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 into another episode of Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike next to Johnny.
We have one job as resellers, even though if you're watching on YouTube,
I have two fingers up.
I only mean to have one up.
And that is, Johnny, what is it?
Take us away.
Make money.
Making money.
That's all we're supposed to do.
There's no other reason to have a reselling business.
Or is there?
I mean, some people, I guess, collect things through reselling.
I have no idea.
But being a used book seller, I see this all the time.
I'm the used book guy.
So people think I love and I care about books, Johnny.
This guy is saving every book he comes across.
And I'm here to tell you, I care less who the author is,
why the book was written, the year it was published,
what edition it is.
All I care about is, is going to make me money.
That's all I know.
It pisses a lot of people off because people
that are passionate about books, there's
a lot of people that enjoy reading, enjoy collecting.
They know all this information.
And maybe they come to my channel like, oh, this guy loves books.
He loves saving books.
And I'm like, sorry, unfortunately, that is not me.
The only reason I sell the books that I sell
is so that I can profit from the books.
Maybe I come across some super rare, like, there's only one
in the world.
Why would you ever sell it?
Because I want the money.
I don't want the books.
I don't know.
Dude, what's your opinion on this?
I'll give it two folds because before I
joined the reselling business, I did read
and I actually had a little library of my own.
I was doing Eastern Press Folio Franklin Library.
Good Englishman looking library, book collection.
That was fun.
I liked reading those because I did like the experience,
the tactile experience that came with reading those books.
And they were books I've already read before.
And they got one reread out of me.
And then they set on a shelf.
I get it.
If that's your jam, you like collecting,
you like admiring, and you like an experience,
there's no problem with collecting.
Everybody's allowed to have their passions and hobbies.
But when you transfer into reselling,
guess what happened in that library?
That went to be resold.
I've read them before.
I'll read them again.
Those exact books, I can get them again if I really want.
And nothing is irreplaceable.
It really isn't.
Even the text, you can get that in a cheaper version
if it's a really, really super rare book.
Or save up your pennies to get that really, really rare book
again.
Now, you're one of a kind, Sarri.
That's a little bit different.
But I'm going to exclude that from this topic here.
When it comes to reselling, when I look at a book these days,
I look at the cover art because that's mainly
what I shill on eBay side of things.
Cover art looks cool.
I'll put it up for sale.
Or if it's very, very interesting subject matter,
or if it was a book that altered history.
There's very few of those kinds of books out there.
But they do exist where they're groundbreaking for at least
the time period.
So from a historical perspective,
those books are cool to me.
Now, am I married to them?
Do I hoard on to them?
Absolutely not.
I'm about making money these days.
And again, if I ever want to start my own personal library,
I'll do it again.
I technically have my own right now.
It's called a bookstore.
And I'm not married to any of those books either.
Of course, most of the books out there
are kind of garbage in my opinion.
But we can admire things, but if we're in the game of making
money, which reselling very much is, you can't be married to it.
And that includes on your pricing too, man.
Don't price it sky high where it'll never sell.
I know what I got, dude.
Price is firm.
No, that's BS.
Sell it.
Make some money.
I mean, when I sold a book out of my personal collection
on eBay first time, I kind of held it.
I was sad for a minute.
And then I put it in the poly bag.
Minute was over.
Had my minute of, oh, I remember reading you.
You were good times.
You were my friend for a couple hours a night.
I think maybe we come off as like greedy old men, right?
Because you basically just told, we're not saying,
you know, I'll tell you right now,
I do have a book collection.
It consists of like one, two, three, four, five,
under 10 books, right?
So I do have a little particular niche
that I look for, particular series that I look for,
the Halloween horror movie trade paperbacks.
But that is like the extent of it.
I also have the Jaws.
Like I'm into horror books.
They rarely exist.
But it's not like I have a huge collection.
And if I had to, kind of bring it back
to like when I was dead broke.
We would get a tax return.
We'd be like, we're spending this money, dude, right?
So like Deb buys an iPad.
I get like an Xbox.
And then like the next month, we're completely broke.
And we have to sell the iPad and we have to sell the Xbox.
I think a lot of people get tied to these items.
And the idea is, what if we took the label off the item, right?
Like what if the CD wasn't a CD?
It was the dollar you paid for it.
What if everything was just like the monetary, the currency
you paid for it versus what you can get for it?
So you're not attached, right?
Like set free isn't like your favorite band of all time.
You just see it as a dollar bill.
So basically you see every item based on what you paid for it
and how much you can turn that dollar into.
I think resellers would skyrocket
because we're not attached.
We're not like, oh my god, I'm not taking this lowball offer.
Well, if anybody walked up to you on the street today,
Johnny said, you give me a dollar and I'll give you five.
But hello, is anybody there?
Like who is going to say no to that?
Like it's crazy to me this mindset of reselling is like,
I got to get all the money all the time.
And I think it gets on the topic of sell through when it comes
to our only job is to make money.
You have to sell items no matter what category you're in.
Media is one of the worst categories
when it comes to sell through rates.
There's some other rough ones.
Used clothing can be rough, low ASP, things like that.
You have to turn and burn because think about it.
