Welcome back to another episode of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube, along with my friend
and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses from the ground up.
We also have a weekly zoom call and private discord for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash use book guy to join the channel and gain
access to the full length podcast zoom call and private discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up everybody?
Welcome to episode 39, Resellers Mindset Podcast, Mike hanging out with Johnny B.
As always, and we have a very fun topic today.
Johnny B's excited about this one.
So we're going to talk about why most of you listening to this set of resellers
probably won't be reselling this time next year.
It's a, it's a harsh truth that I think a lot of people are, I think it's just
going to happen for a lot of people.
I don't know, like it just, it's been in my mind all week long and I'm just like
hearing different businesses, different types of reselling businesses.
Uh, it seems to kind of be the consensus here that a lot of people are already
starting to fall off the wagon.
So I'm going to let you just run away with this.
And I'm just going to chime in cause I got a lot to say too.
Well, uh, I know a lot of people in the reselling business beyond media.
Uh, everybody's noticing a down dip.
I mean, beyond the summer, I mean, sales are down in general
between last summer and now.
Um, however, because of that, a lot of people are scrambling, trying different
things, making adjustments when they don't need to like, Oh, I'll try this.
This will work.
No, it doesn't.
Oh no.
I'm so sad now.
My sales are still down.
Um, and then you have the, the people that are not adjusting to the price
changes of things between the post office, your platform fees, uh, your
cost of good fees have gone up.
If you've been paying attention lately, um, and they're not making the
adjustments for that or finding better sources to counterbalance that also.
Got to watch the, especially in Amazon, the trending market.
Uh, what is your market actually buying and buying the same things they were
last year and that has a lot to do with like your news cycle stuff, uh, what
people's and people's interests change over time.
Wait a minute here.
So you're basically saying people don't understand what it takes to run an
actual successful business.
Correct.
They don't.
I'm just making sure.
Cause that's, that's like the gist of what I'm getting here is like everything
you're saying is like how anybody that has like a real tangible business,
because let's face it, most people don't take reselling as like a serious
business, right?
Treat it like an actual business as if you were like, you know, a large
corporation, like a Walmart or a Target.
People don't treat these reselling businesses anywhere close to being a
serious kind of profession business type.
I think that's like kind of what you're hitting that is like, you can't just
shoot from the hip anymore.
I think them days are long gone.
That's not the wild west anymore.
We could do anything and everything and it'll probably work.
That's not the case.
Um, the consumers have, well, not necessarily caught on.
It's just, there are resellers that know how to resell as a business
now opposed to let's just figure this all out together.
Cause there's no handbook at the very beginning.
This is like 10, 15 years ago.
Now things are kind of standardized on what and how you should sell.
Um, and if you're not playing with that game or going above that, doing
what people aren't doing, they've never been tried before being innovative.
I don't see you making it honestly.
How do you feel about a little reseller blaming a bigger reseller as to the
reason they failed, for example, say, you know, maybe because, uh, they
priced their items lower than I can because they are a large reseller and
they can get it for cheaper than me.
Or maybe they have different process where they can list quicker than me.
Like what's your take on that?
Because mine is listen, whether you're smaller, large, we're all in the same
pond and you know, at the end of the day, you don't have to be super large to be
successful, you just gotta be smarter than the bigger person, the bigger guy.
No, I think he nailed it there.
I mean, one, I think that person that's thinking this and blaming is not adjusting
and therefore they will be incapable and successful, they will go out of business.
So, okay, fine.
You sell Nora Roberts books.
Hey Nora, we love you and all, but what makes you different from all
the other Nora Roberts sellers?
What sets it out?
Is it more item specific?
Is it a better price?
Well, if you're playing at the price, well, you can't play that game.
Okay.
Maybe I'll put 10 Nora's together.
There's nobody doing lots of Nora.
Okay.
Now you're something different or maybe I'll put first edition Nora Roberts together.
You gotta find an angle where you're doing something different than your competitors.
I don't care what the angle is, as long as there is an angle price, uh, how you
do the listing, the quantity of the items in the listing, um, the rarity and
scarcity.
When I said first edition, maybe, maybe you get into sign Nora Roberts.
I'm sure there's a market for that.
She's a loved woman because I see so many of her all over the place.
She gets around.
I do like, I do like the idea of like, we talk about it all the time.
Like not even just on this podcast.
Like when we do our weekly calls and everything, like you have to
differentiate yourself in some way, shape or form you.
The copy paste stuff doesn't work anymore.
Unfortunately, like, and I'm curious what your take is on what I'm about to say is.
Do you think a lot of these winers and cry babies and people that aren't going
to be around in a year from now are people that got on the reselling train
when it was like prime time reselling and everybody was inside shopping online.
And like, you could list anything and it would basically sell like, because a lot
of people now they look at the results they had during those lockdown times
and compare it to now, and they're like, Oh my God, like eBay is, why does eBay
even exist? Why does Amazon even exist?
I'm not getting a 10th of the sales.
Right.
There was extra money to be thrown around because the government was
just giving away free money.
