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 another pursuit of Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike alongside Johnny today's question of the day.
You're watching on YouTube.
I pointed the completely wrong way.
This way alongside Johnny he's over here.
He's not out there hiding Johnny.
Where has the profit gone?
Take us away.
Where's all my money going?
Where's the profit?
People keep telling me I can't make money reselling and you know, I'm curious.
Where's, where's my profit?
Well, it depends what kind of reseller you are.
Uh, for me, my money goes to my employee, my rent, cause I'm in a warehouse.
Um, my internet bill, um, educational expenses, which it, since tax season is
coming on like Mike subscribing to his channel, that's an educational expense.
Um, and you're all your software programs.
If you got an eBay store goes toward that.
Um, your mailing labels.
I mean that if you, depending on how you're doing that, it can come
directly out of your profits.
Um, shipping supplies, um, any kind of.
Improvements equipment wise, whether that's computers or carts or totes or
Ikea bags for those still sporting the Ikea.
I still have mine.
Just they're tucked away.
The best bags ever made for reselling.
I know you know, you're a reseller where you're carrying that Ikea, but I know
you, I know what you're doing, you got the Ikea bag.
Yeah.
I think like a reseller should develop something like an Ikea bag and like
branded just for like resellers, you know, like maybe it has an extra pouch
or something in the side or maybe inside the bag, there's different compartments.
Right.
You know, so like it's an Ikea bag, but you open it up and there's like three
different spots where you can put different types of, I don't, we're getting,
listen, we're already way off.
That's where my profits go.
And I'm going to develop a private label reseller Ikea style bag.
Yeah.
It's just twice as long as a regular Ikea bag.
It's like one of those huge like waste management bags you can buy.
And then you put it to your curb and they just, you just hold up with all
your trash and they take it away.
Um, it is like, I think of reselling profits with Amazon, at least software,
software, software, people that start reselling on Amazon, you don't
realize the, it's almost a required overhead, right?
If you compare it to eBay, like what real software do you need for eBay?
Uh, besides like, you know, your bookkeeping or something like that.
If you're paying for that, there's none of this listing software, scouting
software, repricing software, like these are things, sure.
You can be successful without them, but with these tools, you get back a lot of
time and you can make a lot of money.
So like, if you sell on Amazon or you're brand new to Amazon, I think there's
a lot of sticker shock that goes on because these softwares add up so fast.
And I think about when I first started, I didn't realize, Hey, I'm going to be
spending, you know, some people spend two, three, four, $500 a month on software
alone, just for Amazon.
And I'm like, it can get expensive fast.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, let's say, let's say you use inventory labs and let's say you're on
the month to month program and not the year that's like 70 some odd dollars.
You reprice it, you'd be around 15 starting out.
So you're close to a hundred bucks already.
Oh wait, your Amazon professional account 40 now we're over a hundred dollars for
sure.
Have you bought your ASIN labels and or thermal labels and or printer paper?
Do you have a printer?
I mean, there's all these startup costs.
They pay for themselves.
Sure.
But just starting, it can seem like, man, I'm spending a lot of money just to be
able to do this, right?
I would think that people spend more of their profit in the first six months of
their business on bells and whistles and softwares and different, you know, types
of apps and things than they actually do.
Reinvesting the money into their business, right?
Because you sell for one month, Johnny, I'm not using the HP printer no more.
I need a dimo or a roller, right?
That's like, you just have to, or you're not even a reseller, right?
And then next thing you need, you got to buy the labels for it.
Well, then, you know, the dimo looks a little plain.
Maybe it needs a stand or something.
Maybe it needs some stickers.
I got to bedazzle my things, you know, and all of a sudden your profits.
Yeah, you shake your head.
No, dude.
But I'm telling you, there's bedazzled resellers out there where everything's
bedazzled and honestly, I mean, I wouldn't mind having my Bluetooth scanner
bedazzled.
I mean, I'd be a bad looking dude walking around with this thing with gemstones
all on it.
There's a flossy floss common in there, but I'm not.
Yeah, say, say what?
