Another update on The Penny Stupid Project that Damon Day and I are working on to help test and find good side hustle opportunities so you can make side hustle income to help with your debt situation.
This week I’ve got an update on one of the side hustle projects I’m working on, online arbitrage and retail arbitrage.
In this week’s update, you will see more encouraging news and lessons learned.
We are not selling anything here, so watch the entire video and find the information you can use to earn some extra income.
Damon makes an extra $5,000 a month in his spare time exploring rideshare projects he’s testing on The Penny Stupid Project. Click here if you’d like to read posts about his Lyft experience.
Video Transcript
Steve Rhode: Alright, you are back with Steve Rhode and Damon Day, The Penny Stupid Project. We’re giving you updates again, and this time we’re talking about retail arbitrage. Damon, I have some good news. Alright, This little experiment of ours is kind of the train that could keep chugging along here, and we haven’t made a ton of sales, but.
I have learned so much over the past week or two. I’m using new software now, Source Mogul. It helps to find deals. This week I feel like I’m a whole lot better at using this software in screening for places I can buy items at a low price and send them to Amazon and make what I would say is decent money.
I’m watching videos online and listening to other people and watching ’em say, Well, you need to look for items that you’re making, like seven or $10 an item. Uh, to that, I say bullshit. I would rather spend more time. This is like your ride-share experiment.
You either drive Lyft, or you drive Lyft Lux. I would instead work half the time and make twice as much. And so, with retail arbitrage using Source Mogul, I have found how you can screen out several vendors instead of just looking at one store and just seeing what they’ve got.
I can screen, I don’t know, 50 different places to buy products. Let me give you an example I found on Amazon. I would never buy a giant bandsaw blade in my life, but I found that I could buy those blades at $35 and sell ’em on Amazon for 180. And it was just by using the software and looking at many other factors that it became a good deal to explore.
And Damon, this approach that we’re taking in this Penny Stupid Project with retail arbitrage. I think is a lot better than how we first started on day one with Walmart clearance. Right. You running around the store with your phone,
Damon Day: Walmart clearance turned into Walmart return. Yeah.
And some nice gifts for toys for Tots too, because my wife went through ’em and said, Oh, this looks cool. This looks cool. This looks cool. About half the stuff got returned, and the other half got donated for Christmas.
Steve Rhode: Well, if you are interested in retail arbitrage or Walmart flipping or clearance flipping, whatever you wanna call it, and you enjoy running around to the local stores and shopping for bargains, or as one person told me this week, they go to all the Goodwill stores and look for items in their clearance section they can sell on eBay.
To me, that sounds horrible. I don’t wanna do that at all. That sounds like a hobby where you just want to be distracted and fill your time. I don’t wanna do that. I wanna operate smarter and not harder, and I would rather use technology to help me do that. This week I should have delivered a whole bunch of different items that I had found, and I broke the cardinal rule.
Avoiding electronic items. I know many people have said that, but I found a particular niche that I think is really good, and I’m testing it out. I don’t go and buy like 10 of anything. I usually buy one or two of things and then send ’em to Amazon, and we see how it goes. So I would give this week a thumbs up for retail arbitrage.
I’ve got the video coming on Source Mogul and the other things that I’m doing, and we’ll be showing results and talking about our experience. But we have come so far from that very first day when you called me from Walmart, downloading the eBay app on your phone. This is how it all started. Yeah.
Damon Day: Like we could do this like we should flip this stuff.
Oh, this is great. Yeah. We flipped a few things. We flipped those doll transporters, and Yeah, now we’re waiting for the South Park bullshit to sell. So maybe.
Steve Rhode: Yeah. Well, the funny thing is that we’re almost out of stock of retail arbitrage items we’ve purchased for sale on Amazon. And we got these stupid little 2021 South Park things that, in hindsight, if we had to do it again, just fell in your cart on day one, and we tried to make the best that we could, shining shit into Shinola or something like that.
Yeah. And trying to get something out of these South Park things. Luckily we got Christmas coming up cuz. Otherwise, I think they’d be dead in the water. But since we’re testing everything here at the Penny Stupid Project, we’re gonna test just leaving those stupid little South Park game things at Amazon over the holidays.
Let’s see if they move. Let’s test it.