Now people don't have quote unquote extra money and prices have gone up.
Thus they're spending less.
And so if you join during that wonderful, probably the best time of reselling,
honestly, and you thought that was going to be the standard.
I'm sorry.
That's that this is now the reality check.
Yeah, your sales are lower because there's no extra money to be spent.
And unless the prices of income, AKA jobs go up drastically to counterbalance
the rising prices of consumer goods, it's going to stay this way.
I do kind of want to circle back to what you said is like, you said
is like almost like a, you need to have a business sense.
And whether you're part-timer full-time, because we've got plenty of part-timers
that treat their businesses like a real business.
They probably treat it more serious than a lot of these full-timers do.
And I do think this is kind of going to what's going to separate you from
whether you're going to survive this because do you know what your average
buy cost is? Do you know how much your packing material is?
Do you know how much you're paying for shipping?
Do you know when shipping is going up?
Do you know what it's going up to?
Like people don't even like, I guarantee you if we just did like, you know,
like how like the late night show used to go around on the streets
and ask people questions like, hey, it was the president of the United States.
Like things like that.
Like if we just went to like a reseller convention, maybe that's what I'll do.
Maybe that'll be the first reselling convention I go to.
And I'll just stand outside and ask people the most basic reselling questions.
And I bet you it'll turn into a comedy skit real quick because a lot of people,
they don't know how much of bubble mail or they use calls, you know.
Oh, yeah, I ship all my stuff in nice boxes.
Okay. Well, you're selling a $6 book and you're putting it in a $2 box.
You're filling it with brown paper, your tissue wrapping a thing.
I mean, guys, listen, I'm all for taking care of the customer,
but at the end of the day here, you have to be conscious of your business costs.
And like, I know you are real particular about keeping track of,
hey, how much is this size box cost? How much does this size box cost?
And like, I don't know.
Do you think like that's going to be a huge separator
from the people that fail to the people that succeed?
100%. And I'll comment more in a second.
I said Mike something very early on when we first met.
I think he may or may not remember.
It was a very complicated Excel sheet, but it was my cost breakdown on eBay.
And I just pulled it up here.
And it literally tells me what the minimum price I can accept on.
I made it do it.
That I mean, Excel, a little complicated, but still.
But what we have in here, I have the different shipping cost factors in the poundage.
It includes the shipping weight of the item itself, the packaging is.
But I also have my cost of goods, my final value fees,
my promoted listing standard fees, my shipping label costs, my shipping supply costs.
And that includes the little piece of tape I put on there and my two cents stickers.
I know because I put four stickers on it cost me two cents.
Used to cost me eight, but I got it down to two because I started doing it.
Well, I saved six cents, but when you're doing 30 packages a day, six times 30.
Every day it adds up.
So if you don't know your numbers, you're going to.
Well, you're going to screw yourself and put yourself out of business, to be honest,
because everything's going up.
If you don't adapt to it, like I was overpaying for stickers when I didn't need to.
I was overpaying for mailers and I didn't need to.
I found what worked and how to gradually raise it down.
Now, there's two ways to make money, raise prices or lower cost.
Either way, you're making money.
So this one, this one's easy because you know what you're buying.
Making the money.
That's the harder part are figuring out how to raise prices or get more value out of your items.
Like my listings, I'm selling four ninety nine books for 12.99
because I figured out a way to do that.
You got to. Back to what you were saying, went on my tangent there.
You don't know your numbers either.
Make your money in the buy, right?
But you also make it in the sell.
You got to sell the item and knowing the ins and outs of everything in between,
like your cost for shipping, supply labor, if you got an employee or you're renting a storage unit
or your gas money to go out.
I'm not even talk.
I'm not even going to touch taxes here.
Don't care about taxes right now.
It's you got to know what your cash flow actually is.
It's not just money going in the bank because you're spending money
while you're making money going to the bank and it comes out of that account.
Right. Question mark.
People listening.
This is even worse on Amazon because you know what Amazon does?
They just show you your stupid sales on the app.
Right.
So you look at your app and you see your orange bars and you're like, wow, I sold my book.
Wow, I sold five hundred dollars today, Johnny.
And then people think you're getting paid five hundred dollars today.
No. First off, you're lucky.
Even if you're selling books, you're lucky if that's a 50 50 split.
A lot of people out there are probably closer to 40 60.
They get 40. Amazon gets 60.
OK, so that puts you down to, you know, 220 bucks.
Your buy costs. How many of those books did you sell that day?
You sold another 20 books and you paid a dollar a piece.
That put you down to 200. OK.
Well, what about the 35 software you have for Amazon?
Right. They all cost 20, 30 dollars each.
Right. Or or that 10 dollars to send in each time for each box.
You factoring that in.
There are so many things that I know people don't pay attention to.
And I'm going to be hot take here.
Right. Hot take incoming.
Good riddance. See you later.
Bye. I mean, at the end of the day, if you know you're selling on Amazon,
you're selling books, you're selling media, you're a competitor of mine.
