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 into another episode of Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike sitting next to Johnny today.
Today's topic is always a controversial one.
And for me, I don't know, I feel a type of way about it.
And that's just because I have an experience that I guess the same mindset
as somebody like yourself who sold on eBay full-time and it's summer slowdown.
So we are in the middle of July and every year YouTube social media reselling
gets flooded with the idea that you can't make sales during the summer
because people are not shopping.
And I guess my only argument to that, Johnny is I've never sold full-time on eBay.
So like, I understand there's difference between platforms, but July I'm on track
to possibly have my best month ever since I started reselling.
So the summer slowdown, like when I hear it, it's usually, well, it's always from
people that don't sell on Amazon as other platforms.
So I'm just like, summer slowdown, like you got to be kidding me, right?
Like I'm on track to do my best month ever.
And everybody else is sitting here saying summer slowdown is happening
and we can't make money.
I don't know, take me away and I'll just kind of go down the rabbit hole.
I mean, yeah, people are out and about and not trapped inside with mobile devices
in general as much, sure.
And I also think it's very category dependent and also seasonality dependent.
So you're selling swim trunks, trying to sell those in December,
that's a lot tougher gig than, oh, they're selling like gangbusters in July,
which is the month we're in now, or trying to sell Halloween and Christmas lights.
I mean, they'll sell a little bit.
And I think to get out of that as a seller on these other platforms
that are not Amazon, you have to give a deal, go down a little lower,
you have a secondary category that performs much better
in the slower rest of your month kind of category.
So if your slow time is winter, why don't you sell something
that sells really good in winter time while you're waiting for winter
to roll over to sell what you primarily want to sell in general?
We don't make the rules, but we need to play the game the way the game is made.
So, and that also, that extends outside the platform.
You got to know your customer base and what they do
and they're buying trends, honestly.
Books, as far as books go, it's pretty steady until Q4,
and then it picks up, you're selling more in Q4.
So I don't think in the book category, there's really much of a slowdown.
I mean, it's there, I guess, a little bit,
but it's not as overbearing like I would say like a clothing seller would be,
because I think they're very seasonal based,
and they also have this weird, it's not weird, it's just part of their game.
They have to be aware of styles and trends.
So if your style and trend falls out because it's no longer fashionable this year,
well, you're going to have a terrible time
because you didn't compensate and didn't know what was going on around you.
Let me clarify.
I do agree that retail months in the summer are slower
than any other time of the year,
but I don't agree that just because that's the case
that your business has to go down,
and there's plenty of things you can do.
I think about what you can possibly do with your business,
and I just think about like, you know, Dev's pet toy business, right?
Are you running ads?
Are you doing different things behind the scenes to drive traffic?
It does maybe take a little bit kind of next level thinking
not to have the slowdown.
There's people that don't have slowdowns in summer.
I see it on social media that sell on eBay, right?
Like, I see it every single day on Instagram.
People are listing 30, selling 30, you know, or somewhere close to that.
So the idea that every summer it's like,
I mean, maybe we should just have every season be a slowdown
because the way we kind of look at it is, you know,
fall might be slowdown for somebody that sells sandals or, you know,
winter could maybe I can get famous on YouTube
if I just kind of have a video every season talking about the fall slowdown,
the winter slowdown, the spring slowdown.
I think you could get away with doing that
because if somebody is looking for the excuse
why they're not getting the results they want,
then they're going to find it somewhere.
Right, but look like an electronic seller.
I think their sales, I could be wrong because I'm not one.
I think their sales could be steady all year round.
If you're an iPhone seller,
I think you're going to have steady sales all year round.
Now, if you fail to get the latest model for whatever reason,
then maybe you'll see a slower tick once that newer model is available now
and everybody wants that all of a sudden.
But again, that goes to knowing your market and knowing your customers
and knowing the changes in your market.
I think books is a lot more stable because it's...
I mean, there's trends in books too, like when we have an author die,
we see boons in books, CDs and DVDs all of a sudden
for no rhyme or reason other than they're dead now.
Or it gets mentioned on like Oprah's Book Club,
this is the best or the top 100 reading list on Goodreads
or the New York Times comes out with an article.
We'll see an influx of sales because of things
we couldn't have ever accounted for coming out.
But that doesn't slow us down, that upticks us, right?