Say, say, listen, you're already halfway there, man.
I do think it's weird how people just the profit comes in.
And you really don't see it.
I guess that's kind of what the overall, you know, idea of this question is,
is where does the profit go?
And if you're part time and your hobby is like, it's a little bit different
because maybe it's just fun money or vacation money.
But for me and you, where it's like your full time income, I mean,
you got to pay the bills, right?
The electric bill, you know, whatever the car bills and everything
comes out of that.
So the profit just kind of dissipates.
And you were talking before this, like almost an envelope system for reselling.
Like maybe we can patent something like that, where it's like this envelope
is to buy more inventory.
This envelope is to invest for into a retirement account or something like that.
I don't know.
And this really large envelope is for taxes.
You should watch our tax podcast that we did just a while ago.
That's a good call.
Yeah, it was.
That's and that's another important thing is people really don't keep up with
bookkeeping and it can it can.
I mean, we're talking the difference of you keeping up with your books,
I would argue is more valuable than you selling some little crap
because the money you can get back from keeping up on your books and having
deductions for your taxes, talking tens of thousands of dollars,
large corporations, millions of dollars.
So the possibilities there, but the profit just disappears, man.
And I think that kind of wanted to take me to the next thing is fees go up every year.
You have to just accept the fact that you got to find better items.
Or if you're going to sell the same type of items, then your margins
are going to get smaller.
And I think a lot of people, they they realize fees go up.
I mean, do look at shipping.
Shipping goes up every three months, every six months.
Deb's like, oh, yeah, shipping's going up again because she charges for shipping.
And most people don't even account for that.
And your margins get smaller and smaller because you keep selling
the ten dollar stuff and not graduating to the 15 or the twenty dollar stuff.
I mean, yeah, I mean, if you go up in quality goods,
your cost of goods are going to change.
I mean, it's going to the bins for your sixty four cents a pound.
I mean, you make full time money doing that, but eventually you're
going to experiment with things outside the bins.
And well, I'd say it's going to cost more.
And then if you buy like I have a cart dolly thing, I have two of them.
Those were expensive, but probably my best purchases.
But I really didn't want to spend the money on them.
But I'm glad I did.
Saves my back and all kinds of other injury
preventative things that could go wrong with me.
Racks for your inventory system.
Now to get the fanciest ones, dude, I don't want the plastic.
I want the stainless steel back and hold fifty thousand pounds per shelf.
There you go.
I mean, office, just general office supplies.
I mean, I use I'm probably a little bit old school here,
but I use sticky notes still all the time.
I have notebooks of stuff.
And the other thing like gas, gas is expensive.
You got to travel, right?
Most of the well, unless you're doing the bus line thrifting kind of deal.
But even bus money costs money, right?
Yeah, I guess is.
Gas is expensive. And if you're relying on thrift stores,
you're going to have routes that are going to take you out over an hour one way.
And depending on what kind of vehicle you got, you know, gas miles can be a big,
big, you know, make or break and how much you spend in your business.
It can be a deduction, but then you lose your miles.
Right. So that's another thing you got to kind of think about.
It's people sell a lot of stuff.
People are excited to see the sales numbers on your phone.
Right. We talk about this all the time.
Why? When you look at eBay or Amazon,
you only see your overall sales number.
And it's they do it on purpose because they want you to see, oh, look,
look at all this success. Right.
And to you, success is that overall number.
But in actuality, I think it would be super beneficial.
Never happened in the history of any kind of reselling app.
If they just showed you the actual profit, like you're running current balance
and Amazon has that kind of on their mobile app, but it's not.
You can see your total balance of you can see your sales,
but you also can see your total balance on the mobile app.
So you can actually see how much profits sitting in, you know,
your Amazon account from then to transfer to you.
But people don't realize the number people show you, you know,
like if you say you're a hundred K seller, you know, well, a hundred K in sales.
I mean, if we really think about it, there's people out there
that probably sell a hundred K in sales every year,
and they probably make ten thousand dollars.
Because a 10 percent margin in some business models is actually good.
Or what if that 100 K in sales is, you know, two items, right?