And if you don't know your numbers and you're not making money and I'll tell you right now,
I've had plenty of people in the past few months just completely quit Amazon.
Just, you know, email me, stop showing up to calls, just disappear from the discord.
I mean, this this is a business and I try to like I try to wrap my head around,
like, why would you start something and kind of just take it like jokingly?
Right. It's like you if you're trying to have this income that you're going to rely on to some extent,
whether it's, you know, casino money, vacation money, getting out of debt money,
or even people like ourselves where this is our life money.
Right. Everything that comes in goes to a bill, goes to our savings, goes to this, that everything,
everything that goes on in our life.
The money comes from our businesses and we have people that come along and are just like,
yeah, it's whatever, you know, I have no idea what's going on.
I'm just going to copy what you do.
And listen, you can't copy anybody else's business.
You can try. It's not going to work for you.
And then all of a sudden, it's bye bye time.
And honestly, listen, if you don't know your business stuff, then it's not for you.
It honestly isn't.
You're going to go out of business or you're going to try a million things and be struggling.
And at some point, you'll start paying to have a business.
You're not making any money in your business.
And you only got so much money to do that with.
And then you're going to get a loan.
I have to give you 30% interest and then you get another loan.
You're going to have to file bankruptcy.
Then you're out of business.
You look, remember, remember we had you look at the books that sold for one penny on eBay?
Like this goes on.
Like we can sit here.
Me and you can joke about it, right?
Because we understand what your expectations are of a business, what our expectations are.
But the majority of people just don't get it.
And you said it, like people pay and where this is the most prevalent,
I'm going to say this now, you think eBay is bad.
Go over to Etsy.com.
People pay to have Etsy businesses.
And it's crazy.
One week we're going to have Deb here on the podcast and she's full time Etsy seller.
And my wife, she'll tell you right now, people come in and try to knock off everything she does.
And they have no clue what their expenses.
They'll sell something for $3 free shipping.
It ain't even covering the stamp to send the stuff.
Like people are dumb.
And unfortunately, there's no, is the problem the barrier to entry?
Is it just because anybody can do eBay?
Is that the reason why we have all the people out there that say eBay sucks and it doesn't work?
Is it because anybody can just start an eBay today and think they're going to start selling stuff?
No, I mean, the expectation because of the flash, and I'm going to blame
it's a little bit of social media, high Instagram waving at you.
Put her a little bit too, not so much Facebook and YouTube.
There's a lot of flash out there.
They make it look so easy, but they don't record the stuff that's the actual work.
Because that's boring content.
They're not going to show you that because nobody will watch it because it is boring.
And then some of those people, they just make money off YouTube and the reselling stuff is whatever.
They may not even turn a profit honestly on that because we don't really know what they bought it
for, right?
They show us their big sales numbers, but well, when you're charging your on-debt credit card,
on it every time and you're not paying off the interest on said credit card,
well, that's a bad thing.
But going back to like what I was saying on Excel, you don't have to use that.
That's easy for me.
Excel is easy.
Use a notebook.
There's plenty of sellers that use analog notebooks and they do it just like Excel.
It's what works for them.
It's what they know.
It's easy.
Well, that does.
Right.
You don't need anything more complicated than that.
Just write it down, track it.
And then, well, here's another easy one for you.
Tear that sheet of paper out and then organize them on different sheets of paper,
your cost of goods versus your income.
And then compare the numbers.
You spread it out on the table, whatever works for you.
But if anybody can do this, you don't have to be technically inclined like Excel to do it.
You can have a whole filing cabinet full of notebooks as long as you're tracking it.
And as long as you can understand it and interpret it.
And again, not even talking about taxes.
Just understanding your business.
If you're taking this any way, shape or form seriously is vital to your success.
I do think it is funny, though, because most people laugh about your
turning your 8-cent sticker into a 2-cent sticker, right?
It's like, oh, yeah, I'm worried about, you know, 6 cents.
Yeah, honestly, when you're going to treat this like a business, everything has a place.
If you can save a penny, you can save 2 cents, 3 cents.
Like at scale, when you start scaling and you start needing a thousand stickers,
all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute.
That's an extra, you know, what are we looking at?
Six cents per.
I mean, you're going to ask 60 bucks, maybe six bucks, depending on how many you buy.
It adds up.
And that's how Johnny B survives the next year.
If I was a betting man, I'm all in.
He's going to be around next year.
And people listening to this, just ask yourself.
I want you to sit down and really ask yourself, what is your average buy cost per item?
And what is your average sales price per item?
And just figure out, you know, what it is.
Where's the money going, right?
Because we all know you sell something for 20 bucks.
You're not getting the 20 bucks, right?
Well, you as the business owner need to know how much of that are you actually getting?
And I'm not talking about the generic, well, eBay took 314 and fees and taxes.
No, I'm talking about your pack-in.
And we're not even talking about time, right?
Because we're not putting a monetary value on time at all.
We're just talking about what your expenses are, right?
Your software, if you're using a listing software, your pack-in materials, your thank you notes,
your feedback cards.
There are so many little things that can add up.
