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Dave Shevez
In this article I want to share with you how people just like you and I are buying shoes at Ross and flipping them on eBay for great profits. You can do this, but you have to take action.
Today I am only looking for shoes at Ross that I can flip and nothing else. The focus is shoes, I am going to take notes, and document my activities in this article for OnlineAuctionU readers who are or want to learn how to flip merchandise for profit.
- Number one, I am not going to be sending these into Amazon. I am going to be doing eBay only items today.
- Number two, On this trip, I didn’t look at anything but shoes. I’m so brand new to the clothing game I am still trying to develop my eye on what to look for. I am Still learning the ropes myself, so today we are just going to be talking about shoes.
However, there are many bargains to be found at ROSS and other big box stores. All the tips and tricks and everything that I’m going to teach you in this article are not anything I specifically came up with. I want to give a huge shout out to all those that have helped me and the team at www.OnlineAuctionU.com
Great information guiding & learning the ropes especially Mr. Calvert’s How to Make a $5,000 Monthly Income with eBay. DVD, that is what got me started on this journey.
If you want to master retail arbitrage you’ve got to get in the stores and practice. I’ve just been having a ton of people lately. Ask me where I’m getting my shoes. I’m posting my shoe flips that we do on Instagram. People are asking how I even look up what the shoe style is. It is simple, once you do it a few times. You aren’t going to make any profit just reading articles and looking at Instagram post, you have to decide to go for it.
So, I wanted to show you exactly how to do that. But enough talking time to go hunt. So I am going to go make some money today. I’ll show you guys what I’m looking at. If I just type in Ross in my phone, this is exactly what you can do in your area. Maybe not like that. Zoom out all the way and then punch in Ross, it should come up on your phone.
There we go. So you guys can see that we’ve got three of them right here. This is Salem, Oregon. We’ve got eight, two, four and two and if you zoom in it will show you the exact location. So this is going to be the bulk Ross hunting today.
At 8:30am the first Ross store opens up. They’ll take me about a half hour to get there up in Hillsborough. And then we’re basically going to jilt over and I’ll show you guys the best I can what I am dong today through this article.
We’re going to start in Hillsborough then up to Vancouver and then work our way down. We’re going to end up in Salem here. If I’m done earlier than I think, then we’ll go South of Salem and we’ll hit Albany and Corvallis. And that’s just a straight shot back home. But that was my plan. Hit 20 Ross in one day. I have never attempted this before, but I wanted to give it a try and see how I do.
So none of the shoes that I picked up today are going to Amazon. These are all going to be listed on eBay. A couple of different reasons. One, I found that was specific types of shoes, especially when you’re getting into like the cleats and sneakers. A lot of people on eBay are hunting these things down and creating very quick shoe flips. They don’t have to wait to get them shipped to Amazon and checked it.
By taking this approach, I have been finding that most of my shoes are selling within a week, and you get that money instantly into your PayPal account versus Amazon FBA. It can take several weeks to get them sold and get paid. They usually ship our stuff over to the East coast, so it takes a week just to get them listed on Amazon.
Sometimes it can take a while to get every over to Amazon’s warehouse and then it has to be listed and sold. And then we have to wait for our pay out. It can be like two to three weeks before we even see that money. So for today specifically, are goal is shoes we can flip on eBay.
So, my goal today is to go for high quality and for quality over quantity. If I can come out with 30 or 40 solid pairs that I can make $30 to $40 profit on each that would be the perfect scenario.
If I can reach my goal, I’m going to be very happy. I might end the day with only 10 pair, and if I come out with 10 then that’s okay too because I’m going to share you guys regardless, like even though I’m going to 20 stores, my goal is to find shoes I can flip at every ROSS. That is my goal, but you never know for sure how things are going to turn out. So I have my map and my plan, I am ready.
The other little challenge I’m giving myself too is I’m going to set the budget of $1,000. So, I want to see what I can do with $1,000. Am I going to spend it all? That would be great. Get some more inventory and see what I can turn that into.
Another cool thing I might do too is I might track specifically what I buy today and then from that $1,000 investment be able to show you guys maybe a month from now, two months from now when everything sells through and share exactly what that thousand dollars turn into, I think that’d be great.
So, when you first come in, you’re going to see a giant wall of shoes and when you are new you come in here and go, what the heck do I even look at?
So let’s dive in brand by brand and show you guys what to do. We’ll start with Nike because they’re fairly simple. These shoes have been going around for a while. These Superbad pros, $13.99 you’ll see this pink tag indicates they have been reduced.