So they made five grand on, you know, two 50 K items.
So there's different business models.
But I think people get caught way too much in the overall sales numbers.
I think it is an indicator.
Like if you're growing, you're having more sales.
But when it comes to your overall bottom line, I don't think it really indicates
anything just because you have more sales than somebody does.
It necessarily mean you're making more money.
Right. And on eBay, I mean, you've seen this in any eBay video,
that sales bar graph thing.
Oh, look at my bars, the big bars, the little bars.
It's all over the place.
There's actually a big discussion kind of toward the beginning of the year.
Why don't we just delete that thing?
It's because you can delete on the back end that widget.
It's just a widget because it's inaccurate.
If you want the real numbers, you have to go to a different area on eBay.
It's kind of easy to get to.
But why isn't that on the front end?
That's way more valuable than this graph of lies.
And some people wanted to get rid of it because it was discouraging on low
sale days, like it mentally affects you.
Like this is a bad day.
It's in your face all day.
You're looking at that thing, wanting it to go up.
It's not for reasons unknown.
Well, we can identify the reasons, but just looking at the chart, you can't.
So a lot of people, they removed it from their dashboard.
They know I have to look at it.
They'll have accurate data going the other way.
That's not going to happen.
They'll have accurate data going the other way.
That's not a bad idea.
If you're looking at that thing and having poor sales days, you
will need to fix that.
But B don't have a constant reminder.
You already know it's on your mind.
You go to your sales thing and see how much money you're actually
pulling in your net dollars, not your revenue gross dollars.
That's way more important.
And if they're low there, well, you need to fix something.
You need to figure out what that something is.
Yeah.
And I think that it's a good point to hit on is.
Profit like, where's the profit going?
You see you get a sale every day or you see, you know, maybe you
have a low day or a day with no sales.
And it's crazy how that can control what you decide to do in your
business for the next week.
Right.
So say for example, me and you, we don't have sales today or tomorrow.
And, you know, oh, come Tuesday, right.
We're recording this on a Sunday.
We're like, well, there's no Johnny.
Me and you Mazel just pick up the phone and cry to each other for the
day because we're not getting sales and things are, things are broken.
I understand the mindset of when things are tough, it's hard to be
motivated and keep doing the same thing if you're not getting results.
But a, that should make you look at, you know, what you're doing.
Is there something I'm doing personally within my business?
That's the first place you have to look is what can I do differently
to increase my business, to increase a better process.
It's not automatically like blaming someone else.
I blame Johnny for low sales days.
I blame Amazon, Amazon's down, Google's down.
I think we have to look within ourselves when you see those low
sales days and let it motivate you because the only way you're going
to sell more is if you do more, right.
There's no magical pill where, you know, the switch people think eBay
turns on and off is well, the switch must have been off for me today.
That's not the case.
I'm here to tell you.
I mean, I sold something on eBay the other day, dude.
I run the lamest, like I should just do a video on this.
I run the lamest eBay store, but when I list items and they're
desirable and I promote them at a decent rate, they sell.
It's crazy to me.
I run the lamest eBay store, one listing a week, and I still sell
at least one item every single week.
One day I list one thing that takes one minute.
I don't understand that mindset of what are people doing where
they're listing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 items a day and they're not
getting sales like you're just not doing it correctly.
I think where the profit is gone, you didn't even get to the point
of getting profit.
And that's like a whole nother discussion is you want profit,
but you're not willing to do the things you need to do.
Right.
And a lot of big discussions are going on right now in the reseller
community of blaming the nebulous thing going conspiracy thing
going wrong with eBay.
Don't care if you list a desirable item or a decent price.
Lo and behold, it will sell.
If you list a junk item, it will sell at some point at a price
dump that you select to do two years down the road.
There's a lot of things going there.
Photos, title structure, blah, blah, blah.
But if nobody wants this thing and you're waiting for somebody
to get drunk and go shopping on eBay to buy it, you need to be
listing better quality of goods, my friend.
You're just busy work.
And that's one thing I hate to do.
