

Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies - dinwal
https://flippiness.com/

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dinwal
I happen to be the creator as well, so feel free to ask me any question you
may have. Tech, business, traffic or anything.

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nstart
How does this work for people living say in Sri Lanka (me)? What do I do with
the shipping costs that would usually be astronomical? Or is this not feasible
for someone living here? Or am I just not getting something?

Thanks :). Also, kudos on this. Seems like a pretty sweet idea if it takes
off.

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dinwal
It is only for US residents at the moment. We are working on opening it to
people in other countries soon.

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dRocking
I like this a lot. I thought about doing something similar for used cell
phones, where you could find price discrepancies between Craigslist, eBay,
Amazon, and some others.

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dinwal
Thank you for kind words.

That is where we are planning to extend this. Also, eBay and Amazon
dropshipping are a good target for this.

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danieltillett
What is to stop the this arbitrage being driven down to third world income
levels by something like mechanical turk?

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dinwal
I like how you think :).

You need to get the book shipped to your place first and then you need to ship
it to the buying website. You will need to get involved at one point.

If you hire someone from US to do this, they will start flipping books
themselves leaving you.

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danieltillett
>You need to get the book shipped to your place first and then you need to
ship it to the buying website.

Why not just have Site A ship to the end customer directly?

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dinwal
You need to swap the labels. The buying site gives you a label to put on the
box so that they can keep track of who sent what.

Also, some sites like chegg send Red Bull, Starbucks or even cosmetics in the
box that you would want to keep.

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gremlinsinc
why not use book scouter to get the best buyback/sell price, and bigwords.com
to get the lowest buy price?

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dinwal
Are you suggesting that Flippiness should use those services or are you saying
that a person can use those services for free without paying?

If latter, yes we could use those but we don't know how frequently they update
their prices. If there is a mismatch between their prices and source prices,
our data will be inaccurate. We get prices continuously in a cycle for all
books that we have (almost a Million). This ensures we remove stale records.

If you meant Former, the issue is a person can't manually check prices for a
lot of books every day. Even if they did it will cost them more timewise than
our membership dues.

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actionbrandon
why not just do this trade yourself and keep all the money?

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dinwal
This is a valid point. The reason is that there is a manual process of getting
the book shipped and then shipping it. This cannot scale very well. I can may
be trade 50 books a day but that is the upper limit. I don't want to invest
too much time into something that can't scale. By opening it up to the world
with a monthly membership, I can take a vacation and still make money from
this.

Does that sound good enough?

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FHorse
Who takes the risk of buyers not paying and sellers not delivering? What about
the risk of prices changing in the middle of a flip? I'm afraid I know the
answer already...

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dinwal
Since you are buying and selling from/to businesses instead of people, there
is a low chance of things going wrong.

You sell the book first and get a quote. The quote is good for at least a week
and in a decent number of cases for 30 days. As long as you can get the book
shipped to you within that time period and ship it to the buying website, you
should be good.

I understand the skepticism and that is why we have the free plan to test it
out at low level.