I got 3,400 items sitting in Amazon right now.
My average buy cost is right around a dollar.
That's $3,400 sitting in Bezos warehouse doing nothing.
It's just sitting there.
I basically have over three grand in cash sitting there.
But we don't think about it that way.
You say, well, I got $3,000 in inventory.
So I might sell some.
Well, think about it in monetary terms.
You got $3,000 and your money is just
sitting there doing nothing for you.
If I said, hey, all right, well, you could sell everything
and make your set of your $3,000.
Maybe you're going to make $15,000.
I'm cashing out today, dude.
And I think that's what you hit on it before the podcast
when I was talking about it.
This is replicable.
You can go find this stuff infinitely.
So if we cash out everything today,
you cash out all your $15,000 plus you have in Amazon.
And think about that.
As you scale, your inventory number is only going to go up.
Sure, Johnny isn't paying close to a dollar apiece.
But you still have money tied up sitting there.
There's still fees.
There's still overhead that come with it.
Well, it's at least $0.21 to $0.30 just to send it in.
So there's that.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's the idea that it's fine for items to just sit.
And I know people rag me behind the scenes about it
because I'm all about turning and burning through inventory.
And when I first started, every book I sold
was like my firstborn child.
And I wanted to get the most amount of money.
And now I'm like, well, if I know this thing's
guaranteed to sell, which we can tell from the data we have
as Amazon sellers through software,
and even on eBay, if you go and look up something
and then you filter to sold and you see there's
more sold than listed, you're like, oh, yeah,
we're in the money here.
This is going to sell pretty quick on eBay.
We have the data in front of us, but we still
refuse to take advantage of some of the faster moving.
And the profit's not as high, dude.
So people don't get excited.
Reselling's all about finding a gold bar for a dollar
and selling it for $3 million.
And I think that's why.
Go ahead.
I'm going to interrupt you here.
I'm going to go right into it.
Payments.
Let's take a look at the transaction view.
I did over $10,000 last month.
Let's see what kind of money we're looking at.
Let's see.
$20.18.
$4.18.
OK, here's one.
$0.21 I made in that one book.
A whole $0.21.
But I sent that in with the other books that did $18.25.
There's $1.34.
And then right beneath it is a $51.
It all adds up.
You got to look at your month or your week over week
or your year over year money.
It just all adds in that monthly pile
or that yearly pile of money.
$7, $2, $14, $16, $8, $2.
$1.57 whole cents.
$6, $5, $2.
$0.23 here.
$1.59, $3, $6, $02, $1.77, $19, $13, $2.91, $38.
It all added up to over 10 Gs.
It all adds up, people.
You need money at the end of the day.
And it's apparent, especially since we have the media group.
We do the calls.
And we got the Discord.
And we got the Facebook.
And we do the calls.
We see a lot of people that struggle with cash flow.
And the only way to change that is to sell your stuff.
If you go out and spend $500 this week and you send it in,
it's going to take time for it to sell.
But if you're not in the mindset of selling it, and with Amazon,
I mean, on eBay, it's the same way.
Because a lot of people on eBay, they
don't go back and reprice things.
They don't see if someone else came on the listing
and undercut them.
And with Amazon, we have the data.
But sometimes the data is misleading.
Somebody might have this CD priced on Amazon for $100.
And nobody in their right mind is going
to pay for set free $100.
So you find this in a thrift store.
And you say, well, I'm going to go.
I'm going to be the lowest person and price it at $99.99.
Good luck with that.
It's never going to sell.
You just burn your dollar.
You might as well take your dollar out back and just burn it.
Burn it on the barbecue.
Be realistic.
And I try to get this through the people.
And I know I really don't, because there's
no other way to say it besides, what's the value to somebody?
It's a CD.
Sure, there are super collectible CDs for all you people.
There are CDs that sell for thousands of dollars.
Sure.
But I'm talking about your run of the mill everyday stuff.
And I do think this exists with eBay as well.
Because the problem is anybody can list anything
at any price on eBay.
So if I'm the only person on eBay selling this CD,
and I got a price at $100, and there's no sold comps,
you come along, you find the CD, and you're like, well,
I'm going to price this at $89.99.
And it's going to sell, because it's $10 cheaper
than the other one.
Well, in reality, if somebody Googled set free,
somewhere else on the internet, it's probably
going to have it for $10.
So your item is never going to sell,
because the price is just unrealistic.
I don't know.
For me, I want a price that I think somebody
be willing to buy the item.
Besides the collector's items and things like that,
I like pricing my items $17.99, $19.99 range.
It's almost like my everyday value range,
because people feel like, oh, $17 for a CD, all right,
that's fine.
What's your take on this when it comes
to having a realistic expectation of what you can
actually get for your items, regardless of the data
and the comps you see that are out there?
How much does it cost to go to the movie theater
to buy a large drink and a large bucket of popcorn?
That is the most money I think people would blow.
And that'll change every year as inflation change.
Because going to the movie for a two-hour experience
with a large popcorn and a large beverage,
that's a good baseline.
Or if you don't like movie theaters
and don't know nothing about them, OK.
