How Long Do We Sit On An Item Before It Sells?

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How long do you have to sit on an item before it sells on eBay?

This is a question that we get all the time when people are trying to figure out if they want to use this as a side hustle or go into a full-time business. People get afraid that they will invest a bunch of money into inventory to flip and then they’ll have to wait and have their money sit.

Recent Examples Of Flips

We have two case studies of what’s sold in the last few weeks that will give you an idea of what is acceptable and why we do what we do in this industry. We’re selling high profit items. We sell items that are usually $200, $500, or $1,000. Our business model is to buy high profit items, and we don’t spend a lot of money on our items either. We’re spending very little on the items we get.

The first item we spent $60 on and the second item we spent $42 on.

The first item we listed two weeks ago and it sold in a week and a half. It was a cooktop we bought for $60 and we sold it for $1,500. I got this on our road trip last summer, but just got it listed.

The second item we bought two summers ago was a bread oven and it was sitting on eBay for two years and sold last week for $2,000. The crazy part about this item is it has sold probably three times throughout the last two years, but each time the buyer asked to cancel it before I shipped it out. It’s one of the commercial bread ovens that’s probably used in a Subway or sandwich shop with an oven on top and a proofer on the bottom.

We listed this one for parts which might have been why we got the refund requests. I listed it that way because I couldn’t demonstrate that the proofer worked because I wasn’t sure how it worked. You can absolutely sell items for parts, but it might take a little longer.

Buy Low, Sell High

One of the biggest takeaways is that your profit is made in the buy. Purchase an item for as low as you possibly can and sell it for as high as you can. If you buy something at a low price, you won’t worry if it doesn’t sell because you know you can at least get what you paid for it on Facebook Marketplace through a local sale.

How Long Do We Sit On An Item Before It Sells?

The bread oven was $42 and we knew we could get that locally if we got tired of storing it and wanted to sell it.

We’re always in the mindset of being able to buy something that we’re going to make money on. Even our vehicles, we drive them for years and turn around and sell them for more than what we actually paid for them. That’s kind of what our motto is. If we have to sit on something for a while but have room to store it, we do if we know the profit is there.