Issue #104

Welcome to another Issue of Flip Weekly. We’ve got books selling for $300, Starbucks coffee mugs that have Sold Listings for close to $1,000 as well as a super fun breakdown of Law & Order on DVD. Not only that, I pick up some rich kids PlayStation 2 Magazine demo disc collection from the early 2000’s. I know he was a rich kid because not a single issue was missed. Who doesn’t miss an issue over 3 years? C’mon!

A reminder that if you want more flipping content you can listen to this weeks episode on Flip Weekly’s podcast, just search Flip Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

Let’s get into it.

Mat.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Official Flip Weekly Podcast

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

When it comes to finding valuable items at op shops, we’re looking for things that slip through the cracks. Inconspicuous hidden gems, little treasures that are passed off as being valueless. So when a big item comes into a Vinnies and priced significantly less than eBay Sold or Active listings, safe to say it’s a huge surprise.

This is a complete box set of the manga Demon Slayer. Inside are all 23 books plus a collectible poster and mini book. I’m guessing thrift store volunteers valued each book at $2 and didn’t account for the fact that the complete box set is very desirable.

When buying manga or anime related items, always check the sell through rate. You heard me say it last week and I’ll repeat myself today. Why? Because a lot of people buy manga and then are confused when it’s not selling.

Within Australia, we have 5 Active Listings and 16 Sold Listings giving us a 320% sell through rate. The most recent sale was for $220 but they go as high as $350.

I’ve decided to list it up for $249.95 which should net us around $150 in profit.

Here’s the danger of constantly watching and listening to resellers on YouTube. You hear things like “always buy vintage Christmas“ or “Starbucks cup?! They’re so collectible“ but the truth is, it’s not anything like that. Or at least I don’t think it is.

I’ve heard about collectible Starbucks mugs but I want to test out the market for myself. I saw this, I guess, pretty looking glass mug inside Vinnies and immediately recognised the Starbucks logo on the gold (she’s always reminded me of the villian from The Little Mermaid.)

Remembering the amount of times I’ve seen YouTube resellers buy anything Starbucks I thought I’d give it a shot. At the time I found 1 Active Listing and 1 Sold Listing for around $100 but for the life of me I can’t find it again. I think it’s because there’s currently 250,000+ results for “Starbucks mug“. The sell through rate is sitting at a really poor 14%.

EDIT: I finally found the Sold Listing. A bit less than $100 but the only other Active Listing right now is $129.26 out of China.

This mug I found is a bit different, I think. It’s a China exclusive from 2021 and there’s very few on eBay. It’s a high quality glass, it weighs just over 1kg and the gradient on it is actually pretty. Would I ever own it myself? No, but I could see someone buying it. The thing is, is it worth $100 and will it ever sell considering just how many Starbucks mugs their are out there?

By the way, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, jump onto eBay Sold Listings and sort by Highest for “Starbucks mug“. Some of these are ridiculous.

I’ll report back if I make a successful entrance into Starbucks mugs.

Now, time for something really fun. We’re going to compare and rank all of the Law & Order TV shows to see which ones are worth picking up. Fun, yeah? The reason why is because of this:

Law & Order UK, 4 seasons, listed price of $100. Rare show? Must be, maybe just in Australia? How does it stack up against the other Law & Order shows? Which ones should we be buying? Definitely UK but let’s see. We’ll look at the complete series of each show and go by the last sale price. It’s next to impossible to get the sell through rate for each individual show as they all have the same keywords in the title so we’ll ignore that for now.

We have our outlier! If you’re going to be buying Law & Order to resell, try and find Trial by Jury, it’s only a single season and has a much higher selling price than everything else. Plus, so much easier to ship a single DVD than 25 of the bloody things.

Can’t believe I spent that amount of time looking at Law & Order on DVD and the outcome is basically… eh they’re all pretty average. Why even bother doing research?

Now, I can’t believe nobody snatched these up on Marketplace. They’ve been up so long we don’t see the regular “Listed 10 minutes ago“. All the video game bros left them behind, but I could see some hidden value.

