How to Make Money Selling on eBay: Real Side Hustle Income

eBay Side Hustle 

Zac Shaw is back—and this time, we’re talking all about his eBay side hustle, Over and Out Vintage. 

From vintage board games to throwback clothing, Zac’s turned thrifting into a side career, blending online sales with a brick-and-mortar twist. Great selling on ebay information for beginners and what ebay reselling business is like.

What started as casual weekend treasure hunting, turned into a serious job with its own highs and lows. Zac spills on the thrill of scoring hidden gems, the hustle of building a solid reputation online, and how AI is shaking up the reselling game.

Join us for a journey through the challenges and rewards of this unique career path. 

Zac's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/overandoutvintage/

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Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation

Transcript

Finding Value in Discarded Items

Speaker 2 0:04

This is insane. That people are throwing this stuff away Like the thrill of finding those objects, even if it's rare is just incredible. At the end of the day, it's arbitrage right. It's just you're finding something at a lower price that someone will value at a higher price.

Speaker 1 0:19

Hi everyone. Welcome back to how Much Can I Make. I'm your host, merav Ozeri. Last week we heard from Zach Show about his job as a local news writer and editor. Today he's back to talk about his side hustle, running his eBay store Over and Out Vintage. If you ever wondered how thrifting turns into a business, this one's for you. So let's dive right in. Zach, thanks for coming back on the show. Let's dive right in and tell us how did the eBay store come about? How?

Speaker 2 0:50

did it come about? Well, I've always been a thrifter. My partner's always been a thrifter. Most of our wardrobe is stuff we've gotten from thrift stores Goodwill, salvation Army. I'm drawn to quirky, weird pieces of clothing.

Speaker 2 1:04

Then a few years ago I got into designing a board game during COVID. It seemed like the perfect thing to do. I was locked inside. So as I was designing that board game, I got into vintage board games. And that's when the real sickness began. And it was like every yard sale, every goodwill, I was hoarding all of these vintage board games, anything from like 1950s to 90s. They just started stacking up everywhere. We started grabbing t-shirts. We got this opportunity where my partner who works at LeShag Salon in Kingston. They have a little storefront and they say hey, if you're doing this vintage thing, how about you put up some vintage and used novelty tees and stuff like that? And, long story short, it was really successful. We sold a ton of them out of the Le Chag Salon. That's kind of the main thing that we did, but we also continuously do eBay. Obviously, we reached a huge audience there. Ebay is kind of a pain in the butt but it is a great way to sell certain things.

Speaker 1 1:56

Would you say your niche is the game, the vintage games.

Building a Trusted eBay Store

Speaker 2 1:59

We definitely have some niches, because one thing we learned early on is you really have to know everything about the thing you're selling like. There were so many things that I learned in the first year of flipping vintage board games that saved me so much money down the line and you know, just like my new things like if the box quality and the box condition is like way more of the value of a vintage board game than any other aspect you know, I didn't know that until I bought a bunch of crappy boxes. So we do vintage games, we do vintage clothes Like I know how to identify a shirt tag from the 80s or 90s. My partner does the women's clothes. You get that feedback when people do buy things that tells you exactly what you should be finding, and so after a few years of doing this, we've gotten pretty good at picking out the valuable things and then keep the trash so what does it take to open a store on ebay?

Speaker 1 2:49

how did you start it? You started brick and mortar and then you did the shift. What did it take?

Speaker 2 2:54

I was fortunate to start an ebay account perhaps a decade ago. I have always been a collector of magic, the gathering cards and other collectibles, so it was always a way for me to kind of make a few extra bucks turning around items in my collection that I no longer needed. What that did, though, was give me this long kind of history of always shipping on time and always shipping the right thing, et cetera, et cetera. On eBay, it's reputation, it's everything. It's kind of like the same way with the gig economy If you get too many people saying this ship a week late or this came damaged, then all of a sudden your eBay store is going to collapse.