Do we really see a slowdown on DVDs, CDs and books in video games?
Not so much. And then speaking of video games,
I think they're the same way.
I think they're going to see steady sales all year round
and see a significant sale come Christmas time
because little Timmy wants that perfect game under his tree.
Or Timmy's dad, mom buys him his most collectible cartridge game
that he's been wanting for the last year
and it's not all he could talk about, right?
So I think video games is a lot more inflated
during that quote unquote Q4 month than the rest of us, honestly.
So we got two things we got to talk about.
One, is it the platform?
Or two, is it the stuff you're selling?
I just looked this up.
Well, eBay's got 135 users worldwide.
Amazon's got 310 million users worldwide.
So is it a mixture of both or is it just because,
like, if I took all my current inventory, right?
All 4,000-ish items I have on Amazon and put them on eBay,
would I see the same results?
Or does it have something to do with the platform you're selling
because Amazon has almost three times the reach that eBay does?
I think it...
I'm not going to say the platform itself, but I'm going to say Google.
What's on top of the Google search page?
Because I think people are going to go down one of three rabbit holes.
They're going to Google it first and then they're going to click on the top five ads,
the five things that are there.
Two, people are accustomed to shopping on Amazon.
As you said, the numbers are much bigger on Amazon.
That's not to say there aren't dedicated eBay shoppers
who have nixed Amazon for their own various reasons,
but the buyer poll is just bigger.
And I've done a lot of Google searching in books since I've hit Amazon.
It's just easier for me to find the listings on some stuff.
And honestly, Amazon's on the top search results.
So I think Google has the biggest play factor in your question there.
What's on the top of Google search results?
I think it kind of goes back to what you're saying.
Some of these categories that are collectible or people need the items,
car parts, things like that, desirable items,
those people never seem to be the ones that are like summer slowdown, right?
Like Jack's never crying about summer slowdown.
But it kind of gets me back to the everything seller.
And that's usually where you see the video or the media seller on eBay only.
You see the video that summer's here.
I got no business for the next three months.
And I just struggle with it because as an Amazon seller,
selling the same type of stuff that somebody sells on eBay
and has way more listings than me,
sees that they're not making as much in the summer,
nowhere near what I'm making on Amazon with a whole lot less listings.
I just can't understand it.
And I guess it's just because I've never been just an eBay only seller
and had thousands, tens of thousands of listings.
So I guess it's a benefit that I just sell on Amazon and not eBay.
But then I just circle back to this idea of,
why doesn't everybody just sell on Amazon?
Right?
There's a partial answer to that.
What's readily available in your area?
And some people who live in different areas,
not everything is readily available.
However, I do believe books, especially books,
is readily available no matter where you are.
CDs and DVDs, I can get why it's a little questionable,
but even then you have estate sales, right?
You're going to find that stuff.
So I think in media, there's really no excuse
why you shouldn't be doing that on Amazon.
If you want nothing to do with that category,
then I think it's going to be you may be region locked out
of certain things that you couldn't ship into Amazon.
Like, I don't know if you could do furniture on Amazon,
but you have an abundance of furniture supply in your area,
but you can't ship that into Amazon.
So your alternative is to do eBay
because that's what's local to you to obtain.
And that's not to say you couldn't online source either,
but again, these are choices you as the person,
business owner have to make what you really want to do.
But I do agree with you.
If you have a choice to do Amazon, do Amazon over eBay.
It's just a lot easier.
You can get up more units usually,
and there's an argument of cross-listing,
just blast it and it goes everywhere, right?
Sure.
But I just think the workflow day-to-day
is a lot easier on Amazon than eBay.
Just as your output's so much better.
You may struggle getting the inbound,
but your outbound should be significantly higher
once you've mastered that.
Circling back to summer slowdown,
if you're an eBay only seller,
first year, I'll give you a pass.
You have no data.
You're collecting data.
Year two, you're seeing if that first year's data's backed up.
Year three, you should have no fucking excuse
to not know something's happening.
Like if it's slow in summer in year one or two,
you know on year three, it would be on a shadow of a doubt,
it's gonna be slow that summer too.
I'm sorry.
Your three sellers, you have no excuse.
If you're on one or two, I'll give you a slight pass,
especially if you're on year one.
Year two, you should kind of be squinting at it.
