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 to another episode of Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike, alongside the bearded man, Johnny B.
over there in his bookstore slash warehouse slash second home.
Today's topic is a fun, interesting, sad, happy topic,
depending on how you look at it.
We're going to talk about how the reselling purge has begun here
in 2024.
Lots of resellers, lots of, I was telling Johnny before the call,
lots of YouTube resellers that I used to follow now,
they're no longer posting content.
They've gone back and basically have gotten a corporate job,
which is perfectly fine.
I'm not shaming anybody for getting a job.
And listen, reselling is not as easy to make the money
you want to make.
And I think that's why a lot of people take a step back
and say, wait a minute.
I'm doing a lot of work and I'm making a little bit of money.
And I think that's the biggest thing we realized here
in the past few years is, and you've talked about it
in previous episodes, when the free money was flowing,
sales were great.
You couldn't beat the sales that were coming in when everybody's
getting a free $1,400 check in the mail.
But now, everybody's basically broke as a joke.
Broceries are expensive as they've ever been,
gas the same way.
So nobody needs to buy your Super Mario plush
that you got from the Goodwill for $4 that you
plan on selling for $10.
And I think a lot of it is just, what
is the desirability of the items you plan on selling?
So Johnny, you can take us away when it comes to,
what do you think about listing things that people actually
want?
We sell media, so it's one of the worst categories to sell in.
You could argue for Amazon and eBay.
It is so saturated.
But there still is desirability within any category.
And finding those items is basically
how you're going to win in this.
People want things.
But when necessities versus non-essentials
come into play when you have a well-fixed income,
you're going to choose your necessities.
You're going to buy your toilet paper and toothpaste
before you buy your collectible Mario game,
like you mentioned over there, because you need
that stuff to live.
So when people are making the same amount of money
and prices are going up, they cut what they're going to buy.
Now, if you have a thing that people
are going to buy on a seasonal basis,
let's say Christmas gifts or birthday gifts,
if you're selling that kind of stuff, you can do all right.
I know, I think it was a gentleman who makes all
his money during Halloween season,
because he sells nothing but seasonal Halloween stuff.
So he works all year round to make all his money in one month,
or a little bit before and a little bit after.
But the majority of his money comes during that October
month for him.
The other way to do it is have a commodity
that when it buys at an infrequent basis
that the price tag on that item is very expensive,
like $1,000.
You make a good living doing that.
You may not sell a lot of items on a daily basis,
or even a weekly basis, but over the month,
you're going to make a lot of money.
Now, if you're doing a volume game,
with low margin things, low desirability,
you're going to need a lot of items in a gigantic store,
and or send in a lot of stuff to Amazon,
if Amazon is your game, which most listeners here are.
So, I mean, and then there's the waiting game.
When the market stabilizes, people start getting paid more,
they're going to buy more of your regular run of the mill,
nothing special about it items.
But until that point, you're not going to be making
a lot of money.
It's a longer dollar later methodology,
which I was very much a proponent of.
During the high years, I would make a lot of money.
Like during COVID, I made a lot of money.
And when it stabilizes, let's say outside of COVID,
I made about the same amount of money,
but I did more work, had more items.
But I got in during the period where it was,
like you said, free money going around,
everybody's inside, bored.
They want stuff to read, they want stuff to watch,
they want stuff to listen to in media land.
So it was good.
I was looking forward to the following year,
but put in more additional work, more items
to make the same, well, not the same, I made more,
but it wasn't enough as I was hoping it would be.
I mean, that was just a factor of the market is
what the market is and you need to make adjustments,
which I did and I rolled myself into Amazon.
Now I'm making more money.
I'm doing, I'm putting in the same amount of hours,
but the audience is much wider.
So my lower margin things are getting purchased
a lot more often.
So sell through rate, but it's sell through rate
on a platform that's bigger.
I'm still making money on eBay,
but my workload on eBay is less.
So I have to go with the marketplace that pays me the most.
That's where most of my efforts are gonna go into.
And I've been rambling and I'll give Mike a chance
to speak now.
It's hard for me to kind of, I don't know,
accept the fact that reselling,
like when I hear people, sales are slow, reselling's dead,
fees are going up, right?
eBay wants an extra 10 cents, Amazon fees are going up.