Speaker 2 3:30

So we have, like, one of the top eBay seller ratings, because we're fastidious about getting everything to everyone in the right way, refunding people when we need to. So I'd say, if you're looking to start an eBay account, it's really about building that reputation early on, because, also, if you have, you know they rank people on stars, so, like we have several hundred stars, which means we've had thousands of sales. If you start out, it's very hard to gain people's trust because you don't have any stars, and so you have to make small sales to really build that up. And trust is everything on eBay, because the biggest pain of eBay is that scammers are not uncommon on eBay People who will essentially bid on your item and then they're going to try and get that item and then say they didn't get it and they want a refund. That's the most common thing.

Speaker 1 4:11

How do you check?

Speaker 2 4:12

for that. There's various ways you can mitigate it. There's no real way to stop it entirely. I found like you have to offer free this is kind of technical, but like you have to offer free shipping, because if you offer paid shipping and then you discover they're a scam, now you're out that shipping cost and basically the way you discover their scam is someone bids on your auction that has no interactions on eBay yet and they have some random username that's probably generated by a bot. I get most of them by monitoring the auctions and eliminating blocking those people when they do bid. But everyone now and then someone gets through. So I honestly stopped selling big ticket items on eBay for that reason. I was running into. It doesn't happen on the smaller things, but once you sell a board game for like $300, people come out of the woodwork to essentially bid on that, get it, receive it in the mail and then claim they didn't get it and then yeah, so how do you end up selling the $300 piece?

The Challenges of Online Selling

Speaker 2 5:05

Right now we're working on a pop-up. You know, around Christmas time we're trying to get into one of the local game stores to display the whole vintage game library. Then I can get, you know, good money for the higher ticket items. The games cost a fortune to ship, so the second you're shipping them. It doesn't really make sense cost-wise. And that's what we found is, if you can sell it brick and mortar, if you can sell it in person, it's just so much more profitable. You're not paying processing fees, you're not paying rent to be somewhere, you're not being scammed and you don't have to do shipping. So you can sell things for even more than you would on eBay.

Speaker 1 5:39

Do you have to pay eBay on each sale?

Speaker 2 5:42

Yeah, I think it's something like 9%. I should probably know this. I do that's a lot. I kind of close my eyes. How long have you had the store? I want to say two years, but we have done it sort of under the radar for several more years than that. Pretty much. When we first got together we were going out thrifting and since then we've done trips to Connecticut through Ohio and we did some purpose-built thrifting trips Like we hit, I think, 12 drift stores in Connecticut, reasoning that there's rich people in Connecticut so they probably throw away good stuff. And we were right but not to be a downer.

Speaker 2 6:13

But it really does seem like this has become a very popular side hustle and it's very hard now to find the good stuff. You really do have to travel outside of areas where people are doing this in order to find the gem and people are now much more hip to what things are worth. It used to be that I would. Frequently. The way you make money is finding something that's mispriced, like a strange brand that the company typed in the code for and put the wrong price on. You can make a lot of money finding those a board game that's super rare, that the person didn't know. But now AI everything just tells you exactly what the price is and figures it out. It's a very competitive space.

Speaker 1 6:50

Is it a good side hustle?

Speaker 2 6:51

It is a good side hustle because, even though it's getting more difficult, that feeling of you know, like the other day we're at a yard sale brand new set of chairs that goes for you know $200 online and you talk the person down from 40 to 30. You're just like this is insane, that people are throwing this stuff away. The thrill of finding those objects, even if it's rare, is just incredible. At the end of the day, it's arbitrage right. It's just you're finding something at a lower price that someone will value at a higher price and in that way it's kind of dull and there's a lot of drudgery and packaging stuff for eBay and whatnot, but there's satisfaction in giving something of value to someone that they treasure On eBay. You'd be surprised at how many people write back a message being like I just got this item and it's so amazing and it's made my day and I love this.

Speaker 2 7:38

Do you get a lot of returns? No, returns have not been really the problem. It's been mostly either people scamming and obviously not having legit accounts, or it's been mostly either you know people scamming and obviously not having legit accounts, or it's been something like something gets held up in the mail. Oftentimes someone will ask for a refund and I'll say wait a few days, you know it's probably going to come and most of the time they're like oh yeah, how do you drive traffic to your store?