39 PlayStation 2 Magazine demo discs. Best believe if this was 39 PS2 games for $50 they’d be bought in less than 10 minutes. And yet, they were up for over a week? I know that because the guy didn’t know how to mark as pending and I couldn’t get out there until the weekend so they just sat. Yeah I know, bit risky. I think in the back of my mind I was still a bit hesitant - most deals that are really good are gone very quickly.

So what value did I see here? First of all, it’s the obvious 39 demo discs. With each disc, a range of between 5-10 playable demos on each. I had a look through the photos to see if there were any rare or expensive games. Yes, it’s not the full version but people can still play bits and pieces. And what do you know… there were. Here’s a few of them below along with what the full version of the game sells for.

Silent Hill 4: The Room - $200

CY Girls - $100

Forbidden Siren 1 - $140

Forbidden Siren 2 - $175.00

There were just a few I could see. These games are rare and hard to find, so if you can get a cheaper (albeit demo) copy than maybe people will buy them? Without having this angle, the demo discs don’t fly off the shelf.

Some people choose to bundle the discs and we do have multiple of these 7 disc bundle sales in the past 90 days.

I then realize from looking on eBay that some listings state things like “Disc 40“. When these discs were released, they were given away for free with Issues of the PlayStation 2 Magazine. Each magazine had its own Issue number. I look up a few of the discs and I start to see a sequential ordering. If all 39 were in order, that makes it even more attractive to people who are wanting to start a collection or finish it.

So I go and pick this up on the weekend and once I get it home (inside a box that wasn’t taped on the top or on the bottom) I start to go through them and I’m really surprised. These are in sequential order, we have from Demo Disc 22 starting at Christmas 2003 all the way through to Demo Disc 59 ending at November 2006. This is actually really impressive. I’m thinking back to the odd magazine subscription I had as a kid and there’s no way I would have every single issue for 3 goddamn years.

I legit think we can turn this $50 Marketplace pickup into $300 on eBay. It will be the highest price item in the category and I can’t see any sales this big on Sold Listings, but that’s okay. We’re used to setting the benchmark for items. Oh, and I typed out every single playable demo to include in the listing. Only took 15 minutes. Anyway, I’ll include a few photos of some of the covers below. Something cool to look at.

A few other cool finds:

I talked about this on the podcast but I didn’t include it in the newsletter. Last weekend was my little nephews 1st birthday. I wanted to get him something cool. By cool, I basically mean something I would like. Just prior to Christmas I saw one of my Holy Grail items come up on Marketplace. It was priced at $100 and I was 50/50 on whether or not to buy it. A few days later the price was reduced to $50 and I knew I had to get it. Whilst this was a gift, if it was you, you could have totally resold it.

This castle might have been my most played with toy as a kid. Draw bridges could snap open, cannons would shoot boulders, figures could be locked away in the dungeon, I’d spend hours on this thing.

If you can find it with a few figures, you can make a lot of money.

I knew this would make a great gift… even though he’s only 1 and doesn’t really know what’s going on. So I buy that and pick out the official figures that came with it and discard the rest. We’re left with 4 figures and a horse. I then remove the portable cannon from the gift for 2 reasons. 1… I didn’t have it as a kid so my nephew doesn’t get it and 2… it by itself is worth $100 so I can recoup some money. Genius, Mat.

I wrap the castle up, it fits perfectly within a Bunnings 52L Light Duty Moving Carton (if you ever find one yourself and want to ship it) and think that’s that. Wrong. Another Facebook Marketplace listing shows up and this one is just pure dumb luck mixed with curiosity.

I see a listing for “47 figurines”. I decide to check it out.

Within this 47 figurine lot were TWENTY little soldiers that went with the castle play set. To me this was so nostalgic, literal Holy Grail find. At first I was content with giving my nephew just the castle and the original figures so I could list up this lot of 20 figures for… wait for it… $200…

But I succumbed. Nephew gets them all. I told Sam that if she ever wants to get rid of it not to throw it out. If everything was lotted up together, the castle plus 24 figures I think you could easily get $500. It could have been an easy $80 into $500+

Million dollar question, did he like it? Nah man, he’s 1. He looked at it for like 10 seconds and then crawled away. That said, I’m excited for him to grow up and (hopefully) give it the same amount of play time that I did when I was a kid.

