Thrift Store Flipping On eBay $100 Challenge Using Your Smart Phone Tips You Need

If you don’t have a car charger for your cell phone it should be the first thing on your to do list, data uses your battery up, so without a charger once you leave home you have a limited amount of time to work.

Some days when my wife and I go out shopping we have come home two days later, car overflowing with items, and a few hundred miles on the Infiniti that eBay pays for every month. We can hit as many as 10 shops in a day and keeping the smart phone charged must be a priority, regardless of how well you know your niche.

I was shopping in a Good Will on US route 41 just the other day, and I meet a woman that was retired that had a Harley Davidson shirt on the top of her cart so I joked with her how I knew where that was going, she said really, I said yep thats going straight to eBay. She turned red in the face and said how did you know, I said ma’am I know a biker when I see one, and I am sorry to tell you but you are not a biker. She chuckled and smiled. I told her about myself and she told me she did this to keep busy while the hubby was fishing. Right before I was going to leave the store, I seen her fussing with her phone, come to find out she was trying to get one last search in. the shirt she was looking at was 7 bucks turns out it would bring her a good profit after I looked it up for her on my fully charged smart phone.

Now while I am shopping, I am naturally a loud guy, I stand out in a crowd, play around a lot, and find that while it is not for everyone, I am very open when I go out. I tell people exactly what I am doing, and will take a few minutes to chat about it. I also point everyone to try it. I am not shy either, so it makes for an interesting day of shopping. Okay Okay back to the phone tips.

Many people tell you, make sure to get all the apps, like worthpoint, and such, SORRY, I am not like them, I don’t get it. Since I am going to sell everything on eBay the only app I need is the eBay app which you can download for free. I do have Amazon installed but I don’t use it much. I may look into Amazon in the future, but for right now I am all about eBay.

Time for shopping, look I am not going to tell you how to run your business, or how you should source your items for sale. I know I can spend hours in a store and find some really good stuff, sometimes I am not in the mood to look through 5000 pieces of clothing. So for me I just go with my mood, remember, I am retired and don’t do this for a living it is to keep me busy.

Normally the first place I go is towards the back of the store looking for fresh merchandise which will normally be in carts. I am looking for battery operated toys, remote control cars, anything that takes batteries. Once I find an item of interest I check the price, some I know right away I want it, some I need to look up. Here is a great example of something I found. I found a 3 foot heavy multi joint dinosaur it has a battery compartment and is made by fisher price.

The first place I go is straight to my smart phone, I look up Fisher Price Dinosaur and scroll through, and I find it. Complete it is listed at about a 100 bucks up to 300 all are plus a lot of shipping this thing is heavy. But I see there is a remote and a charge as well to make it work. So I decide to look up parts and see what this thing is worth as parts. The body brings, 50 bucks or so including shipping, the rechargeable battery brings 25 to 30 bucks with shipping. So as I have said before I am into these things. So I can at least list the parts.

BUT I the one thing I don’t know is how it sells, so this is where the smart phone comes in handy, I go back to my search results, and I have a droid phone, so at the bottom of the window, it says Refine. I click that, next I only check Sold Items Only and click done. This shows me things that have sold, when they sold and for how much, I see that Spike sells… so but how well is the question. So I click on Refine again this time I click Completed Listings (I uncheck the other one if it is still checked) And I can see how often it is listed, RED means ended no sale, GREEN means sold, I can get a rough idea of just how many times it gets listed before it sells. A lot of RED means it doesn’t sell through well. More Green then Red it sells through well, 50-50 sells okay at best.

I see this thing sells through extremely well. So I buy it. 5.00 less my military discount of 15% 4.25 final cost. Yes I use every discount coupon or advantage I can when shopping. BUT what does it do? So I break out my smart phone again and look it up on youtube, I was going nuts, even showed the cashier my find. (Remember no charger or remote to this came with it) I couldn’t wait to look for parts to find if I could buy what I needed online and get this guy working, not to sell it so much, to play with my grandkids. They will scream and hoot for hours like I do.

Anyway, it does work and it cost me 45 more dollars to buy the remote and charger, judging by sold listings I found on my smart phone, I am going to guess if I ever wanted to sell him, I could easily double my money plus all the hours of enjoyment I will get from Spike until then.

In closing I guess what I am saying is don’t waste your money on apps, if you learn how to use what you can get for free, take the time to know it, do a little research, every purchase you make should sell quickly for you if you price it right and buy things with a good sell through rate or a lot of green in the REFINE screen on your FREE eBay app.

Hope this helped.
God Bless