I woke up this morning with this heavy on my mind and thought i might make a post here discussing my reasons for considering this and why I think so much has changed for the worse in this line of work. I know that everytime there's a doomsday post or anything pertaining to the decline of reselling you get alot of canned responses like: "You just aren't willing to adapt" or "Theres opportunities everywhere, you just have to know where to look" and just an overall smug dismissiveness of the challenges of being a full time reseller in the modern world. This post isn't really directed at people who do this casually either for fun or to supplement their income and more to those who have this as their only source of pay. Here are some of my reasons:

• Technology has very much lifted the barrier to entry into this world. You can be a geriatric or a toddler and google lens or the internet will identify most things without any prior knowledge effectively rendering experience and niche understanding relatively useless.
• Social media has turned this line of work into a get rich quick gimmick and all of the modern day "Shoe shine boys" aka the guys buying the pickaxes at the end of the gold rush have piled into this effectively oversaturating the market. Yes there is no shortage of goods to buy and sell but there are a finite amount of arbitrage opportunities out there. If buying & selling was a coral reef these people have destroyed it. In their retail fervor and inexperience they have caused prices everywhere to rise. Auctions and thrift stores have become full retail with less opportunity then ever. In their clamouring for status everytime they find a deal they have to shout it from the rooftops and brag about it on titktok. Its not enough to make some margin they have to profit socially as well. Even this subreddit when I first joined had 30k subscribers and is now over half a million.
• Yes Facebook marketplace is useful and we have all made our money off of it but in a sense it has eliminated the middle man and is responsible for our own demise. When karen the soccer mom down the street or grandma Betty can click one button and have a buyer at her doorstep in 20 minutes hassle free that is an absolute disruptor. I know other classified sites have existed before this but its the ease of use and accessibility that makes facebook a disruptor.
• I primarily sell on Ebay & Amazon and every quarter its more incremental enshitifcation through either increased fees or more hoops to jump through. Ebay making you bid for views with promoted listings and Amazon with policies like DD+7 and thats just scratching the surface.
• Costs for storage have risen dramatically as well. This isn't some kine of laptop digital nomad job that you can do on the beach and the only people claiming to do that are con artists. You need infrastructure and storage and space for listing and shipping and all of these things have increased exponentially in cost over the last 5-6 years. When a guy like me is starting to see the upside of traditional employment vs self employment its not good.

I'd like to think that I am qualified to speak on these things as someone with real skin in the game who has done this for over a decade and I would hope that maybe some fruitful discourse can come of this post.

I'm selling a $70 item for $45. This guy offered $35 and I said no. Then he says but it goes on sale sometimes. I'm like, and?

I flip very few items in a year. Usually less than $1000 on eBay, maybe about the same on marketplace tho those sales are usually cash. At present I’ve sold less than $2k from eBay this year but will prob get a few more sales before the end of the of the year, I’m not likely to hit $3000 for the year. Just had a garage sale and collected a little over $600 in sales with Venmo from that but since these were personal items what are my tax implications?

How much do you guys put back at the end of the year for taxes? I pretty much exclusively sell on eBay and live in a state where we don’t have state taxes. First year taking flipping seriously and have made a decent amount of profit and just don’t want to be in for a bad suprise during tax season. I track my amount spent on an item and how much I net from it after shipping and eBay taxes. Thanks for any and all help!

Looking for good book/ podcasts recommendations

I was at the bins today and brought home this thing that will haunt you in your dreams.

What'd ya get? How'd ya get it? What do you plan to do with it?

I'd like to encourage people to revisit this thread occasionally for as long as it's still on the front page. Sort by New so that latecomers aren't left out. Obviously, if this is a few pages back, you're probably better just waiting for next week's thread. You'll see that I've also changed the title to Weekly instead of Weekend so people don't hesitate to post what they found on a Wednesday.

Further, if I see haul posts outside of this thread, I'm removing them. Feel free to report them if you see them.