What I Sold

I swear when I picked this up it was worth more than the final sale price. Heck, the title had “Rare“ tacked onto the end of it.

A $20 sale price! TWENTY DOLLARS. We work so hard to get the average sale price up to what it was and then this Mario plush brings it right back down. I don’t know how some people do it. Buy a plush from Vinnies for $3 and sell it TWO YEARS LATER for $20. I’m literally putting this first in the What’s Sold section to punish myself. Don’t buy this crap again, Mat. If you’re buying plush, there needs to be an angle.

It’s either incredibly rare to the point it’s worth hundreds, it’s a crazy good seller with a sell through rate exceeding 100% with plenty of sales (not just 1 or 2) or you have an angle. Maybe it’s a huge bundle that isn’t normal on eBay. Either way, it’s not just “I have a single plush, I will turn $3 into $20 in 24 months.“

If it wasn’t for this dumb Mario $20 plush my average sale price for the month (although it’s early) would be sitting at $235. Ugh.

Let’s get this average sale price back up again.

Boom, $325 for an Olympus Stylus 1 digital camera that I bought for $50. This sale served as a reminder to turn off Local Pickup on eBay. I’m not a fan. You get the dreaded interaction of a Facebook Marketplace deal without the dopamine hit of cash in your pocket immediately. Not to mention if your buyer is anything like this guy, he’ll invite himself inside to test things out.

Polly Pockets continue to dwindle out of my huge collection. This Polly Pocket had 3 of the original figures (not fully complete) and a couple of the lights inside were still working. If I continue to go through life making $100/week from Polly Pockets I’ll be a happy man.

Side-note, I gifted my 2 year old niece a 2026 Polly Pocket last weekend for our belated Christmas party and she didn’t seem very interested. She’d rather play with a pair of tongs that I was given.

This next sale completely shocked me.

When I heard eBay’s KA-CHING and saw a $300 sale price for “Maze of the Blue Medusa“ I genuinely had no idea what I just sold. I completely forgot that I had a $300 book stored away for a rainy day.

Back in September I found 4 tabletop role playing game books at Savers. I paid $20 total and the Sold Listing comps were insane, it was going to be $20 into $850. We’re finally starting to see a return with Maze of the Blue Medusa selling for full asking price of $300.

Here’s a few tips for spotting these sort of tabletop role playing game books:

1. You gotta be lucky.

2. Usually in one of these sections: sci-fi, crafts arts and hobbies, military/history.

3. Inside pages look like instruction manuals.

4. Titles sound like battles or feature made-up words. The more fantasy sounding the better.

5. If you completed tip #1, you might even see words on the front and back that give it away. Words like game, kit, RPG.

6. Be lucky again.

They’re extremely niche and haven’t moved at lightning pace, but who can really complain when I didn’t exactly price them to sell quickly.

What did I say about this next item? I said that in 2026, Toy Story related merchandise will sell quickly for you.

“Enter the litmus test“ - Mat, November, 2025.

A bucket of soldiers with a dingy parachute sold for $80. I paid $4 in a Lifeline.

I really need to stop underpricing items on Marketplace.

Both of the above items were listed on eBay for $100 but only $50 on Facebook. I think when I’m doing my cross-posting I see $100 and just cut it in half which is insane. Journeys of Frodo has Sold Listings on eBay for close to $200 and we’re letting it go for a measly $50. No wonder it sold quickly. Do better Mat.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week, thanks again for reading, make sure to check out the podcast. I’ll see you again next week!

Mat.

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100% Free Resources to Help You

Flip Weekly have created the following resources to help you become a better reseller.

• Ultimate List of YouTube Reseller Channels

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• eBay Sell Through Rate Calculator

• How To Tell If A Book Is 1st Edition

• 100+ Nostalgic 90s Kids Shows Ranked by eBay Value

• Reseller Terms and Acronyms You Should Know