And before you know it, your $20 sale, you're lucky you're making five bucks before the time
you even have to put to go pack and ship and take it to the post office.
Yeah, my thank you notes with the ink and paper, it comes out to six cents.
My void fill, the dunnage, two cents if I buy it.
I get a lot for free now.
And then I have my packaging breakdown.
I mean, do not bend stickers, they're two cents.
My literature mailer is about a dollar, honestly, but they're big, thick ones.
The boxes actually.
And then my lowest one is 36 cents for a stay flat mailer.
So you're looking at two or three dollars.
Do you know you're spending two or three dollars each time you mail a package, people?
Do you know that?
No, they don't.
Let's be honest here.
Most people are not going to be able to break down what you just broke down.
And I'm paying, and I can't sell a book for four dollars if I'm paying two to three dollars
to even send it out the door.
Can't do it.
I am going to counteract here what you said about social media and YouTubers like myself.
Yes, it does create a false, like it creates a false picture.
One hundred percent.
I mean, you go on any of these platforms and especially the Amazon world is toxic when it
comes to this kind of stuff.
Like, oh, my God, I'm a billionaire.
Check out my my sales on Amazon.
But at the end of the day, right, once you start doing something, you're going to understand
real quick whether or not somebody was kind of giving you the run around.
Right.
If all of a sudden I say you can go to you can go to Costco, scan the stuff in Costco
and leave, you know, ten thousand dollars richer and you go to Costco yourself and you're
scanning stuff and you're like, wait a minute, I can't sell this.
This is I'm going to lose money if I sell this.
And it's just like you realize real quick.
And I think people don't take the self initiative to almost see if things are what they really
what people really make it out to see.
Right.
It's like they just take, you know, I make a video saying you can make, you know, a thousand
dollars selling Hershey bars.
And people will just like, instead of thinking about it, like, hey, wait a minute, you know,
let me run this business plan through my mind here.
It's kind of like when me and you have crazy business ideas and it's like, hey, let me
get somebody else who's going to say, all right, I'm going to think this all the way
through beginning to end as a business before I even do anything.
People don't do that.
They just jump right in.
They'll go by the Hershey bars and think they're going to get the results.
Right.
And I'm going to steer away from the social media is the biggest offender and or the YouTubers
who is really the biggest offender.
It's the platform itself.
The number they're showing you is not the actual number.
It's in gross dollars, not net dollars.
Every time you have to go digging around to figure out the net dollars.
If it's even available, it's available on eBay.
You got to you got to know where it's at.
I don't remember if it's available on Amazon, to be honest.
I think it's still just gross dollars over there.
But it's just gross.
But you go to your payments page and it'll tell you how much you have.
But it doesn't give you like you can go to the transaction view to see like, hey,
I know you download the form and figure it out, but there's no actual.
This is what you made in net dollars on it.
Now, even if you click on the order, it won't show you what you made.
It'll just show you what the order total was.
Right.
Somebody buys your book for twenty five bucks.
You click on that specific order number and it'll just say twenty five bucks.
Right.
Because I remember having to download that sheet,
totaling the column and figuring it out on my end how what I actually made.
It was a little more complicated to figure out than it is on eBay.
But even eBay, those net dollars doesn't factor in the other things.
Like I was mentioning the out of eBay cost expenses.
So even on either platform, you're going to have to do that.
Etsy, I imagine I'm actually looking forward to talking about numbers here.
I imagine it's worse on Etsy.
Maybe it is.
It is.
They it's just it's it's antiquated, but it's like, dude, why would they do that?
Why would they want to show you the pennies you're actually making?
Because then that's less money for them, right?
Because it's less sellers.
So that's less listings.
That's less listing fees.
That's less store subscriptions.
So like it is it is their fault.
I agree with that.
But it's like, I mean, the number they're showing you, it's on the front page.
Look at how much money you made, people.
Look at all this money.
Is it their responsibility to show you exactly how much you got paid?
It can help us out a little bit, but no, it's not.
People won't listen to it anyway, right?
People are like, yeah, whatever.
It's all for 20 bucks.
There's no way I only got three dollars.
I mean, I probably only got three dollars, but you know, here we are.
Right.
It's tough.
I do think we are going to see a huge purge in resellers across the board here.
I know people say, oh, there's more and more people reselling.
Well, guess what?
There's more and more people going bye bye just as fast as they're, you know,
people getting on the cruise ship and there's two for everyone getting off the cruise ship.
And for people that take this seriously, or even if you're part time and you understand
your business, I think this is a good thing.
It's almost Amazon just had this huge thing and eBay has it right where you got to confirm
your identity.
And oh, my God, the government wants to know who I am and what I'm doing.
Just stop with the nonsense.
This is better for everybody.
How does anyone know who I am?
This is better for everybody.
How does anybody that has a legitimate business think this is a bad thing?
Besides the government overreach argument, which I could care less about, they do what
they want at the end of the day.
Who cares?
This is going to weed out, especially on Amazon, all these sellers that are in a different
country trying to be like, oh, yeah, I'm doing this from, you know, this country and they
can't verify their bank account.
