The Garage Sale Reseller

If you’ve hunted across the internet for ways to make money, you probably already know that it is not easy to simply start making money. And when you do start making money, you almost never make more than a tiny amount. I myself have tried every legitimate avenue: Amazon Mechanical Turk, paid surveys & online focus groups, freelance writing services, this blog, online poker… the list goes on. I’d sold on eBay before, but my main problem was product sourcing. One day, the thought occurred to me that garage sales might be an excellent product source, and unsurprisingly I encountered a lot of people wanting to get rid of some fairly valuable stuff at a low cost.

As a way of making money, I would rate garage sales reselling as FAR from “make good money quick.” It’s definitely got a “start making money quick” aspect to it, which is good, but to make it pay you enough to put food on the table takes a lot of work and experience. Comparatively, I would rate it as one of the best ways of making money I have found (outside of a steady, high-skill job), so if you’re looking to make an extra buck, I suggest you give it a chance (even if only to make an extra $100-$200 per week). It’s got low capital requirements, and best of all, it’s fun and addictive!

This article gives an overview of the process, all the way up to the point where the money lands in your pocket.

The Basics

Here’s the rough procedure:

1) Look in your local newspaper, craigslist, etc. for garage sales. There are now programs that aggregate results from Craigslist and elsewhere and present garage sales in a map, such as gsalr.com or the iPhone app iGarageSale.

2) Go to the garage sale, inquire about prices, do research on-site if you can, haggle, and walk away with the goods.

3) Sell the item on eBay or other sales channel.

4) Profit.

5) Repeat.

It seems simple enough, but the amount of complexity that can go into making this as efficient and profit-maximizing a process as possible can be quite staggering. In my first week of reselling, I thought that I was completely banking, but by the time I sold everything and looked at the numbers (all of my costs, the amount of time I invested), I was barely cracking minimum wage. Since then I’ve really worked up my hourly payoff, but it was only after some serious troubleshooting. The articles I have on this site are all about streamlining the process and ultimately maximizing your profit.

Getting Started

The first thing I recommend doing is getting a little bit of practice selling some of your own stuff on eBay. You need to do this to get the hang of navigating eBay, looking up the value of an item, listing it accurately, and shipping it. Even if you can’t go to garage sales and source new products, learning how to do this gives you an outlet for stuff you don’t want anymore. During my first week of garage sales, I went on an eBay rampage throughout my house and easily found over $1000 worth of stuff that was collecting dust. eBay unites buyers and sellers globally: there is no reason to ever let something good go to waste.

Go to eBay and make an account. They’ve made this pretty easy, so I won’t need to explain it here. You’ll also need to make a PayPal account. PayPal is a payment processor very well-integrated into eBay, and eBay requires PayPal under most circumstances. Then, Google search a tutorial on how to list an item on eBay.

Once you’ve sold one item on eBay and seen how it works from start to finish, head out to your first garage sale. Look around at the items available and ask about the prices. It’s hard to give specific item category recommendations, so this is a process of trial and error as you go home and try to sell stuff. Generally, here are some no-no categories: VHS & DVD players; old cameras, unless they’re professional grade; books, unless they are hardcover or part of a fancy collection; general junk & bric-a-brac. Better categories are: video games, computer peripherals (e.g. wireless keyboards), heavy-duty appliances (e.g. kitchen mixer, food processor). Again, this is not a strict buying strategy, just a few tips I have from experience. I have seen video games be a huge rip-off based on their pricing, and DVD players be a great deal based on their quality and pricing. There will be more articles on this subject.

Generally, work from your knowledge about the items, but if you own a smartphone, take the guesswork out and do an eBay search of completed listings on your phone. I have an iPhone, so I have the eBay app and an app for the research tool TeraPeak (more on this in another article). These let me look at the completed listings for the item I’m looking up, letting me know if the item sold and if so at what price.

After I have this information, or at least a rough idea of what I can sell an item for, I look at the asking price and compare it to what I can get for it. I then deduct, as a rough rule of thumb, around 15%-20% from the sale price for eBay fees, PayPal fees, and incidental item costs (such as a new battery). If you come out in the green after this process, I recommend buying the item. Early on, you don’t have to worry about managing an optimal inventory – you just want to turn a profit on every item you sell. Later, as you become more advanced, you can pass up profitable items in favor of more profitable items (so as to make more efficient use of your limited time to work on garage sales each week).

Keeping Records

An important way of making sure you’re making good decisions, as well as measuring your success for morale purposes, is to keep good records of your reselling expenses and revenues. Enter every item you buy, the price you bought it at, and also give it its own unique inventory number (so that you can package the item and identify it without having to write the name of what’s inside on the box!) I use an Excel spreadsheet, into which I also enter the price I sold it for and deduct PayPal and eBay fees. This spreadsheet is also a good place to write in your travel distance, time spent for the day at garage sales and listing your items, any business-related purchases you have made, etc.

Note that there are some eBay-integrated software solutions out there, but I hesitate to make any recommendations at this point. If you’re just starting out, KEEP IT SIMPLE! You don’t want to overinvest in something that you won’t feel like doing in the end. As you get a sense of your process, from item purchase to resale, you will begin to figure out what you need to make your business more profitable.

Keeping your Head

Earlier, I said that garage sale reselling is fun and addictive. But addictive can have its drawbacks too – you may find yourself, in a mad quest for money, in over your head. Just remember to put this in perspective: this is not a cure-all to your financial problems. To turn this kind of reselling into a business that brings in serious cash takes a lot of time and experience. There are also a lot of frustrating things about the business, from the inconveniences of driving for hours to annoying eBay buyers.

But at the very least, if you learn some of the basic skills required, you can always get that little bit of money when you need it as long as you have some spare time. The best part about it is that you won’t always feel like it’s “work” – after all, you set your own hours and there’s a sense of adventure as you’re staring across a pile of junk. I always get a kick out of seeing the funky stuff that people have, like vintage Motorola Brick Cell Phones in box (!) or Jagermeister Tap Machines.

More articles on the way!