, appreciate the level of detail! Was wondering since I don’t know where you live, how big is your local market for CL/FB etc.?
I live in a small town of about 1,000 people – so my “local” market is tiny. That’s why I list larger items on all CL’s within about a 4 hour drive (and why I mostly focus on larger items with bigger profits to be made). How far away I’ll list totally depends on the profit to be made — I won’t list a Kindle Fire four hours from me….but as an example, I transported a Segway about 4 hours away a couple of months ago. I sold it for a couple thousand dollar profit, so I was willing to take a ride on a sunny day. I generally just look at the time and profit to be made and make a judgment call. Sometimes I’m surprised by how far people will drive to me for a deal. For example, the guy who bought the Marshall speaker in this post drove about 2.5 hours to come get it. And he pulled in with a trailer, planning to drive 3 hours from me to pick up something else from CL (back in his direction, but past where he’s from).
I list small stuff like the Fires in FB groups in a “city” of about 10K people that’s only about 30min away and most of my larger items in a 100K+ population area about an hour away (sometimes I’ll list things like the Fires there as well if I’m already planning to be in that direction for a day). A family member has been helping me with smaller stuff — she’ll meet people in her town and we’ll split the profits. Or I’ve occasionally listed things in cities where I’ll be passing through. For example, on a trip down south to visit family last holiday season, I met someone in a DC suburb with a Segway miniPRO. I was driving through anyway and had descriptions written, so about a week before my trip I listed stuff in some of the larger areas I’d be passing through.
That said, I try not to make my plans centered around CL sales — people flake out all the time on CL. I find the flake out rate to be remarkably lower on FB. In fact, just today, I had 2 CL sales and 1 FB sale lined up — people we’d been emailing with all week long and setting up for today. This morning, both CL people backed out at the last minute….FB sale was there, happy, & smiling.
I’m not sure why, but I tend to get more action on CL listings after they have been posted for a couple of weeks.
Anyway, hope that helps.
yes, ty for such a detailed response. I was assuming you must be in a big city, obviously wrong on that one.
[…] Six things I’ve resold lately […]
Great article, and motivating, thank you!
[…] We had already settled on a different crib elsewhere and had just been waiting on it to go on sale — but at $79.69 after the $10 credit, plans might have just changed. I’m not absolutely positive that we’ll keep this one, but at that price we’ll have to set it up and and see if it works for us. If not, I imagine I’ll be able to add this to the list of things I’ve resold lately. […]
Excellent article. I have been reselling for years, mostly ebay. I’ve stuck with smaller items for the ease of shipping, but reading your article makes me want to try some larger items. We have a local FB group that I think I will try. Also, thanks for the tip on uship for larger items.
I’ve always wondered about reselling. Now, I never have to think about it again. I applaud your initiative and hard work, and it’s clearly quite rewarding, but this post now conclusively makes me realize that it’s just not for me!
Wish I could handle months-long waits to sell while carrying the float on big items like some of those.
So, on mechanical items like generators, do you test them out prior buying? And do you looks for warrantys to include when you sell it? This is important as you wouldn’t want to find out months later that it doesn’t work. And, how do you handle the warranty or satisfaction guarantee when you sell it?
Good questions. While I’ll source stuff like kitchen electrics, cookware, tableware, etc even if it’s used / open box, I’d be more hesitant on reselling a second-hand generator. I have bought and sold refurbished appliances from shops that specialize in that, but I’ll usually do some homework to see that they have a solid reputation before I buy. I’ll certainly ask to plug something in if need be, but I avoid buying a pallet of used electronics because of the time involved in testing them. Some people do really well on that kind of thing, but I don’t want to put the time into it. On the other hand, if it’s a refurbished fridge for $250 that I think I can resell for $850, it’s worth a second to plug it in. It’s very situational on that.
As for warranty, I always assume it won’t transfer and tell the buyer the same. Honestly, I don’t want the headache of dealing with that six months down the line — I’d rather just find a price compromise that takes the lack of warranty into consideration. I focus on buying things cheaply enough that I can offer a significant enough discount over the store price to make it enticing — and I find that most buyers understand this (and use it when negotiating). If it’s practical to have the buyer plug something in / test it, I’ll find a way to let them do that so they know I’m not trying to scam them. If it’s brand new in the box, I find they only want to open it about 30% of the time — and then I just ask that we have a deal set in place before they open it so that when they open it and find it is new as described it’s a done deal. Of course, if the item really didn’t work, I’d deal with that — but I *usually* avoid things like tablets, computers, and smartwatches as they attract more claims of something not working. Funny enough, a few days after I sold the pellet stove in this post, the buyer sent a text message saying that it didn’t work. I was going to offer to replace it since I do have a couple more of the same stove. Luckily, I didn’t have to – when I texted him back several hours later, he said that he figured out what he was doing wrong and it worked fine. I’ve had people ask me if things were stolen, I’ve sold things to police officers who showed up wearing an ID, presumably so I’d know they would come after me if it was stolen. I even had one guy who was buying a $9K item tell me on the phone before he came to pick it up that he carries a pistol “just so we both know”. In that case, he was showing up on private property with a lot of money in his pocket, so I understood his position. On that note, I carry a bill checker (one of the pens with a UV light on one side and the ink checker on the other side) for Craigslist sales, but on an item that expensive, we go to the bank and deposit the money in person together. I want his face on camera handing over the bills. At the same time, I’m more comfortable focusing on large, expensive items — the crowd of buyers I attract are usually fairly easy to please in terms of offering the right price to make everyone happy.
As for a satisfaction guarantee, I offer returns when selling on eBay on most items just because that makes buyers more comfortable. I don’t offer returns on items that are freight shipped (though I know that eBay will force me to take it back if it is not as described, and I assume that most buyers know that as well). I try to focus on items that aren’t likely to be returned and I rarely have an issue. On Craigslist, once it’s done it’s done. On Amazon and eBay, I would conservatively estimate that 90% of items that have been returned were new consumer electronics — used consumer electronics have a lower return rate in my experience. Outside of the tablets/phones/cameras/smartwatches, it is very rare for me to have a customer satisfaction issue.
Years ago, I met someone in this space who told me that he was focusing on comforter sets at the time because people know what they want in terms of color and design — they didn’t get returned often and they weren’t very heavy for shipping. I didn’t find that particular tip to work out for me, but I took the concept – trying to focus on something that someone isn’t likely to want to return — and it’s been very useful.
Nice, I have done a few generators as well. eBay deals and some other sources provide some good deals.
Thanks for a very iinteresting and informative article!