How I turned $20 into $8,500+ in 2 months

[stavedeve]

I had the great fortune to meet Jill from this forum at B&P 2013 who is a savvy and profitable eBay seller. We were sharing stories and this is one I shared with her. She encouraged me to post a thread here giving some of those details.

This was about 10 years ago when we were doing a lot of sales on eBay.

Each week my wife and I visited 2 auctions houses looking for items to buy and resell on eBay. One week we came across a bank liquidation auction. One of the large banks here were selling all their office furnishings. We came in a bit late and most of the stuff had already been sold except for a bunch of Steelcase Criterion office chairs. 5 chairs in excellent shape sold for about $50-75 each. There were 91 chairs left, most of which were not in the best condition. Cracks in the arm pads, dirty/stained/ripped fabric, broken components, etc. However about 20 of them were still in fair condition. The auctioneer became frustrated as he continued to try to sell the remaining chairs at $50 each but no one was biting. He then decided to sell them as one lot with a starting bid at $300... no bidders... $250... no bidders... $200... then $150... still nothing. It was obvious his frustration was compounding. He then blurted out "Somebody start the bid!". I quickly yelled out "$20!". He emphatically shooted "Sold!" Effectively not giving anyone else an opportunity to bid.

I just bought 91 office chairs for $0.22 each. I then quickly thought "How am I going to get all these home?". I knew nothing about these chairs. I had no idea at that time what the retail price of these chairs were or how much they may be able to be sold for or anything. I just saw an opportunity and responded.

I made arrangements to pick them up the next day. I went home and did some research on these chairs and was pleasantly surprised to see this model of chair sold for $600-$800 new and a few good condition used and refurbished ones were selling on eBay for $300-$500 each!

I got the chairs home and figured out how to reupholster the seat and back and how to disassemble for easier shipping. I then typed out re-assembly instructions for the buyers. My wife and I went to JoAnn Fabrics to pick out some nice higher end fabrics. I bought a few cans of spray adhesive, went home and got started.

Of the 91 chairs 20 of them were in pretty good condition so we just cleaned and reupholstered those and sold them for an average of $350 each. Another 12 had some minor cracks in the arm pads but we still reupholstered them and sold them for $125 each. I placed an ad in the local newspaper and sold a lot of 10 as-is for $100 and another lot of 10 for $50.

The remaining chairs were not good enough to sell so I just used those for parts as I made repairs to the others.

After adding the cost of new fabric, spray adhesive and some minor repair parts to the cost of the chairs, our cost per chair ending up being $0.90 or almost $82. A net profit of $8,568 (minus eBay fees).

I hope you found this valuable or at least an interesting read. There is a whole world of opportunity out there. NO EXCUSES!

This is great! Thanks for posting and really interesting.

 

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