I think it's hard for me to swallow that pill
because there's no other business in the world
where you can get stuff for free and sell it for $100.
Some people have gotten free stuff,
sold it for thousands of dollars.
The ROI should be so high.
The only thing you're gonna run into is finding
and listing, especially if you're an eBay seller,
listing enough profitable items
to make the money you need to make.
I just, and we talked about it before the call,
I list once a week on eBay.
Well, I decided to list three items the other day
and two of them already sold, it's been three days.
So I think the whole idea of,
well, you gotta list 10 items every day.
It's just not that, it has to be items that are desirable.
I sold a Metallica cassette, two cassette, a little set.
And then I sold a DVD that was not in production anymore.
So if you're listing and finding the stuff people want,
even if it is collectible,
even in a downswing of the economy,
your items are still gonna sell
and you have to be willing to put them at a reasonable price.
Oh my, it drives me nuts, man.
These people are like, I wanna get top dollar.
Top dollar is gonna be no dollar
because nobody's ever gonna buy it.
Right, I mean, I charge a premium
for the way I do my listings on eBay,
for extra photos and for better shipping,
packaging more or less,
and the time and effort it takes to do the listing itself.
Now, do I go crazy with that number
that I put my premium on?
No, I don't.
I still, most of my items
are still below an everyday value thing
because it's hard to go anywhere
and spend less than $30 these days.
I don't even know a meal for two
can even be 30 bucks anymore.
Maybe if you go to Waffle House still, maybe.
I don't know, I've been to Waffle House in a while.
But if I were to put my items, let's say a $4 item,
I normally would do like 12.99 on that item plus shipping.
If I went 50 bucks on a $4 item,
there's no way that thing would sell.
But if I come down to the realm of reasonability
and sometimes people get sticker shock at reasonability,
I then explain it to them
why I'm charging the amount I'm charging.
And then I, oh, okay, that makes sense, I understand.
But I'm looking for a cheap copy.
I'm like, that's great.
There are other sellers who sell the same item
where you can get it at the price you want.
I'm looking for the customer
where the price doesn't, it doesn't affect them.
I don't cater, and this is gonna sound bad.
I don't cater to the shoestring on a college budget,
eating ramen or they're living off social security customers.
That's not my customer base.
Even though they may want my same items,
I would sell my items much faster
at a lower rate with less work, absolutely.
But I've chosen not to do that, at least on my eBay end.
I save that for Amazon.
Amazon can do that for me.
Yeah, it's hard because it's all a balancing act
with reselling.
And I think a lot of people get caught up with the,
oh, I'm going to the thrift stores
and the thrift stores are fun.
And I've kind of, I talked about this the other day,
is thrift stores, it's not like, I don't know,
it's not going to the carnival for me anymore, right?
I go in, I scan the stuff and I get out.
There's no extra nonsense that takes place
when I'm in a thrift store.
There's no looking at the glass cases, right?
I'm here for the media.
I'm getting, scanning the media and I'm leaving it.
People, you just burn time as a reseller.
That's one of the big reasons I think a lot of people fail
is you wind up putting in all these hours.
And I put a YouTube poll out the other day.
If you work 40 plus hours a week in your reselling business,
should your sales, not profit,
should your sales be at least 100K?
And I was blown away that so many people said no,
because I think to myself,
if you're doing this 40 hours a week minimum,
you should easily be hitting 100K in sales.
What are you doing with your time?
I mean, I try to, I mean,
there's only so many thrift stores you can go.
There's only so many items you can list.
I think 40 hours, I think 100K is even super low,
but I just fell to that number
because that's kind of like the glorious number
a lot of people like to kind of think about.
No, it is.
And I think it's an overly produced number.
And I think that number is flawed.
I think it should be double that,
maybe a quarter of a million you need to do in sales
to really account for the economy,
doing what the economy is doing,
and for you to be able to make some investments
to go in toward that.
We're gonna get dinged for this again, Mike.
You're 80 years old and you're still packing boxes.
You don't need to be doing that when you're 80 years old.
If you have, if you're doing a quarter million dollar
in sales, that gives you the flexibility
to pay for what you need to pay,
live a very generous lifestyle,
and have investments that pay you back for your work.
