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Niche cheat sheet

Phone Flipping

The flipper's one-pager: the buy ad and screening text, the max-offer formula, the secondhand-dealer checklist, and the capital-velocity math.

The method behind this sheet is taught once, in the spine — the full application lives in the Phone Flipping course.

Phone flipping is local buying and national selling from a drawer and a spreadsheet. This page holds the formulas, scripts, and fee bands the course teaches, at 2026 fee levels.

First customers in phone flipping

The first-ten method runs backwards here: your first "customers" are sellers, and you make them call you instead of chasing listings. The course's buy ad is deliberately plain, posted in local Facebook groups and Marketplace morning and evening:

Cash paid for used phones. Any condition considered, cracked screens okay. I pay fair prices and can meet today. Text me the model and I'll quote you.

Every reply gets the five-question screening text: model and storage, carrier and paid-off status, cracks and battery health, whether they can sign out of iCloud or Google, and what they hope to get. Sellers who dodge the paid-off or sign-out question are telling you something; believe them. Meet at a camera-monitored police exchange zone in daylight with only the cash you plan to spend. On the sell side, the lanes are fixed: eBay and Swappa for clean phones, local cash for speed, instant buyers only as the dump valve.

Pricing in phone flipping

The pricing method is the five-minute sold-comps appraisal: filter eBay to Sold Listings and Used, match model number, storage, and carrier status exactly, average three comps, and shade down. Then compute the number you will not exceed:

max offer = (expected sale × (1 − fee rate) − shipping − supplies) − target profit

On a $350 expected sale with no eBay store: fees at 13.6% are about $48, shipping and supplies about $14, target profit $70, max offer about $218. The fee bands to plug in: eBay 13.6% plus $0.40 without a store, 9.35% with one; Swappa 3% plus roughly 3% processing, buyer pays 3% on top. Plan on $50-90 net per clean mid-priced flip and treat anything better as a good day. If your max offer lands within $20 of the expected sale, the deal is too thin to survive one surprise.

Rules in phone flipping

The legal framework plus one trade-specific layer the course teaches in full: secondhand-dealer law, a state and city patchwork written for pawn shops. Before your first buy, search your city and state plus "secondhand dealer license": some jurisdictions require registration, transaction reports, photo ID capture, or holding periods before resale (operators report holds up to thirty days). The bill of sale is your legal spine, IMEI, price, seller name, address, license number, no ID no deal. Sold a stolen phone anyway: take the paperwork to the police, hand over the device, file the report, never resell it quietly. Platforms collect sales tax for you; repeat local cash selling can trigger a seller's permit. A 1099-K arrives only above $20,000 and 200 transactions, but all profit is Schedule C income either way.

Money in phone flipping

The money system wraps a working-capital loop. The two formulas the course drills:

flips per month = (working capital ÷ average cost per phone) × (30 ÷ average days to sell)
monthly profit = net per flip × flips per month

Four hundred dollars of capital at a $200 average buy with ten-day sells turns three times a month, about $210 at $70 net. There is no fourth lever; anyone selling one is selling the old market. Budget losses at five to fifteen percent of purchases, keep a Sunday dashboard (cash, capital sitting, days-to-sale, net per flip, losses), hold at least a third of capital in cash, and run the stale rules: fourteen days unsold, hard price cut to comp floor; twenty-one days, fastest lane whatever it brings. Reinvest every dollar of profit until you hit your working-capital ceiling, and keep the business in its own checking account from day one.

First hire in phone flipping

This course teaches a no-employee business ("no store, no lease, no employees"), so it has no first-hire playbook of its own; if growth takes you toward a repair shop with staff, start with the first-hire module.

Every number here is compressed from the full course, where each figure carries its source.