I’m still figuring out the direction of this blog, but I’m feeling like it should extend beyond eBay how-tos and such. Flipping is so much more than buying low and selling high. There’s way more to eBay than calculated shipping and feedback. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but making a regular thing of selling stuff online is hard! While everyone’s in it for different reasons, here’s why I spend a ton of my spare time on eBay.

Selling on eBay makes me feel accomplished

I’m starting here because I feel like it’s probably my biggest motivator. I consider myself pretty high-motor — as much as I love relaxing and gaming, I need to feel like I’m getting stuff done.

Can I go overboard sometimes pretty much all the time?

Who, me?

Yes.

I worked my full-time job today and am currently testing PS3s and controllers as I’m writing this. I just have a longing for doing, and eBay helps scratch that itch.

You can never place a true value on your time, but you can usually feel when you haven’t used your time as wisely as you could have. For better or worse, I look at a ton of my time through a productivity lens:

• What did I accomplish?
• How did I spend my downtime?
• How optimized was my process?
• What did I prepare myself for next?

I also love being able to make progress on something during otherwise “dead” time, like when dinner is in the oven, my wife is in the shower, or company won’t be over for another 15 minutes. It’s easy to jump on your phone or find something mindless to kill the time, but I always have eBay to turn to.

I don’t need to be entirely present to test a PS3, so that can run in the background. It doesn’t take long to wipe down games and controllers, so that’s a quick item to check off the list. I can snap a few pictures or weigh some boxes. And if nothing else, I can browse through my saved searches and scout out new inventory. I may not be able to get loads done in these sprints, but it’s more than I would have done otherwise.

I’m letting out more feels than I anticipated here, but I guess eBay feels like a fix to me in some ways. If I don’t have eBay, I’m just a dude working a regular job. It’s one of my distinguishing factors (alongside my uncanny resemblance to Adam Driver) and a small piece of my identity at this point, having been at it for almost 15 years. I take pride in the business and process I’ve built, mostly on my own, and the drive it takes to keep a hustle like this alive.

I’m coming off like a super clingy ex-boyfriend! Or like in Spiderman Homecoming when Tony Stark takes away the Spidersuit and Peter Parker is all like “Bruh no I’m nothing without the suit.” eBay has been the engine, but I’ve always supplied the gas (that sounds pretty incriminating). I’m working through some self-reflection if you couldn’t tell, but I’m grateful for the platform and voice that eBay has given me — even if it’s come with a serving of obsession.

I feel like I need to keep up the momentum

Phew, that last section was kind of heavy. But wait, there’s more! Here’s another bombshell: honestly, I’m scared of washing out or losing traction.

I’ve been selling on eBay since shortly after my 12th birthday in March 2008. By December 2009, I sold an item for over $1,000. eBay provided all of my fun money during high school and grew into a steady source of income for me in 2015. 2019 was the first year I had listings up for the entire year (I had a lot of stop-and-go in college). Every year, I was able to take my eBay sales higher than the previous year!

At the same time, I’ve been moving up in other aspects of my life. Getting through school, landing my first job, earning my first promotion, moving out, getting married, switching jobs, scheduling my own doctor appointments — pretty heavy stuff. But I’ve always been driven to make time for eBay.

I don’t want to regress. I don’t want to have to rebuild or ramp up to get where I already should have been. I don’t want to feel like I’m throwing away what I’ve worked so hard to build and maintain. I know I shouldn’t worry about what other people think, but I don’t want to have to tell anyone that I stopped doing eBay unless something bigger and better took its place.

I set the bar high for myself because that’s what gotten me to where I am now. If I try and take things easier on myself, I’m not sure I’ll be able to perform at the same level. I guess these often unreachable standards stem beyond eBay alone, but flipping helps me chip away at them.

I get to play matchmaker

Imma take a break from sharing my deepest insecurities and look at eBay from another perspective not entirely tied to my self-worth. One of the awesome perks of online flipping, especially on eBay, is the the marketplace reach. You have access to such a huge audience!

While that doesn’t mean that you always interact with the best people (see my post on eBay buyer red flags), you’re guaranteed to make some pretty fortunate connections. Just think about what it takes for someone to find your item on eBay. For starters, they must have the need for whatever it is that you’re selling. Next, they’re not able to find it around them or aren’t too interested in searching. They then have to find your item on eBay, and that could mean that they looked at a range of other sites before they found your item. Then they need to be in a position to actually purchase the item. And from there, the mail carrier needs to bridge the gap and get the item in their hands.

It can feel like buy-ship-receive, but there is so much going on behind the scenes. All sellers have different levels of emotional stake in eBay, but I think there’s something so fulfilling about every eBay sale. In the simplest terms, you have something that someone else is looking for. If you didn’t pick that item and get it listed, they may have never found it.

And you can look backwards, too! Think about everything that had to go right for you to originally source the item. As fate would have it, you did indeed find and decide to purchase the item. Your sale forges another link in the chain, and the item lives on.

It’s borderline free, sometimes effortless, money

I have this point at the end for a reason. While I of course want to make money through eBay, I try not to treat everything as a business. I would consider eBay more of a hobby than a profession, which is why I don’t think I would ever go all in on eBay as my sole source of income.

In my opinion, getting down to the dollars and cents of something takes away a good deal of the magic, especially if you don’t need to do so in the first place. For anyone making their living from eBay, much power to you! I’m not knocking that at all and know how lucrative that can be with the right mindset. That’s just not what eBay really is for me (as you read earlier, it’s much more toxic and convoluted than money).

That said, you have to appreciate the value-add of flipping. In so many ways, flippers profit off of laziness — people don’t want to research an item’s true value and they don’t want to wait (either to find a good deal or sell something of their own). As a flipper, it’s not uncommon to buy an item, do literally nothing other than wipe it down and take a few pictures, then sell it on eBay for double or triple what you paid for it. It’s never that simple consistently, but there are a ton of opportunities like that out there (and no one is capable of catching every single deal).

From a purely financial standpoint, flipping can feel like free money. You’re not developing a product, you don’t need to roll out a marketing campaign, and you don’t really need to go hunting for buyers. As long as you’re patient and diligent, you can make some side cash.

Are you okay?

Valid question. This was a bit of a juxtaposed post (a juxtapost) that is summed up pretty well by this meme:

Like I said, eBay is way deeper than buying and selling, at least for me. I’m not sure exactly how helpful this stream of consciousness may be, but I hope you’re able to think deeper about what eBay means to you and why you’re on that flipping game. Now go list! Or maybe take a break because you have so earned it after reading this rollercoaster!