Product flipping / reselling for a profit

So you would like to make money in Switzerland with product flipping. That is great! This is one of the ways how you can make quick easy money without much knowledge or education. Also, the easy way how to lose money if you don’t know what are you buying/selling.

Switzerland is especially a good place for this kind of side hustle. Why do you ask? In Switzerland, the number of people who value their time more than money is above average. This has a simple implication, some people are selling their old unneeded belongings for little or even giving them away free if you can save their time. Dealing with them fast and being able to get your item personally saves a lot of time.

I would like to write here about flipping the items with a value of <1000 CHF. There is a lot of expensive things you can flip – cars, real estate, art, wine, etc. But these flips require an incredible amount of capital to start with and you really need to know your stuff otherwise you will get burned pretty bad.

What is flipping / reselling? How to make money with reselling?

The process is quite easy. You acquire items for an under-the-market price. And you sell them later for a higher price than you have bought them. The difference minus any other expenses is your profit 🙂

Of course, it is not that straightforward. You should focus on the type of items you have the best knowledge of. You should not buy random items which seem cheap. Rather buy the items you can estimate the value based on the state, the liquidity, and other relevant parameters.

So think about what is your passion, your profession, or your education to select the best items for reselling. For example, if you are a fashion freak you could focus on reselling branded clothes or accessories. If you are Nerd, you could make money by reselling computers.

Of course, you are allowed to repair or upgrade the items you bought for even more profit! If you are a professional watch repair(wo)man, you could buy broken luxury watches and repair them for a bigger profit.

So it’s up to you which way you grab this. In my opinion, almost everybody has some specialized kind of knowledge in a different category of the items, so almost everybody can make money with this method.

Where to get items to flip?

Classified ads portals – tutti.ch, anibis.ch, facebook marketplace, ricardo.ch

Here the premise is, that you buy something cheaper on the used market. It is relatively easy to find good deals if you can invest some time into it. You can use whatever platform you like. For me, the best option is tutti.ch because there is a huge number of items being added every minute. So you have a huge selection. Facebook marketplace is also a good place, but you need a Facebook account which I don’t have. Anibis.ch seems to be more of a site for the french-speaking part of Switzerland. And Ricardo does not seem to offer such good deals compared to a Tutti or Facebook Marketplace.

None of the platforms mentioned support RSS feeds which helps a lot with this kind of search. But I found it can be partly replaced with Tutti’s saved searches. Which will show if there are new results for your saved search. Here is a small tutorial.

1. Search for your items and save the search

Find your item and save the search with a click on the button “Suchabo speichern”

2. Monitor the results of your search and be fast

As soon as there is a new result for your saved search, be fast and contact the seller. If the seller has a phone number public, call him. It’s always better than waiting for the answer. You also get once a morning overview of all new results for all searches.

After you have chosen your ideal item, contact the seller and try to make a deal. Pick it your item up from the seller or arrange the delivery. It is normal to first pay for the item when you agreed on delivery. So you are exposing yourself to a risk of being sent rocks or nothing at all. I usually prefer personal pickup.

And the first step is done 🙂

New products – toppreise.ch, preispirat.ch

It is also possible to buy new items for a good price. Especially consumer electronics are relatively cheap and have frequent reductions or cashback. It’s worth to keep eye on it and don’t buy anything for a full price. This is true also if you want to buy something for yourself, not just for a resell.

If you are lazy and you like to get the deals server on the plate, I recommend preispirat.ch to you. It is a blog-style page, which most of the current deals. People share the deals they find online and offline. They also do special coverage for sales like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. As with other things, there are hundreds of other lazy people who may be less lazy than you and grab the deal before you :).

So for active people, there is another website called toppreise.ch. In short, what it does, it tracks prices for any product for most of the swiss online shops. There are more alternatives like (comparis.ch) but I don’t find them so useful and intuitive.

The only thing which is interesting to you on toppreise.ch is the section called “Neue Toppreise”. This is an automatically updated list of products, which had the biggest change in price.

