3 Stupid Simple Steps To Finding Your Reselling Niche In A Couple Hours
Map Out Your Reselling Business On A Lazy Saturday Afternoon
3 Stupid Simple Steps To Finding Your Reselling Niche In A Couple Hours
TL;DR - You can use google to locate the local thrift stores within a 50 mile radius of where you live. If you go to those stores, you’ll see what items those thrift stores sell a lot of. You can then go to ebay and filter by price and by location to see what sells in your area and go buy those items to resell online.
You can ask everyone in the reselling community what you should sell and you’ll either get no answer or you’ll get the tried and true response of, “Sell whatever’s profitable” which is a nice way of saying I’m not telling you what I sell.
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The reason everyone is so guarded when it comes to what niche they sell in is because they don’t want to create any competition for themselves. As if all of a sudden they will be out on the street because you decide to sell used clothing like they do. Obviously this is a silly notion seeing as there are thousands of used clothing sellers but it still doesn’t stop people from being afraid to share their niche.
Niche is just a fancy word for category. For instance, If you sell toys, you are in the toy niche. Some people only sell a single type of toy like Transformers or Legos. This is called “niching down”. The farther down you go, the more streamlined you can make your business, but that’s a lesson for another day.
It took me a year to really figure out what to sell and I am going to give you the fast lane method on how you can figure out what’s a good fit for you to resell.
The Lay Of The Land
Everyone wants to know where to get inventory to fill their online stores. When I say everyone, I really mean everyone. This simple notion is so difficult to solve that even veteran resellers still ask anyone they think might be able to help them if they got a good supplier. The reason why is because they went about starting their reselling business backwards.
You first have to know what you are working with. Consider this step one in your reselling journey. Go on to google maps at your house and search for “thrift stores” and set the radius to how many miles you think is a reasonable distance to travel to a thrift store. I suggest 25 to 50 miles to start. This is going to give you an idea as to how many stores you can buy inventory from. The more thrift stores in your area the better.
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If you happen to live in a real rural area, you will have to be either willing to travel farther out for thrift stores, or learn how to find bundles or lots of items for sale on platforms such as eBay, Facebook marketplace or Craigslist. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a successful reselling business, it just means you’ll have to be more resourceful.
Maybe you live in an urban area and you have a metric ton of thrift stores in your area. You might think that’s a lucky break until you step foot in those stores. You’ll quickly learn that the thrift stores in the city tend to price everything much higher than they do out in suburbia. This doesn’t mean you cannot find great items, it just means you might have to be more selective of the items that you pick up. If you live in the suburbs, you have a bit of the best of both worlds. You might not have that many thrift stores in your area and the ones that you do have are overpriced. Make sure that you make a list of all the thrift stores in your area because in step two we are going to need that list so that we can formulate something of a grade sheet for the thrift stores.
What’s Abundant at the thrift?
Now you have a strategy you can work with by identifying how many thrift stores are in your areas. This is going to dictate how much you can legitimately source from thrift stores and how much you are going to have to find from online or yard sales.
Just knowing all the thrift stores in your local area is not enough. It’s time to actually go to all of these thrift stores, with your list in hand, so we can grade each thrift store. I suggest that you make two notes for each store. The first note being what is the most abundant niche at that thrift. Does that thrift sell a lot of toys? If they do make sure you make a note of that. If you really want to sell in a specific niche, you can note what the status of that niche for that store is.
The second thing you are going to want to take a note of for each store is their pricing. For you to make a profit, you have to buy these items at a decent price that makes sense. Not only do you want to identify the pricing for the niche that is most abundant or the niche that you wish to sell in, but you are also going to want to know if they have any rewards programs that you can take advantage of. Does the thrift store offer discounts for seniors, military or college students? Does the thrift have regular discount days that garner additional saving opportunities? Just because a thrift store is priced high or low doesn’t mean they aren’t a good fit, it just means you have to be more strategic with that thrift location.
What should you buy?
Now it is time to answer the big question. What niche should you dive into. You are so close to being able to answer this question but you are still missing one vital piece. You have to know what profitable items are in the niche that you have determined from your thrift stores. To do this we are going to enroll the help of eBay.
We are going to jump on to ebay and do a search for whatever niche we decided was a good fit based on the stores that we toured. For the sake of this article we are going to pick the niche “toys” to do our search. We are going to do a broad search for “toys” in the main ebay search bar at the top and hit enter. We are now going to filter our search by price. I suggest starting out the price filter to a $20 minimum and a $50 maximum. This is going to give you a really good mix of high dollar items that are reasonably good fit for your business.
Next, And this is where the secret sauce comes in, we are going to filter by location. Set your filter to the same distance that you set it for when you were looking for thrift stores in your area. This is going to tell you all the toys that have been selling in your area so you know the local thrift stores will have them because they have already sold in the area on ebay! Make a list of all the toys and especially toys that have multiple listings of the same sort of toys. You can do this with any other platform you feel is good for reselling your niche. Some other platforms are Facebook Marketplace, Poshmark, Mercari and Craigslist.
Now you have what we in the business call a “BOLO list”. This list is going to be your ticket to building a very profitable online reselling business. I can tell you that list you have just made, other resellers have spent years chasing down. It is something that you are going to want to keep close to your chest.
The daily thrift grind
You now have all the pieces and parts for a very successful online reselling business. You were able to map out the outline of your business in an afternoon (or a week if you have a ton of thrift stores in your area), You have a few last ends to tie up before you can deem all this a success. You need to map out a good thrift route.
You might be a real “go getter” and want to list 25 items a day. That is going to require you to find more than 25 items per day in order to list that many items. You are going to need a thrift route that will give you the best shot at getting all those items.
Remember when you went to all those thrift stores and got all the discount info on each of the stores? Maybe 3 stores in your area have 50% off sales on Sunday. You now know that on Sundays, if you need to thrift, you need to hit up those stores because they are going to keep your buy costs down. You can figure out what are the best stores based on the day of the week to give you the best savings because of the list you made.
After a while, you will also learn when the employees put out the new items and you will want to adjust your thrift route accordingly. You will also learn which thrift stores are “high volume” (meaning they sell a lot of items a day) and put out new items more frequently. You will also be able to weed out “low volume” stores that you only have to check in on once a week or once per month.
Final Thoughts
You have your list, you know where the best items are and when they are the cheapest to buy. You now know when to go and get them. The only thing left is to go out and get them! This of course isn’t the only aspect to having a successful reselling business. You have to know how to correctly list these items that you have found on the proper reselling platforms for the best chance to make the most money. Honestly, with good in demand products, even some listing mistakes shouldn’t stop you from having a strong online reselling business. But I can help you with that as well.
If you want to be a part of a great online reselling community, make sure you join our Facebook group.
In my next article, I will be going over how to list properly on eBay. It’s not as hard as you think but you have to know what you’re doing!