What's it cost to buy a loaf of bread, ham, cheese,
and a beverage at the grocery store?
That's your average cost of what people
are willing to spend and not think about it, in my opinion.
Again, this is an opinion.
And I'm basing my opinion on what people do every day.
What do they do for entertainment?
We sell entertainment products, books, CDs, DVDs.
So that's why I like the movies more to the groceries.
Because you need to eat, honestly.
So groceries is more of a need versus a want to have.
So in a want to have scenario, what's the average Joe
or average Jill going to pay?
Movie ticket plus the price of popcorn and a beverage.
That's what they're willing to pay.
Or what's a subscription to Netflix cost?
What does a subscription to Hulu cost?
Yeah, there's upgrades to Hulu.
There's upgrades to Netflix.
But you've got to base it on what's the market doing today?
Now, COVID things shot up.
So prices on everything shot up.
Even the mailing stamp has shot up.
And it takes almost six months for average Joe and Jill
to get used to those increases of mail costs.
Why did your prices go up?
I'm used to paying this.
Well, because the stamp went up.
And you're just unaware what stamp prices cost every day.
That's my take on it.
Be realistic and use practical examples in the world we live in.
While it's the United States of America,
if you're listening to another country,
use your country's numbers.
Because instead of dollars, it's pounds or rubles or rupees.
What do you think about the person that comps everything
on their phone when they're reselling and they come across?
Some of these items are, I don't know how it's done.
I don't know the science behind it.
But I've seen some the other day in a thrift store.
I almost took a picture and sent them to you, honestly.
Beanie Babies.
All right.
This Beanie Baby or the Disney VHS Diamond Collection,
Black Diamond, right?
Like, this is going to sell for $3 trillion.
And they go on eBay and they see the sold listing.
And it's like $5,000.
And they're like, oh my god.
Like, I know the majority of people that listen to this
understand that's not the reality.
But there is a large part of the reselling community
that is absolutely clueless when it comes to understanding
market value and understanding the platforms that they sell
on and how sold comps work.
And it's just, I don't know, man.
Like, how do some of these things have sold comps for $5,000
when we know the Beanie Baby's worth a dollar?
If that, you probably can't even give it away.
My guess is money is exchanging hands
between the same hands.
And if you didn't catch on to that scenario,
I think it's money laundering to some degree, honestly.
And they're using some cheap product
to make it legit.
Now, are some Disney, Black Diamond things
worth some money?
Yes.
Do I think they're worth as much money
as we're seeing in the solds?
No.
So I think it's, I'll give a good example.
Ria's resellers are not in the storage game.
There's a gentleman.
And if you've heard the news cycle
in some degree of reselling, I think it's Mile High Comics.
He bought a gigantic collection in the early 90s.
He still has most of it because he's priced them
extremely high.
He's a collector who doesn't want them to really go.
So he priced himself outside of the selling market, more or less.
Does he sell some things?
Sure.
But there's plenty of documentary films out there
on this gentleman.
Dude, who is this guy?
You're calling out resellers on the podcast here.
This is a podcast first.
Mile High Comics?
Yeah.
Now you're going to have me go down the rabbit hole here.
Chuck Roszynski, I think is his name.
Man, he must have you real pissed off, huh?
No, I just find it fascinating.
I look at his warehouse.
His warehouse is gigantic.
It's over a million comic books.
I think maybe close to three million comic books.
There's a lot of them that are just there since he bought them
over going on almost 30 years ago.
We still got six million comics and change.
That's blatant ignorance.
I think another problem is you're a reseller.
I think we have to change the mindset behind this
because a lot of people join my group
and maybe they expect some kind of book of the week.
Like, oh, I'm reading this book this week.
That is not the case.
I have the group.
It's a business-minded group.
It's not a book collecting.
It's not a collectible.
It's not a save literature group.
At the end of the day, my only focus
is to help you make money selling media.
And as resellers, we have this mindset of, oh, I'm a reseller.
Well, no, you're a small business owner.
You literally are sole proprietor.
Whatever you are, LLC, you go down that whole rabbit hole
of that stuff.
But you are a business.
And resellers don't think that way.
We just think, oh, we're a reseller.
And that is just a mumbled, jumbled word.
And I just Googled it.
10 million comics and over 300,000 comic trade paperbacks.
The gentleman has.
I don't know what his sell-through rate is,
but I'm going to guess it's small.
But no, I mean, you got to detach yourself.
I stopped calling books books.
I call them units now.
I call CDs units.
I call DVDs units.
I call whatever units.
I don't call them what they are.
You can't, dude.
People aren't.
It's too drastic of a change.
No matter if it's books, clothing,
like it's only going to be the Nike shirt.
They're widgets.
They're units.
It's going to be the Polo shirt.
I agree, though.
It would make your life easier if you just had this uniformed
look at things, right?
Now you can just see it as, all right, well, yeah,
I'm selling that item.
Or that dollar's a go.
It's just like what you said.
This is dollars.
But to me, they're units that convert into dollars.
How many units do I need to convert into dollars?
And I love it when I'm talking to people
trying to sell me stuff.
There's blah amount of value in this box.
