The Best Stores For Retail Arbitrage
The key to retail arbitrage is finding items that people want, at a lower price point, so you could sell those items at a higher price without customers complaining. Here are the types of stores you could find items to sell:
- Wholesale chain stores like Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.
Every online merchant goes to these stores to find many low-priced items. You might think that the competition is fierce if youre sourcing from these stores, but choosing which clearance items to buy and which branch to buy them from matters a lot. Some people even have insider info about sale dates of each local branch.
- Mom-and-pop stores
These little gems in the community still hold value, even if theyre trapped in between multi-million dollar wholesale stores. Youd be surprised at the high-profit, low competition items you can find at mom-and-pop stores since the lack of inventory often means you can up the price because no one else is selling them.
- Specialty stores
Heres where an eye for good finds would help your retail arbitrage business prosper. Visit specialty stores and look for items that dont belong. For example, check out the toy section at your local grocery store, hardware tools at the bookstore, electronics at drug stores like Walgreens, general merchandise at your local home improvement store, or DVDs at hardware stores like Ace.
- DIY stores like Etsy
- Local and international wholesalers
Best Places To Find Items To Sell Online
Garage Sales, Yard Sales, Rummage Sales
Located at churches, community centers, schools, and neighborhoods.
Thrift Stores
Local thrift stores are a great resource to find items to sell online for profit. Some thrift stores offer coupons and special weekly discounts. Ask someone working in the store when they usually put out new items so that you can plan on shopping days when there are fresh items on the floor.
Remember not all thrift stores are the same! It seems like each thrift store has its specialtyGoodwill clothes, KARM furniture, Habitat for Humanity Re-Store household appliances. Get to know your stores!
Dont forget to shop all the locations in your area or ones that are within reasonable driving distance.
Estate Sales
Estate sales can be a great place to find deals on items to sell online. You will need to arrive to an estate sale early and get a number. Then you will most likely have to wait in line to get into shop. Thats why its very important to get to any estate sale early before all the good stuff is picked over!
Just make sure you do your research to know if the prices are worth the purchase. Sometimes estate sales are overly priced, again it just depends on the area that you are in.
Flea Markets
Flea markets can be hit or miss, it just depends on where you live and the type of flea market in your area. My local flea markets mostly sell items from China so I never find good deals there. Make sure you check out what is available in your area.
Where And How To Buy And Sell Shoes
Now that you have the shoes, you must find the best channels where you can sell them to turn in a profit.
You can start by creating an account on a consignment shop like StockX to resell the shoes there. Both sites serve as middlemen between buyer and seller. Therefore, you deal directly with either website to sell your shoes. Send them the sneakers when youve chosen the highest bid, and they will take care of the rest.
Sites like StockX are convenient ways to sell your shoes and ensures buyers that they wont be duped by fake sneakers.
On the flipside, you dont get the personal touch from consignment stores that go with seller-to-buyer transactions. However, if youre not much of a salesman or a people person, then this shouldnt be a problem.
If you want the traditional way of reselling shoes, you can always go the way of Facebook Groups, Craigslist, and eBay. These sites allow you to put your personal touch on your pairs product page.
As a best practice, you need to be descriptive and detailed as possible about the sneakers. Leave no stone unturned and make sure that you are honest in your description. Assuming that youre a new seller, itll take time before buyers warm up to you. Therefore, you need to keep working on gaining the trust of buyers and continue marching forward.
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Determining Genuine And Fake Shoes
The last thing you want to go down is to make a mistake and buy fake shoes. This problem exists in online marketplaces that do not have an intermediary, such as Amazon or eBay.
If the asking price is too reasonable to be accurate, it could be fake. But, before you come to that conclusion, you must first discover how to determine whether the sneakers are genuine.
Here are several ways to check if a pair of sneakers or shoes youre looking to buy is genuine:
Ask For Receipts
You must request a receipt for new transactions to verify the validity of the footwear. The receipt should prove that the shoes were purchased from authorized retailers.
It should then be easier for you to sell the sneakers because you will have actual proof that they are authentic.
Ask For Real Photos
In most cases, the price should be sufficient to persuade you to buy anything. Other aspects that go into the sale of sneakers, however, must be considered.
One way to tell if the sneakers are authentic or not is to look at tagged, high-resolution photos. To see if its for real, have the vendor take many images of the sneakers.
Ask to include newspapers or any indication that these are fresh photos. The photographs can then be compared to the genuine version of the shoes on their official website. You may get more information on how to recognize fakes on Instagram too.
Trust Your Gut
Pay Attention To The Details
Where To Make Money Reselling Thrift Store Flips
The best places to sell items online are
Let Go App
Etsy for vintage items
PRO TIP: Choose one platform to get started with and learn everything you can to start selling successfully. Once you are comfortable selling on that platform select another platform to sell on. Starting small will increase your chance of being successful in the long run!
