'Toy flippers' capitalize on supply chain crunch for popular consumer brands

Yahoo Finance Contributor Vera Gibbons explains the side hustle many people are taking on this holiday season: flipping toys. Amid supply chain disruptions, popular toy brands are fetching higher prices on the resale market.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back. Toy flippers are gearing up for a busy holiday season of shortages and outages, filling in the void with retail arbitrage, as they call it. It's on the rise as a timely holiday side hustle. Yahoo Finance contributor Vera Gibbons joins us now. And Vera, as we were talking about in the break, I assume people were doing this, some kind of arbitrage buying low, selling high, trying to fill these supply chain voids. But the scale of it is pretty impressive.

VERA GIBBONS: That's what sort of prompted me to actually do this story because I knew people were doing this on the side as a side hustle. But this year in particular, more people are jumping into the flipping scene because there is that opportunity to hit on gold. Some of the retailers I spoke to, they invested in hot toys and electronics last summer, you know, when there was all this talk about supply chain shortages and the impact on holiday spending or holiday toys.

And now they're selling them on eBay, Amazon, and some of these other platforms for two or three, if not four, times more than what they actually bought them for. So it's a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon. It's not just the stay-- the kids. It's the stay-at-home moms, it's the dads, it's the retirees. One reseller I spoke to said in her 11 years of selling on Amazon, she has never seen so many people jump into the toy flipping business. So it's a big one.

AKIKO FUJITA: God, that makes me so cynical. These are toys for kids, right, that are going to be sent out for Christmas. But talk to me about some of the hottest toys that are being flipped. What did you find?

VERA GIBBONS: It's funny that you feel the same way that I sort of do. It's, oh, the poor parents are going to have to pay a pretty penny to get the toys they want for their kids. But the resellers see this as they're buying and selling data. They're doing you a service. They're personal shoppers for you. And there's opportunity to be had.

So, Magic Mixies, Magic Cauldron is a hot one this holiday season. The LEGO Elf Clubhouse is a hot one. Gabby's Dollhouse Perfect Dollhouse is going, like, $250 plus. And this is surprising to me, the American Girl Limited Edition Winter Princess Doll, in some cases, is going for almost $1,000 in the secondary market. It's crazy money, but that's a scenario.

AKIKO FUJITA: Vera Gibbons, Yahoo Finance contributor, with, I guess, it's positive. An opportunity is an opportunity, right? And people are taking advantage of that. You can catch her-- you can catch your story on our website, yahoofinance--