I'm like, the number of units versus your cost
versus the margin I'm going to make.
That's all I care about.
That has nothing to do with what you perceive.
It's a perception of the value to be and said box or boxes.
I don't care.
I buy stuff for x.
I sell stuff for y.
Z comes in my bank account.
That is all I care about.
You are literally Mr. Krabs today.
And I kind of like it.
I like when you're greedy for money
because someone said that.
I forget who it was a few weeks ago.
Someone commented on one of the shorts
I posted on YouTube of the podcast.
And they're like, everything isn't
about money in the world.
I'm like, all right, hotshot, here we go.
If I want to even have a YouTube channel
or have a roof over my head,
you need something called money.
Unless you're Tom Hanks on your island
with infinite food supply, fuck off.
I understand people get offended
when you sound like a money hungry,
greedy little bugger.
You're like, I just want to make money.
I want to make all the money.
But that's what we do as resellers.
One of my favorite movies is Boiler Room.
And he makes this statement.
It's Ben Affleck walking around the table,
giving these young guns some advice.
Anybody who says that money doesn't buy happiness
has never had any.
That is one of my favorite quotes.
Money does buy happiness.
I'm here to tell you right now.
Or it buys the option to have happiness, right?
Just because you buy a water slide,
does it really bring you internal joy?
No, but how do you know if you can't even buy
the water slide to find out?
That's my point.
Yeah, I think money, the way I look at money,
it takes a lot of stress out of your life, right?
Being someone that used to be so dead broke,
it was pathetic.
Living dollar to dollar,
not even paycheck to paycheck, worse than that.
Credit cards and just struggling to get by.
The big thing money gave me and Deb was peace of mind, right?
If something happens, something happens to the car,
I need to spend $3,000, okay, it's there to spend, right?
Some other kind of emergency happens.
That's the biggest thing with money for me is
it allows you to sleep easier at night,
knowing you have it set aside
and you're not worried for the sky to fall.
Because when you are in that stage
of not having a lot of money,
it always feels like the sky is falling.
Every week, Johnny, there's something else happening.
Oh, I gotta get flat tire.
Oh, I gotta take the cat to the vet.
I don't have money to do this.
And it always, you just feel like
you're in this repetitive cycle.
And that's why as resellers,
you have to get money back out of your items.
And there's lots of times, you know,
Johnny just said 24 cents for some of the stuff he sells.
Okay, you lose few.
You're not gonna win every single time,
but you at least get some money back out of the item
to redeploy smarter in the future.
Exactly.
And some of those items, even on the lower dollar ends,
I mean, those are fast movers.
They sold, they were in the sold section
that I was reading those numbers off of.
They have sold.
Now, another thing to think about is
you go out and buy stuff,
but how much stuff are you bringing back home
and how much time does it take you to A, haul it back,
or B, select what you're buying,
B, haul it back, C, process it,
D, send it in, and E, wait for your money.
So the reason I broke it down like that is each phase,
you have to evaluate your profit per hour
or your profit per day.
Oh, you're gonna piss people off, dude.
People don't like the profit per hour talk.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm here to help people make money.
Okay, I'm not sorry at all.
You're gonna sit back and listen
for the next couple of minutes,
podcast listeners.
So if you go out and buy a hundred books
and the end result is you get a hundred bucks
in your bank account, okay, that's not great.
So you go out and you buy another set of a hundred books
and you get a thousand dollars in your bank account.
That's even better.
But you shouldn't just stop there.
You should always be thinking, okay,
how can I make more money doing the same thing?
We always have to be thinking that, even me.
I mean, I'm pretty set on sourcing and stuff I have come in,
but if there's an opportunity where I can make more money
buying the same amount of,
can't see it right now,
but there are air quotes happening, units,
and getting them back and making double the amount of money
I normally have, I'm gonna take that opportunity.
And that's an opportunity cost and opportunity analysis.
And I may be using some higher level businessy terms,
but I'm speaking to people who are running a business,
not a hobby. To the hobbyist people though,
I would apply the same methodology.
You can make your hobby,
you can make your part-time job very profitable
doing these kind of simple, they're not simple.
I won't say simple.
What's a good work, Mike, for if you put the time in,
you'll get the results back.
Maybe I'll just say it like that.
Yeah, that's a good way to say it.
I don't think there's an actual term for it,
but I do agree because even when I was a hobbyist,
I'm like, if I go spend 20 bucks,
that's 20 bucks I wanna make some money on.
And I needed to sell those hobbyist items
so I could go buy my Pizza Hut pizza.
Cause if I'm a hobbyist, I'm just doing this for fun money.
Maybe I buy collectible with the money I make.
But if you don't sell the stuff you buy,
even if you're a hobbyist, what even is the point here?
There's no point even doing this
if you're not in it to make some kind of money.
Right, I mean, even if it's your vacation money
you're using reselling for, great.
But instead of roadside Motel 6,
somewhere in the outskirts of Vegas,
you can be hopping it up in the Flamingo,
even though I think they're demolishing that place now.
But you can change your experiences to have a better life.
You can have more fun opportunities for yourself.
Give yourself some more fun chances.