They can't verify their identity.
I think it's a great thing.
I'm going to assume you're in the same boat because I mean, this is just going to get
rid of a lot of the riffraff.
It's great.
And it is.
It honestly reminds me when there used to be legalized gambling in the United States
online.
Can't do that no more.
But once upon a time, you could.
And then you had to have some funny bank account rules and stuff.
And I could see this happening.
Or you bought what did they call it?
Like you bought like tokens, like you pay and then you could cash out your tokens.
But your tokens went to this other third world bank.
You had to wait a month to get a cashier.
I play poker, people.
You had to wait a month to get your cashier's check, which looked really funny.
And taking that to the bank to cash in was always fun.
But people always will find a way to circumvent the rules.
There's no different here.
But I do believe they're taking the right steps.
This will help reselling as a general.
Now, we talk about people that are no longer going to be here.
They're still going to have all this stuff, right?
Or at least the eBay side, maybe the FBM side.
If they're FBA, they'll probably just destroy it.
Those people that go out of business stuck with stuff, you know where you end up?
Well, you first try a garage sale and then you're stuck taking it to the flea market.
And then you're maybe in antique mall.
And then I'll see you sitting at your flea market, really sad.
And you look at me, and you'll be like, I was a reseller once upon a time.
Those were good days.
Now I work at a flea market.
Do you think the surviving resellers are going to get almost a worse rap than they already do?
Because a lot of people think reselling, like, oh, you're scalping, right?
It's like, do you think the surviving group of resellers, it's going to be even worse now?
Because all the resellers that failed are going to be like, yeah, sure, you're making money.
I tried it for 10 years.
And I'm going on record again here with another super hot take.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
I'm going to say something in a minute.
A super hot take here.
This isn't only for new sellers that came along in the past three, four years.
These fools that have been selling the same stuff on eBay for 20 years, the same junk,
think they can do things the same back when I was a 10-year-old kid and get the same results today.
It don't work, you fool.
And good riddance when you go bye-bye because if you don't change with the times,
you're going to be sitting in the store graveyard right next to Kmart and Sears
and Bed, Bath & Beyond and every other retailer that went bye-bye because
this is how I've been doing it.
I've been selling books for 30 years, Johnny, and this is how I do it.
And these platforms, they don't care about me.
No.
Times change.
We live in a society where things change so fast.
Year to year, we're playing a completely different game month to month.
And some of these advances, it's month to month.
You never know what the platform is going to decide to do.
And these people just get out of being stuck in your ways.
It's so counterintuitive for your business and life in general.
If somebody comes along with a better idea, just because you're like,
well, that's not how I do it, doesn't mean you shouldn't try it and see if it works for you.
Absolutely.
Now, the old-timer mentality, I'm so glad you mentioned this.
I hear this.
I'm in a couple groups and I hear this all the time.
It was really daunting to me when I first started joining groups.
Like, okay, maybe they're right.
It doesn't sound right, but they've been doing this.
Well, I guess they're right.
Couldn't find out.
A lot of them are wrong.
And couldn't find out less than a year later, I'm farther ahead than they are
and they've been at this game 10, 20, 15 years.
They haven't even made it to like the storage unit.
For those who don't know, I consider there are certain phases of reselling.
You start in your home and then you go to a storage unit.
Then you can make the decision if you want to build a shed in your backyard
and or get a warehouse or maybe storage unit life's for you.
But those who choose to scale will end up in a warehouse like me.
And of course, if you're in media, that's just going to happen.
So when I'm superseding people that are still working out of their home and media,
they've been doing this for 20 years.
I have some question marks.
Why are you doing this?
You're not going anywhere, really.
I think the almost the old timers that don't get results
or people have been reselling for a long time,
they're just not going to change.
I think a lot of them are going to go bye bye with a lot of these new people that kind of
when the trend was hot, we got the trendies and then we got the people that have been
doing it forever that are stuck in their ways.
I think we're going to see a lot of these people step out of the game.
And yet again, I'm here to say you don't know your numbers,
you don't know the business thing.
I mean, you probably shouldn't be doing this anyway.
So less competition for me.
So see you later.
Bye.
Right.
And then in my field on eBay, I got plenty of competition,
but they're so far behind me in what they're doing.
And here's a fun one we haven't mentioned.
I'm going to mention it.
If you've not really been paying attention to what's happening as far as technology,
there's this thing called artificial intelligence now,
and it's going to be able to do eBay listings and adapt a lot better.
So people like myself are taking note of this.
And well, what can I do that the AI can't do?
How can I compete with AI?
You got to start asking yourself those questions and start working on that today.
For when that time comes and Skynet takes over,
you can still continue to make money because technology changes.
And I'm sorry, get with the times or prepared for when those times come
where you're able to still survive and not only survive, but thrive.
I'm making plans for this, and I suggest you do the same.
It is.
It's kind of like we can kind of relate it to like the writer's one on strike, right?
Because I can go to an AI website and they can write a book for me in 10 minutes.
