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How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights
Thrift to Profit - Side Hustle Insights
00:16:17
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- [00:04]
A
This is insane. That people are throwing this stuff away or, like, the thrill of finding those objects, even if it's rare, is just incredible. At the end of the day, it's arbitrage, right? It's just you're finding something at a lower price that someone will value at a higher price.
- [00:20]
B
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to How Much can I Make? I'm your host, Mira Vozeri. Last week, we heard from Zach Shaw about his job as a local news writer and editor. Today, he's back to talk about his side hustle running his ebay store. Over and out Vintage. If you ever wondered how thrifting turns into a business, this one's for you. So let's dive right in. Zach, thanks for coming back on the show. Let's dive right in and tell us how did the ebay store come about?
- [00:51]
A
How did it come about? Well, I've always been a thrifter. My partner's always been a thrifter. Most of our wardrobe is stuff we've gotten from thrift stores. Goodwill, Salvation Army. I'm drawn to quirky, weird pieces of clothing. Then a few years ago, I got into designing a board game. During COVID seemed like the perfect thing to do. I was locked inside. So as I was designing that board game, I got into vintage board games. And that's when the real sickness began. And it was like every yard sale, every Goodwill, I was hoarding all of these vintage board games. Anything from, like, 1950s to 90s, they just started stacking up everywhere. We started grabbing T shirts. We got this opportunity where my partner who works at Le Shag salon in Kingston, they have a little storefront, and they say, hey, you're doing this vintage thing. How about you put up some vintage and used novelty tees and stuff like that? And long story short, it was really successful. We sold a ton of them out of the Le Shag salon. That's kind of the main thing that we did. But we also continuously do ebay, obviously reach a huge audience there. Ebay is kind of a pain in the butt, but, like, it is a great way to sell certain things.
- [01:56]
B
Would you say your niche is the game? The vintage games?
- [02:00]
A
We definitely have some niches, like, because one thing we learned early on is you really have to know everything about the thing you're selling. Like, there were so many things that I learned in the first year of flipping vintage board games that saved me so much money down the line. You know, just, like, minute things, like, if the box quality and the box condition is, like, way more of the value of a vintage board game than any other aspect. You know, I didn't know that until I bought a bunch of crappy boxes. So we do vintage games, we do vintage clothes. Like, I know how to identify a shirt tag from the 80s or 90s. My partner does the women's clothes. You get that feedback when people do buy things that tells you exactly what you should be finding. And so after a few years of doing this, We've gotten pretty good at picking out the valuable things in the heap of trash.
- [02:47]
B
So what does it take to open a store on ebay? How did you start it? You started brick and mortar, and then you did the shift. What did it take?
- [02:54]
A
I was fortunate to start an ebay account perhaps a decade ago. I have always been a collector of magic, the gathering cards and other collectibles. So it was always a way for me to kind of make a few extra bucks turning around items in my collection that I, you know, no longer needed. What that did, though, was give me this long kind of history of, you know, always shipping on time and always shipping the right thing, Et cetera, et cetera. On ebay, it's reputation is everything. It's kind of like a. The same way with the gig economy. Like, if you get too many people saying this ship a week late or this came damaged, then all of a sudden your ebay store is going to collapse. So we have like one of the top ebay seller ratings because we're fastidious about getting everything to everyone in the right way, Refunding people when we need to. So I'd say if you're looking to start an ebay account, it's really about building that reputation early on. Because also if you have, you know, they rank people on stars. So, like, we have several hundred stars, which means we had thousands of sales. If you start out, it's very hard to gain people's trust because you. You don't have any stars. And so you have to make small sales to really build that up. And trust is everything on ebay. Because the biggest pain of ebay is that scammers are not uncommon on ebay. People who will essentially bid on your item, and then they're going to try and get that item and then say they didn't get it and they want a refund. That's the most common thing.
- [04:12]
B
How do you check for that?