And when I listen to the sake of listing and that does you and
your bank account zero good.
I am the opposite.
I want zero busy work within my business.
But for some reason, people love just being able to say, thank
Johnny, I listed 10 things today.
Right.
If I told Johnny, I listed 10 things today, he'd be like, dude,
what are you doing?
I'm sure those listings are crap.
And why are you doing 10 listings?
Right.
It's just not my business model.
But for some reason people will go from, okay, I'm listening
one item a week.
Maybe they see, you know, tech put out a video to real motivate
and all of a sudden I'm going to start listing 10 a day and they
don't realize that those 10 listings, maybe that one quality
listing you were doing once a week, you know, you're going to
sell it once a week is better than you doing 10 crappy listings
every single day.
I would argue it probably is because the quality listings
eventually going to sell if it's listed right and it's price,
right?
Right.
And here's another example, since we'd love to talk about
her so much, I'll list 10 Nora Roberts books.
Will they sell?
Probably in a very long time.
Now, if I take those 10 Nora Roberts books and put them
together to do one listing, I've now created value with her.
That's the other thing.
I've done a lot of things.
We're compelled.
There are things now.
Do we need to list them?
Yes and no.
Either you need to get rid of them.
If there's no value, don't list them for the sake of listing
them.
If there's no value there, throw it away or donate it.
If there's value there, if you can create value out of it, sure.
Go right ahead.
Just like my Nora Roberts example, there's no value listing
them a single item.
You put them together and a lot though, you've now created some
value and you'll now have a higher sell through rate and profit
rate or get your money quicker at least than trying to list them
individually.
You got to examine what you're buying.
You make your money and this is not my quote.
I want to clarify this.
This comes from somebody over in the other group.
You make your money in the buy.
That's where you make your money.
I'm going to give everybody a tip and trick to get more profit
out of your pocket starting this week.
As soon as this week, I'm going to make you more money.
If you are thrifting, maybe you're part-time, maybe you're
full-time.
I literally, this has saved me up probably over 10, 10s of
thousands of dollars.
Shop on discount days.
This might sound stupid and I actually recorded an outtake for
the YouTube video and the file got corrupted.
By me shopping during half off days, Johnny, if I'm spending
a hundred dollars in a single store instead of spending $200,
I'm saving a hundred dollars.
I'm basically saving a dollar per item.
Usually the books are $2 hardback, a dollar softback.
If I shop on half off days, if you compound that math at just
a hundred dollars, I'm saving over $5,000 a year just in
buy cost and that's only on a hundred items.
Now I scheduled my routes to go specifically on these half off
days.
So the Salvation Army, my community aids, they're all 50%
off and then on Mondays at Goodwill, I get my senior citizen
discount.
Don't judge me.
I'm a senior.
Those alone are instantly going to put money back in your
pocket and what happens here is with a lower buy cost, I can
be more competitive at lower prices on Amazon and with Amazon,
the lower the price, the higher chances you're going to get
the sale.
It's really all that matters.
So not only am I saving money, I'm in turn selling my items
faster because I have a higher bottom price than Johnny.
If Johnny's spending two and I'm spending one, I can go down
another 50 cents and still make 50% margin where he can't go
down because he'll be losing 50 cents on that sale.
I'm going to we shop differently.
I want to clarify that people differently.
I would go the day before the sale and buy everything of
value from a looking at it from a bulk buy everything perspective.
Now what Mike's talking about is cherry picking and saving
cost of money also very effective and I agree with that.
There's just different strategy and different tactics depending
what you're doing with your business and competition.
I mean, if I had I don't want competition.
I want it all.
I want all the good stuff.
I want to take my I want to put Mike out of business.
No offense Mike.
I think that argument is valid because if I had a bunch of
people scanning and like I went on a half-off day and I seen
you know my competition there's three of them and they're in
every store.
I will 100% just go the day before and pay full price and
get all the good stuff like that.
Actually, there's there's I guess it's not set in stone.
Like you're saying.
Both are very valid.
They are but if I left you nothing to buy you have no
inventory, but if I didn't buy it all and there's stuff left
for you works great.