Guess what?
What are you doing differently than the AI?
And I do think that is a super important thing, because if it ain't the AI,
there's going to be something else, right?
And it's kind of like when you compare your business
to like somebody that uses a listing software.
How do I compete?
How does Johnny B compete with the scanners?
Well, I'm doing something the scanners can't do.
Exactly.
And people don't see it that way.
They think they can just list the same junk.
And that's another thing.
Since I said the word junk, all right, you're selling junk.
Let's be real.
I mean, junk behind me is people's trash.
You're selling junk.
You have to get out of this mindset that you can just sell anything.
And this is one of the most overhyped things.
And I'm sick and tired of hearing about it is I have X amount of listings on eBay
and you deserve some kind of award for having 20,000 listings on eBay.
If you're doing it the right way, you already see the reward in more sales.
Why would anybody else care about?
If somebody's got 50,000 listings on eBay, I'm thinking to myself,
why do you have 50,000?
Shouldn't you be selling like 2,000 listings a day,
a thousand listings a day, a thousand listens a month?
There's no way an eBay seller, especially in media, has 50,000 listings
and continuously grows their listings by 10,000 a month.
And we still can sit here and say, hey, I'm not getting the results.
I want to get, well, have you ever thought about the quality of the stuff you sell?
It's just not there.
And I think about it all the time being in media because a lot of media is undesirable.
Well, if it comes down to it and I ever have to switch,
I'm going to sell something that's desirable.
Maybe your brand, maybe I sell Apple phones, maybe I sell something more desirable
because media, it's not at the bottom of the barrel, but it's pretty close.
Right.
I mean, here's a perfect example.
Let's name some media that may or may not be valuable.
I'm sure there's people that do it.
Let's talk about LPs or vinyl, or let's talk about A-Tracks,
or let's talk about Laserdisc.
Yeah, there's some money in there, but when you're in a market
that is literally shrinking every year because those people and collectors
are dying off and there's less people to collect them and think they're cool.
Well, I hope you have something beyond that to help you grow monetarily.
I think you'll need more than these things.
Now, LPs and records, I think they're trending up to be fair,
but I mentioned them in just for as a reference points for everybody.
And cassettes.
I know a cassette seller, he does pretty well, but he does what he does very well.
But again, is his market growing or shrinking?
These are questions you should be asking.
Or is my paperback book market, are they growing or shrinking?
Maybe I should add hardbacks in the mix or maybe I should go up a decade
because I do older stuff, right?
Well, that's why I bought my clientele is mainly from the 70s on back,
but I throw 80s stuff in there because I know eventually my older buyers will die off,
unfortunately, but then the 80s guys will come along and they'll start buying more online.
So you got to make adjustments and plans for that as your business grows,
at least on the eBay front.
Amazon's a little easier, I think, because you got the technology.
Yeah, I'm going to start selling grocery tomorrow if I wanted to, right?
Just go to the discount grocer and look things up.
I got a question for you.
Do you think a lot of people even start reselling because it's fun to go to a thrift store
and maybe find something for yourself?
And then maybe you see like a Instagram reel or TikTok
where somebody flips something from a thrift store for 100 bucks.
Do you think a lot of people kind of initially get sucked into it
just because they're like, hey, I get to go thrifting?
Do you think because it is a thing,
because how many people have death files, right?
People buy hundreds, thousands of dollars of stuff
and it never even makes it to the platform.
It just sits in a bin in a pile somewhere.
Do you think that plays into it?
No, absolutely.
I mean, we got to think back like you and I here,
and we've been doing this for a hot minute.
And I get it every now and then, it's that treasure hunt, right?
Whoa, look at this.
I get to go treasure hunting today.
Let's go, let's walk in, see what I can find.
I've watched all these videos.
I'm looking for these particular things.
Oh, here it is in front of me.
That happens when you first start
and you get so excited, so pumped up.
You got kind of like goosebumps, like I found a valuable item.
I found the jewel in the pile of junk.
I just had to dig through it.
That is exciting.
But for me and you these days, that's a typical Tuesday.
Yeah, I think another thing we kind of can get into here
is when we talk about treating your business like a business,
all of the thrift stores, a lot of them are getting smarter, right?
A lot of them know that online platforms exist
where they can sell their goods at a higher price.
So you, Johnny B, he's been relying on thrift stores forever.
And all of a sudden, his thrift stores are scanning the stuff in the back,
like we all know Goodwill does.
They have their own online site to sell the stuff.
You know, if you look on Amazon, you see all the Goodwills have,
you know, seller stores, all the Salvation Armies have seller stores.
And then Johnny B comes to me and says,
Mike, I can't sell nothing no more because my thrift stores stink.
Well, they have the stuff coming in.
They decided, hey, let me change my business here.
I can get more money selling it online.
You can't fall any thrift store.
You can't fall any business for trying to make more money.
And it works.
So guess what?
You're relying on them.
They're not relying on you.
So that's on you.
That falls on you at the end of the day.
Right.
Look at Half Price Books.
