Has anyone ever sold at a Flea Market or Yard Sale?

[marvelvscapcom2]

I am thinking about starting up a Flea Market table at the local Flea Market this summer.     Or setting up some Yard Sales and advertising .   Has anyone ever tried and what are the Pros, Cons and Must knows before i try? 

I have been trying to think of ways to have constructive fun on the side by doing something self employed and fun on my off time. Last year i went to a Flea Market with an avid comic book collector.  He paid me to carry all his boxes of comic books from his van to his stand and back and to set them up for him to sell. it was like our little fun weekend day at the flea market. It was quite a fun experience. I ended up picking up doom which had just came out and it was an enjoyable day.

But as we were there i was seeing how much he was making and the person on the side of him were making and it's quite breathe taking.  Some of these Flea Market vendors or Toy convention tables can make 1,000-2,000 dollars in a single day!!    Which is incredible.  On a hot summer weekend.  Everyone is out with passion buying a variety of different things and if you can price comparably and get a good spot with good merchandise.  You are bound to sell some stuff.   

My only problem is i would never be able to sell video games. Because any time i would try to build inventory to sell.  I would only keep it because i love video games too much and would never be able to part with anything good or anything i didn't have.  So i might sell other things.  Mostly comic books and toys.  Which i know a decent amount about but i don't collect. 

I will also price way way lower than all the other reseller manipulative people that plague all these hobbies. Tbose types of people really irk me.  My goal is to have fun, meet new faces, make some side money to help fund my video game hunting but also help people find cheap cool stuff.   Hopefully forcing other vendors to lower their prices as well. 

I know all of that is a whole lot.  But might as well try something new and fun.   


Does anyone have any Flea Market memories.  Either buying from or Selling from a table?   Any tips for me starting out  ?  Thank you

[98dgreen]

I sell at a flea market 2 to 3 times a year and make somwhere around 500 selling doubles for 50 to 75% of what they go for.

Pros:
You get to walk around before the general public
Gets rid of doubles that failed to sell through other methods
Makes you money

Cons:
Sunburns
A lot of the people at the flea market are scum
Have to worry about stuff getting sun/water damaged
Most of the people who specialize want 150% of ebay

[hexen]

Cons:
Sunburns
A lot of the people at the flea market are scum
Have to worry about stuff getting sun/water damaged
Most of the people who specialize want 150% of ebay

It always feels good to remember that I am not alone in my pain.

As for selling at a flea market... maybe I will one day, usually I am just a customer though. When it comes to video games, I would much rather sell them to other collecters where I am much more certain they won't just re-sell them (As 98dgreen said, scum). However, my late father, who I got my collecting tendencies from, was a pilot who not only made good money because of it, but also had days at a time in other cities all over the US to explore flea markets and such. At my mother's house he had a giant 2 story garage built, which is PACKED with the exception of a slim walkway with giant shipping boxes full of random collectables. One day I may try to sell some of it at a flea market, because it is just so varied. My mother has no respect for all he collected, so it might be nice to try to get them in the hands of people who care.

[kamikazekeeg]

I sell a few times a year at the Flea Market myself.  It's super cheap for a booth/tables for the day and it can usually work out.  I never make tons of money, but where I live in Florida, it's a kinda tough place at times for making deals, even when I usually sell fairly cheap on stuff usually, especially compared to Ebay.  Sounds like you are on the right path for it too, which is great.  I actually just did a flea market go today with a local group of gamers who collect and then bring a bunch of stuff to sell affordably there.  I didn't sell much of anything to other people, but made over a 100 bucks from a couple of the guys there with me lol

I'll probably be doing my own solo one towards the end of the month where I'll be selling off comics, movies, and games.

[bikingjahuty]

I've never sold at the flea market, and frankly I don't think I ever will. The way people haggle, you'd likely sell very little or pack up and leave early after the flew of $1 offers on your consoles and games.


I have sold games at garage sales before, but not for a very long time. Probably the most painful garage sale I ever had was when I was around 11 or 12 and I ended up selling most of my childhood consoles and games (a Genesis and SNES, and about 10 games between the two). Unless I was selling a bunch of filler titles I would not do a garage sale again, at least with games.

[ignition365]

I'm too used to seeing folks complain about people who will just steal stuff and run.

[kamikazekeeg]

Might just depend on the Flea Market as I've never seen anyone steal anything when at mine.

[soera]

I used to sell at the flea market but it wasnt games. It was hot wheels right around 2001-2003 (before Ebay/Amazon) and it was crazy then. People would pay $30-50 for a car that I paid $1 for. But with the use of online selling, Hot wheel market went to junk.

As far as video games, I shop there very seldom but I will agree with some of the comments here. There was one seller I can recall that had an unopened Final fantasy for the NES. But they were at an outside booth and that thing was sun damaged so bad that it was hardly recognizable. And they still wanted full Ebay price for it. Absolutely unwilling to negotiate regardless of the damage to the box and everything that was inside.

[kamikazekeeg]

Yeah the resellers at places like that can be rough.  At mine, there's one prominent one who never makes deals and always has high prices.  There are two others that are much more reasonable and one I'm cool with.  There's another flea market in the area that has one or two resellers that are also a mess.  One I know has plenty of sunbleached stuff, but still charges outrageously. 

[Warmsignal]

I sold once a few years ago. Honestly it was a bunch of crap that GS was throwing out. Most of the discs looked pretty good, but the titles were nothing special. I took some other junk that I had also found. When it comes to the flea market crowd, believe me they don't care about anything but the games... and store displays if you have those.

I sold the games at about $3 a piece unless it happened to be a premium title then I would ask $5. People haggled, mostly kids and not collectors, and I accepted if they bought a bunch. I made about $180 in a day selling $3 games and a few displays. Getting ready to pull out the rest pretty soon and have another yard sale.

My advice is price to sell, especially if you have a lot of goods you want to move. Great prices make sales more than anything. Don't worry about market value, a profit in hand is better than the lingering potential of bigger profit down the road. Besides, no one at a road-side sale wants to see retail prices on anything, and you might not even make much more than your booth fee back at the end of the day doing that.


As a buyer, I have so many flea market memories I wouldn't know where to start. Used to come back with bags full of games and maybe a $20 bill spent. That's just how it was back then. Found so many great things at those places... I remember when I first got into OG XBOX collecting, I found a guy at the market selling his entire XBOX collection $2 a game, and mostly top tier games. Once, I found a lot of nearly 30 boxed NES games and bought them all for $40. Then there was the time I found a Vectrex console for $20. There was this one guy we regularly bought from, he had milk crates stacked to the ceiling with NES games and most of them were less than $10 each. There was the one time I found an SNES with Diddy Kong 2 and 3 and the guy sold it to me for $5. Once I actually found some cardboard box Sega CD games for like $3 each, and I also bought the entire Prof Layton series on DS for about $10. My brother bought a box of SNES games including EarthBound for $20 once...

It goes on and on. Sounds like a fantasy now, but it's just an era gone by. Sadly not worth the effort to go look anymore, at least for me.

[zephyria]

I've been finding deals at one of the local swap meets since one of the sellers will haggle with me.  It's easier to talk them down when buying multiple items.  For me as long as it's within the average pricecharting.com price I'll take it. 

It's been really rare to get games for just a few dollars, though there are some decent finds like that for PS1 & PS2 games at my thrift stores.  I could find stuff at pawn stores too since there's a lot of them, but I just can't get as excited for modern games.  Seems to be okay for GBA, though.

Offerup and Craiglist has been the best, though, since it's often just people cleaning out their closets instead of resellers.