Let's see if this is true again.
But you should prepare for it,
especially if you're a year two seller.
You year three guys, get your shit together.
I swear to you, I was just gonna say
basically exactly what you said.
So, right, the first year you got no data.
Second year, all right, it happened again.
Now you're gonna prepare for it the next year,
which I'll tell you right now.
Deb, she's got her own brand,
selling kind of dog toys.
Summer is time to prepare for quarter four
because it's a little bit slower,
but there's still things going on.
Now, if we know that in the summer,
our sales are down 30%.
Yeah.
Is the argument to be made,
if you just listed 30% more items,
then you would not have a slowdown
because the math would math out evenly.
I don't think that works that way.
I think, because not everything we list
is gonna sell ultimately,
if we're talking about strictly eBay.
I think it would need to be more
to balance it out.
I think you'd have to go beyond a 30 for 30 kind of deal.
Alternatively, again, add something that sells better
in the slower months of your season,
or keep the status quo and just,
okay, I know the next two months are gonna be down,
but I've made more in the earlier part of the year
to compensate for that.
And we're playing the average game.
You can't, dude.
People don't play the average game, Johnny.
They have three bad days of sales in a row and that's it.
There ain't no law of averages
where we look at the overall picture.
Well, they should.
I'm sorry, they really should, but yes.
It's never gonna happen, man.
Okay, and land where we're not dealing with smart people,
fine, we'll rule that one out.
So yeah, I would sell something different
or I would vastly increase your listing goal,
and or maybe explore other platforms that you list on
to have a more even keel of, okay, I list 30,
but now I'm not listing just on eBay.
I'm listing on Macari.
I'm listing on Poshmark.
Hi, Rachel.
I'm listing on Walmart.
All these other places you have access to,
list the same item.
It's a little bit more work and there's some technology
and there's some overhead,
but if you're wanting to increase your sell through rate
during the slower months, I think that's a good play.
I think it is a trap though,
because like you're saying, cross list,
you might go down a rabbit hole
because you're not getting the results
because there's less people shopping
because you're selling the same items,
you're doing the same exact thing,
you're not really making no increases
in productivity or listings.
Maybe you try something that just,
it isn't never gonna work for your business,
and then you start losing the foundation
you had of your business, even though it's slowed down,
right, so I'll give an example.
If I was just in this situation,
just make one up real quick,
my sales are down on eBay, I sell books.
I decide the hot new fire thing is selling live,
whether that's eBay live, whatnot,
and I'm like, hey, I'm gonna do this.
And then all of a sudden you start investing
all this time into this other business venture
and you start taking away time from your main business
and you're just pumping wasted hours into this other idea
because of the quote unquote slow down that way.
And so it's slow down that we have
because we can't see past the summer slow down,
we can't see that in January through March,
we made enough money to cover April through July.
I'm all for experimentation and finding out things,
but I agree with you, I don't think you should bank on
this thing is gonna save the day,
because you don't know, because again,
you don't have the data to prove this just yet.
I do think this though, when it's slower,
you should be ramping up, maybe you're buying honestly,
like you know, maybe you'll find if you ramp up your buying,
maybe you could get higher quality items in more abundance
and those can go in your pipeline during these
critical months of lower sales.
Like, oh, I got instead of five banger items a week,
now I'm getting 10 and putting those up
because it's generally gonna have
a longer sell through anyway.
But if you list more of those higher quality,
higher end items, you'll in theory,
you will sell more of those and thus that 30% loss
that we mentioned earlier, maybe only 1% loss
or in that 2% gain if you increase your buying.
Now, I'm not saying increase the binding
where it's a detriment,
where you're now having a death pile, don't do that.
But if you have your systems in place
and you have a queue set up, if you increase the queue,
if you're capable of increasing the queue
as a space limitations and just your systems
are good enough to do that, that might be a good play
or an option for you as well.
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it,
summer is when all the garage sales happen,
all the flea markets happen all summer long.
But it gets me back to the thing, Johnny,
is that resellers, we have the highest margins
and the lowest bank accounts.
So if there's a summer slowdown, Johnny,
I don't got no money coming into the bank account, bro.
Like I can't go to the flea market
because I don't got $20 I can spend.
Well, if your margins are that slim,
you should have just did your business before summer,
my friend, but let's just say you didn't
and you're here now, fine.