Speaker 2 8:02

Well, for eBay it's. I don't do too much extra. I mean, we do have an Instagram account, but for the most part it's just showing up in eBay searches and you know I'm familiar with search engine optimization from doing my digital marketing work, so you know I know how to write the titles and put in all the info for it to appear in searches and then eBay tells you how many people are seeing it and then you can modify based on that to get more people. So if we ever were to scale this up, I'd probably be more aggressive on social media, because that's definitely a way to drive people to your stuff.

Speaker 1 8:29

So you have different side hustles between music and digital customers that you help them with the digital world. Which one is your favorite side hustle? Is it the eBay?

Unexpected TikTok Fame

Speaker 2 8:39

Well, the eBay is probably the most fun but it's also not extraordinarily financially rewarding. Like every time I work on it I'm kind of like I could make so much more money per hour like doing any number of the other things I do, but it just, you know, the fun of it compensates. I just love creating stuff that people get value out of. Like the most popular thing I ever made was the TikTok channel, which has half a million viewers, 60 million views on our top video, whoa. It paid our rent for a few months.

Speaker 1 9:08

Well, you mean, you got money from TikTok for that?

Speaker 2 9:11

Yeah, when I talk to kids, I have a 12 year old. When I talk to some of her friends, they're like that's your account, you're a celebrity. Oh man, you're going to be famous. The entire channel is me feeding this animatronic children's toy. That's like sitting on a toilet. I feed weird food, that's all it is.

Speaker 2 9:27

And so people like there was one day where I was like we've reached more people than all cable news combined like more people have seen what we did today. This makes no sense and then also to have your like most popular achievement be the dumbest possible thing you could think of. We tried posting other stuff and then people go no, no, we don't want this, we want to be feeding the toy. So we tried posting other stuff and then people go no, no, we don't want this, we want to be feeding the toy. So, unfortunately, the toy sings a song Uh-oh, gotta go.

Speaker 2 9:53

And they have copyright struck every video. Now, like every anytime we try and put it up, they just take out the audio because they have claimed a copyright on the song that the toy sings. So we can no longer. So we're like what do we do now? I don't know. We'd send this on ourselves, can you. It got to the point where I was like what am I doing? Maybe, but it was like a deep philosophical hole where it was just kind of like is this what my life is amounting to? Like feeding a toy cold pizza so that, like 12-year-olds, can comment like feed it Almond's next, you know.

Speaker 1 10:21

How much TikTok pays for 60 million?

Speaker 2 10:24

views. Well, talk pays for 60 million views. Well, that was a while ago. It's not as much as it used to be. I mean, back then I think we got 1500 for that one video. I kind of I feel like it kind of worked out to maybe like 20 to 30 dollars per million views. So I told like, uh, my old landlord. I was like, yeah, we got 60 million views on this video. She's like, yeah, my son just came out as trans or something and got five million views on their video. I'm like like, oh, I guess I'm not that special.

Speaker 1 10:49

Anyone can reach millions of people overnight, it's a bizarre world that we live in, Totally bizarre. One thing I'm curious about when you buy a vintage game and you buy it at some thrift shop, you have to check that every piece is there. Does it happen that you ship it and then there's a missing piece and it's a whole big hustle?

Speaker 2 11:07

yeah, I mean, usually what happens is you you check the box and you think all the pieces are there and then you recount and you're like, oh, there was just one missing. But I actually have an ai assistant that helps me count all the pieces, because I'll be like, okay, this is the this year edition of this game. What are the pieces that are supposed to be here?

Speaker 1 11:25

this is what I'm seeing, and ai, I tell you it comes in, so handy amazing it's very helpful I know what was your biggest seller.

Vintage Sales and Future with AI

Speaker 2 11:33

We sold a lot of band t-shirts for a while. So the funny thing is like I did a little bit of this, maybe like 10 years ago, and I was turning over real vintage shirts. Like you know, a jimmy hendrix shirt from 1980 would go for like 150. That market has collapsed because the bands got wise to this and started basically making fake vintage merch. You've seen this.

Speaker 1 11:54

Yeah, no, but I can imagine now that you mention it, so it looks like a vintage band t-shirt, like a vintage Def Leppard t-shirt or something.