That usually is a sweet tag. Ross does really well on stuff. So when you see that pink on the tag, pay close attention. And again, Nike is super easy to look at the size tag. So we’re looking at the size tag around, look at this style code right here. All we’re gonna do is open up an eBay app, go to search and I’ll type in those couple of different ways. Do this. Number one, this is usually how I do it, is in type in Nike and then whatever that style code is.
Here we have a 511334-116 so the first six digits are going to be what style of shoe it is. The last three digits are what color it is. So you can see these are being listed $40 all the way up to $50 or $60. But these are just what’s listed. We don’t care about these prices. This is basically what the seller is asking. We care about what customers are actually paying.
So go to filter, do sold and completed as well done. So we can see based on that exact thing, this sold for $24.99 plus $17 shipping. So its the same style, different color, selling for $39. Same one for $40, $40, $44 so you can see not great. If you punch this number in, because this is only going to pull up the listings that have that number in the title or the description.
If you pull this number and search for it and it doesn’t have any listings underneath that, you’re going to Google that and that’s going to give you the name of the shoe. And then you can just put the name in here.
So, the cover, typically shoes, I personally do free priority shipping on all my stuff. So typically it’s going to be about $10 to $12 on average. Sometimes you get a little bit more of that last sort of $10 with a clear round with just completed items. See that was completed at $40 and same thing.
So this is not giving us enough margin to really play around with. So I decided to skip these cleats right now I’m going for a little bit higher price and it’s fairly simple for other brands. So you’ve got Puma and Adidas are both going to have what’s called an art number.
(So, I zoom in right here). So you read where they have the art number. So let’s do the same thing. Just type in Puma and then there are number, see what pops up if that nothing comes up and just Google it and get the name. Same thing on the Adidas. Adidas is nice cause the art number is usually pretty short. Third one that goes by an heart number is actually under armor.
So again, underneath the sizes you’ll see that part number right there. So just type in under armor and under armor you also see UA is what people, but commonly and then search that. That’s the basics of how you searched the model numbers and get the names for these types of shoes too. Until you come in here often, can you start to memorize what different styles hard I’ve just used the style codes for now.
So the Tag of the Shoe will tell you exactly what you are looking at, are you with me? As I am writing for this I realize this is going to be harder than I had originally thought. Honestly it is just common sense. punch in the tag info into eBay Completed Auctions and see what comes up. That is the simplest way to explain what I am doing when finding shoes to flip.
And then next up is pricing.
So common ones that you’ll see usually range between like $30 and $50, which typically is when we hold the too high. Personally I like to pay under thirty. So, these are going to be worth looking at the comps. I don’t mind paying $30 for a pair I can sell quickly. I will invest $50 for a pair of shoes, as long as it’s going to bring in a $90 to $120 when I flip them on eBay.
The higher the buying price, the higher the sell price. In order to make it worth it. We’re gonna type in under armor, and the art code is 126420-734. & see what comes up. And again, these are $30 to buy and we can already see that these are selling for $34.99, so I really don’t even need to do this, but let’s just look at the sold listings. Yeah. So you can see this style is definitely not going to be worth 30 bucks.
Jeez, I’m actually picked up several of these lately because, check this out. Here’s 17 but the thing with these, these are going to be track shoes. So you want to make sure that they come with the spikes. Now, if they’re super popular, they actually don’t need to come with spikes. I actually sold one pair of wisp based one without and, I just chose a lot of laughs for the one without, haven’t actually gotten this color yet.
So I’m gonna check and see these are going for certain type in the style code is 98964-100 so $17 by cost. Again, I do free shipping. It’s always a factor in about $10 bucks extra for shipping. If I’m looking at about $27 for by cost shipping, obviously $34.39 is what they are going for & not going to be worth it. Yes, I can make a profit selling these, but it is smarter to put my investment capital in a pair of shoes that will give me greater returns.
Chances are a lot of new people came in and flooded this a little bit, so this style is going to be a no-go today. Now there are other styles just like this, especially the ones that keep an eye. They have silver bottoms or gold bottoms. Those things run pretty well, so you guys can see there’s a little bit more to it than just looking up the style code. You kind of have to know what your margins are going to be if no, if you’re tracking shipping, if you’re not, and play around with different numbers that way. See what works best for you.
Now I’m going to go through and basically you might checks on as many things as I can and see what we find.
All right, Ross, number one was a bust, but like I said, we don’t win every single one. There’s actually a lot of stores where you don’t win. It’s very few that you do win. So every time you see these Instagram posts or YouTube videos, you see all these great sales that people are making. Just remember how many shoes they scanned to find those great deals.
All right, so why don’t you find a pair that you think you might want to start investing in. I’ll show you guys how we run the numbers just to see what fees and all that kind of stuff are going to be. So here’s a pair of Nike Vapors for $20 so once you look it up on the, so you can see these are selling pretty consistently across the board.