- [04:13]
A
There's various ways you can mitigate it. There's no real way to stop it entirely. I found, like, you have to offer free. This is kind of technical, but like you have to offer free shipping, because if you offer paid shipping and then you discover they're a scam, now you're out that shipping cost. And basically the way you discover their scam is someone bids on your auction that has no interactions on ebay yet, and they have some random username that probably generated by a bot. I get most of them by monitoring the auctions and eliminating blocking those people when they do bid. But every now and then someone gets through. So I honestly stopped selling big ticket items on ebay for that reason. I was running into. It doesn't happen on the smaller things, but once you sell a board game for like $300, people come out of the woodwork to essentially bid on that, get it, receive it in the mail, and then claim they didn't get it. And then it's basically like, yeah, so.
- [05:03]
B
How do you end up selling the $300 piece?
- [05:06]
A
Right now we're working on a pop up, you know, around Christmas time, we're trying to get into one of the local game stores to display the whole vintage game library. Then I can get, you know, good money for the, for the higher ticket items. The games cost a fortune to ship, so the second you're shipping them, it doesn't really make sense cost wise. And that's what we found is if you can sell it brick and mortar, if you can sell it in person, it's just so much more profitable. You know, you're not paying processing fees, you're not paying rent to be somewhere you're, you're not being scammed and you don't have to do shipping so you can sell things for even more than you would on ebay.
- [05:40]
B
Do you have to pay ebay on each sale?
- [05:42]
A
Yeah, I think it's something like 9%. I should probably know this. I do.
- [05:46]
B
That's a lot.
- [05:46]
A
I kind of close my eyes.
- [05:48]
B
How long have you had the store?
- [05:49]
A
I want to say two years, but we, I've done it sort of under the radar for several more years than that. Pretty, pretty much. When we first got together, we were going out thrifting and, and since then we've like done trips to Connecticut and through Ohio and we did some purpose built thrifting trips. Like we hit, I think 12 thrift stores in Connecticut, reasoning that there's rich people in Connecticut so they probably throw away good stuff. And we were right. But you know, not to be a downer, but it really does seem like this has become a very popular side hustle and it's very hard now to find the good stuff. You really do have to travel outside of areas where people are doing this in order to find, you know, the gems. And people are now much more hip to what things are worth. It used to be that I would frequently, the way you make money is finding something that's mispriced, like a strange brand that the company typed in the code for and put the wrong price on that. You can make a lot of money finding those, you know, a board game that's super rare that the person didn't know, but now AI everything just tells you exactly what the price is and figures it out. It's a very competitive of space.
- [06:50]
B
Is it a good side hustle?
- [06:52]
A
It is a good side hustle because even though it's getting more difficult, that feeling of, you know, like the other day we're at a yard sale, brand new set of chairs that goes for, you know, 200 online, and you talk the person down from 40 to 30, you're just like, this is insane that people are throwing this stuff away. Or like, the thrill of finding those objects, even if it's rare, is just incredible. At the end of the day, it's. It's arbitrage, right? It's just you're finding something at a lower price that someone will value at a higher price. In that way, it's kind of dull and there's a lot of drudgery and packaging stuff for ebay and whatnot. But there's satisfaction in giving something of value to something someone that they treasure. Like on ebay, you'd be surprised at how many people write back a message. Be like, I just got this item and it's so amazing and it's made my day and I love this.
- [07:39]
B
Do you get a lot of returns?
- [07:40]
A
No. Returns have not been really the problem. It's been mostly either, you know, people scamming and obviously not having legit accounts, or it's been something like something gets held up in the. In the mail. Oftentimes someone will ask for refund and I'll. I wait a few days, you know, it's probably going to come. And most of the time they're like.
- [07:57]
B
Oh, yeah, how do you drive traffic to your store?