Here you can scan for deals and clicking on “Mehr anzeigen” will show you more items with filters to select from the timeline. Sometimes quite a good deal can be found, sometimes even price errors which will not get delivered, but you may get lucky :).

If you decide to buy anything from the online shop there few steps before you strike the deal I would deem it important to maximize your safety and profit.

1. Always buy on invoice (auf Rechnung) when buying things too cheap to be true. It can save a lot of headache trying to get back the money from the merchant in case your order gets cancelled.
2. If it is not available, use credit card. With credit card you can get the back some money back. For example credit cards from swisscard will give you 1% cashback on each purchase using free american express credit card. Even though American express is not accepeted everywhere, you still get another Visa credit card which will be connected to the same account. Unforunately the VISA one has cashback only 0.3%. So I use the American express as much as possible. I recommend that you sign up for American Express / VISA duo credit cards from Swisscard. If you want to get free 40 CHF just for signing up for this offer, please use my code WC40XW4NK during the application process.
3. Get that cashback! There is site called Rabattcorner.ch. They offer cashback on many different online shops in Switzerland. The cashback differs for each website from ~1% up to 15%. It is also advised to install their chrome addon, which will always alert you on the respective online shop there is a cashback available. Some times they offer also discound codes, which is a double win. After 20CHF of cashbacks you can withdraw to your swiss bank account.
4. Find vouchers! For vouchers I usualy use search on preisepirat.ch. If there is nothing, try to check the website, they usually have 10-20% off just for signing up for the newsletter. Next I will just google “site:.ch <shop name> rabattcode” ex. “site:.ch microspot rabattcode”. But be aware! Most of the “voucher websites” will overwrite your cookies in a browser for the online shop which will destroy your eligiblity to get the cashback from Rabattcorner.ch. So after you have finished searching for the vouchers, active the cashback offer from Rabattcorner.ch again!

If you always go through this list you will manage to make the profit even bigger.

Where to Flip the items

There are no strict rules for this. You can flip wherever you want. Just don’t approach random people on the streets :). You can use the Facebook marketplace, ricardo.ch, tutti.ch, or you can also sell to your friends if you feel like it. If you are feeling adventurous, you can set up a stand at the local “Flohmarkt”.

I usually use tutti.ch, because it’s free. You can quickly create ads with 5 images from the phone for free. So you can create the ads without much effort. Another great feature is that your phone number can be hidden and the whole communication can be done through the tutti platform via the integrated chat. I really like this chat. There is also a possibility to bug some highlighting or other perks. Up to you if it is worth it to you. I would maybe do it with highly-priced items, but otherwise no.

Be aware of selling items online. Even in Switzerland, there are people trying to scam. Fortunately, I have not been scammed yet. I prefer personal pickup so I can minimize problems. Don’t send anything to foreign countries, those are usually scams. If you are sending the items in Switzerland be sure to get the money first and send it after you have the money in the bank account. A serious buyer will not have a problem sending you even 500 CHF first.

If you are an expat, although it’s not impossible to do it without a local language, it helps a lot. If don’t know the local language, at least use www.deepl.com to translate your classified ads and as part of your emails/chat. And learn numbers to 1000 so you can barter with another person 🙂

My experience

I am not flipping actively or often, but I did some good trades. Luckily till now, I didn’t lose any money on any of the flips.

New products

I have flipped one iPad I managed to buy for ~200CHF new for 300CHF. This is was really nice a quick money. I have sold it the next day for a profit of 100CHF. I have used the usual method of scanning www.toppreis.ch and www.presipirat.ch.

Actually, I have kept most of the stuff I have managed to snatch for a good price, so not much earned here.

Used products

I have flipped a few used electronic items (I am not exact on purpose). Found a product that seemed to sell well and used the tutti.ch saved search method to grab the good-priced ones quickly. Here is the table of sales.

Conclusion

In my opinion, this is quite a safe and not too time-consuming way how to make a few hundred Francs per month. It’s not my primary way how to make money, but it is certainly something that can bring the side money home. You can make it a main source of income if you have time and knowledge.

Hopefully, it helped you a bit and please let me know in the comments what are your experiences.