Issue #48

Every time I start writing one of these newsletters I’m amazed at the Issue number. 48? Are you kidding? We’ve almost done an entire year of these? Without fail? Goddamn. This week we have some really random finds and yet they sell instantly. I’m not talking instantly because I have a YouTube channel where people are following the eBay store as some sort of home shopping network experience, they sell because they’re weirdly rare and in demand.

Besides that, I really wish I could tell you what I have planned for Flip Weekly in the upcoming weeks but the marketer in me knows that I need to keep things under wraps.

If you haven’t already checked out Flip Weekly’s 2024 Year In Review, I’ve posted it on Instagram here. I painstakingly went back through all 48 Issues and tallied up a total of 124,328 words written over the past 48 weeks. If you struggle to put that word count into context, it’s basically if I wrote Harry Potter #1 twice… without coming out the other end hated by a large portion of the population. Enjoy Issue #48 and I’ll see you again next week.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

How fun, pens! This week we’re starting off with something that I haven’t bought and sold before, nor has anyone else apparently because we have no exact comps on eBay. At a thrift store this week I came across a couple of Platignum cartridge pens sealed and carded. Pens are something I’ve heard can be decent to pick up so I looked them up and couldn’t find anything. Next thing I did was search eBay for the brand, Platignum, and found 126 active listings and 259 sold listings, giving us a 205% sell through rate. With the pens priced at just $1 each, sealed and looking quite old I figured I’d could do buy them and do more research once I got home. I couldn’t find much, if anything, so I decided to just test out the market and listed just 1 for $49.95 with free shipping and offers turned on. I’ll report back with how they go.

I don’t pick up CD’s that often but if something jumps out to me, then why not? The $15 price-tag stuck out to me but I quickly realized it was simply due to the number of discs (7 CD’s, 14 discs) because there wasn’t a single active listing for the box set on eBay, only the individual CD’s and only 8 of them.

I always get a bit excited whenever this happens and daydream of turning on Sold Listings and seeing hundreds, giving us the one and only item of something desirable.

Not quite hundreds but if we turn on Sold Listings, there are 25 results and they’re all for the box set. The prices range from $75.00 on auction with 11 bids to as high as $79 + post. I legit think I can get $100 for this set and sell it quickly.

A board game. An opened board game. The bane of my existence. It was only $3 and I would have left it behind if not for the comps, because I mean… I don’t want to deal with an open board game with missing pieces.

$3 into $100 sounds good to me but the most important thing is that all of the pieces are there. If I’m going to pick up something like that I want to know exactly how many pieces are in the set and luckily on the back of this board game it laid them all out. That means it’s just doing a bit of counting which isn’t that big of a deal. Fortunately for me all of the pieces were there and I have to say I was pretty confident just based on the condition when I opened the box in the thrift. If it looks like its been taken cared of, your chances of it being complete are higher.

First of all, this is a mix between a personal and flipping purchase. If you’ve been reading Flip Weekly for a while you’ll know I sort of collect factory sealed pieces of portable audio history. It’s a very strange niche, sure, but it’s close to my heart and seeing this pop up on Facebook Marketplace for $240, eventually negotiating down to an even $200, I didn’t want to miss out. Not many young people will know what this is, but before iPhone’s and even iPod’s, in order to listen to music on the run we had to use physical media such as CD’s. CD’s were a great invention as they were incredibly flimsy, easy to scratch and could hold barely 20 tracks.

This will sit nicely next to my factory sealed iPod’s until somebody ruins the fun and purchases it from eBay. If you find one of these loose in the wild you’re looking at around $50 - $100. Take a look at the comps for both Sold Listings and Active Listings for factory sealed below.

I’m not exactly in a rush to sell, so I’m legit listing for $999.95 and see what happens. I think if I listed for $500 it would sell within 90 days but I’m happy to keep it for a while.

The only reason I’m familiar with TinTin is because I’d always see kids reading the comics all the way back in primary school. I never did pick up the book back then, I didn’t have the attention span to sit down and read, I’d rather be in the oval playing handball or trading Pokemon cards. With that said, I know now there’s a huge market so I got a bit excited when I saw 7 volumes of TinTin in hardcover format at a thrift store this week.

Unfortunately, I had to pay up for them. Each volume contained 3 TinTin stories and they were priced at $9 each. I had to make a decision as to whether I wanted to spend $63 on 7 books. You’d know that in most cases when I go out to thrift stores and garage sales I’m spending barely $5 per item, so $63 on 1 set of books is quite high. To make matters worst, the comps aren’t crazy high:

I did some mental maths and thought I could aim for $120 on Marketplace which is essentially doubling my money, and $200 on eBay which would give me maybe $80 profit. In hindsight maybe not the best purchase but I like TinTin enough that I don’t feel too bad about it.

A few other items I picked up this week:

When it comes to items that have multiple pieces, in this case a car and a remote, I always look them up as often a piece is missing. Comps for just the car on eBay are around $30 - $40 so I’m comfortable listing up the complete set for $79.95 and $50 on Marketplace.

