The Friday Flip Vol. 3

Flip of the week: none

Find of the week: New with tags 1998 Comedy Central South Park baseball cap

Welcome to the Friday Flip!

We're gonna talk briefly about conducting research and streamlining the listing process. Both of these are tied to what I consider an essential tool of the trade - my phone. It's important that it has good battery life, a great connection, and most of all an incredible camera. With this, I use a Pixel 6 Pro (unaffiliated).

Conducting Research

One of the things I love about having a smartphone is the fact that information is readily available whenever I need it. If I come across something I think may be a good find but I'm not completely sure, I'll do a quick google search around it.

If something has a barcode, even better. The eBay mobile app has an awesome search feature where you can scan the barcode of something with your camera and automatically do a search for that product across eBay. After scanning for something, you're gonna want to filter by sold and completed items. Doing so will give you an idea of what things actually sell for instead of what people hope they sell for. Looking at sell dates will provide an idea of how popular an item is currently.

Streamlining Your Workflow

For all of the enjoyment I derive from flipping, it's important to remember that time is money in this hobby. You want to maximize the hours spent on the fun stuff - going out and hunting for interesting things, and minimize the hours spent on the boring stuff - taking pictures of inventory, posting to eBay, OfferUp, or other selling platforms.

The way I do this is by housing the entire listing process to my phone. Steps usually look like this:

1. Find some natural light by a window
2. Take images of the products, documenting any blemishes or deformities clearly
3. Upload to eBay and fill out the necessary fields. If I'm on the go this is usually sufficient, but if I have my computer on hand, I'll usually pull up a listing that recently completed for my item and use it as a template for filling out categories on my own listing.

The whole listing process usually takes 5-10 minutes per product. I'll usually throw on some music or Lord of the Rings to have on in the background.

That's it for this edition of the Friday Flip. Happy Hunting.

Micah