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
used 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 in another episode of the Resellers Mindset podcast.
Mike here alongside Johnny B. as always.
And Johnny doesn't know it, but the topic I told him
we were going to do just now before the call,
I've actually switched it up a little bit
because I thought about it.
So the topic today is going to be
the days of lazy reselling are gone.
Our initial topic here, just for full transparency,
was the golden days of reselling are long gone.
But I think the days of lazy reselling are gone
because I still think there is a lot of money
to be made in reselling.
So I couldn't say the golden days are gone
if I'm kind of still living proof
and Johnny's living proof that you still can make
a full time income reselling.
So yeah, that's what we're going to cover today.
And I do think it is.
Things have changed so much
and I think it changes faster now.
It's almost like technology.
The reselling game, it switches up.
There are so many fads and crazes that come along.
And for somebody that's niched down,
it's kind of easy for me and you to block out
the vintage tees, the collectibles, the trading cards.
But for an everything seller,
it's like you got to kind of chase the fads
and just adapt your business
to whatever is hot in the moment.
So I'm going to throw it over to you.
You kind of can take us anywhere you want to take us.
I mean, sure.
I mean, I could speak on both fronts for Amazon, eBay.
Let's start with a little old Amazon here.
Little old.
You can't send in $2 books anymore.
The fees are gone way, way up.
I mean, they pretty much doubled.
And I was only in Amazon for less than a year.
Now I'm back again, but yeah.
That changed and it wasn't very long.
And then on eBay, I mean,
yeah, I mean, there's some fee change there,
but that's traditional, nothing really major.
But the bigger change is the big talk is AI.
Oh my gosh, the AI is going to do better listings
than human beings.
Now, what are we going to do?
Well, you can adjust.
You can do things the AI can't currently do,
but eventually be able to do it.
Or you can do something better than the AI can do,
at least for a little while.
But then you're competing with that.
And then you couple that with huge volume.
Are you out of business question mark?
Nobody really knows.
So it's a wait and see kind of game.
Or maybe we all get lucky
and eBay just bans AI technology without it.
But there are things to consider.
You have to constantly be upping your game.
It's not that you're out of the game.
You got to be upping your game
as well as diversifying your game.
That's why I'm back in Amazon.
That's why I got a brick and mortar.
That way when a curve ball pops me in my noggin,
I can adjust accordingly, or it gives me time to adjust.
I'm not dependent on anyone sales channel and or platform.
And I'm probably looking to do more,
just to double my bets more or less.
Yeah, you got to take it seriously,
especially if you're doing this full time.
You constantly got to be adapting and adjusting.
And you got to be able to see the writing on the wall,
even if you got to squint
and move in a little bit to see it.
So I went on the tangent there.
Your turn, Mike.
I think a lot of this boils down to,
how do people find out about reselling?
Usually it's YouTube or some kind of social media platform,
where they hear from a friend
who's seen something on YouTube.
And I do think a lot of the,
this is just one example.
I'm in the same boat.
Media is like so saturated.
But I think a lot of the big time YouTubers
that I kind of see in my feed,
a lot of it is focused on selling clothes, use clothing.
So the problem you have here,
if you decide today you're going to start
a reselling business and you're going to sell used clothing
or even used media,
you have to realize you are stepping into a market
where saturated doesn't even do it justice.
I mean, there are so many sellers,
there's so many items for pennies.
People sell it for pennies.
People will even sell items that take a loss.
Some of these huge players in these categories.
And I think what happens is,
and a lot of people,
maybe they started reselling during the pandemic
where everything was flying off the shelf
because people couldn't go to the stores.
All of a sudden,
I think we're kind of starting to get back to normal here.
And even further back past the pandemic,
even when I was selling everything,
I feel like it was easier to resell.
I feel like my things sold better
because there was less competition.
Now these categories are flooded with people.
And what happens is, it's the same thing.
It's probably worse on Amazon is that
you have to realize your competition, right?
Me and Johnny are competition.
Johnny doesn't have to know anything about the item
or what the price the item at
or what the item sold for in the past.
This probably happens hundreds of thousands times a day.
Somebody prices their item way undervalued
and somebody snatches it up immediately
to resell for profit.
This happens all the time.
You can't control other people.
So when you're in saturated markets,
your hands are like, you're kind of tied.
Even if you're finding quality stuff,
you can't control Johnny B, the idiot book shepherd, right?
That's just the reality of it.