Are you as excited as I am about making money reselling items online?! Id love to know what you have sold lately to make money flipping thrift store finds! Let me know in the comments section!
Looking for more ways to make money
Find work that lets you create the life you want with this stay at home mom jobs list that will help guide you to a job that lets you work when you want.
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How To Start A Shoe Flipping Business
If you want to get started reselling shoes for a profit, most people look at sneakers.
The sneaker market is huge, with over $1 billion in annual sales.
Starting a sneaker reselling business can be an excellent way to make money.
If youre into sneakers, it might be a great side hustle or even a full-time job.
Where Do You Buy These Shoes To Resell
I like to buy older models either through eBay or Facebook groups and sneaker conventions.
For new shoes, youll go directly to the brands website and either press your luck right on the release time or you can utilize a sneaker bot to greatly increase your chances of securing a pair at retail price.
There are also authorized retailers that stock desired shoes, like FootLocker or Eastbay, but its best to go with lesser-known sites like Mr. Porter and END to increase your odds of getting the shoes at retail.
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Best Items To Resell For Profit
So, you are hunting for the best items to resell for profit for your new thrift store flipping side hustle!
Im always looking for easy things to do to make money from home. I especially love when there is a way to do something fun and make money.
Thrift store flipping is basically buying new or gently used items from a thrift store, and then sell for money online .
Selling items online is a great side hustle that can lead to extra cash or even a full-time income. You should check out my interview with my friend Melissa at Flea Market Flipper. She has sold everything from baby gear to a prosthetic leg .
Dangers Of Sneaker Resale
Risk management is a key part of every successful business strategy. The sneaker resale risk factors are:
· Liquidity: Many strategies involve borrowing money to buy stock. Not being stuck with unsold gear when the loan is due requires careful capital management.
· Shrinkage: Sneakers are hot items, and they can walk out the door. Budget for insurance against loss in storage, transit, or mugging.
· Information: The sneaker biz is increasingly driven by data and tech. Getting unreliable release information of lagged price feeds will lead to price and acquisition strategy errors.
· Quality: If youre buying resold shoes for further resale, you open yourself to counterfeiting and damage. Buy from accredited sources, and request verification from sellers. Multi-angle shots of the shoes against current newspapers is one method.
· Competition: Hordes have been drawn to the business in the push for a quick buck. This makes it harder to get rare shoes. It also creates downward pressure on the margins.
· Regulation: Lawmakers have their eye on taming whats been a free-wheeling industry. Consumer protection concerns see resellers struggling to get the quantities they need, as retailers are compelled to reserve stock for end consumers.
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Applying The 10x Rule
Thinking back again to the successful commodity traders, I recognized the obvious fact that the reason that these traders became millionaires is because they were trading in large quantities of money.
I had also been watching the TV show Million Dollar Listing at the time, where real estate agents made as much money selling one house as the average American would earn in a year. They did basically the same amount of work as the typical real estate agent but made ten times more simply because they were selling houses that were ten times more.
I was selling $50-$100 items and making about $10 per sale and $50 per week, so I thought, why dont I sell items that are priced at $500-$1000 and make $100 per sale and $500 per week?
A similar amount of work for 10x the results.
I had saved some money and was ready to start flipping more expensive items but wasnt really sure where to start, so I searched for higher ticket items to sell. I knew luxury items were expensive, so I researched high end designer items and expensive watches.
Through my research though, I found that it was nearly impossible to make money reselling name brand luxury items. In fact, they were almost universally selling for less on eBay than they were in the store, even when they were on clearance.
Every now and then, I would find a luxury item on deep clearance at the mall and see on eBay that I could make a profit, but that the margin would be too thin and the sale too slow to justify the upfront investment.
Reinvest Your Earnings Into More Shoes
If you want to get into the reselling game for the long haul, reinvesting your earrings into another pair of more expensive or limited-edition sneakers is a good option. You can start researching what pair those may be even before you have the money to buy them. Once you get comfortable with the industry, you can sell more sought-after shoes with higher profit margins!
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Have A Plan For Storage
Shoes take up more space than other items you can start flipping. And its not like you can fold them up into nice piles like with T-shirts and pants. The shoebox is equally important when reselling shoes, so you must accommodate for stacks of shoeboxes. Also consider how you will organize different sizes, colors, and types.
How To Determine If The Shoes Are Fake
The last thing you want to happen is for you to purchase fake shoes mistakenly. This is a problem that pervades in online marketplaces without a middleman like Amazon or eBay. If the price is too good for its good, then maybe its a fake. But before making that conclusion, you need to learn how to find out if the sneakers are legit or not.