By doing your hobby and your part-time
and or your full-time job better,
more efficiently, more profitable.
This is all about profit.
If you spend a dollar,
what do you think is a reasonable return on your dollar?
In our game?
Yeah.
Reasonable return, $17.
So think about it like this.
You just said you wanna make,
you wanna turn your dollar into over a $10 bill.
Yeah.
What about the mindset of,
you find a highly desirable item,
you pay a dollar for it,
you make $2 on the item,
but it sells all the time.
That's not appealing to resellers.
No, it's not.
No reseller is gonna get excited about that.
But if I have the data in front of me
and I'm buying a book for 50 cents,
and I'm gonna make $2 and 50 cents,
and you know what's gonna sell, right?
Cause we have the data,
we see it sold multiple times every single day on Amazon.
I would take an infinite supply of those.
Yeah, it's free money.
It's your license to print money at that point.
But resellers don't wanna do it.
You're right, they don't.
And I think they're bullish for not.
I mean, nobody likes,
it's not fancy to say I doubled my money.
I tripled it. Especially on a dollar.
But if you double a million dollars
to now have $2 million, that's something.
And let's do it again, two into four,
four into eight, eight into 16, 32.
Continue the ladder.
Now you gotta hold back some to pay for your overhead,
the cost of goods again.
So it's not exactly a true doubling,
but you're getting closer every time
and it just compounds and compound.
And it's very simple.
It's the banking compounding interest.
You can go Google that one.
You can go watch some YouTube videos on that one
if this conversation's above your head.
But the power of compounding your money
is the best it'll ever be in the world of reselling.
Not even the stock market has the kind of
compounding effect as resellers.
Yeah, you figure stock market, your money doubles,
I think every seven years at around 10 to 13%.
And we're sad that we can't do it in 90 days.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think a lot of resellers grow
before they really can sustain their cashflow.
I think that's another thing.
And you've grown from just being you,
now you got this warehouse, you got an employee.
If there's no cashflow in the business, you can't grow.
I mean, you can grow, but you're gonna go bankrupt, right?
Like Johnny B goes away if he decides
to hire 20 employees tomorrow, right?
Like, god.
And we were kinda talking about this before the podcast.
It's like, grow at the speed of cash,
as dumb as that sounds.
What do you have coming into the account consistently?
What other things can you do to increase that?
And part of it is being A-okay with lowering
the amount you make per item if it has a faster sell curve.
So imagine that anybody, eBay, Amazon seller,
have I told you, if you priced everything
you're sending in this week by $5 less
that it would sell within a month,
everybody would do that.
Every single, and if not, you're a fool, I don't care.
If you're not willing to part ways with everything
for five less dollars, you're a fool.
No, absolutely.
Now, I did an experiment when I first got into Amazon.
First month, high is ASP.
I think my ASP was like 30 some odd dollars,
a ridiculous amount.
And then I said, okay, I'm gonna do it differently
this month, and I pretty much halved my ASP,
so now we're at 15 bucks.
I made double the money, double,
because I was selling through things faster.
Now, what I'm doing now is kinda like a hybrid
between those two.
I'm setting it high and then gradually lowering it.
But knowing that things sell faster
if priced appropriately and or accurately,
that is very powerful.
That is a good tool, probably your primary tool,
outside of getting the goods itself
in our industry of reselling.
It will sell at the right price, no questions asked.
It will sell if priced correctly.
All right, I know you're the eBay guy,
so I wanna hit on eBay a little bit here is,
not only do you have to find your item at a good price,
have a sell through.
With eBay, you have to understand
what the platform expects from your listings.
And I know it's not fun, but it's pretty straightforward.
You need quality listings and a quality item
if you wanna sell it on eBay.
That's all it comes down to.
There has to be some desire to this item.
It has to be at a good price.
And not only that, you gotta make sure
your specifics are right, your title is correct.
And I think if you lose one link in that chain,
it's gonna take way longer than it has to
for that item to sell.
Right, most things you list will sell.
How long that period of time,
there's a bajillion factors that go into that.
It could take five years for that thing to sell,
but it probably will sell eventually.
We don't wanna wait five,
we're not playing the stock market,
we're playing the reselling game.
We wanna sell it as quickly as we can.
Now, I'm gonna trim it back down to books.
Let's take books as a very good example.
Me listing a Nora Roberts book at $20, not gonna sell.
Me listing a Nora Roberts book at $5,
it's probably gonna sell, probably within the week.
Here's the one even better.
I put that Nora Roberts $1 auction, they pay for shipping.
It's gonna sell probably within the auction cycle.
Now, would Nora Roberts sell at $20?
At some point, I can't tell you when, may take a decade.
But yeah, another example, let's take a premium product.
Let's take an East Impress book.
It's going, let's say it's worth $100.
You price it at $200, it's gonna take forever to sell.
You price it at $100, it's gonna sell at the decent rate.
You price that at $90 or $80 below market value,
it's probably gonna sell within the week.
Because people, the buyers, the consumers,
know that it's worth $100.
So when they see it for $80, it's like,
oh my God, here's my money, take it all.
And that's what we want.
We want them to throw the money at us.
