Starting A Resale Business — The Complete Guide To Reselling

Reselling has come to mainstream attention in the past few years due to the phenomenal tv shows American Pickers and Pawn Stars. These shows spark the curiosity of the flip in each of us. Reselling is the simple act of buying low and selling high. Buying anything you can make a buck off of is not only a ton of fun, but a way of life. People become passionate about the craftsmanship, or start to collect themselves. Reselling or flipping is a way of life. The opportunities that are around you are endless. Everyone has something they are willing to sell for cheap just to get rid of it. I was a reseller for many years, and this is all of my tricks of the trade. All of these tips will increase your ebay resale business in a matter of days if you take action. The things you will learn in this guide will dramatically improve your Amazon resale business as well. Ebay and Amazon are what I sold on for years, before making a much better platform myself.

Growing Your Resale Business

Growing a resale business can be very difficult. With only so many hours in the day, you need to know where to look in order to grow your business as a reseller efficiently. This complete guide on reselling should solve a lot of rookie problems as well as dig into some strategies for reselling that are taking off.

Before we dig fully dig into strategies to grow your resale business we need to understand the approach to being a reseller. Being a reseller is a more of a lifestyle. We outlined some of the reasons why and why not you should start a reselling business.

The Plus Side Of Reselling

Reselling paid me throughout my college years and beyond. Reselling is an easy way to make side money because you can take it as far as you are willing to take it. I will share all of my tips as someone who sold for many years online. These are a few of the benefits that I have found over the years.

Negotiating/Buying Experience

On an average weekend garage saling in New Jersey, I would make about 10–15 purchases on a Saturday evening. Garage sales give you a ton of negotiating experience. You will eventually run into a point in your life where you need to negotiate. Flipping items online and reselling them will give you a tremendous amount of courage after doing it a few times. This is a great exercise for anyone looking to increase their business IQ in general.

Reselling Means Being Your Own Boss

Freedom is huge when you are working a traditional 9–5. When you flip full time he only thing you are tied down to was your business. Running a business using a marketplace is one of the easier way to run a business. That why I am making one. When you have the freedom and an entrepreneurial spirit that combination makes for great personal growth. Reselling online is a great thing to do in your college days. A lot of successful eBay sellers are in college. Reselling online is for anyone willing to hustle and grind. You can make easily over $2,000 a week.

Life Becomes Cheaper As A Reseller

When your job turns into finding things for cheap to resell on eBay life becomes a whole lot cheaper. You will run into little nick nacks and household item that you just need. I remember picking up a really nice retractable dog leash for free on an already good deal for some action figures.

Collecting And Flipping Items You Resell

Your favorite type of thing is typically something you should try and resell. If you are into the hobby you can use your resale business to fuel it. No matter the hobby this works with about anything.

Networking To Buy And Sell More Items

One of the things I really regret is not fully utilizing the network of people you meet when you are out in the wild. Talking to face to face with people is something you need to do when you are a reseller or ebay flipper. If you have to talk to them anyways, you might as well be as friendly as possible if they seem friendly enough you should put them on an email list, send and email out to everyone in the area.

The Negative Of Being A Reseller

Reselling is a lot of fun, but there are some down sides. Do not let these scare you away, there are negatives to any online business.

Finding Your Flips/ Sourcing Items To Resell

When you resell online finding your next flip is what keeps you in business. You never know what the next flip you can find really is, nut this becomes the difficult part in becoming a very large reselling online. If you do not learn to find new flips and source items for your online resale business you will not do well.

Fees When Reselling

The thing that really sucks about all of this are the fees. Ebay takes 13% right off the top from your profit. Amazon has 15% in fees and room to grow so long as Luckily we are building a marketplace that resellers will love. It currently has zero fees for sellers. Click here to sign up.

Testing Your Items As A Resale Store Owner

Once you have the items to flip online an important part of your business is making sure the items work properly. This can take up a large part of your time depending on what you sell online. Most electronics resellers know that this can be a pain and even eat into your profits. There might come a point in time when you buy something thinking it is a good deal and later find out the item is ready for the junkyard. Just keep in mind of your account health.

Listing Your Items For Sale

Listing the items themselves can be very time consuming. This is an unavoidable task. eBay has by fast the slowest time to list, and Amazon is the quickest. Our site will also be very fast and easy to list on. I would recommend trying it before eBay. We are better suited for resellers.