Below are ways that you can check if a pair of sneakers or shoes youre trying to buy is genuine or not:
Criteria to Determine if Shoes are Fakes
While these tips will help you avoid purchasing bogus shoes, its not foolproof that you will entirely avoid such purchases. Just make sure to ma careful and alert enough to keep these provisions in mind when buying.
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Want To Get Rich Quick Reselling Sneakers These Guys Want To Help
All these stories start the same way: with a pair of sneakers purchased for the retail price, and then flipped for a profit. They start this way because odds are you, or someone you know, has done this very thing, or will very soon. And the odds are decent, too, that your path to that cash, or your brothers or your cousins, has resembled one of a handful of proven methods, whether it involves seed capital from the Bank of Dad or a little bit of gentle corporate hacking. Because as the secondary sneaker market has swelled to somewhere in the range of a $2 billion market with the potential to reach $6 billion by 2025, according to investment bank Cowen, its turned into a boondoggle for everyone involved.
The sneaker resale platform Goat acquired Flight Club last year and then received a $100 million investment from Foot Locker in February. StockX, where people can sell sneakers alongside watches and streetwear, is now valued at over $1 billion dollars. But those profits are also trickling downwards, where a cottage industry is forming, eager to reap the profits of sneaker reselling. Below are the group of people you meet when you start flipping sneakers for profit. They are entrepreneurs who want to make you rich, and just might succeed. But don’t mistake them for benevolentteaching you how to flip a half-dozen pairs of Yeezys will make them phenomenally wealthy, too.
Two AMNotfiy members show off their towering haul
How To Become A Sneaker Reseller To Make Extra Income
Sneakers are a fashion statement. The kind of sneakers you wear describes the sort of person you are. But do you know you can make a tremendous amount of money reselling sneakers?
Already, several entrepreneurs are making an astronomical amount of cash. It’s a great way to avoid work-from-home scams and get into a real entrepreneurial business.
If you’re also planning to start your own sneaker reselling business, here is a complete guide for you. I use Personal Capital to track all my side hustle income and money earned online.
It’s a great free way to keep everything organized, so I can focus on growing my businesses. Read more about it in our Personal Capital review.
However, before we get started, let’s have a quick look at the sneaker reselling market.
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How To Make Money Through Stockx
Are you a sneakerhead with an entrepreneurial spirit? Then you might consider taking advantage of your love for a good pair of sneakers and profit off it And what better way to sell sneakers and collectibles than on StockX?
Founded in 2015, StockX is a reliable marketplace for collectible sneakers, streetwear, and more. If weve gotten your attention and youre interested in finding out how to make money on StockX, keep reading.
Sports And Exercise Equipment
Sports equipment is another category to be on the lookout for. Bulky items like home gyms, treadmills, and exercise bikes can actually resell for pretty good margins, and because they take up so much space, sellers are often happy just to get rid of them.
Well-maintained bikes, skis, golf clubs, and even hockey equipment is worth a look since buyers may be eyeing starting a new hobby or purchasing for their kids.
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Is Reselling Sneakers Profitable
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. The profitability of sneaker reselling depends on a number of factors, including the following:
- The type of sneakers being resold
- The rarity and desirability of the sneakers
- The geographical location of the reseller
- The resale market conditions
That said, it is generally possible to make a healthy profit by reselling sneakers. Buying shoes and selling for a large profit is a great way how to build wealth from nothing. Its possible to turn a profit of several thousand dollars in a single transaction in some cases.
Stay Informed Of Sneaker Trends
Sneakers are a very important part of fashion especially for those that are interested in streetwear. However, since it is apart of the fashion industry, it also means that trends change over time. Meaning that it is a very volatile market. With volatility comes high risk and high rewards.
Other industries are subjected to the concept of supply and demand. If you want to resell sneakers for profit then you will need to understand the concept of hype and supply. Being able to resell a sneaker for profit is going to be dependent on hype and how much supply there is.
Demand Doesnt Always Equate to Hype
The concept of supply and demand also applies to the sneaker industry. However, just because there is demand behind a sneaker doesnt always mean there is the hype behind it. One good example is the Jordan 11 Breds that dropped in 2019. The demand for these sneakers were high based on it being a classic sneaker. However, there wasnt much hype behind it.
As a result, the Jordan 11 Bred typically sold around $287 in money sizes. The retail price was $220. So after paying for shipping and handling along with any transaction fees, then you may have walked away with a $40 profit.
Collaborations and limited edition shoes come with high hype. Good examples are the Travis Scott and Nike Collaborations. We are currently seeing some of those sneakers resell for over two thousand dollars.
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