- [07:59]
A
Well, for ebay, it's. I don't do too much extra. I mean, we do have an Instagram account, but for the most part it's just showing up in ebay searches. And, you know, I'm familiar with search engine optimization from doing my digital marketing work. So, you know, I know how to write the titles and put in all the info for it to appear in searches, and then ebay tells you how many people are seeing it, and then you can modify based on that to get more people. So if we ever were to scale this up, I'd probably be more aggressive on social media because that's definitely a way to drive people to your stuff.
- [08:30]
B
So you have different side hustles between music and digital customers that you help them with the digital world. Which one is your favorite side hustle? Is it the ebay?
- [08:40]
A
Well, the ebay is probably the most fun, but it's also not extraordinarily financially rewarding. Like, every time I work on it, I'm kind of like, I could make so much more money per hour, like doing any number of the other things I do. But it just, you know, the fun of it compensates. I just love creating stuff that people get value out of. Like the most popular thing I ever made was the TikTok channel, which has half a million viewers, 60 million views on our top video.
- [09:06]
B
Whoa.
- [09:07]
A
It paid our rent for a few months.
- [09:08]
B
Well, you mean you got money from TikTok for that?
- [09:11]
A
Yeah. When I talk to kids, I have a 12 year old. When I talk to some of her friends, they're like, that's your account. You're a celebrity. Oh, man, you're going to be famous. The entire channel is me feeding this animatronic children's toy that's like sitting on a toilet. I feed it weird food. That's all it is. And people like, there was one day where I was like, we've reached more people than all cable news combined. Like, more people have seen what we did today. This makes no sense. And then also to have your, like, most popular achievement be the dumbest possible thing you can think of. We tried posting other stuff and then people go, no, no, we don't want this. We want you feeding the toy. So unfortunately, the toy sings a song. Uh oh, gotta go. And they have copyright struck every video now. Like every anytime we try and put it up, they just take out the audio because they have claimed the copyright on the song that the toy sings. So we can no longer. So we're like, what do we do now? I don't know. We've seen this on ourselves to the point where I was like, what am I doing? Maybe. But it was, it was like a deep philosophical hole where it was just kind of like, is this what my life is about? To, like feeding a toy cold pizza so that like 12 year olds can comment, like, feed it almonds?
- [10:21]
B
Next you know how much TikTok pays for 60 million views?
- [10:25]
A
Well, that was a while ago. It's not as much as it used to be. I mean, back then, I think we got fifteen hundred dollars for that one video. I kind of. I feel like it kind of worked out to maybe like 20 to $30 per million views. So I told, like, my old landlord. I was like, yeah, we got 60 million views on this video. She's like, yeah, my son just came out as trans or something and got 5 million views on their video. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm not that special. Like, know anyone can reach millions of people overnight. It's a bizarre world that we live in.
- [10:54]
B
Totally bizarre. My one thing I'm curious about, when you buy a vintage game and you buy it at some thrift shop, you have to check that every piece is there. Does it happen that you ship it and then there's a missing piece and it's a whole big hustle?
- [11:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, usually what happens is you. You check the box and you think all the pieces are there, and then you recount and you're like, ah, there was just one missing. But I actually have an AI assistant that helps me count all the pieces because I'll be like, okay, this is the this year edition of this game. What are the pieces that are supposed to be here? This is what I'm seeing.
- [11:26]
B
And I tell you, it comes in so handy. Amazing.
- [11:30]
A
It's very helpful.
- [11:31]
B
I know. What was your biggest seller?
- [11:33]
A
We sold a lot of band T shirts for a while. So the funny thing is, like, I did a little bit of this maybe like 10 years ago, and I was turning over real vintage shirts. Like, you know, a Jimi Hendrix shirt from 1980 would go for like $150. That market has collaps collapsed because the bands got wise to this and started basically making fake vintage. Have you seen this?
- [11:54]
B
Yeah, no, but I can imagine, now that you mention it.