I did some digging at a thrift store and came across this Marvin the Martian bobble head. I’ve been weirdly keen on bobble heads lately as they’re in that promo item area which can lead to limited edition / short manufacturing runs which means rarity and potentially good money. You take a look at this piece and I guess it does look $2 to a thrift store employee, especially with broken pieces on the skirt(?) but to us it looks old, heavy, not made of plastic and well made. When we look up the comps:

I’ve never gotten the appeal of Looney Tunes to be honest. I visited Movie World at the Gold Coast when I was a kid and have the home videos of the Looney Tunes ride yet with all of the characters yet it still does nothing for me. Nevertheless, $50 - $80 for a $2 bottom of a crate bobblehead appeals to me now.

I’ll tell you what’s funny about this controller. I visited the local thrift and saw on a table, in wide open view a stack of PS2 games. As I use Flip Vidya (shameless plug) I was able to tell pretty quickly that the games were all sub $20. This was a thrift store that I visit often and I was surprised that they had video games as they’re mostly on the DVD shelf and they’re all FIFA and Wii Fit. Anyway, everything was on the table and I skipped past it and went over to the toys and book section in the back, corner of the shop.

I was able to dig around some tubs on the ground and find Marvin (plus an item below) but what I saw even further back, further to the bottom of the tub was two PlayStation 2 controllers. I'm talking buried very deep. I don't know who or why but these obviously came in with the games and somebody has buried these deep in the back of the shop.

Between us, we know the the following when it comes to video game controllers:

• We want only the official controllers. If it's a PlayStation, we want Sony. If it's an Xbox, we want Microsoft. If it's a 64, we want Nintendo.

• Test the buttons in the store. Press down on all of them and see how they react. Do they stick? Are they loose?

• Boring colors equal boring prices. The more funky and wacky the color the better the price.

You could sell 2 Sony black controllers for $49.90:

Or sell 1 transparent blue controller for $74.45.

Also note that you don’t need a PS2 to test out the controllers, you could opt for a $5 PS2 to PC adapter and then use a website like Gamepad Tester to test out the controller on your computer.

A general rule of thumb, for me at least, is when I come across an action figure that looks anything like this, I look it up. Like you, I have no idea who or what this is besides the fact that it looks like it would sit on someones shelf and it’s only $5. Our trusty friend Google Lens does the hard work and shows us that it’s a “Halo 4 Deluxe Promethean Knight Figure”. Cool, is it valuable?

I’m pretty sure this was the Google Lens result that popped up in the thrift store and is the reason I picked up the figure. I love that:

1. It was described as rare.

2. It was over $50.

3. It had over 10 watchers.

US stuff seems to do well here in Australia so I listed for $60 on eBay, $40 on Marketplace. It’s already doing pretty good numbers, a couple of watchers on eBay and same with Facebook.

Every weird looking action figure is worth a lookup, especially when they’re not absurdly priced.

What I Sold

Ahh, the ebbs and flows of flipping. Just today I hit the thrift and walked away with virtually nothing, thinking to myself I guess they just don’t put out the good stuff anymore. I come home and start to write about how I’ve sold a $5 toy picked up just 2 weeks ago for $500 and realize that some days you get just lucky.

The title of Issue #45 was “A Christmas Miracle: This $5 Toy Will Sell For $500“ and that miracle came true. Selling for full price, this Beyblades 6-pack from 2012 was off to the USA with an addtional $50 postage which goes to show that the older Beyblades hold their value well. Who knows if I’ll get this lucky again in 2025 however I have a feeling this item will appear in the “My Top 10 Flips of 2025“ in December.

Gone in 48 hours, not even New Years Eve could stop this from selling. I think this is the fastest a board game for me has ever sold so if you ever see Netrunner at a thrift store or garage sale you should definitely pick it up. The hardest thing is making sure the game is complete but if it is, jackpot.

1 hour after selling Netrunner, this CD box set has sold for full price. What a day this was, I bought both for $18 and they sold less than 48 hours later for $200. I don’t know if you’ll ever find this box set but it pays to look up anything big and bulky in the CD’s.

Like I said on Instagram, I feel like a one trick pony with this sale - all I’ve been talking about lately is The Wiggles. Here’s an exercise for you. Think of your local thrift store. Think of how cheap they sell DVD’s for, maybe a buck or two? Now think of The Wiggles branding. Do you think you’d be able to spot it easily? Yes? Good, all you need to look for is a regular tall DVD case and the original cast. You don’t want the new kid friendly DVD cases:

You want the original cast in the old school DVD cases:

If you’ve been putting off trying your hand at reselling, this may be the easiest thing you can look for to start. It’s easy to post, they sell quick, they’re cheap to buy and you’ll end up with a hundred bucks. The only thing you want to look out for when buying is 1) that the correct disc in in the case and 2) the disc isn’t too badly scratched.

In Issue #46 I told you to keep an eye out for this copy of Twilight. I had it for sale on eBay for $100 which was below market rate and it ended up getting a lot of attention with 54 views and 10 watchers in 21 days (which is pretty good for a book). When I’m listing items for sale, I always list on Marketplace cheaper because I love that instant cash so this was listed for $50 and its gone on to sell. If you find this yourself, chances are it will be priced like a regular book <$5 but you’ll know it will sell for either $50 on Marketplace or $100 on eBay.

Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

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Flip Weekly on Social Media

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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

• Google Sheets Reseller Spreadsheet

• Memorize Video Game Prices with Flip Vidya

• eBay Sell Through Rate Calculator