Speaker 2 12:01

But then you look at the tag and it's printed on and it's their official merch, and so that gutted the whole vintage rock market. But ironically, for a while those reproduction shirts were popular, and this is where it gets nuts. So these shirts are sold at Target for like $10. And you can easily find them in thrift stores for three or four. We were putting them on the rack for $20 and they were selling.

Speaker 1 12:27

Wow, that must have surprised you.

Speaker 2 12:30

It blew us away and I mean, I think part of it is just it's a luxury salon next to more expensive clothes, so it's in a context that makes you feel like the shirt's actually more valuable than what it's worth. And I also think people are used to spending like lots of money if they go to a show and get merch Like it's always way more expensive. Anyway, that's died out. I think people have gotten hip to that. But that was probably our biggest, most profitable product because you could just get it everywhere and they would fly off the shelf.

Speaker 1 12:57

And which game sold the best.

Speaker 2 12:59

So I haven't really sold much of the game collection. Honestly, sitting on that collection a little more because this pop-up around Christmas, my instinct is that that's going to be the way to sell them. Like, a few times a year, go to a game store. It's easy to find people who want shirts Everyone wears shirts. It's much harder to find someone who specifically wants a vintage board game.

Speaker 1 13:19

So do you see yourself doing this in the next five, 10 years? Are you continuing with the eBay store?

Speaker 2 13:26

Yeah, I'll always be snapping up these vintage board games we might phase out of apparel because, for various reasons, I just feel like it's a saturated market. It's hard to find the good stuff anymore. But I'm a 10-year believer in vintage board games. I think they're going to be like vinyl records in the future. It would be so cool to. One thing I want to do is provide vintage board games to the local bars that have, especially the ones that have like the vintage aesthetic. What a great idea.

Speaker 2 13:52

Amidst all the side hustles and everything that we've talked about, the one thing I know I'm going to be doing in 10 years is, whatever it is, it's going to be mediated by AI. Like what's coming over the next few years is going to be a complete creative revolution where any single person is going to be able to create their own video game, board game, book song. Everyone will be a musician, everyone will be an artist, and a lot of my fellow creators are scared, terrified of that prospect, and I just see it as the best thing to ever happen in humanity. Like every single person is going to be able to be a creator. Like that's where culture gets interesting again, when you never know what's going to happen. Every day, there's something completely new coming out of someone's head that would have never been able to do that if they didn't have AI to take them. You know 95% of the way there, so I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1 14:37

Are you working on designing your own game?

Speaker 2 14:40

Yes, I'm playtesting my card game called the Last Game on Earth, which is one player plays major disasters and the other player plays the last remaining survivors on Earth in sort of a battle to survive, and I very much look forward to making video games with AI.

Speaker 1 14:57

And, by the way, why did you choose eBay and not other outlets? It's just the biggest audience.

Speaker 2 15:02

I know for certain women's fashion there's better choices Mercado, I think, is one of them, but I just have been doing eBay for so long that it was there. It's easier to just stay there.

Speaker 1 15:12

All right, that was so interesting. I know a lot of people are dreaming of side hustles, and I know another person that has a clothing store on eBay. She's doing all right, oh good, good I guess, if you learn the system, you could do really well.

Speaker 2 15:26

Yeah, the women's clothes especially does. I don't understand it, but they do especially well. And Women's clothes especially does.

Speaker 1 15:30

I don't understand it, but they do especially well, and, by the way, why did you choose eBay and not other outlets? Because of the auction?

Final Thoughts and Closing

Speaker 2 15:36

It's just the biggest audience. I know for certain women's fashion there's better choices. They're like specific to women's fashion. Mercado, I think, is one of them, but I just have been doing eBay for so long that it was there.

Speaker 1 15:48

It's easier to just stay there. All right, thank you so much. That was fantastic, my pleasure. All right, thank you. That's a wrap for today. Big thanks to Zach for sharing his side hustle story. If your dream is to have your own eBay gig, I hope his tips sparked your next move. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to hit the follow button before you go. See you next week.