You saved a lot of money.
I agree with that and there's no point in you know, if you
don't have competition, there's no point in if half-off days
Wednesday no point going Thursday.
Why you go?
Why you going Thursday when you can just go Wednesday like if
you want this business to work and you want to be, you know
as frugal and as profitable as you possibly can then you can
say, okay, well, I'm changing my Thursday to Wednesday and you
can fit that in your schedule one way or another where
you're whether you're full-time or part-time you can make it
work so that you're not spending as much money because a lot
of people when they start Johnny they're like I'm going to
go buy everything in a thrift store and then your whole bank
rolls done and you haven't even listed anything.
You don't have the cash flowing back in.
So for me, I'm still cheap as I can be if I can get 15% off
on senior discount discount day of Goodwill.
Guess what?
I'm not Goodwill on Mondays simple as that.
Right. I mean, it's the same analogy of you could contact
an estate sale that's going on and say, hey, I want to buy
all your books before the actual state sale goes on.
Let's make a deal versus going the last day of the estate
sale and trying to buy it at rock-bottom prices both work.
They just work differently and they're both effective in what
they do there.
You got to assign the strategy that you want to do in the
future.
And what I'm pushing here on my agenda is you're going to get
everything good and bad.
The one Mike's doing is you're going to get things good and
cheaply just may not be a lot of it.
That's the only difference here just depends what you want to
do.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's a good thing to bring up is if you're going
to take everything you better have a plan for everything,
especially if you're new it might sound good that you're
going to get everything right.
Oh, Johnny.
I can take it all.
Then you show up and you don't have boxes and you don't have
the handcart and before you know, it's 12 hours of your day.
You're hand carrying books to your car or truck and then you
got to get them home and unload them and figure out and this
goes for anything.
I even just books clothes anything toys.
They're bulk is a great way to get items for next to nothing.
But the problem with bulk is and why most people think is the
process of getting rid of everything else that isn't good
for your business.
You can't list everything whether it's good or crappy item.
You have to have parameter set up in the business of buying
bulk so that you know, you touch this item once is it going
to my business or is it going to the donation pile?
We're not playing this game where we're going to list every
single and there are bulk models out there that will list
everything.
But I mean, we're talking a percent of a percent you have
to because bulk is exciting, right?
There's nothing better than just being like, yeah, I'll take
it all. It's like kind of like a treasure hunt.
Oh, this is like storage wars, dude.
But then all of a sudden, you know, a month goes by and that
crap still sitting behind you and you're like, I quit.
Right.
I mean Amazon eBay donation box.
What are they called your buyback programs?
There's two.
Oh, this box is going to this bookstore because they'll give
me trade credit or this box is going to the library or one
of those filler libraries take a book leave a book kind of
thing.
So you can do it that way too.
And that's also another way to save money to put more profit
back in or change out your worthless stuff into worth more
books kind of deal was your store credit or book for book
kind of deal.
Yeah, it's it's important.
I think about this just even outside of media.
Like if you were to go to buy clothes in bulk and you have
no flu like you're just buying like a baler, you know, baler
a bell of, you know, use clothes you have to think about what
is the accept rate for items that are a good fit for your
business and you cannot bend on your margins because what
happens here Johnny you go in and I say, all right, all the
t-shirts I bought a whole, you know, a thousand pounds of
vintage t-shirts or whatever.
I'm my business model right now is I'm only going to list
t-shirts that are $30 plus on eBay.
What happens here you're digging through the clothes and
you're not finding that many but you find like, oh, this is
a $20.
This is a $15, right?
And all of a sudden your wheels start spinning.
You're like, well, should I actually list this stuff because
I'm not finding the $30 stuff.
I'm kind of looking for.
I think it's super important to have a line drawn in the
sand and you don't cross it regardless, you know, okay, this
is my business model.
This is what I'm taking.
Everything else is irrelevant.
You have to have that line drawn because all of a sudden
your ASP goes down and then you're not making money.
You're spending more time listening to junk.
I don't know, man.
You can just get carried away so quick.