Your sweat equity that you put in today in reselling,
you're gonna get that back,
but you can, yes, reinvest in your business.
No arguments there, but also reinvest in you
with the profits you put in your bank account.
Put it into a savings account.
Put it into the stock market if that's your game.
Make some real estate investments.
Maybe open another business.
Invest in yourself.
I mean, I don't know what's hard about that.
Well, me and Johnny are gonna go down the HIP route here.
So have you heard of GirlMath?
GirlMath?
No.
You're not hip, dude.
So GirlMath basically is, right?
You buy something from Target.
You spend 50 bucks on this item at Target.
For some reason, you decide you don't want it.
You go back, you get your refund,
and that's basically considered free money
because you got a refund for that item,
so you can spend it on other things.
I think this applies to reselling so much
because I get a sale on eBay,
and it's like, ooh, I got eBay money.
That's fun money, right?
It's like, I think resellers,
they turn and burn that profit.
It's not, there's no business sense in reselling.
Overall, I think we sat down with like a thousand resellers
and said, hey, what's your P&L look like every single month?
People are gonna be like, what's a P&L?
There is zero business sense
when it comes to the majority of resellers.
That's just the reality of it.
And I think what happens here is you get the sale
and you get the profit,
and you see your $93 on eBay funds, right?
And you know now, right?
I do it sometimes and it pisses you off.
You can go and I can shop.
I was looking last night.
I ain't gonna lie, Donnie.
I was looking at a Funko pop I was gonna buy.
And it's like-
Oh my, no.
You have $93 in spendable funds.
And I'm like, all right,
that's some girl math right here, right?
I'm like, this is free money I got sitting in there.
I think that is the biggest thing that people run into
is when they make the money,
it's gone before it can even get dispersed.
I think people just think in their mind,
it's all free money.
And I think it's important.
Another thing, this is just gonna,
we're gonna get so many off the wall comments here.
Isn't it gonna get so many negative comments?
It's gonna be great.
You should not be building a reselling business
off of any kind of debt.
You literally, no matter what category you sell in,
you can start for free.
You can get items for free.
You can literally sell things you have around your house
to start a little fund to build your business.
I think people that leverage that, it just added stress.
It just burns you out having to pay these monthly payments
every single month.
Controlling your cost of living
and building a business the right way,
that's how you're gonna win.
I don't care what anybody else says.
That's how I did it from day one.
And you don't need a lot of money
when you don't have no expenses.
I mean, somebody out there right now,
maybe you have a car payment.
Maybe you have, I don't even know,
maybe you have 10 subscriptions, Netflix, Hulu, all of them.
There's so many other,
your credit card payment every single month,
your insurances and things.
There's so many things that are like,
insurance, yeah, you need that for sure.
But there's so many unnecessary expenses.
Pay off your car.
That $93 you have in your eBay account,
put that towards your car.
Pay your car fairly.
If I told anybody here that has a car payment,
hey, imagine not having a car payment.
And these car payments, they're expensive.
We're talking five, six, $700 a month.
That's a lot of damn money.
And if you don't have that overhead,
all of a sudden you don't need as much
to survive and get by.
I'm not making millions of dollars reselling,
but I live a comfortable life,
because I have zero debt.
My money that comes in is going back to the business,
going in the savings, covering the bills.
And hey, if I wanna go out to eat, then I can.
Right, I mean, the only point I have
is when you know what the hell you're doing,
and that's questionable,
because people will just say they know
what the hell they're doing and they don't.
You can leverage debt to grow a little faster,
but you gotta be 100% certain
that what you're pulling out plus the interest,
the 30, up to 30% or more interest,
Yeah, dude.
Be worth it.
And yes, you can grow a lot faster with debt,
or a loan or whatever, or an injection of cash
that you have to pay back plus interest
of some kind, some way.
However, the people that know how to do that
in reselling are like half a percent or less.
It's unadvisable for you to say,
hey, well, I need $20,000.
I can buy a lot of books with $20,000.
Well, that's great, but that 20K,
you're gonna end up paying 30K of it back.
So are you gonna clear $30,001
to even make a dollar more than your initial loan?