Damon Day: Yeah. Well, and we have, we never got any hits. Not one hit on eBay. Not one hit for anything. I sold one of those remote control trucks. Mm-hmm. , um, which were really cool that I got at Walmart for 35 bucks, and they’re still for sale at walmart.com for $84 plus tax.
Mm-hmm. and I got ’em in the store for $35. But I sold one on Facebook marketplace to somebody local for $70. So that was nice. That was actually $35 profit cause I didn’t have fees or anything like that. And I still have one more that my wife’s like, well, if you don’t sell it, I know plenty of kids that I can get that too.
She’s shopping in my hallway out here where I got all the. All the inventory. She comes in, and she’s like, Woo, look at what you got.
Steve Rhode: I want to take this to the next level, which is the last thing I want to do is hassle with things arriving at my house and having to rebox them and all that stuff.
I had to run to the UPS store today to drop off that giant bandsaw blade. I don’t wanna do that. So, now talk about working a little smarter. I think I’m gonna have to give us credit with the Penny Stupid Project for this, but there are fulfillment houses that you can use. They charge you a couple of bucks per item, but in the state of Oregon and Delaware, they’re sales tax-free.
So you’re making money by having your items shipped to those locations, those fulfillment houses, and paying them to repackage ’em to send them to Amazon because you’re not paying sales tax. Lots of little tips. I hope to share a whole lot with people coming up. I know there are gonna be some posts about it, and hopefully, we have really good news and a path on how to show people how to do this
Damon Day: Well, I like what we’re doing by because when I’m doing this ride share, and I’m, we’re be trying these gig apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats and all that stuff. Eventually, get to. What’s nice about the dichotomy of what we’re doing is that you’re working on things that are not going to be upfront cash now.
Mm-hmm. Like you need upfront cash. Now, retail arbitrage is not the way to go, but no. As we can follow Steve on his journey as he’s learning these things and how to work smarter, not harder, he’s spending a lot of time now getting very little return. But he’s hoping to grow it to the point where he figures all this stuff out, and then he can start to ramp it.
Once he figures out how to do it and gets all the bugs worked out, he can start ramping it up, and then, yeah, he’s making a lot per hour in theory, but at the same time, the stuff that I’m doing, somebody can start today. Yeah. And go make a thousand dollars the first week. So if you need money right now, there are things that we’re testing that you could jump into and make money right now.
But at the same time, if you’re interested in retail arbitrage, something like that, or some other thing we get into, you can be doing that on the side. You could be learning, what is that Source Mogul, Steve? Yeah. Source Mogul. You can be driving for luck, and in your downtime on your laptop following Steve’s videos on Source Mogul and learning all the ins and outs of retail arbitrage, so you’re eventually building something that will generate money when you’re sleeping rather than when you’re just sitting there trading an hour for a certain amount of money.
Steve Rhode: This is crazy, but you could drive for Lyft and make so much money first. You could start buying items to send to Amazon to multiply your profit and make even more money.
Damon Day: Yeah, so it’s good. We got two different things going, two completely different strategies. Still, if you need money now, a business opportunity is usually not what you should be spending but what little money you have.
Yeah. You need to get into something that gets you income. Now I can get paid, have somebody get out of my car, hit a button, and whatever I made on that ride is in my bank account. I could get paid that fast with Lyft. So ride share. And if you don’t like people, we’re gonna be testing DoorDash and Uber Eats and all that stuff, and if you’d rather drive hamburgers around, that’s fine too.
Steve Rhode: You can maximize Amazon, not just with fulfilled by Amazon or retail arbitrage that we’re talking about. I woke up this morning to an email that said I had sold seven books I had designed and put together on Kindle Direct Publishing. There were five in the United States and two in the UK; my royalty check for that is coming.
So there are lots of ways that you can work. Make money while you sleep, but the things that I’m doing are more like, you’ve gotta fill the pipeline, and it takes time. The downside is that you don’t want to invest your time and resources into something that’s never gonna pay off. If you want to do something immediately and see the results right now, ride share like Damon is doing is something to consider.
All right, Damon, that’s my retail arbitrage, thank you very much. We’ll see you soon. Sell
Damon Day: those Bandsaws.
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