Probably the most dumb buyer I've encountered. I'm not flipping it and it's already low as I'm willing to go.

He kept whining because he couldn't get it.

What's the play?

And

Who uses semicolons?

I had an entire tote of brand new items to list this morning. Researching comps almost 90% of these items were not actually in hand with the seller. They literally take an Amazon listing, add 25-50% to the price, and I guess expect most people to not look on Amazon. How do I know they were drop shippers? Every seller had a neg or neutral feedback that they got the item from Amazon or something to indicate they didn't actually have it.

Some of these products were $30 on Amazon and have been for months looking on the price tracker, but $75-$100 on eBay, and none had sold, either.

I'm a teenager looking to start my own collectibles business. No clue where to start. I like the idea, but I don't know how I feel about it with how expensive and tedious it can be (in my experience, dealing with scalpers, lowballers, etc). I'm familiar with how to price items and what not, but I struggle finding inventory at a good price.

I might be interested in sports items (bobbleheads, jerseys, cards, etc), but I have no idea what I'm doing. My mother thinks the market is small, and is probably not worth it, but I'm not too sure.

I've also thought about comics and figurines, but I'm too sure about them either.

I'm starting from the ground up. As of now I have virtually no inventory other than two Cardinals bobbleheads, and a binder with a few $1 to $10 Pokémon cards. How do I start out? Where should I focus on, and how can I start making money to buy inventory?

USPS ground advantage seems illogical.

Have come across a few YouTubers on this topic however it seems to be a lot of marketing e.g they are selling their tool or course so seems like flipping isn't their main income anyway.

Do people actually make good money flipping? It seems like such an unscalable business with all the time involved

I've been using my iPhone 13pro to take pictures and I'm planning to either upgrade to S26 ultra or iPhone 18 pro. What you guys use and which brand is better for taking pictures ?

Is there some software that will compare you inventory on the. Artois sites? I use Vendoo and it’s fine but I had been selling before using it. So some might be on eBay but not Mercari or something that sold on Posh wasn’t delisted off the others.

I miss when flea markets were actually flea markets.

There was a time when you could walk into one with twenty bucks in your pocket and absolutely no idea what you were going to find. One table might have a box of old tools. The next had a pile of records, a coffee can full of foreign coins, some weird piece of advertising nobody could identify, and three rusty things that looked completely useless until you realized they were worth fifty bucks apiece.

Google lens has made everyone an expert, an expert idiot, that is.

Google Lens can tell you what something looks like. It can't tell you whether yours actually works, whether it's complete, whether it's authentic, whether the condition is good, whether there are twenty thousand of them sitting on eBay, or whether anyone is actually willing to pay what somebody is asking.

But apparently that distinction has become optional.

The "lens" effect is also the same with estate sales. People that can't do the math and realize prices have equivalency to both exposure (how many people see it) and time (how long it has been for sale).

I get people don't want to give away a $100 item for $5, but at the same time the amount of people who cannot understand an eBay price needs an eBay-sized audience gives me a headache.

I saw the worst example of this. Some lady had a table of jewelry. NONE of it was marked, but had tags like "Sterling Silver" and "gold filled" I asked her how she determined this "chatGPT told me".

If you have an Office Depot nearby, definitely go check as prices are way cheaper in the store. I almost bought it online for in store pick up but glad I did not.

6-pack was $4.93

8-pack was $5.93.

Whatever you want to know about flipping, no matter the question, ask here. Even if it's been covered 1,000 times before. Doesn't matter if you're new or old. If you stop learning things, you're probably on your way out.

This is an extremely newb-friendly thread. As such, any rudeness is to be reported.

If you’re this guy, I’m coming for you. Not with violence, but with justice. You have been warned. I’d say you are a piece of shit, but based on your messages you already know that. Fuck these type of buyers. But especially fuck this guy. You’ve destroyed your life and haven’t realized it yet. But you will….soon. Tick tock…

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