How To Start A Profitable Resale Business

Going out and finding what to flip and resell is the entire business. You let the marketplaces sell the items for you. In order to go out in the wild and be a successful reseller you need to have a sense of direction.

Figuring Out Your Resale Business

Obtaining a sense of direction is more than half of the battle when it comes to reselling. Direction is what will transform you form a garbage man to a sophisticated online entrepreneur. Some of the best flips are the items that you know the most about. If you are a gamer, flip video games, if you collect watches flip watches. Doing something that you really enjoy will only help you as a reseller.

What To Look For As A Reseller

Sourcing items is fancy way of finding things to resell online. Sourcing can be done in multiple ways, there is no right or wrong way to. When you source items for your online resale business theses are the places I would suggest to go after that will almost guarantee you items to flip.

Garage Sales/ Estate Sales — A Resellers Dream

Saturday Morning is a gold mine. Garage sales are the true bread and butter of reselling online. Typically they only happen in parts of the spring and fall, but happen every weekend during the summer. Rain or shine you are typically able to find a garage sale on a summer Saturday morning.

I was able to make well over $1,000 in a single day by milking garage sales for things to resell online using these following tips. I would highly suggest you do the same if you are interested in making more money as a reseller.

1. Understand the mindset — People who are having these garage sales are using it as a desperate attempt to clean out their house. You need to capitalize on that. When you are in their home or on their property try to use phrases like “ you have a lovely home” “what you did with your bushes looks fantastic” “I love your collection” Compliment them on what they are not selling, and then rip them apart on what they are. Building up a friendly enough repore so they do not feel disrespected when I get into the art of the lowball.
2. Early bird everything — When you go garage saling and learn the ropes of selling online you will soon understand that early birding is necessary. Once the item is gone its gone. Saturday morning needs to be early, and quick. I would suggest to show up a half hour early to the first garage sale in the area, and then being early to every other one as well.
3. Asking — At these sales you will be meeting people interested in selling their stuff left and right. What you need to do is very politely ask the people with the sale, “Do you have any ___” Ask them exactly what you are looking for. All of my best finds are from me just walking up and asking the owner of the house “Do you have any video games?” You will be surprised what some people pull out of their house. Everything is super cheaper. If it is not, do not buy it. You should know the rough price of the items you are asking for.
4. Tools — You need a few things to be really effective on the fly during garage sale season. You need the eBay app, the Amazon app, and most importantly Yard sale treasure map. Get These if you are serious about reselling online, We do not have an app just yet. But we still feel like the best marketplace to sell on as an online seller.

Using Flea Markets To Find Items To Sell

Similar to garage sales, flea markets should be a staple. In New Jersey they have a few very large ones that happen every weekend. Other states have the same. A good flea market will have mom and pop sellers who host their version of a garage sale at a flea market. The bad flea markets are the ones with more businesses or traditional antique sellers. Your job is to beat those people by finding the good stuff fast and easy.

Thrift Stores To Find Items To Sell

Thrift stores are the best for reselling. If you like to flip clothing there is nothing better than thrift stores. The big block thrift stores, Goodwill, Salvation army, Savers, Etc. These places can be great. However, I would suggest checking all of the smaller and more local thrift stores in your area. Sparking up a relationship with an employee would be a great idea too.

Placing Local Ads To Find Items To Sell Online

You will hit a point as a reseller where you want people to start coming to you. This is where local ads on Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, and other similar sites come in handy big time. As a reseller you have to educate yourself on what works. If you explore the idea of local ads, be ready to dive nose deep into a large experimental process for your resale operation.

Educating Yourself As A Reseller

You have to understand your niche. Reselling is a difficult thing if you have no sense of direction as a rookie. Being an incredible reseller takes time. I would highly suggest to define a niche, master it and then move to others. The most well known resellers and the American pickers. IF you watch the show they feel comfortable throwing a number on just about anything without doing prior research. You will get to that point as well so long as you take it serious. Work small, and then get big. Start off buying things you find interesting. It will make the whole process much more simple.

Knowing Your Margin In A Resale Business

When you buy something you need to have a rough estimate on your margin and understand the whole fee analysis before you make the purchase. As a rough estimate on fees they are the following: Forra— Zero fees for sellers.

eBay — 13% fees plus listing and listing option fes.