And if you've never made,
we were talking about this in the media call
the other night in a text group,
if you've never made a business plan all the way through,
you have no business, sir or ma'am, taking the loan.
If you don't have a business plan
with a forecastable model on a week, monthly,
and year to date basis, don't do a loan.
Yeah, dude, but they're too easy to get, man.
I'm on Amazon Seller Central right now,
and everybody's Seller Central,
Amazon wants to offer you money, right?
Right now it's like Amazon lending,
take $11,000 loan today.
eBay does the same thing with,
well, it used to be Lending Point,
they dropped business with them,
now they're doing some other loan company.
But all these platforms offer you,
hey, you're doing a good job, seller.
Take a check.
You only gotta pay it back on a monthly basis,
but you can go out of business so easily, so easily.
Yes, really fast.
By the time that terms up, you're done.
And it's like, and not even in the sense of eBay or Amazon,
I mean, just think about how many credit card offers
come in the mail, right?
And you tell yourself, okay, I'm gonna,
this credit card here is going to be
my business credit card, right?
Like, this is my AAA card.
I don't mess with any credit cards,
but AAA is a good business expense.
You ever get stuck somewhere on the side of the road,
you just call this little number, they come hook you up.
For somebody like me who knows nothing about cars,
we're not sponsored by AAA, but I've had them for years.
And I just, it's a piece of mind.
But I think the ease of use
and the ease of tricking yourself into,
okay, this is all I'm gonna spend
on my reselling business, Johnny, is what's on this card.
It never works.
It'll never work.
It'll never, I don't care what anybody says.
It's just not gonna work for you.
I think you can-
Once you have a credit card, you know what you can do?
Can I increase my line of credit?
Absolutely, sir, man.
We'd love to do that for you.
Here's another $5,000 on your credit line.
You max that thing out.
Hey, credit card company, can I have an increase?
We do it again.
And eventually, you're $50,000 in debt.
Are you gonna make $50,000 a year just to break even?
Some people do it,
and some people just go flat out of business.
What do you think's one of the,
or what do you think is the biggest reason
why a lot of resellers are jumping ship this year?
The reality of hard work,
they gotta work harder to make the same,
and they gotta work even harder to make more,
because that's everybody's goals to make.
Well, it doesn't necessarily mean it's everyone's goal,
but some people wanna make more
than they made the previous year.
You wanna see some growth
to account for the kind of thing we mentioned before,
inflation, prices go up.
Well, I need to make more
to maintain at least the status quo,
but I wanna make more than that
to go to that investment thing
we also talked about previously,
where I don't gotta be doing this when I'm 80 years old.
So the quest to make more money,
and I'm not talking about the hobbyists,
I'm not talking about the part-time guys,
I'm talking about for the full-timers.
The quest to make money,
if they don't know how to get there, they're confused.
So they're gonna go with another thing
that pays them the same,
that has the possibility for slightly more money,
but I don't think the people that have jump ship,
and no shame in jumping ship,
have the wherewithal,
there we go, word of the day right there,
to sit down and figure it out,
how they can do it with an ongoing fee economy
in a very competitive market,
where the fees just constantly go up,
and it just gets more and more competitive,
and they see no hope or way to do it,
or they decided that it's too much work
than they wanted to put in before they got in,
it was easier when they started, now it's getting harder.
And I don't look down on these people, and it's okay,
but if you wanna stay in this game,
you have to figure this out.
If you can't figure it out, take a walk,
and all the respect in the world,
if you decide to take in a walk.
You put in your time,
it wasn't what you thought it was gonna be,
it's just like a career change,
you decided it's not for you, and that is A-okay.
You're gonna be nicer than I am about this,
because being somebody that's on YouTube,
and I help a lot of people behind the scenes,
at the end of the day,
if you're not willing to put in the work,
it ain't gonna work, I can't spin no magical wand,
and make you all of a sudden start,
sending in stuff to Amazon, listing the stuff on eBay,
you got to do work, unfortunately,
it's not me and Johnny, don't sit here all day,
and goof around, when the podcast isn't recording,
there's work being done around the clock.