So, I’m going to come in and these are actually a size 14 which is higher. And you guys do not be afraid of bigger sizes because they’re harder to find, which means people have to go to eBay and Amazon to get them.
These are $20 let’s say I can list them at $49.99 so I’m just going to type that in 49.99 and then run the eBay fees. So eBay fees and with PayPal is about 13% so there are times 0.873 13% again, I usually deduct about $10 for shipping.
That leaves me $33.49 I’m going to try for $20 for my product cost. So if I can sell these a $50 and get the shipping under $10 I can make about $13 now these are larger size, which means that they’re probably going to be a little bit higher on shipping.
So I’m going to deduct two more dollars for shipping. So, I’m going to spend $20 make about $10 or $11 which is about a 50% ROI, which I’m actually good with.
And here’s what I’m going to do the deal, not just because I’m going to make a quick, easy 10 bucks, but because we have the dates, you can see these are 2/5, 2/5, 2/4, 2/2, 2/2. The sold dates tell me, this shoe is selling quick. Now, these are not selling that fast. I would not worry about it because it’s only a $10 profit, but because I can list these tonight and probably sell them in the next couple of days, so I decided to go for it.
Again, that’s just one of the business models I play with as a quick flip, make 10/20 bucks at the time. Of course mixing in the golden ones which are $30, $40, $50 profits. It’s up to you to determine if you want to go for those quick flips and accept a little bit smaller margin or if you want to hold out, wait a month or two for yours to sell and then you get a higher profit from them.
That’s another one. I’m not sure how this is going to do, but it’s only 18 bucks. The buying cost is fairly low, so I can afford to lose that or hold on to it for awhile. Is there a size 16, 10.5 or 55 a size 16 one for $60 so I was okay with holding out turning $18 into potentially 60 40 another pair of those track ones. $16.99 even on the low end of $40 bucks, $20 $17 of the forties to start making a few dollars profit.
Keep in mind that you want to look for unique stuff too and not just the typical Nike’s and Reebok’s and all my stuff. So I just pass these and I’ve missed this the first time until I pass on the second half. Well Mickey Mouse on those guys, Crocs, $15 selling for $50, $55, $55, $50, $35, and a low. And these are newer tags by the way. $55 so I am definitely gonna snatch these guys. All right, store number two, got three pair total. $55 bucks, not too bad.
Number three. Another dud you can definitely tell the store is that other resellers have been in and picked over. And then other ones, like the last one, I got those three pair pretty easily.
There were like $10 to $15 profit. But like I said earlier I don’t want to sit and hold out for that stuff. I want to try to get my stuff moving as quickly as possible. If I can get sales that happen in under two weeks, I’m more than happy to do that with, so some of these carriers in here, they were just not too great.
Ross number four is a no go. My game plan now is to jump over. I’m in the Hillsboro Beaverton area. I’m actually going to jump over to the other side of Portland and a head up North from there, hit Vancouver just over the river and come back down South and end up through happy Valley and Salem after that. So here is what happened………….
At the rate I’m going, I’m spending about 20 to 30 minutes in each store, which I’m right on schedule with. At this point in time, I don’t know for sure I’m going to have time to hit all 20, but I’m gonna do my best and just keep bouncing from store to store.
Ross number five. I’ve got two pairs. These have the spikes with them, which is great. And again, all of these track one track and field one for finding our $16.99 so $17. Comps are hanging out right about the $50 mark, which I’m good with. Second pairs, actually the first one I found one of these is each of these and we slightly difference a track and field series. So these one’s got spikes are typically going track based. These guys are just rubber bottoms and these are actually for Shotput and Discuss.
Again, 17 bucks and we got season coming up. So, these pretty fast, we got $55, $59, $58 cause you’re going to cheat a little bit because there is a Burlinglington co-factor right around the corner.
Ross number six did really, really well. Super excited. (This was a personal buy because it looks super comfortable). So check these things.
So another tip is keep an eye out for just crazy looking colorways. People love that stuff. Um, these were another cheap one. $17.99, $23 for these guys should double our money on these sounds.
More of those Springs that we did earlier about some of these tiger Adidas, a couple of good stuff in here that they’re going to go and do at the very end of the day when I’m all done with this is I’m going to tally up everything for you guys and give you an overall shot. So stay tuned at the end of the video and I’ll go ahead and cover everything in a whole.
Also, cheated again popped over to Marshall’s cause it was right in the same block. Found these guys for 25 bucks. You should see about double our money back on that, but the profit.
