So this year, starting last January, I went hardcore into e-commerce and reselling. I had gotten back into the market last fall, experimenting with different channels and finding viable niches again that I could work with. I also spent a lot of time researching what was available regionally around me to use as supply for reselling, looking at everything from surplus channels to thrift stores to buy-low/sell-high options. Thrift stores ended up being my primary channel for goods, low entry cost and easy to work with in terms of packing and reselling quickly for prompt liquidation. The last thing I wanted with a new e-commerce venture was to get stuck with a garage-full of goods and no sales, losing even more money to a pit of over-commitment.

It's now been six months into 2026, and the results are notable. I'm not going to be a millionaire anytime soon, but the results on my investments are definitely producing returns, far better than anything I was going to earn on the stock market, for example. My overall gross for the last six months has been a bit over $3,945. From that, I paid costs (fees, shipping, supplies) of $1,530. That left me an operating profit margin of about $2,415. From that was my cost of goods at about $1,572. My net profit then was $843. Basically, $140.50 a month in extra cash. More notable, The increase of $843 on my original investment of $1,572 was a 53.6% profit gain for 120 days. Try to beat that on regular stock trading (options are pure gambling, don't even mention that version). 

I was originally just working with IT tech books. From there I started branching to hardware, and then I dabbled a bit into clothing & board games, but limited my clothing exposure to sports-oriented or music fan stuff (band shirts etc.). I really just don't know clothing well, and it can be very high risk in terms of getting stuck with a lot of garbage. Board games were tricky. I made some really good money on some items, and yet versions of the same game in other formats didn't sell at all.

Now I'm looking at scaling up and putting more of my attention on surplus goods, like pallets of overstock, discount or similar that I can move digitally once I set up sufficient storage for the inventory. The mark-up possibility can be exponential, but again it depends greatly on targeting the right market with the right demand. On cable shows this kind of stuff has been popularized with storage unit bidding wars, but that's practically gambling as well since you really won't know what you got until this bid is over. You could lose thousands of dollars per bid on a unit full of literally nothing or garbage. I'm focusing more on true surplus where you know what you're getting and then it's a matter of connecting it to buyers in a timely manner. With businesses constantly downscaling from too much physical property, there's plenty of choices but storage of goods is the cost creep challenge I have to strategize here carefully.

Reselling hasn't entirely replaced my side income that I used to earn freelance writing, but it has been a good recovery since AI shafted my literary 2nd job. Now I'm working with far different dynamics, including shipping changes and market interests that go up and down. It's challenging but I feel freer to manage my success than I did as a writer. Much of that was dependent on middle-man platforms finding the work to do. Now, I'm dealing with the customers directly again. Hopefully it pays off more in the 2nd half of the year. With the economy seemingly cooling off on inflation and hopefully jobs regaining, people could have more disposable income in the summer, fall and winter, which is what I'm betting on. We'll see what happens. It's very much like farming, hoping for a harvest being on schedule.