Ecommerce

Live selling is having a moment and you don’t need to be an influencer or have any e-commerce experience to get in on it.

Clinton Benninghoff is a part-time pastor and full-time golf enthusiast who took over Golf HQ, a brick-and-mortar golf shop in Midland, Texas. He spent years building it into a community staple and developing relationships with the top golf brands. Then in October 2024, he joined Whatnot — and everything changed.

In just over a year, Clinton’s live-selling channel hit $2 million in sales. He was the first seller in the golf category to crack $100,000 in a single live show. And he did it all while still running the physical store, which did a little over $3 million last year on its own.

What if you could make money this weekend helping people clear out their homes without buying a single thing yourself?

Estate sales have been around for decades, but a newer, fully online version of this business makes it faster, safer, and more efficient for everyone involved. And it’s wide open for someone willing to learn the ropes.

Sue Antinoro has spent the last 10-20 years in consignment, eBay, estate sales, and auction sales. Today she runs AuctionMastery.com, where she’s built a flexible side hustle turning other people’s belongings into cash — and helping families get through one of the most overwhelming transitions in life.

Her most recent auction? A two-part sale for a house packed floor to ceiling with items. The total gross: $17,000. Her cut: around $8,000 for a couple weekends’ worth of work.

By month five, Jayden Clark’s dropshipping side hustle was generating more profit than his corporate salary. Two years after that, he sold the business for $700,000. The twist: he never bought a single unit of inventory upfront.

Jayden was 27 when a post-vacation reality check made him realize he couldn’t spend the next 40 years living for one week off a year. After exploring Amazon FBA, he landed on high-ticket dropshipping — selling products over $1,000 through domestic UK and US suppliers.

He quit his job at month nine and sold the business two years later. Today he runs the 1% Ecom Club, a Skool community of about 150 high-ticket e-commerce business owners, and actively builds two more stores.

Flipping furniture for profit is an increasingly-popular side hustle.

You can make $150-250 per flip in your spare time, work with your hands, and potentially save items from the landfill with your upcycling efforts. Here’s how to get started.

What if you could turn a single dollar into $5,000 in under a month? That’s exactly what happened to Mindy, a member of Shannon Jean’s reselling mastermind community.

She bought two pallets of books from a government auction for $1 total, discovered they were packed with medical and curriculum books selling for $200 to $400 each, and turned that dollar into $5,000 within about a month. And she’s still selling the books today.

Deals like that are hiding in plain sight — on government auction sites and retail liquidation platforms that most people have never heard of. Shannon Jean has been buying and flipping product this way for decades, and in this episode he walks through exactly how it works.

Shannon is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and creator of the $5 Reseller Mastermind, a community that has grown to more than 3,000 members over the past year.

His motto: “Buy with math, sell with emotion.” You can find him at ShannonJean.com.

A guest early on in the Side Hustle Show said this: “Why am I more excited to make $5 passively than I am to make $5,000 actively?”

And whether or not that is true in your case, it is a line that stuck with me because that $5 can scale. The $5,000 usually can’t.

Chelsea Shelton is a former elementary school teacher, a mom of three, and a digital products coach at Gold City Ventures, the same program co-founded by Cody Berman, who previously shared how he built a $1,000/month Etsy shop from scratch in Episode 665.

She took the Gold City Ventures course during maternity leave, decided to stay home, and threw herself into selling digital products on Etsy.

Within 3 months, she hit 1,000 sales. Today, her shop brings in $1,000 to $1,200 a month largely on autopilot, and she spends much of her time coaching other sellers through the same process.

(Learn how to start your own Etsy digital products business with Gold City Ventures.)

Half a million dollars in hamster balls. What if you spotted a gap in a market that hadn’t changed in 50 years and turned it into a fast-growing product business while still in college?

That’s exactly what Ethan Haber did with Happy Habitats, a small pet products company he started as a sophomore at Wake Forest University.

While watching his hamster Mooksy roll around in a standard hamster ball on campus, Ethan looked over and saw someone walking a dog.

The thought hit him: why can’t I walk my hamster? That simple question launched a product line now heading into 1,500 stores nationwide through a major big-box retail deal.

Ethan’s story covers everything from cold-emailing a design firm and navigating COVID shipping delays, to cracking Amazon and landing a mentorship with the founder of PetSmart — all from a niche that most people overlook.