People get so frustrated.
Well, why are they selling it for $5?
This is a $50 shirt.
Well, they can sell it for whatever they want.
There's nothing you can do.
I can do, anybody can do, eBay can do,
because that's just the reality of the game.
The platforms want the sales
and they can't control how you're pricing.
Sure, Amazon kind of does with their fair pricing policy,
but Amazon will let you give something away.
You want to give it away for five, six bucks
if they're not going to argue with you and say,
all right, that's another happy customer for us.
You pay us our fees and who cares about that?
But I do think it's what you see
and what people kind of get the door with
is they're already stepping into a market
that is so saturated and you don't have any plans
to differentiate yourself from me or Johnny.
If we all have the same book, right?
You listening or watching, me and Johnny,
we all have the same exact book, right?
What are we doing to differentiate ourselves?
You're either going to have a much better listing like Johnny,
you're either going to sell it for,
try to get 20 bucks out of it like me,
or you're going to be somebody that just like,
I had no idea what I'm doing,
I'm going to sell this book for $5
and you actually think when it sells for $5,
you're going to get $5.
So a lot of people I think
just step into oversaturated markets
and I think that's like kind of the biggest mistake
you can do and I think it's so prevalent now
that everybody's trying to get into the same thing.
Amazon, everybody wants to sell media
because oh, it's easy, the ROI is crazy,
but there's so much more that goes into it
and you're just stepping into a whole pile of crap basically.
May I'll give you a perfect example of this.
I've price tanked a lot of listings as of late
because of my free price here wasn't set up.
Mike helped me out earlier this morning for $7.99
when these books are way more than that.
But I just screwed over my competition
for if they scan my books this weekend,
so I'm happy about that.
But anyway, I'm having to go back in
and manually adjust them right now.
But if I didn't stay on top of it
and today's thing, lazy about it,
just let it go and not even bother to check,
I wouldn't have known and I wouldn't,
I missed out a whole bunch of money
keeping more people like Mike out of the market
because they're like, who's this jackass on the listing?
Well, it's Johnny, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing
and can't send my book in now.
I guess that's the other thing.
You gotta always be double checking things
just to make sure you can be as firm as you want on it's right.
I set it up right the first time.
I thought I did, like I reactivated my account.
Didn't bother to check till I had some boxes checked in.
You know what?
Well, my prices were out of whack.
So now I gotta manually go do it.
So I spent my weekend doing it.
I checked the merchant fulfilled as well this weekend
just to make sure, but I think everything's right there.
But anyway, back on topic.
So reselling is not easy.
It's probably more challenging than it's ever been
if you wanna do this for the longterm.
Now, if you're just doing this part-time
or a hobbyist kind of level,
you may not need to pay attention as stringently,
but even at a part-time or hobbyist level,
you want as much money for the time you put in as you can.
So maybe you put some time away to check things,
refine those things, even on a smaller scale
than people like Mike and I.
I do think like, I think about it like,
let's just take you as an example.
For example, if Johnny B, he lists his books,
he's got full item descriptives, full,
everything's perfect.
It doesn't get no better than his listings for his books.
Now what happens if Johnny B,
if Johnny B existed 10 years ago, right?
Where there wasn't a competition today,
he maybe would only need to take two photos, right?
One of the front of the book, one of the back of the book,
put a cute little description in there.
Hey, thanks for supporting my small eBay store, right?
And those items you could argue would probably sell back
then, but now things are so different.
The competition is just,
if Johnny B didn't take the approach he did
to his eBay today, I mean, it would be tough going, right?
If he was lazy with his listings
and he's trying to get a higher price
for the same items that I'm selling,
he's basically capitalizing on all the lazy people
out there listening to this right now
that are selling his kind of stuff, right?
He's like, well, you don't wanna do it the right way,
then I will, I'll charge a premium
and I'll actually make money when mine sells.
And even though you're spending the time
to list it the wrong way, when you sell it for $5,
you're not even making no money.
So it's almost like a double-edged sword
that works in your favor.
And I think you have to differentiate yourself.
I don't think you can just keep copy and pasting
what other people are doing on all the listings out there
and all the, some of the stuff,
there's hundreds of the same exact shirt.
And it's like, how can you ever justify
you getting a sale for something
if there's a hundred of them listed?
Like, you got a one in 100 chance,
however often that shirt sells, once a week.
I mean, good luck.
And there's no rhyme or reason.
Are you promoting?