Now I agree with that having rules that you never cross
that line in the sand on are so vital in this business because
it's so easy to compromise yourself because you see a dollar
there or a quarter there.
I want a quarter.
I want a dollar, but then your time gets spent processing
that stuff, storing that stuff.
What and then that stuff piles up and now you have a well,
you're storing items to store items that never sell or sell
for very little and you waste a whole bunch of time that
you could have allocated making a whole lot more money.
It's don't do it.
Just don't don't be the junk seller.
That's for the people that go to flea markets.
Don't be the flea market guy.
That's a that's a good thing to bring up too is you can
increase your profit if you are buying large quantities
of items by utilizing, you know, the outlet you kind of
talked about, right?
I think about clothing like Plato's closet, right?
You can go and you can literally it's like a trade-in
store for clothes you go.
Yeah, there's there's options out there and even if you
don't have one of these stores, but such a lame excuse and
you know, look up somebody, you know, go on eBay and I
tell people do this, you know, search in your area and like
for somebody that sells books and if they're getting lots
of books, they don't have nothing to do with it.
I just tell them, you know, search Nora Roberts book search
Stephen King book see if there's other sellers that are
willing to you know, their business model is the six seven
eight dollar book and then all of a sudden you have an
outlet, right?
Maybe you get a few dollars back if you you know a pocket
full of change, but you're getting something out of it
and it's not an extra step you have to take in the business
because you start sinking time profit is not only money.
It's the time I think profit needs to be kind of looked at
in a way of a time aspect at least for me because I you
know, I try to you know, I don't want to be reselling 60
70 hours a week.
No offense to anybody out there.
You're true hustlers.
You're crazy for doing it.
I hope you're making I mean if you're working that much you
should be making a crap ton of money reselling for me.
I think profit is not just money.
It's the time you're spending like what's the profitability
worth to you, right?
And that's kind of where we fall into why only list items
on eBay at $20 because my time is worth X amount of dollars
if I was going to lower that then my time value goes down,
right?
My time is now not as worth as much if I go up to $30 now
I'm saying my eBay time is more valuable than if I went down
to $10 and I'm saying, you know, it's really not worth my
time to kind of do.
We absolutely I mean as you go on this business, you're
going to meet people that are in the business.
They just have a different jam is how they're conducting
like me.
I do paperbacks, right?
If I go to Mike, hey, hey Mike, I got all these vintage
paperbacks for you, man.
You can make a lot of money.
He'll tell me to go pound sand because that's not his business.
That's not what he does.
It's my business and what I do.
So if Mike came to you at the same deal, I say hey man,
bring him on and bring as many of them as you can.
That's great because that's for my business.
There's a there's a seller for a certain thing like I forget
if she's in this group or not, but there's a woman who does
nothing but children's books.
I want nothing to do with children's books, but if I get
them on a large quantity that I it overwhelms my store shop.
Guess what?
She's going to be my first point of contact.
Hey, I got a lot of kids books.
I don't want to deal with would you like them for a deal?
I think I know you're talking about because she was on one
of our things.
She's on the YouTube call last month.
She's super smart because children's books are so overlooked
ever since that call like I've been making a point to scan
the kids books and I've been I've just been pulling so much
profit out of it, but a good point to to bring up is that
paperbacks aren't my thing.
Any CD or DVD that's not worth it for my business.
It ain't my thing.
So what do I do with it?
It goes in a box and it goes to Johnny Johnny.
Well since Johnny does this I cover the shipping right, but
all my CD and DVD duds go to somebody else that's in the
group.
They cover the ship and all I do is put in a box and then
the dimensions in the weight and it's gone.
I'm not trying to like ring every dollar and penny.
I accept the fact that this isn't a fit for me.
Sure.
There's probably you know, there's money to be made in the
stuff.
I'm sending Johnny and I'll Mike though all the Doug disk,
but it doesn't fit my business model and I'm perfectly fine
with that.
I'd rather just see it gone, but people can't I think it's
like resellers or hoarders, right?
It's like if you're going to be a reseller, you're basically
a hoarder.