That place used to be amazing.
But look at them today.
They've raised a price.
I went to the, I went not this year, last year.
I went to Half Price Book store just to see
because I heard horrible things,
but I've used Half Price Book as a consumer before.
I didn't believe it.
What in there?
What's the clearance section?
You know how much the cheapest item on clearance was?
$4 on clearance.
And I'm not talking limited selection here.
It was a gigantic clearance section.
$4 was the cheapest item on clearance.
I do think they are not in a rush to sell their stuff either.
I don't think it's like a fire cell mentality anymore
because they have incorporated these online outlets for their stuff.
So it's not like, you know, my Goodwills didn't do the color tags, right?
Where, oh, it's 50% off Wednesday through Friday.
My Goodwills didn't do that for years.
They just recently started doing it.
And honestly, like, it's not like they have these crazy dollar days anymore, right?
Or half off days.
Like they don't exist anymore.
Like Goodwill, you know, they give you the 10% discount.
Like if you're a veteran, like that's nothing to them.
Like they know that it can sit here.
We already pay for the space.
We make money, everything we send to online.
If this stuff sits out on the sales floor for three months, so be it.
At the end of the day, we'll throw it in a pallet.
We'll sell it to some sucker reseller online that's going to buy it by the pallet
and make no money.
And that's honestly, that's their whole game plan.
And they're going to be around because that's what they do.
Right.
And it's not their fault for doing it because they know you.
I hopefully nobody listen to this.
They know one of you people's a sucker.
Don't be a sucker.
And the Goodwills, if you don't know, they, well, if you're a bookseller here,
I'm going to let you know they have a bookstore only, a Goodwill only bookstore.
There's several of them.
And they don't sell clothes.
All they sell is books.
They got boutique stores too, dude.
Upscale, nice boutique stores.
Where do you think all the coach bags go that are legitimate?
Where do you think all the designer clothes go that are legitimate?
All the nice sneakers, they have boutique stores where they're
sending all this good stuff and they're selling it for marked up prices.
If you think that's not the case, you are mistaken.
We can sit here and make it seem like we're blaming the thrift stores for you failing.
But at the end of the day, this whole call, the reason you're going to be around in a year
or the reason you're not going to be around in a year is you.
Right.
I mean, this all falls on you.
You do a lot of research.
I do a lot of research.
And I'm not talking about watching silly YouTube videos.
I'm talking about going out in the field, looking around your area,
understanding what your area is doing.
Do you know what a common thing out in my area that I figured out is?
Dollar a disc when I was doing disc media.
That's a game, this whole region place.
The box set has 20 disc in there, 20 bucks.
So knowing that you can smarten your negotiating skills up.
So not everything spelled out.
There's no handbook for this, right?
A lot of this stuff.
There's a lot of information online.
Don't get me wrong.
There's a lot of information in groups, but you in your area have to figure out what's
going on around you, know your surroundings that you're going to and knowing what you
can and can't get away with when negotiating people.
If you think these people don't talk to each other, they'll always be talking to each other.
They don't know who you are after a period of time.
You're wrong.
They do.
So you need to know your stuff and know what you're working with and who you're working
with.
I like the idea like we were kind of, you're asking me before this is like people,
like I think about it, right?
They're closing all these goodwill bins and people rely solely on those.
And I know like when we first started talking, right?
Our big thing was let's find the inventory upstream, right?
The bins is basically the last stop before the landfill, right?
What are we doing here?
Why are we at the end of the line trying to find the items instead of being closer to
where the items initially come from, right?
There's just, it's crazy to me that so many people rely solely on the last stop.
This is the train's last stop before it goes off the tracks and crashes and burns.
And you're like, sure, yeah, I'll get on the train.
Like you got to start thinking two or three steps ahead of everything else.
I'm going to give you guys, well, let me ask, are we on the members part of the call now?
Or we members get nothing this week.
So maybe I should mention this one.
I was going to get a free one, but I don't know.
This is important for everybody because whether you're a member or not, I do think this next
year is going to be super pivotal and crucial if you want to survive in this reselling game
and still treat it as a business and still get results because it's not just media selling,
right?
I know people in all kinds of different fields, online arbitrage, retail arbitrage,
wholesale, private label, everywhere.
The scale is tipped in the opposite way.
I'm telling everybody now, there's a lot of people getting out.
There's a lot of complaining.
There's a lot of price tank and there's a lot of idiocy.
Going on out there.
And personally for me, besides sitting down here and talking to you about it,
I ain't worried about it because I know what I'm doing at the end of the day.
And I know my sources and I know where I can go to get this stuff.
So like it is what it is to me, but I do think a lot of people don't hear the fact that
in a year from now, you might not be here as a reseller.
Right.
So I'm not going to give away exactly what I was going to say to members only,
but I'll give a variation of what's to stop you from going to Goodwill,
talking to the manager.
It's like, look, you don't have to play your employees to scan all this.
I'll just buy it outright from you.
Beat it before the good stuff goes away.
Before it goes off to wherever, because I guarantee that store manager doesn't care about
his upstream.