I'm that guy, dude, you just hit it on the head, right?
So I'll get my own, my library will call me,
I'll go pick up books and like come across
some valuable antique books, right?
Like Atlas Shrugged, and it's like whatever edition.
And I'm like, somebody's got listed for like 250 bucks.
And mine's just a little bit beat up.
There's one sold com for like 170.
Dude, I put it at 129.99 and it sold within the day.
Like, I got it for free or I got it for a dollar.
Like I understand, okay, everybody's like,
you're leaving millions and trillions of dollars
on the table.
The table ain't in my house, right?
My pockets, my pockets in my house.
I don't care what imaginary number
we possibly could get for the item.
What can I get for it right now?
And if that means I can get my money quicker,
and I'm only into, we're only into this stuff for like,
you know, pennies on the dollar.
We're so greedy, we want all the money all the time.
Why?
No, stop it.
Take some of the money, reinvest your money,
get more items and do it again and again,
compounding, compound your money.
Now, we mentioned him a ton because he says
these exact same principles all the time.
Tech's got open public videos right now
explaining this very fact with a marker board.
And I still see people today who watch that video
and don't understand.
I don't know how to make people understand this.
You buy it for low, you sell it for not high, but medium,
and do it over and over and over and over again.
So, dollar into 10.
Okay, fine.
You're left with five.
Okay, take double that.
So now you're gonna spend two, you pocket three.
Do it again, compound it, compound it over and over again.
If you need to listen to this segment of the podcast
20 times until it clicks, you need to write it out.
You need to put us in slow mode
to understand that basic principle, please do it.
How many eBay sellers have inventory they have listed
that's over six months old?
Give me a percentage between one and a hundred.
All of them, a hundred percent.
Come on, dude, there's gotta be some outlier, all right?
99%.
So- I mean, there are people trying to target
a 90 day sell through rate, sure.
Do they sell within a hundred percent of their inventory?
No, there's always something that's left over
for some unexplainable reason.
Either the market trend shifted, this is more in clothing,
or you did something wrong with your pricing
or your listing and you missed the notification,
the memo down in the basement, if you will,
that, oh, it was $30 this month, it's now $20 this month.
And once you make the correction, it's gonna sell again.
If you sell bars of gold, is a good example, or iPhones,
it's probably the most example I hear mentioned a lot,
it's going to sell as long as it's priced correctly
at or below market.
If it's priced below market, it's gonna have
the shortest window of time that it takes to sell.
The items I send into Amazon have six months.
That's why I put the six months label on it.
Yeah.
Six months to sell.
From the second I send that item to Amazon,
it's got six months or it goes to the Amazon landfill,
whether that's liquidating, wherever that is, I don't care.
So think about that.
If you have an item in your eBay store over six months,
I never have an item over six months
in my Amazon business.
So this book, I buy for a dollar,
it's got 180 days to make me more than a dollar.
If not, it gets liquidated, I might lose 50, 75 cents.
But that might be mind blowing to people
that have a lot of items sitting in their store
for over six months that,
he's only given his items six months
and myself has been sitting here for two years.
That business model does make sense.
You kind of operate that type of business model,
but six months, it's all those books got to sell
and then it's gone and I don't care where it goes,
it ain't coming back here.
Like if this book shows back up,
I'm not bringing it in the house,
I'm throwing it right back into the middle of the street.
That's it, six months, no extra time, no extra nothing.
I probably leave money on the table.
I know I leave money on the table,
but I wanna turn and burn through inventory
more than I wanna play the game of hanging on
and waiting it out and hopefully some items sell
and some items will sell.
We'll see proof of that in your business,
but I'm just a one person operation.
I wanna get my money back, I wanna get my cashflow back.
And when Amazon liquidates some of these books
or CDs or DVDs, I might make a few cents, right?
So I get my initial investment out,
I make a few pennies on top of it,
I can redeploy that money into more of these types of items.
Yeah, I mean, I think when I first did Amazon,
my liquidation, I did like 900 liquidation,
I got 30 bucks back.
Now, did that account for all that storage time
that was in there for that six month lockdown
that we were all experiencing back then?
I don't think so, but it could have been worse.
I could have gotten a bill for $30
versus them giving me $30
and that'd be additional money out of my pocket.
But going back onto here, I mean,
here's some perspective,
because I don't wanna get blasted in the comments
by the cranky old eBay community.
And books, the average sell through,
and I've talked to a lot of book people,
we think it's about two years.
Do we have concrete data?
No, but if a book's been on your shelf
for more than two years,
it's probably time to reconsider
doing something with that book,
whether that's getting rid of it,
getting it out of your inventory,
and or is there something wrong with my listing?
Did I miss the memo down in the basement perhaps?
Now, on the other end, for the more higher end,
book collectors or book sellers rather,
they're doing the 100 to 500 to $1,000 books,
you might have to put a five-year timeframe on those books
because those require the right customer at the right time
and with the right wallet.
There's no way, dude, I'm out.
Yeah, if you wanna play the eBay antiquarian game, cool.
There's people who do it.
There are people who are very successful doing it,
but you gotta be prepared to wait a very, very,
very long time for that.