I don't think it has to be that way.
I think you can run a super lean inventory operation even
on the bulk level.
You don't need to be keeping all the stuff sitting around
all the time and you don't need to try to monetize every
single piece of inventory that comes in the door because
you're never going to be able to you're just going to lose
your money.
You don't have enough time in the day.
You can't hire enough people.
Right.
I mean, I just so happen to invite people into my hoard to
pick out of and buy is called a storefront.
I run a bookstore.
You got to figure out a way to do it.
I don't care if it's a recycler.
I don't care if it's a storefront.
I don't care if it's mail-in boxers to your reseller friends
who deal in the particular stuff or fire pit outside.
Get rid of it.
Get it gone.
It's a distraction from your core business.
You need to be focused on your core business and to the point
of this call your core business makes you the profit and what
you do with that profit and how you hold on to it.
Well, that's up to you.
Let's get as much profit as we can and then we have all the
options in the world, right?
There is no like I'll give a little bit of insight here to my
Amazon business.
So when I'm out scanning in the store, I'm paying, you know,
thrift retail price for an item.
You expect to make a certain amount of profit, right?
If I scan a book and the book sells once every week and I'm
going to spend a dollar on it.
I'm fine with making $5 profit.
So basically I'm going to make $4 in profit after I spend my
dollar by cost.
Now you think to yourself, especially if you're an eBay
seller, like you would never sell something to make four
bucks profit, right?
Most people are have a higher ASP.
Well with Amazon, all you're really doing is just slapping a
label on the item, right?
And putting it in a box.
There's no other work that goes into this.
You're not shipping it to the customer.
I never have answered a customer's question on Amazon.
You don't have to, you're not required to feedback when it
comes to feedback.
Everything's good condition, right?
So I mean, it's a used book.
So you really don't have to worry about headaches with that.
All the nonsense that kind of comes along with that.
So that's me at a thrift store.
I spend a dollar.
I'll make $4.
Now if I do like a bulk buy, like I had a library pickup, I
already have these items.
My profit goes down because I already have these items in my
possession and I need to figure out what to do with every
single item.
So it's either going into Amazon or it's getting donated when
it comes to books.
So my profit goes down to $3.
I paid nothing.
So I'm only willing to make $3 profit.
If these are all items I got from a bulk buy or free pickup
because I need an outlet for these.
I don't want them all sitting around.
I want to scan them once make a decision based off that.
So your profit dependent on your business model.
And if you're somebody like myself where hey you thrift,
but then again, maybe you come across huge lots that you pick
up it can vary but with eBay, I think you have to have something
set in stone because eBay takes a lot more time to do it the
correct way.
The photos the listing the item.
I was telling Deb I listed a squish model last week and so
like they got like names and everything right?
Like I don't even know.
I don't even know.
She'll show up here.
Come on show for the YouTube fans.
We can't see her.
But in front of you like directly in front of you.
Yeah, now we see it 24 inch squish model, right?
So I go on eBay and just like most eBay sellers do all my
phone rate.
I'm listening to the phone and somebody's I go off one of the
ones that's already listed and all the descriptions are wrong.
Johnny, they have different colors.
It's not a penguin.
They got it listed as like a wolf or an owl or something.
I forget and I think to myself the time it takes.
That's why I command a higher price on eBay than Amazon and
profit on eBay and Amazon because the time it takes to do
it correct is exponential compared to Amazon.
So the the $3 profit on Amazon if I'm just slapping a label
on it, that's fine.
But there ain't no chance I'm taking, you know, 12 photos of
Tamara the penguin here and fixing the whole listing does
the barcode needs to get scanned in the color the animal like
all of a sudden your time starts going away.
That's why I think most people that sell on Amazon and eBay
when it comes to media, they usually have a higher ASP on
eBay because they know the time it takes in comparison.
Right.
It's funny.
You mentioned poor listings like I was doing one on Amazon
and the photo popped up for it was a hard look up and it was
literally somebody's wig with a bowl on it was not a book.
I go down to the description like what did I type this the
ASIN in wrong or the ISP in wrong?
