It is time for another eBay story, part of our You Sold That For How Much series. As you may or may not know, we are very active online retailers. We sell on eBay daily; in fact it is the major source of our family’s income.
From time to time we like to share a fun “score” that we have had on eBay to show you how fun and how profitable selling items on eBay can be. We’re not suggesting you give up your current job and head into selling full time. We are suggesting to you that eBay is a great way to make extra money. For us it all began with selling items we had laying around the house and were not using. That turned into exploring thrift stores, garage sales, etc for more items to sell.
Our latest score
Our latest thrift store find was a used vintage sheet set. We picked up several vintage sheets that day for $2.99 each. We scored a vintage Strawberry Shortcake flat sheet:
A vintage Raggedy Ann & Andy flat sheet:
And a vintage Peanuts flat sheet with matching fitted sheet (no pillowcases though):
We know a bit about vintage sheets and know that some people collect them. Some people buy them and use the vintage fabric in projects. All of these vintage sheet sets were in clean, nice condition. They were used, but you could tell were probably in storage for a long time. There were no holes or spots on the sheets. We bought them all and happily walked out the store with our haul.
When we got around to photographing them and doing a little research on eBay, we discovered the Peanuts sheet set was something special. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had a gut instinct and went with it. This particular sheet set is called the See America First series. It shows the Peanuts characters with famous cities and states; it really is super cute.
The vintage Peanuts sheet set eBay details
We used eBay’s completed listings as a basis for our research and we decided to start this sheet set as an eBay auction with the beginning bid at $49.99. By the end of the day we had over 30 people who had looked at the auction and we had the opening bid. How exciting! The eBay auction ran for 7 days and on that last day I was honestly a little bummed because with just over a few hours left it was at $68 and change. Granted that was still a super nice profit, but I was hoping for more in the $100 range based on what we had seen similar sheet sets sell for. Well, as the magic of eBay goes – that final few minutes was crazy! This sheet set ended up selling for a whopping $273! You can see the completed eBay item here.
Here is a breakdown of the profit from this item:
Final sales price 273.00
eBay fee -24.98
Paypal fee -8.22
Shipping -18.85
Cost of the item -5.98
Profit………………..$214.97
Over $200 profit for selling one item on eBay. Granted not everything we sell is a super score like this vintage sheet set. You aren’t going to get rich quick by flipping items on eBay, but consistent effort will result in a steady stream of extra income. Extra income you can use towards paying down debt, saving for a new car or vacation, extra fun money or savings.
It is easy to learn more about selling on eBay. If you have any questions, feel free to comment and I’ll try my best to help.
Happy selling!