Are you the lowest price?
People are always gonna lower the price
because there's a hundred of them.
So it's not gonna sell.
So people are gradually gonna lower their price.
It's like, I don't know, man.
I just don't see the path forward
with people that are getting in the game today
or even recently, and are just trying to basically do
what everybody else is doing.
I think you have to start thinking outside the box,
start doing different things,
experimenting with different things
because the days are just stepping in and selling,
use books on eBay and Amazon.
I think they're long gone.
And I think it's the same with clothing.
I mean, the huge clothing sellers have systems in places,
processes in places, suppliers in places.
If you get it for the cheapest,
you can sell it for the cheapest
and still make a lot of money, right?
That's kind of the big thing here.
Even when it comes to media,
these huge resellers can sell it for $6
if they got it for three cents a piece.
And those are the people you're competing against
at the end of the day.
They have the most listings.
And there's some of these huge guys,
some of these huge players do things the right way, right?
Like we always reference, you know, Chris and tech,
like tech does his clothing like no other, right?
Everything's done the right way
and he does huge volumes of it.
So it's like, how could you ever compete
with somebody like that?
You really can't.
So you have to figure out a way to switch it up,
be different than that person, right?
Even if it's the same category,
kind of like Johnny B's doing with those books, right?
It's a little crappy paperback we see in every thrift store,
but the way he lists it, takes the photos,
has a description, drags all the information in there.
No other listing on eBay is gonna contain that information.
So he's winning automatically basically
just by doing things the right way.
Right, and to put things in other perspective for you,
I mean, Mike mentioned it with the larger ones.
I just crossed 10,000 active listings
and that may sound like a whole heck of a lot
to somebody who's not even close to that,
but I am a very small fish in a very larger ocean.
10,000 is nothing immediate, absolutely nothing.
Now I don't do the scan route like the bigger guys do
and they have conveyor belts going all day 24 seven.
I can't, that's not my game.
So I had to do something differently than that game
because I can't compete as far as slinging books up
left and right, that's not my game.
My game is about quality listings.
And yes, some of us have the same books.
I have the same book as the person I just mentioned,
but if you rack the two up and you rule out price
because mine is gonna be higher, sure.
But my listing just looks better.
It looks like I wanna buy it versus,
oh, this is a stock photo.
Huh, half this information is wrong
because they scanned it in
and didn't even bother to double check.
Huh, but it's only 499, they get it, it's the wrong book.
Or it's different than what they were expecting
or it's in worse condition.
Because I've noticed with those higher end sellers,
their conditionings all over the place.
Some of it's right, some of it's wrong.
More often than not, they didn't catch everything.
Versus mine, we probably catch like 99.99% of errors,
flaws on our conditioning.
Even that's there by us.
Because again, our separator's quality experience,
what you see is what you get.
I think if you break down the categories,
I think there's an opportunity in every category
to do something different within the category,
to make money.
I'm just gonna start throwing some crazy ones out there
and you kinda can think about some as I go here.
So we had Sabrina on the podcast a few weeks ago
and she's a huge Barbie seller.
And I said, well, can you sell Barbie parts?
And somebody out there right now is probably like,
what do you mean Barbie parts?
Can you pull off the head of the Barbie?
Can you sell the legs of the Barbie?
Even down to the accessories.
So if you're just selling Barbies
and you take a step back, you're like, wait a minute,
I can sell accessories and Barbie heads, Ken heads.
Like, yeah, it might sound a little depressive to somebody.
It's like, oh man, this weirdo is selling,
take a picture of the little Ken head on my finger.
Here goes 1993 Ken head.
And then again, it's like sewing machines.
Are you gonna sell sewing machines
or are you gonna part out sewing machines?
Yes.
I think the easy route is not always
what you think it is.
S-L-S-O, machines of pain in the butt.
It's a huge heavy thing you have to ship,
test all this stuff.
If you're just parting it out,
you got little tiny parts,
you don't gotta test the parts
as long as they're all there complete, boom.
You got probably 50 more listings than that one listing.
You're probably gonna make a lot more money
because usually when you part things out,
you make more money.
That's just the rules of the game.
And I even thought about this,
what about board games?
People collect their board games.
What if you just buy board games for a dollar piece
and you part out the board game pieces?
How many pieces are in a board game?
Just imagine a risk of board game
where even Monopoly, one card missing.
There's so much more opportunity that meets the eye
and there's so much more profit to be made
if you just think things one more step further.