As your own business,
you are literally basically on call 24 seven,
and me and Deb have realized this over the past year,
somebody messaged you about something,
you got to go respond to it,
somebody send you an offer, you got to respond to it,
Amazon wants this information, you got to deal with it,
you're basically on call 24 seven,
and this isn't the life for a lot of people,
and I think the glamour that YouTube has created
around reselling, it's finally catching up to people,
and I think the easy cop out is,
well, the fees are going up, the platform hates me,
so I can't resell, it's not because I can't resell,
it's not that I can't be the best reseller,
it's just eBay and Amazon hate me,
and they're never gonna give me sales,
it's such a lame cop out, like you said,
you change careers all the time,
there's nothing wrong with doing it,
but at the end of the day, if you have an endeavor,
and you're the, I mean, think about it,
your reselling business is you, but it's me,
if my reselling business doesn't succeed,
it's because of me, it's not because of anything else,
even if I get banned from eBay,
even if I get banned from Amazon,
there's still other routes you can go,
so the idea of blaming something else beside yourself
when you fail at reselling is lame,
get out of here with that nonsense,
I don't have time for it, and I think the reality is,
and I kind of went into this year knowing that,
I think there was gonna be a huge influx of resellers
that would go away, and the fees have,
listen, if I could pay a reseller 10 cents per item
to get them off the listings and decrease my competition,
I mean, I'll have a little piggy bank
right over here all day long,
but that's really not why they quit,
it's because they suck at reselling
and they have no kind of business sense,
that's just the reality of it.
Right, it's like, how do I put it?
Planning a trip, right?
Before you go, planning a trip is fun,
you're gonna go to Disneyland,
we're gonna do all these things,
and then when you get there,
I mean, even if you're that person
that created the itinerary, hi, I'm one of these people,
anyway, you do it, and it's a lot of work
to go through all the things you plan to the nines,
your two sheets of paper,
and you're exhausted at the end of that trip.
It's the same thing with reselling,
but it's work that actually pays you money,
you're gonna be exhausted,
but you're gonna get the reward
of being able to do it all and get all the money.
But if you don't put in the hours,
like I was joking with Mike,
and I wasn't really joking at the beginning of the call,
next four days, Monday through Thursday,
I'm putting in 16 plus hours a day
to get in all the lower margin things
before the fee hike goes up on Amazon.
I'm gonna do as much as I can, 16 hours a day,
minimum, the next four days.
How many people are here listening to this
who do reselling have done one 16 hour a day,
let alone four?
And I used to do this back when I was doing
60 listing plus a day on eBay,
16 hours a day on the regular for a couple months.
And sometimes it was 18 hours, man,
I've done all-nighters before.
If you grind like that, you will get rewarded like that,
or see things in your business you need to do
and adjust, you'll fast track the correction
you need to make if you pump in the hours,
versus, I don't know, doing eight hours a day.
And it's okay if you do eight hours a day.
When you're starting, it's gonna take you longer
to find the flaws in your business,
versus, well, double that, do 16.
You're gonna find it twice as fast,
and you can make the corrections and go forward,
twice as fast.
I think another thing people run into is
they start reselling and they're immediately
thought is like trying to figure out ways
to get out of the business, be like,
kind of like I'm a CEO type figure in a reselling business.
Like, I'm gonna hire everything out.
It's like, you are going to crash and burn so fast.
You think, oh yeah, like, and it goes hand in hand with,
I said it earlier, thrifting isn't like,
it's not like storage wars, right?
It's not like reality TV.
You go into a thrift store and you find
a thousand dollar item every single time.
I think you have to treat it as a business.
Treat it as a business, even when you're out thrifting,
you're looking for your category you're selling in,
and that's the extent of the thrifting.
It's a business.
I mean, I wanna get in and out of thrift stores
as fast as I can.
Time is all we got.
The more stores I can get to, the more items I can scan,
the more potential profit I can make,
and people, I know for a fact, people just,
I'm gonna go to garage sales today just for fun,
and then I wind up buying a bunch of stuff
that I don't need for myself,
maybe a thing or two for the business,
but then your whole day's gone and you still tell yourself,
yeah, I was garage selling today for eight hours,
and you got nothing to show for it.
Think about it like this.
I mean, we'll start with Max here since he's not here.
Max does a particular thing.
He gets basically all his inventory free.