He cares about his bottom line at his particular store.
Why not talk to a man or woman, whichever the case may be.
Look how many people we got in the group that have backroom access and the Goodwills don't care.
They're like, Hey, come by whatever you want.
They call them the day they get the bookshelm and hey, we got a Gaylord for you.
You come by, you swing by, you take only what you want.
Do that because there's so many hours that goes into scanning it in that backroom.
They don't have to do that.
If you come along and like, look, I'm solving a problem for you.
You just got to give me a ring and let me know.
The last topic we're going to cover real quick here, and this could be a whole episode on its own,
is that it takes work and it's a lot of work and so
and some days it's heavy, nasty, 90 degree lift in a hundred pound tubs
in your front lawn type work.
And even though it seems like, and this is not just for media, this is everything,
clothing, shoes, electronics.
It takes effort and work and time.
And some days, a lot of days are going to suck a whole lot.
And you just have to realize that that's not all roses and rainbows like you see out on
YouTube and social media.
It's the complete opposite.
Yeah.
I mean, I just spent the last three days running a yard sale because I do bulk buying
and I accumulate my own junk.
It doesn't fit my eBay store.
So that gets piled up and I have to get rid of it some way.
I like to make money on it, but I got to tell you my whole body hurts
because like he was saying, moving a hundred pound, two hundred pound,
three hundred pound carts, deadlifting stuff, moving bookcases, loading books,
organized takes all day.
It's exhausting, to be honest with you, to recoup a little bit of money, but I
it's it's worth it to me in the long run to get to again, knowing my numbers.
Well, I can make my lower numbers a little bit higher by doing things like that.
Yeah, it takes a little bit of my time.
I know there's going to be an argument for, well, how much is your time worth?
Well, it is worth it because I've raised my bottom line all the way around
from what I saw on eBay by doing that because it changes the number game.
I'm going to have to make like a mental note here.
So like a year from now, we do this podcast again and like we'll have everybody
that listen to this podcast sign a petition.
Right. And then a year from now, we'll have everybody listen to it,
sign a petition again.
We'll see how many people went away, you know, within a year's time.
But I do think it is a lot of work.
And I think a lot of things, honestly, a lot of it I see on YouTube,
a lot of these clothing sellers, like, you know, like you said,
they don't show the glorious stuff of ironing clothes, cleaning the clothes,
you know, cleaning the shoes.
And it's like, guys, you just see them picking their orders.
Like if you only knew the amount of work that went in from sourcing it
to listing it, not even selling it, like that's where 90 percent, 95 percent
of the work is like the 5 percent of grabbing it back and it is nothing.
Nothing. Buying it and shipping it out.
That's the easy part. It's like you said, everything in between.
There's so much work, so much work.
I'm going to make a video of just follow me around like for a week straight.
And you're going to be like, dude, like, what do you mean?
You're not just getting paid money every single day.
You're in the storage unit sweating.
You're you're doing your job.
You're driving an hour and 15 minutes one way.
Like nobody wants to see that, dude.
You made a video about packing boxes and doing the heat gun.
I remember that. And it was a fast forward one.
Yeah, it still took you 20 minutes in the fast forward speed up version of it.
And it was a good video because that was the honest truth of what reselling is.
I sit here every weekend with that damn heat gun and peel off those stickers.
And it's probably an hour of my time, depending how many I get from thrift stores
that have the stickers, I can sit here for an hour with that heat gun on.
And it's 90 degrees out and I'm peeling those stickers for an hour straight collecting a pile.
But hey, I mean, maybe I can like record myself dancing or something and just put some music over.
That's the music on some TV between each iteration.
Yeah, it's it is it is one of those things.
So I'm curious to see here who survives the next year.
I do think we're going to see a huge change in reselling.
It's already happening with the eBay AI descriptions.
Everybody's complaining about that.
I mean, listen, get with the times or see you later by just because you've been doing this for 50 years.
Doesn't mean you're entitled to get sales.
Doesn't mean you're going to get sales.
Doesn't mean what you did last week is going to work this week.
You got to change with the times or you're going to go away and stop believing all the the hype you see around.
I mean, I haven't even been doing this long and I've seen so many fads come and go, dude.
It's like, oh, my God, sell books, do online arbitrage, do retail arbitrage, do eBay to Amazon.
Do Amazon to Amazon.
Do do this.
Do consignment, do bulk, do buy a forklift, buy a warehouse.
Yeah, buy a rental property, buy Airbnb, rent your cars out.
I mean, I've seen so many things come and go just in the past two years alone from really paying attention to like the trends on social media when it comes to resell.
And I think that that's going to be the next one is going to be trends with what to do with the money.
You make from reselling because I think it's already headed that way.
It's no longer going to be like a reselling trend, like do this business model or do that business model.
It's going to be like, well, what you should do with your reselling profits.
Like, I think that's going to be the new trend here.
I'm calling it now.
Reseller investment portfolio.
I like it.
I'm just saying.
So as always, we appreciate you listening and we'll talk to you in next week's episode.