It's just like, give me something.
You got something on your mind where it's on the surface.
With books, you could just sell dust jackets.
Yeah, I mentioned that one too.
I could have a totally dust jacket store.
It'd be kinda cool.
Easy to store potentially.
No, I mean, back to Barbies or just toys in general,
I could see somebody just doing the boxes,
not even toys, just the boxes the toys come in.
Because people are always after the box
for those people that need it in a box, right?
You could also, I mean, even with books,
you could do, I mentioned dust jackets.
I mean, I hate to say it,
but if you take some of the older, not worth anything books
and you cut out the illustrations,
you could sell those illustrations
for probably more than what you would sell the book for
that had all of them in there to begin with.
Now, that's blasphemy in book land, but you could do it.
I mean, who knows, dude?
Who's, yeah, of course, all the gatekeepers of media,
you're not gonna make anybody do that, Johnny.
It's like, you could cut out the insides of the book
and have a little safe in there, right?
There's so many things we can do,
but we're just like, well, we just gotta sell the book.
We gotta sell the book as the book.
We can't do anything else to it
to think outside of the box.
It's crazy to me, we get so narrow-minded.
I guess it should be the resellers suck
at innovating their own market, right?
We just copy and paste what somebody else does.
We hit sell similar, that's it on eBay.
On Amazon, the listing's already there.
We're just listing, there's no innovation.
And I don't think anybody even cares.
I do know there's people out there
that are thinking outside the box,
making a whole bunch of money right now,
because everybody else just copy paste.
But I do think there is still so much room
to kind of switch things up.
And honestly, it'd be less work, you make more money.
What could go wrong?
Like if I ever got out of media,
I would probably do something along those lines,
parts or pieces of something
where there's an endless supply for super cheap.
And it's easy to store, it's just, I don't know.
I just think it's laziness, man.
No, it absolutely is.
I mean, in the lazy part,
the start of it is even thinking about these things.
You can be anywhere to think.
I mean, you may need to set some distraction
free time away from yourself,
but you take your brain with you 100% of the time.
So you can be thinking when you're standing in line,
on your commute to your day job
or on your commute to go sourcing,
or hey, first thing when I wake up
or last thing before I go to bed,
I'm spending 15 minutes on how to be better
than everybody else or not even that.
Do something differently than everybody else.
You know you have to be better
if you're not a hyper competitive person.
Great, be more creative, do something different.
I'm gonna die on this though, Johnny.
It's gonna be like when we're like 80 years old
still doing this podcast,
I'm still gonna talk about this one opportunity
I think that exists in the eBay marketplace.
Hiring some hunk ripped guy to sell romance novels
and the cover photo is him all oiled up, right?
He's looking like Arnold in his prime
and he's holding your book right there.
And I guarantee the sell through on those books
would be at least 10X compared to the category.
I've seen people do that in clothing.
They hire a model to actually wear the clothes
instead of doing a flat lay or a mannequin.
There's a model wearing the clothes.
I mean, I don't need clothes.
No shirt is in the job description for my-
Shirtless man with a kilt.
Yes, a hunky shirtless man
that holds up my little Fabio style love paperback books.
I mean, I'm just saying that's where my mind runs to
sometimes and I do think if some like,
if we just allowed ourselves to kind of explore
these categories we sell in,
like you could strike gold today.
I guarantee it.
If you just decided,
and if you do go down one of these rabbit holes, right?
You have to give it a real chance.
With anything in life,
you have to give something an actual chance
to give results before you can be like,
well, this doesn't work.
I'm not talking about you hire Fabio's twin for a week
and then expect to get crazy results right away.
Anything you try, you have to give, I don't know,
like three months, two months, three months full attention
before you can even-
The longer you give it, the better,
true to what the results are it's gonna be.
Yeah, but I mean, some people will be like,
well, I listed three dust jackets today
and I haven't sold any in a week.
This doesn't work.
Yeah, yeah.
Those people can, they can do a yard sale.
That's what they'll be good at.
Yeah, it's just, I feel like there's so much room
for innovation and reselling that's just untapped.
And I don't know, like,
I try to figure it out sometimes.
Like people are probably like, well, why don't you do it?
Well, what I'm doing currently works, right?
I'm not on YouTube crying that eBay is dead
and my business is going under
and me, Deb and the cats are eating out of the dumpsters.
Like my business is working fine,
but I see so many people whining all the time.