I did not because all the book information was there.
It's just their photos.
I don't know what they were photographing, but it was not a
book nowhere close to a book.
But the scouting software says it sells frequently.
I'm like, okay, I guess I'm sending this in but I don't know
what to say and I've seen this before but not to that extreme.
But yeah, that was special because it's still going to sell
on Amazon on eBay that won't fly but on Amazon.
Okay, sure.
Let's play.
All right before we wrap this up.
Give me some tips to increase your profit on eBay.
Don't overbuy like if you have a quote-unquote death pile
list that stuff get some profit back.
You don't need to go out and buy every day.
They don't give me this crap of well, my sources depended on
me. No, he's not.
I mean, he likes your money, but he'll find money elsewhere.
If you don't give it to him, he'll be okay.
I don't care if he's got ten children in the back.
Don't care.
You're running a business for you and your family not theirs.
Another tip would be get your storage in line.
If you just have piles of stuff, you're going to waste so much
time where you could be buying more items or processing better
if you're working in a clean workspace.
It's okay to pay up for items.
If you're going to make more out of it in the long run, I'll
spend $10 on a $50 item.
I'll spend $10 on a $100 item.
You don't have to go down to the bargain shelf to make $4
an item schedule.
Make yourself some kind of schedule.
Even if it's a rough one, like I'm doing this on this day.
You don't have it planned to the hour.
At least you have an agenda for the day and or days of the
week that that'll that'll boost your money because you have an
outline of what you're doing.
You're not wasting time thinking about what you need to do.
Last one.
I probably got for you here is do your homework and research
so, you know what to buy.
There's plenty of things out there for both Amazon and eBay
that can help expand your knowledge or spend some time
learning your software's that you're using get a little bit
more intricate with that.
Does it really work the way I think it does?
Oh, if I do this, well, I've exponentially increased my
profit by the year for $10,000.
Go make yourself $10,000 by spending 30 minutes of work.
Go do that.
All right, I'm going to take over some eBay or not eBay Amazon
profit Increaser's.
So I think a lot of this boils down to just because you do
something on the platform, right?
Think about us as resellers when we shop on eBay or Amazon like
sure will click into the item descriptions.
Sure.
We'll click in and scroll through all the photos.
I'm here to tell everybody on Amazon.
We don't care.
Nobody cares.
Nobody's clicking through.
We're talking maybe 3% of Amazon shoppers are clicking through
when seeing your condition.
No, you can you can even upload photos on Amazon if you wanted
to there are things that you have to accept just because you
do them doesn't mean the majority of the population does
it and with these stupid conditionings when it comes to
use items on Amazon, it is the biggest waste of time and me
and Johnny have even talked about this.
You don't even need condition notes.
If you don't want to have a condition, no, I don't think you
would see any you might make one or two extra sales a year.
I don't think you would see any difference when it comes to
overall sales on that my condition notes are literally the
copy paste from the Amazon condition notes.
That's my condition note for good and acceptable.
All I do.
I just had I just had an epiphany for this whole episode to
make more profit on Amazon do less to make more profit on
eBay do more that is literally what it comes down to because
Amazon is just how many items can you send in how many items
can you list at the lowest price to make money on eBay comes
down to the quality of your listing because eBay shoppers.
I mean you want to see the photos of the actual product.
You want to see it an item description personally for me as
a reseller if I'm going something on eBay.
I want to see an item description that isn't just see photos
for details right like I need a little bit more, you know things
and when me and Deb have sold larger items like she sold
embroidery machines, you know, I write like a two paragraph
story about the item why we're selling it and things like that.
I think eBay doesn't have to be a huge time sink to be profitable.
I think you just have to understand how the platform works
and do it the right way and if you hover in between where
you're like some listings are great some are not then all of
a sudden you become into one of these and now or read list
people and it's all just you just it's all just junk.
It just doesn't work.
So we're going to wrap it up there.
We appreciate you listening and we'll talk to you in next week's
episode. Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers
mindset podcast today's full episode and all previous
episodes are available to all YouTube members along with
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