My watch-flipping experiment

Dan S

I would go to the thrift store and buy some old diver style watches for $5 each and sell them for $25 on eBay. Buying and selling on eBay alone doesn’t give you much upside, since you will be trying to sell back to the same market that passed up the chance to buy the watches originally. The value added by cleaning up the watches and describing them better will be very minimal, and eBay fees and taxes will eat up your profits. Also if you traffic in less desirable watches, they will take a long time to sell, and the turnaround time will reduce the efficiency of the flipping. It will become boring and cumbersome. Just my two cents.

pIoNeErOfThEnILe

you have to branch out to more expensive watches. it's gonna take a long time to build up your nest egg reselling 25 watches...up your spending to 100/200..and look to double your investment

i'm not sure you can do it long term without stepping up in pricing, and how much is your time worth to make$ 5.oo-10.oo? for the work putting in.

ebay use to be a place to find great deals on watches, and in some aspects it still is, but hitting a HR is much, much harder than it use to be. (buying a 100 watch and reselling it for 1000)

i believe watch prices across all brands have plateaued and have already begun to come back down. the most recent price pushes in the past 5/10 yrs made watches very expensive.

stuff just sits on ebay for the most part, as there are less deals because of it. you can spend hours trying to find a steal of a deal and come up empty

Engee

It’s just a game - I’m not trying to build a business or even a nest-egg here. Just trying to learn about watches - what’s desirable and collectible, by researching the lesser known brands - and trying to add value with that knowledge, well written descriptions and decent pictures.

However, as you and others have said, it seems there very little juice to be squeezed out of eBay to eBay flipping. Problem there is I’m not really able to get out to boot sales or markets these days so either I keep looking on eBay for bargains or put the game on hold until the lockdown is over.

Maybe there are other online sources, but I suspect that craigslist and places like Facebook marketplace are even more full of junk and fakes than eBay, but without the protection, and therefore without the incentive for sellers to self-police at least to some degree. So eBay it is for the time being, and let’s see what happens. Or doesn’t.

cristos71

Not bad for 18 months work! 😉😁😜

gbesq

Sounds like an interesting experiment. My approach takes a longer term view. I buy quality at reasonable prices. Watches that are in good to excellent condition, don’t need work, are not particularly easy to find, that are increasing in value, and that I think other collectors would want to acquire. Most importantly, I buy watches that meet the foregoing criteria that I also want to wear. If I tire of a particular piece eventually, then I sell it and hopefully make a profit or, at a minimum, recoup my servicing costs. Works for me.