Now, if you have enough of that stuff,
you're gonna get daily sales.
But that is a different book eBay model
than I even want to fool with.
It's a very specialized market.
But if you're just a general book seller,
you need to give it about two years
and you need to list a metric ton of it.
I think resellers are too broke.
I think as an overall group,
resellers should be rolling in the money, right?
They should, you know, we have such an opportunity
to make a lot of money from a little money.
And reselling doesn't take a lot of money, right?
As you grow, sure, you'll have bigger expenses,
but you should be making more money.
But starting out, the cost is super low.
You're going to thrift stores,
you're going to yard sales, garage sales,
paying pennies on the dollar.
Why are so many resellers so broke,
like struggling paycheck to paycheck?
Like, I can't make this work.
If you can't make reselling work as a business,
I don't think you can make any self-employed business work
because the profit margins here are just astronomical.
Okay, let's see if I can name a general five.
You're over buying, you're spending more money
that's coming in.
You don't have any good business sense
and you're not knowing how to do reinvesting of your money.
Number three, you're probably going to try something
that does not work
and you're going to put money in that's a bad investment,
more or less, and you're going to have to learn from that.
Number four, you are trying the same thing
over and over again, expecting a different result
and not pivoting.
You refuse to pivot because you believe in something
that'll never work, unfortunately.
The five, last one here,
you're not asking for help from others
who have been at it for a minute
and know a thing or two about it.
You're refusing and you're being stubborn
and it's okay to ask for help when you really need it.
So I would say those are probably a good five
of why you're failing to make money and you're broke.
People think my under a dollar buy cost,
for a while there I was on this whole
getting your buy cost down as low as you possibly could
and for a while I was around like 70,
I was in like the 70 cent range per item
across the board, CD, DVD, book.
I think, think about it this way,
I said I have 3,400 items.
My buy cost is only around a dollar.
Now imagine you have double the buy cost
or triple the buy cost.
That's even more money tied up
and that should even motivate you more
to wanna sell through your inventory.
What are you doing to sell your old inventory
that's been sitting there?
And by old, I mean it's been sitting there for a month
because if it hasn't sold in a month on Amazon,
all right, maybe something's going on.
Maybe we gotta go back.
Maybe we gotta look at repricing our stuff.
The same with eBay.
I'll tell you right now when I was an eBay seller,
I never went back and looked at to see if anybody else
hopped on the listing to undercut me
for any of these items.
Like how many do they have?
Maybe you have this one item
and you think you're the only person,
then Johnny hops on and he's got 5,000 of these things
and he's got a better price
and he's got better handle on time.
You're never gonna sell that item.
You gotta stay up with the business
and look at why isn't your stuff selling?
There could be a million different reasons why
and if you're not willing to go buy stuff,
there could be a million different reasons why
and if you're not willing to go back in and say,
hey, this is why this item's not selling
or you're not fine just getting rid of stuff.
I mean, when I got out of eBay,
like it all went in the trash, man.
There was no like trying to, you know, oh my God.
At some point you gotta just get rid of it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in the process of doing that right now.
Yesterday I pulled about 200 books
that when my awesome employee comes in on Tuesday,
she's gonna unlist those couple hundred books
because I had to go out and sell the one hundred Press
and I had to expose them and I didn't want,
I could do no harm Airlines,
I was open to it when I went out to TW.
I was closed off from streaming
and I had to prove that they should never been listed
in the first place or they were too damaged to be listed.
So they never need to be listed in the first place.
I was looking at things.
I was like, this thing is water damaged the hell.
It looks cool but there's water damage.
and learn and that's the whole thing with what we do.
We try things, didn't work or didn't work as well
as we thought it would and we need to pivot
and make adjustments.
I'm slimming down my eBay business
and I'm making it a very lean operation.
And in those changeovers,
the stuff we're injecting in our store,
I mean, I still price a little on the high end
on my eBay store, but that's because I do a little bit
extra work out from my listing.
So I'm peeling to that kind of customer set.
If I were to price my items at market value,
I wouldn't list those items in the first place,
to be honest with you,
because my little paperbacks, they're worth, I don't know,
anywhere between five to $50, depending what it is.
And you got some outliers that are in the $100 range.
Those are few and far between.
But I like listing them, I enjoy listing them.
So eBay is kind of more of my funsie store these days
and my funsie store is still thousands of items.
But back to the point at hand, we have to make money
and we get money two ways.
We sell better profitable items or we lower our expenses
and you honestly should be doing both.
Figure out way to lower your costs
and sell things for more money, more profitable items.
Now there is something to be said for buy cost,
as you mentioned that.
I look at the video game market and what those guys pay.
They don't pay dollars per unit.
They pay a percentage of current market value.
If we did the same in books, CDs and DVDs,
we'd literally have all the inventory coming to us
because we're paying the best prices.
Now, are our margins per unit going to be smaller?
Yeah, but when you have all of the inventory coming to you,
doesn't matter.
Now, do those guys buy everything?
I don't think they buy everything.
There's certain things they don't buy.
But with video games, and here's the point of desirability,
I think they have 100% sell through rate.
Yeah.