I'm just like, well, what are you doing differently?
No, of course you can't compete with Tech or Johnny
in their respective categories.
You're not doing nothing different than them
and your listings are worse.
So like you automatically lose out the gate.
It's like, you're almost handicapped immediately
when you start a business,
when you go into some of these categories,
especially on eBay, right?
Amazon, a lot of it's based off price.
Yeah, you lose money, but it's really like with eBay,
you have to be different.
Your photos, what are you doing for your photos?
What are you doing for your listings?
Self-similar works for somebody like me
who has no expectations to make any kind of money on eBay.
If I do ding, ding, ding, it's a bonus, right?
Oh my God, I sold something on eBay.
But like, if I just had to sell on eBay,
it would be brutal.
I think about this all the time.
Like if Amazon ever takes me to the guillotine,
like it's gonna be brutal, but I will guarantee you,
I will not do just books on eBay.
Like if the time comes and I get axed and I'm not media,
I'll probably still be a part of it,
but I'm gonna go down one of these parts and pieces,
business styles and do something
that nobody else is really doing.
Or maybe there's always gonna be somebody else doing it,
right?
Like we can go look for anything on eBay,
but it's kind of like you did.
You identified like almost like a gap in the market, right?
There's something going on here.
Exactly what I did, yeah.
So even if there's always somebody else doing something,
I'm just telling you to do something better.
And I think the same argument can be said like,
Deb, she has a cat and dog toy business, right?
And so many people knock off her toys on Etsy,
but they don't do it the same way.
Her listings are better.
She's got more reviews.
She's got video reviews.
Everything about her, even down to her product quality,
it's all better.
So yes, she gets knocked off all the time.
Deb of five years ago,
when she first started her business
would probably be more pissed off today.
Now she's just like, it's garbage compared to me.
Like who cares?
You're just like, you can't keep being an imitator, right?
You gotta be the person at the front of the line.
If you're always chasing,
and what they do on Etsy, right?
They sort things by best seller.
So like if Deb gets a best seller, it's like,
oh, this is gonna get knocked off within the month.
And that's exactly what happens,
but it doesn't matter
because Deb already controls that market, right?
She's already built up a brand.
She's already built up the store.
The people know the quality.
People see the reviews.
So you get to a point where as the big person,
you don't care about all the new people
or all the people coming in and knocking you off
and thinking they can do things the way that you can
when you know they can.
And that's just the reality of it.
It's the same thing in reselling.
That's why all the little people go away with time
because, hey, you can't compete with the big people
because they're doing more.
They got more capital.
They got more inventory.
They got more everything.
They're getting inventory for cheaper.
They're doing a better job listing.
Maybe they have help so they can list more.
It's just like, I think it's a revolving door.
It's just like some people are never gonna get there
doing what they do today.
Right, I mean, even people can come in and compete with me
and do things slightly different.
I told this on one other podcast.
You do everything like me
and then you include page numbers
because I don't do page numbers.
You've won.
You've done something differently than I do.
Yeah, but I mean, what are the odds
that somebody's actually gonna do that?
None, that's why I gave it.
One day, one day a new book shepherd
will emerge from the shadows.
And it's for me to go off in the pasture and lay down.
That's right, so I think we're gonna wrap up the,
we're gonna jump into the members part here shortly,
but I think we're gonna wrap up the call here
and just I want everybody listening
to think about the category you sell in
and think about one thing that makes you different
from everybody else in that category.
I think that's the biggest takeaway
even from my Amazon business.
I have things that I do differently
and that doesn't necessarily have to be something
related to product, right?
Maybe it's a process.
Maybe all of a sudden you cut your time
that you're investing in the business in half.
So all of a sudden you're not expecting
to be selling millions of dollars a week.
You can sell half million dollars a week
because you're spending half the time in the business.
There's plenty of different things you can do
just to think outside the box.
And I'll be curious if you're watching this over on YouTube,
drop a comment for something like,
what do you think is different in the category
that you're in that you think could actually make money?
I think there's opportunities out there everywhere.
I think the golden age of reselling is,
it's still here because the fact we could even do this
and make it income is proof
that the golden age of resellings here
because I mean, where else in the world
can you have a business like this
and make a full-time income,
being your own boss, selling junk nobody else wants
in quotation marks because there's always a buyer out there
for you, you just have to get it to them.
So I appreciate you all listening.
We'll talk to you in next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the resellers mindset podcast.
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