- [11:57]
A
So it looks like a vintage band T shirt, like a vintage Def Leppard T shirt or something. But then you look at the tag and it's printed on and it's their official merch. And so that gutted the whole vintage rock market. But ironically, for a while, those reproduction shirts were popular. And this is where it gets nuts. So these shirts are sold at Target for like $10, and you can easily find them in thrift stores for three or four. We were putting them on the rack for $20, and they were selling.
- [12:27]
B
Wow, that must have surprised you.
- [12:30]
A
It blew. Blew us away. And I mean, I think part of it is just it's a luxury salon next to more expensive clothes. So it's in a context that makes you feel like the shirt's actually more valuable than what it's worth. And I also think people are used to spending like lots of money. If they go to a show and get merch, like it's always way more expensive anyway. That's died out. I think people have gotten hip to that and. But that was probably our biggest, most profitable product because you could just get it everywhere and they would fly off.
- [12:57]
B
The shelves and which game sold the best?
- [12:59]
A
So I haven't really sold much of the game collection, honestly, sitting on that collection a little more because this pop up around Christmas. My instinct is that that's going to be the way to sell them like a few times a year. Go to a game store. It's easy to find people who want shirts. Everyone wears shirts. It's much harder to find someone who specifically wants a vintage board game. So.
- [13:20]
B
So do you see yourself doing this in the next five, 10 years, continuing with the ebay store?
- [13:26]
A
Yeah, I always be snapping up these vintage board games. We might phase out of apparel because for various reasons I just feel like it's a saturated market. It's hard to find the good stuff anymore. But I'm a 10 year believer in vintage board games. I think they're going to be like vinyl records in the future. It would be so cool to. One thing I want to do is provide vintage board games to the local bars that have, especially the ones that have like the vintage aesthetic.
- [13:51]
B
What a great idea.
- [13:52]
A
Amidst all the side hustles and everything that we've talked about, the one thing I know I'm going to be doing in 10 years is whatever it is, it's going to be mediated by AI. Like what's coming over the next few years is going to be a complete creative revolution where any single person is going to be able to create their own video game, board game, book, song. Everyone will be a musician, everyone will be an artist. And a lot of my fellow creators are scared, terrified of that prospect. And I just see it as the best thing to ever happen to humanity. Like every single person is going to be able to be creator. Like that's where culture gets interesting again when you never know what's going to happen. Every day there's something completely new coming out of someone's head that would have never been able to do that if they didn't have AI to take them. You know, 95% of the way there, so I'm looking forward to it.
- [14:37]
B
Are you working on designing your own game?
- [14:40]
A
Yes, I'm play testing my card game called the last game on earth, which is one player plays major disasters and the other player plays the last remaining survivors on earth and sort of a battle to survive. And I very much look forward to making video games with AI and by.
- [14:57]
B
The way, why did you choose ebay and not other outlets?
- [15:00]
A
It's just the biggest audience. I know for certain women's fashion, there's better choices. Mercado, I think, is one of them. But I just have been doing ebay for so long that I just stay there.
- [15:12]
B
All right, that was so interesting. I know a lot of people are dreaming of side hustles, and I know other person that has clothing store on ebay. She's doing all right.
- [15:22]
A
Oh, good.
- [15:23]
B
Yeah, I guess if you learn the system, you could do really well.
- [15:26]
A
Yeah. The women's clothes especially does. I don't understand it, so. But they do especially well.
- [15:31]
B
And by the way, why did you choose ebay and not other outlets? Because of the auction.
- [15:36]
A
It's just the biggest audience. I know for certain women's fashion, there's better choices. They're, like, specific to women's fashion. Mercado, I think, is one of them, but I just have been doing ebay for so long that I just stay there.
- [15:51]
B
All right, thank you so much. That was fantastic.
- [15:55]
A
Thanks. My pleasure.
- [15:56]
B
All right, thank you. That's a wrap for today. Big thanks to Zach for sharing his side hustle story. If your dream is to have your own ebay gig, I hope his tip sparked your next move. Thanks for tuning in. And don't forget to hit the follow button before you go. See you next week.