I mean, I know he does some sourcing
outside of his consignment steel stuff,
but the stuff that gets sent to him,
it's all high margin stuff, all of it,
because he'll, how many thumbs downs
have everybody who's dealt with Max gotten
versus the thumbs ups.
The stuff he gets, I mean, whatever his commission rate is,
it's still enough, it's good margin,
and the stuff he sources that he spends his own
profit dollars on to reinvest his business,
he's able to do that, and he has employees and stuff, sure,
but he still puts in the time, he found a different way,
and look at Mike over here.
He only sends in certain profitable items.
They have to meet a certain metric or threshold.
Look at myself, I deal in the paperback market,
where the scarcity value is there,
because not a lot of people like to deal
in just sole paperbacks,
and people that kind of deal in it do lots,
and even Max does paperback lots.
I'm like, oh, I'd love to have those,
but he has like 50 of them, or three or five.
What I'm getting at here is each one of us
has found a different way to make money in this business.
We're doing what people are not doing
as the status quo or norm.
You listening out there should find
whatever that missing hole in the market,
or what you can do better that the market is not doing,
go do that, and I think you're gonna be A-okay.
That's so true, I mean, listen,
I'll be the first one to tell you,
I am not in this reselling business,
nowhere near 40 hours a week.
You can think of it however you want to think about it,
I could care less, because I know the money,
I'll make it on the backend
for the little bit of time I put in.
So you don't have to, it doesn't have to be
80 hour a week, 16 hour a day,
there's nothing wrong with that,
and there are times where, hey, I have crappy long days,
and I gotta be out in the storage unit,
and it's 30 degrees, and I got a thing,
storage unit full of books, I don't feel like dealing with,
but it's gotta get done.
People, I think resellers, I mean,
I probably shouldn't say this, but resellers are soft,
most of them are cut out for this business,
most of them are not cut out for reselling,
that's just the reality of it,
the listing, the lifting, and I'm on the third floor,
so, and me and Johnny were talking about,
you got no excuses, we're gonna blow them all up right now.
I'm on the third floor, every single book,
CD, DVD, iSource, has to get carried up
four flights of steps, because my house, my apartment,
is not on ground level, there are steps to get up
to the first floor, going up four flights of steps,
carrying every single item all the way up
four flights of steps, labeling it, boxing it,
carrying it back down four flights of steps,
we're talking probably close to 10,000 items a year,
give or take, depending on what the year is,
and Johnny, he just started Amazon again,
probably what, two, two and a half months ago, three months?
No, it's been probably closer to four now.
Four months, four months, he's already,
February would be close to a 10K month for him in sales.
Sorry to put your numbers out there, but too bad.
Four months, he went from zero items,
not a single item, nothing to be found.
His Amazon warehouse was empty, right?
He's walking around, he's looking at all the empty space,
he's thinking about what kind of events he can throw,
and he said, wait a minute, I'm a book seller,
there ain't gonna be no proms going on here, right?
Four months, he's at 10K in sales, from nothing,
and that's just the beginning,
he has boxes and boxes waiting to be checked in.
And he said, he's kind of tired of the,
there's no excuse not to be successful
selling media on Amazon, so I'm gonna let him take away
and kind of lay into you a little bit,
kind of like how I just did.
Sure, I started from nothing,
and I'm making close to 10K in sales now,
and that's just books, ladies and gentlemen,
not CDs, not DVDs, haven't seen anything else but books,
and I'll send in Danielle Steele,
I'll send in Nora Roberts, if the trigger says I can,
and I'm doing, again, I'm doing some things
that most Amazon sellers aren't doing,
I mean, I've talked to Mike about that,
we have two entirely different business models,
my metrics are a lot lower that I send in,
but I do a lot more volume that I send in,
I put in more hours, thus I'm able to make more
on what I'm doing.
So the critical thing here is whatever style of business
you go with, like Mike, he's a lot more particular
when on the things he sends in,
so he probably has, I don't know what your percent
sell through rate is, above half a percent, I think.
Yeah, it definitely is above half.
Mine's lower than that, much lower, probably like half,
and that's okay with me, because I've just sent, sent, sent,
because it costs me as much money and time
to do a $5 book, a $3 book, than it takes to do $100 book,
it's all the same, they all go in the same box, right?
