What Is Flipping?
Flipping is when you buy a product and then "flip" it for a profit.
An example would be where you buy a rare pair of Nike sneakers at Foot Locker, then after they're sold out in stores, you sell them on Trademe for 2x the price.
Another example is when the Playstation 5 released in New Zealand in limited numbers. If you pre-ordered one for $800, you could have flipped it online immediately for about $,1400+.
Often, people simply buy goods overseas at lower prices in Asia or America, then flip them in New Zealand for a 50%+ profit.
Essentially all businesses that sell products in New Zealand today are "flippers".
For example, The Warehouse imports cups from China for 50 cents and then "flips" them to customers like you for $3.
Flipping is one of the oldest and simplest ways to make money.
Brainstorming Your First Flips
The first step is deciding what to sell.
The best place to find ideas is actually your own bank statements.
Go through your credit card and bank statements and note down everything you've purchased in the last twelve months.
This includes everything from homeware to food to medicine to vacations.
Even if they aren't things that could possibly be flipped, that's okay.
The purpose of this list is to help you generate ideas.
Sourcing Your Flips
The next step is taking these items on your list and seeing if you can source them for a much cheaper price.
What you're looking for is a big price discrepancy giving you the potential for profit.
For example, let's say you bought this smart pet feeder for your cat from Harvey Norman for $255:
Let's see if this product has flip potential.
I go to AliExpress and search for pet feeders.
I find many options available from different wholesalers:
After browsing through the options, I find one that looks reliable:
This model has 248 five star reviews, and is selling for $63 NZD plus $4.89 shipping for a total cost of $67.89.
We know that Harvey Norman is selling pet feeders similar to this for $255.
However, even though Harvey Norman is making a killing, that doesn't necessarily mean we can make a killing too.
Which brings us to our final step:
We'll most likely flip this on Trademe, so let's see if anyone is selling these pet feeders there, and for what price.
This is not ideal.
We can see multiple sellers offering pet feeders for around $80.
At a cost of $67.89, after accounting for selling fees, we're unlikely to make a profit at this price.
That means this particular flipping idea is a no-go.
So what do we do?
Go to the next item on your list!
Once you find an idea worth flipping, you can move onto the next step.
An Example
Here's an item I found while browsing AliExpress.
They're stainless steel money clips.
You can buy them for 70 cents each, and five pieces will ship for $7 from China.
If you do the math on that, it's $10.50 for five pieces, or $2.10 each.
Let's see how much they were selling for on Trademe:
Fantastic!
If each clip only costs us $2.10, and we can sell them for $12, we can 6x our money on each one!
The next step is to place your order on AliExpress.
It's no different to buying anything else online.
When they arrive, list them up on Trademe and start selling!
It shouldn't take long for you to make your first $100.
Once you find products that are good sellers, you can then scale them up to earn a regular income.
Want To Learn More?
During the flipping experiment for @moneybren, I found 13 different products like the one above that could be flipped successfully.
Over those 13 products I made $2,700 profit for the @moneybren portfolio in just a few months.
The details of all these products, how much I made on each one, the exact Trademe listings I used, plus many more tips on increasing your sales and finding good flips are detailed in my course Simple Flips.
If you'd like to build a reliable side income from flipping, there's no better place to start.