Ross number seven. So kid shoes are usually hit or miss. Sometimes you’ll find something in here. It comes up tempos couple months back and then he gets stuff like this. Really Ross? Found another pair of these guys cause Tiger’s awesome. Way higher on buying costume. I like 40 bucks but some of these have sold as high as $110 so I can take a shot it
Number eight, let’s go. So reception is super, super spotty in here so I could barely look anything up. So I’m going to have instincts. Some of these, these are just way different. Color way was the usual under Armour’s that I’ve seen in this style.
So you guys can see some clutch fit. The comp I did be able to pull out, these are $30 but I did see that some of them sell for about $90. Some kind of take a shot of that. And then two brands I’ve actually never heard of. It’s always good just to double check brands you don’t know is Umbro red jacket retail was $65.
This guy is actually 10 bucks. I couldn’t find this exact one. Again, my reception is not doing the best with me. I couldn’t find this exact one, but the ones that did fine, we’re selling upwards of $40 to $50 so we’ll see. And then the last one, I have never actually heard of the brand, but I, I recognize the alligator. So I picked these shoes up.
They are on sale for $30. I think it’s a LaCost. I’m sure one of you reading this article are familiar with this brand. So I looked at the comps on just generic white sneakers at this brand and some of them are selling upwards of $60 to $70 so I’m going to take a shot at these too.
That’s half of the ballgame guys. If you want to get good at flipping and you want to get good at sourcing, you have to just take the test buys and use trial and error sometimes to get to know what works for you.
Store #13 was a Goodwill and a total bomb. I don’t know if I have ever been in a Junkier Goodwill. I should have stayed on the Ross path, but it is hard to resist the hunt.
Ross number 11. I got a decent pair here. The brand I bought usually sales pretty good, but its the first time I’m seeing this shoe in black, $25, but every day lots of sales; $69, $59, $87. So if I list these for $60; $25 from $60. Not bad so I bought them.
Ross Number 12 I arrived at 8:00 PM. So, I was hoping no one took all the good stuff. I ran out of time. I still made it to 12 Ross & three other stores, which was Burlington, TJ Maxx and Marshall’s. Now like I said at the beginning of the video, not every single store was a win, but hopefully you have seen I have been able to pick up some solid pairs of shoes at Ross that I will be able to resale and make good money with.
All right, so here’s the final hall. Ended up investing in 23 pairs of shoes total, which is right on track with what I wanted out of the 13 stores that we went to. I ended up purchasing from nine. The total I invested, based on the receipts, was $532 divided between the 23 pairs. I spent an average of about $23 per pair, which was right on target with what I wanted.
So, aside from that, I’m going to label these as specific ways. So I know this was part of one load on eBay. So when each time I sell something I’m going to track on Excel. Now I’ll do a followup article once these are all sold and share with you guys based on that $532 price tag that I paid, how much we actually made in profit. So, as you guys can see we got a huge variety of different kinds of shoes. The ones that I’m loving right now are the Nike track cause I’ve sold a few of them. Right now are these track and field shoes are out of season.
So you’ll have different ones. Like these are going to be a Discus/ ShotPut shoe. Javelin, and so on.
I have sold some of these before for about $80 so I know these are going to be a really good profit makers for me, especially because the track and field ones are usually being clearanced out and I only have 18 bucks in them right now.
Now when you’re going to source shoes, be sure to pay attention to what type of athlete that you’re looking at. So, anything that’s track related, typically you’re going to have a smaller frame person. I typically go with smaller sizes on those.
That’s not to say you can’t go bigger and get away with it. That’s fine. So, all in all, I am extremely happy with this. These were not great fines. Let me just put that out there. I didn’t find anything that was rare or really, really tough to get a hold of. These are just kind of average sales. Some of these we’ll see a $30 $40 profit on other ones we’ll see 15 or 20.
But again, like I said earlier, throughout this whole video, it’s up to you to do your research. Use trial and error if you are curious and if something will sell, just buy it, list it and see how it does. But at the end of the day you need to decide what type of business model you want to run. These are just a few examples of what we do. Alright, and last piece of information I wanted to cover real quick is how I ship my shoes.
Now I’m not going to cover that step by step in this article. I will do a shoe specific shipping article for you guys pretty in the future. But I just wanted to share with you the two boxes I use.
So number one is just the standard priority shoe box. This will fit most shoes, especially these smaller ones. Now if it gets to a larger size or something that’s a little bit higher top I use the larger priority box. These boxes are available free from your local post office.
For this one, you’re going to take a cut halfway through the box, come down on each side and then after that cut is done and it’s gonna allow you to fold this into a little bit bigger of an opening that we can fit those in there. But again, that’s just the basics of the two boxes I use. Thanks for reading this article, make sure to subscribe to onlineauctionu.com to stay in the loop on all things flipping.
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