So my methodology is more of how many boxes
do I need to do a day, or first you gotta really assess
your output, how many boxes am I currently doing,
how much on average in profit are my boxes worth,
and then take out your overhead,
and then you can really play with the numbers
in the sky's the limit.
Okay, if I want a million dollars,
and I know that I need to do, and these are BS numbers
I'm pulling out of the wind here, five boxes a day.
Okay, how do I get five boxes a day to send into Amazon,
to make that million dollars in sales?
And do it every day, seven days a week, 35 boxes a week,
365 days a year, that's all you really need to do
once you figure out your numbers.
Numbers are very important apart in any business,
whether you're doing bulk or you're cherry picking,
or you're somewhere in between.
We'll use Tommy Boy here, if he needs to send in
100 VCRs every month, I bet you Tommy Boy will figure out
how to send in 100 VCRs every month if he's clearing,
like, I don't know, $50 of VCR clearing,
so $100 in sales, we'll just say that to make,
for simplistic math.
Bet you he's pulling up all the estate sales,
all the auction houses, all the garage sales,
looking at Facebook, looking at Craigslist.
You know what I'm getting at here?
Work, you gotta do some work, you gotta get some hustle.
You can't just, I don't know, go to the Goodwill Bins
and pray and hope for the best.
I mean, no shame to people that sit at the bins all day,
good for you.
No, there is shame on that because the Goodwill Bins
is gonna close, and if you don't think the Goodwill Bins
is gonna close and you got one stupid source,
it ain't gonna last, Johnny.
They've closed around me, I literally used to have
booksellers that would sit at the stupid bins
all day, every day, guess where they are now?
Out of business.
Unfortunately, you can't rely on this one bin.
It might be great for a period of time, right?
And there's people that are over in the group
that rely on just the bins, and I try to tell these people,
you cannot put all of your eggs in that basket.
You cannot do, listen, it's great while you have it.
I'm not saying don't go, take advantage of it,
but you better have some kind of plan
for when that place closes.
And if you don't think Goodwills are closing,
just go look around on YouTube, they're closing all over.
They're closing by me, Golden State Picker had one
of his biggest Goodwills closed by him.
They're closing, and people that rely,
so what do you do if you only have one source
that you rely on and it closes?
You have nothing immediately overnight.
These people don't have backup plans,
they just, the bins will be here forever.
I'll keep paying a nickel per pound for my stuff.
No, you can't live that life.
It's not gonna work, it might work this year,
maybe for the next two years, maybe the next three years.
That's fine if you plan on getting out of reselling
in that timeframe, but at some point, it ain't gonna work.
It's gonna go bye bye, or prices are gonna go up.
No, absolutely.
So yeah, I stand corrected.
And I like this little role reversal.
I'm the nice guy today, and you're the angry guy today.
This is great.
You gotta work, dude.
I mean, listen, I used to be at CBS endless hours,
and it was a miserable job.
If somebody decided to take a crap on the floor,
I was responsible for cleaning it up.
It happened, it's not just made up stuff.
You gotta actually work to be successful,
whether it's reselling,
whether you have a different type of business,
whether you have a brand you're trying to build,
whether you have a YouTube channel,
whether you're making music, whether you're writing books,
anything that you are doing on your own
as your own business,
there is gonna be trials and tribulations.
And at the end of the day,
the only way you get through it
is doing more or figuring out a way to do something
that none of your competitors are doing,
which you said earlier, you gotta do something different.
Stop going to the Goodwill and buying the polo shirt
that has 50 million listings on eBay.
Stop buying the stuff everybody else is buying.
You're never gonna win.
Right, or pick out the one polo that's worth $50
and leave the other polos behind.
Don't buy the junk polos, buy the only good ones.
Figure that out too.
I mean, that's something that's talked about
solicitly, well, not exclusively, in text group.
You gotta really know what you're doing.
Do your research.
Research is a huge part of this game.
Do you think I knew everything about paperbacks
before I got into them, selling them?
No, I like to read some of them,
but I didn't know all the little intricacies
that went into the little things.
There's tons, tons and tons and tons.