This is a book or a CD or DVD
which may not have 100% sell through rate.
Video games do.
And the video game guys sellers, they know this.
So they'll pay up.
They're actually paying up.
They're paying what resellers and video games pay,
which is a percentage.
Oh, I'll give my final example here to wrap it up.
So I'm an eBay seller.
I listed my little T-Y sloth here.
For those watching on YouTube channel,
I have a little beanie baby sloth, right?
Cause I'm like a sloth some days.
So this guy, I'm an eBay seller.
I list them, I sit them on my shelf, right?
He's like looking at me all the time.
I'm like two years past,
the sloth is still staring at me in the face, right?
Like at what point do I just want to grab this sloth
and just rip his head off and throw him in the trash?
I want to rip his head off.
That's what I'm saying.
But we get so content with just, well, I listed it
and it's in a tote or it's on a shelf.
So it can just sit there forever.
Now I say, all right, this sloth's already pissing me off.
It's only been here for like 30 seconds on the podcast.
I'm like, hey, you walk him by, you got a dollar?
You can have my sloth for a dollar.
I don't want to see his face no more.
Okay, Mike, eBay plus shipping, dollar auction
and wave sloth boy goodbye.
Wave him goodbye, get a little bit of money back out of it
and move on.
Storing the stuff isn't cool.
You're not cool because you have a garage full of shelving
and all these bins and all these nice cardboard boxes
with Ziploc bags inside of them,
number to 55 million because you just have 55 million items
that are never going to sell.
Make money today.
I can't emphasize it enough.
Sloth agrees.
Yes, sell your stuff, please.
I want a new home.
Well, he ain't going to have a new home
unless you price your stuff right.
And does anybody even want sloths,
like are sloths even cool anymore?
Like, I don't know, but people don't care.
We don't go back and look, we go spend our money.
We list it, we forget it.
It sits there for 10 years.
And then I see it on, you're having a garage sale
and then some other reseller comes along
and buys the same junk.
It's like some of the stuff.
I wonder how some of these items,
how many different resellers eBay stores
has the same item been in.
I bet there's Beanie Babies out there.
It's probably been in like 10 plus serious reselling
eBay stores because nobody can sell it.
And then they closed their reselling business.
And then Johnny comes along and says,
oh, cute sloth for a quarter.
I can sell them for 10 bucks.
And then he doesn't sell.
It's like a never ending cycle with inventory.
Okay.
I'm going to give some actionable things
for you people to do as my last little tidbit
of our podcast today.
And I may go off in our morning call,
but I haven't decided yet,
but you may have it coming
if you're listening to this a couple of weeks later.
So little too late.
You didn't get the memo in the basement.
All right.
So one, I want you to go through your eBay inventory.
If you have things listed at $30 or under,
decide if it should even be in your eBay store
to begin with.
Toss it, get rid of it,
put it on dollar auction plus shipping and wave it goodbye.
Send it on down the road.
Take it out back old Yeller style and make it go away.
Two, on the Amazon end,
go look at your bottom line.
You do all the math.
If your bottom is 20 bucks,
but yet you have items that, I don't know,
could sell for 12 to 15,
maybe decide re-lowering your bottom.
Second actionable item for your Amazon guys.
Sort your active inventory from low to high
and look at your lower end items
and decide if you should just go ahead and liquidate.
Rescan the triggers on the ISBN or the ASIN there
and do the reverse from your high to low.
Maybe you priced it too high
because you're the only Amazon listing
and you priced it for a million dollars.
It's never gonna sell for a million dollars.
It'll sell for 20 bucks.
So maybe think about repricing it to 20 bucks.
Make it go away.
Make money.
Yeah, I agree.
And eBay sellers, turn and burn through your inventory.
I know that there's times when it's tough
and you feel like you're up against a wall,
but I guarantee you,
your significant other, husband, wife,
will appreciate not seeing Mr. Sloth
for the next three years of their life.
There's a lot that goes into,
and then you start making money.
All of a sudden, Johnny, you start making money.
Hey, the sky's the limit with this business.
And taking the quick dollar,
turn your dollar into two, three, four, five,
even greedy like Johnny,
he wants 17 for one of his dollar bills.
You don't have to be that greedy.
Just multiply your money.
It's like an infinite money hack, right?
Oh my God, you just keep turning dollars into more dollars.
It's just like investing, like he said.
But the only thing here is,
you gotta make sure you do the work
to turn that dollar into more.
So there's many steps that go into this,
but it's possible.
I think every reseller should make money.
And I've dealt with plenty of resellers
that don't make money.
And it's just a problem of figuring out
what's the root cause of it.
Sometimes it's one thing, sometimes it's multiple,
but self-reflecting and understanding,
you are a small business owner
and not the stupid term reseller
will send you far in this game.
So that's gonna do it for this week's episode.
We will, wait, I just ruined this ending, man.
That was terrible.
Like it threw me off.
I don't know.
I'll give you a do-over.
You can have it.
All right, I got a do-over.
That's gonna do it for this week's episode.
And we will talk to you all next week.
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 the weekly Zoom call and private Discord.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy
and consider joining for as little as 2.99 a month.