Amazon — 15% in fees plus $.99 per listing.

Let’s take a look at a quick example. If you were to sell something for $100 you would receive the following on each platform

Forra = $100

eBay = $87

Amazon = $85

Let’s talk about margin and how this affects your resale business. With any business, you need to understand your margin. Reselling online is typically a very profitable thing because you will always pass up deals that are too slim of margin. This is how you can quickly calculate your margin.

Net sales — Net costs = Margin

The fees involving marketplaces will crush your margin in most examples. This is why we created a marketplace free of fees.

Know What It Takes To Sell

In order to sell online at high volumes you need a database of sold items. Luckily eBay has this feature in its sold listings section, Amazon has a similar feature in its app. Amazon allows you to see available listings and will show you where they think you should price your item to sell.

Taking a look at the past data will give you a clear idea of the going rate where the item sells, and how quickly it will take to sell. These two metrics will help you identify a good flip and a bad one.

It takes guts to be a reseller. Sometimes you will run into a situation where there is not prior data for the item you are trying to sell. In this scenario, you need to use your judgement and utilize past experiences to make that call. Flipping an item online is not always easy.

The Solution Forra Provides

When I spent my time as a reseller I wished that there was something made specifically for reselling. I wanted something that was easy to use, intuitive, but allowed me to feel empowered as a business owner. There are many times where an online marketplace kills your profit due to fees when you sell online. You will find yourself passing on items left and right because you are dollar short of what you feel you can pay.

Low fees

When we set out to create our own consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace we wanted to build it for the modern entrepreneur. Ecommerce and selling online is difficult when you think about the fees associated with starting up an eBay or Amazon marketplace business. Forra has zero fees. With zero fees, suddenly selling an item becomes more feasible when the only overhead present is shipping.

New Audience

Where can you buy items with cryptocurrency? Forra is the one of the first options for people to use cryptocurrency as, well, an actual currency. With Ethereum mostly being used as tradable investment (like a stock), Forra aims to bring a new functional use to the cryptocurrency. Instead of HODL-ing Ethereum, people can now purchase items with their digital assets.

From a sellers perspective, users can now obtain cryptocurrency by directly selling a physical asset. For those not ready wanting cash, selling a personal belonging can offer a seller the opportunity to get into cryptocurrency without giving up liquid assets. Instead of using cash to buy Ethereum on an exchange, sell that golf bag you never use and get into cryptocurrency.

Why we are building it

After the 2016–17 bull market got the world talking about cryptocurrency, we believe that Forra will be the next step to bring even more of the general public into the cryptocurrency space. We want to establish a strong connection between digital currencies and physical assets. In order for cryptocurrency to be adopted on a widespread scale it must be used as an actual currency. By having the ability to purchase an item using Ethereum, Forra is able to extend the transactional efficiencies of Ethereum to the masses in a safe reliable fashion.

Who is Forra for?

Everyone! Scared to buy cryptocurrency on an exchange? Sell something on Forra. Want to use your digital assets to buy a vintage Casio G-Shock? Buy it on Forra.

Forra is a low risk and easy way to introduce people to cryptocurrency. We are constantly looking for new sellers. If you would like to sell on Forra Sign up here.

How blockchain is helping online sellers

Blockchain technology is going to help online sellers of every kind. As a former online seller turned blockchain enthusiast I see how the two can work hand and hand in the future. Blockchain technology will revolutionize the way online business works for many reasons.I want to only focus on two.

The Future of Online Selling Platforms

The way trade works in the future will inevitably be done through some type of blockchain experience. Blockchain technology ultimately has the best user experience because it cuts out all middle men in the transaction. For more information about blockchain and ecommerce you can view this blog post.

We think that reselling items online is the tip of the iceberg for our platform.We want to give back to the entire community of people who sell online. We are the cheapest marketplace for selling your item online.

The future will be filled with other ways to utilize and avoid excess fees. People will always be looking and promoting the products with the best user experience. In a marketplace you want to focus on getting as much money for your item as possible. By being the cheapest place to sell online we want to attract those who treat that freedom seriously.

We do not see ourselves trying to decentralize trade. We see ourselves providing a better user experience for people who use marketplaces.

Originally published at forra.io on August 27, 2018.

Starting A Resale Business — The Complete Guide To Reselling was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.