I bet you Max knows tons and tons and tons
about his old inked aquarium books
that Farmer John wrote in Pennsylvania in 1858
from a small Amish community that's renowned.
I don't think that, he does,
but I have a different information set than Max
and there's crossovers between us.
And Mike has a lot of information on the CDs and DVDs
he knows intimately that I have no idea on.
It's not my world.
That's so true, it's you develop,
you gotta be willing to learn.
And for me, like I didn't know nothing
about trade paperbacks probably up until the last year.
And I've pulled out plenty, probably over a thousand dollars
at profit from the trade paperback section
that I used to overlook every single time
when I'm in a store.
So like for those that don't sell on Amazon,
you scan the barcodes of items, right?
So usually like those little crappy trade paperbacks
that Johnny has behind him every single week,
if you're watching on YouTube,
they're usually not worth nothing, right?
So you're just like,
I'm not even gonna bother with that section.
Well, you start getting knowledge,
you start pulling out books that are worth it, right?
All of a sudden you come across that,
the Clue trade paperback from the movie tie-in, $250.
I came across my Halloween trade paperback movie tie-in,
$200, like you start developing things.
And I think just it all reverts back, man,
that resellers ain't about the life no more,
the easy days of just going in and filling up your cart
with profitable items, taking one photo, listening on eBay.
I think them days are gone.
And unfortunately, a lot of resellers
are gonna leave with it,
but it's also a good thing for people out there
that plan on sticking with this, right?
Because less competition, less bozos out there.
One of the things I listed on eBay the other day, Johnny,
now you know me, right?
Sell similar, I'm the sell similar guy.
No details filled out, dude, at all.
No details, nothing.
Like nothing for Metallica at all.
Like it just like blows my mind that
why are we wasting time listing something
if we're not doing it right, right?
If it just doesn't make, if you wanna do that,
just go sell on Amazon,
where all the information's already there for you.
Don't sell on eBay, you're never gonna get a sale.
You don't even put the band name,
the year the cassette came out, the title of the cassette.
Like, holy smokes, I wonder why none of you bozos
are getting sales, let's be real.
Nobody wants your junk.
And if they did, they can't find it
because you ain't got no details filled out.
Like it's crazy to me.
There's very few things that you can list on eBay.
You don't really need anything else
besides a title and maybe a photo.
If I put on there Stephen King It signed
and just have a photograph of his signature
on the title page, it'll sell, no questions asked.
But if I just put a generic, well, Stephen King It,
it'll probably sell not as fast, but it'll take a minute.
Now, if I put no name, poor author, weird title
no one's ever heard of, do that same methodology,
it'll never sell.
Yeah, I think we're gonna wrap it up here.
There's nothing wrong with moving on from reselling.
But at the end of the day,
don't try blaming it on the platform.
So I'm here to tell you, I love eBay.
I get sales on eBay every single week
and I don't do much work, Johnny.
I'm on like a two month streak of getting
at least one sale every single week, listing one item.
This last week was three items
because I just wanted the list.
I had some desirable items.
That's the craving, the urge.
They'll be sold by the time,
the middle of the week rolls around,
my three items will be sold.
I already sold two of them.
So I think we have to reflect on ourselves.
And if you move away from reselling, who cares?
We've all failed things in our lives.
I wanted to be a professional football player.
Look at me now, Johnny, I'm sitting here with you.
I'm not doing anything related to catching footballs
or tackling anybody.
So it's like, I accepted the fact
I'm never gonna be on the Dallas Cowboys, right?
I'm never gonna be, growing up, I thought,
hey, I'd be in a suit and tie.
I'd be some kind of businessman.
Now I wear Michael Myers hoodies and graphic t-shirts
and people think I'm some kind of hobo
that lives under the underpass.
And I'm perfectly fine with that.
And it's the same with business.
You try things, if they don't work, it's fine to move on.
You just have to realize that at the end of the day,
you are the sole responsibility,
whether or not you succeed
or whether you fail at reselling.
And there's, you can't blame nobody else.
You get banned, you probably deserve to be banned.
98% of bans are probably valid.
If you can't handle the rising fees, then that's on you.
You can't find items cheap enough, more desirable items.
So we appreciate you watching over on YouTube,
listening out there on all the podcast platforms.
And 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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