We'll play with these kind of people we're talking about.
There are other options to get free inventory.
You'll trade time to get free inventory,
but there's Craigslist, there's Facebook,
there's freebie alert app, and there's next door.
There's a lot of them.
Will you get everyday value items?
Probably, you're gonna need a lot of junk too.
Are you gonna get some bangers maybe every now and then?
But more importantly, you might need a source doing that,
a repeatable source.
That to me versus the stuff,
the mediocre stuff is invaluable.
Because if you can grow that source
to give you more better than everyday value,
that is worth your time investment in my opinion.
We need better wording that summer slowdown.
We need a productive term for summer.
It's always negative.
We've been doing this for years and years and every summer,
it's the same song and dance.
And I just say it wears me out
because summer's never really a slowdown for me.
Let me ask you this, or I'm sorry, go ahead and finish.
No, no, no, I'm done.
So the people who are saying it the loudest,
I think it's from the YouTube community.
And of the said YouTube community
that focuses on reselling,
in your opinion is the abundance of them clothing sellers?
No, it's mostly everything sellers.
Everything sellers, okay.
So why would the everything seller,
they're in multiple categories from the get go,
why are they struggling the most?
I don't have-
No, I got the answer.
Because if you're buying everything,
some of those, you're gonna buy the skis to sell
in the summer, right?
You're gonna buy anything
that you think you can make a buck on.
But I still-
So it's not steady sales consistently
because you're the everything seller
from skis to sombreros to kazoos, okay.
I mean, it also exists in the media world,
on YouTube's world as well.
Again, if you're an everything seller,
you should know what categories sell when.
If you-
Yeah, but you can't focus on that, dude.
If you're an everything seller, you accept the fact
you walk into a place, you're looking at everything.
As much as you sit here and say,
just focus on the stuff that's here and now,
we can't do that, that doesn't exist.
You're talking, this whole call,
you're talking next, next level things,
even though they're really not next, next level.
We gotta treat it like we're holding somebody's hand
and walking them through this.
You're right, okay.
You're right with everything you say,
but your average everyday reseller
that the summer slowdown exists for
isn't ever gonna do the things you recommend.
If you're an everything seller,
well, maybe you're an every season seller
and whatever's in the season, I'll buy that.
I understand, that's how I would do it, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a better way to word it.
You're not gonna try to sell the sleds in the summer.
You're not gonna sell the pool floaties in the winter,
but that's the idea we have is,
I can sell anything online, I can flip anything on eBay.
And then you go and you list all the stuff
that's way out of season, you're not gonna sell
sweatpants in Texas when it's 150 degrees outside.
Let's get real with ourselves.
I still think the answer is expanding your sourcing.
You're not gonna have some way or trading your sources.
Let's say you had this bad source
just because it's local to you.
Let's trade that bad source for a better or much better,
or this is the best thing I've ever done
with my business kind of source.
If we're just staying in the same pond
and we're never going outside of our little lake area,
I think that's a disservice to our business.
I've gone to both sides of the country now to source.
And one of them ended up repeatable,
one was a one-time thing.
I'm just, you don't have to go to those extremes of course,
but let's just say, okay, my bubble's maybe
a 30 minute radius, maybe we expand to a 45 minute radius.
That doesn't necessarily include driving,
that could be marketplace, that could be stuff
that delivers, it could be auctions,
it could be estate sales, it could be garage,
all these things we talk about.
There's more of it outside of your little bubbles,
what I'm getting at.
And then if you can get that repeating and recurring
and or ship to you kind of scenario,
I think that's the ultimate one.
I'll say right now, you kind of hit it on the head.
We have had more people over in the group
that sell media on Amazon and eBay,
secure more relationships that are gonna tend
to extra business over the next three months.
And since the start of summer,
well, that's when me and you kind of started pushing,
getting out there, building these relationships
than we ever have had since we've started the group.
So literally from the beginning of summer to now,
more people have secured more larger, better relationships
that will go on and on and on during this summer season
and people are sending in more inventory.
I mean, think about this, dude.
We had Tatiana, our timer, she bought a dump truck
full of CDs and we say dump truck,
she literally had a dump truck, drove to get the CDs
and filled up the back of the dump truck, right?
This is somebody that's part-time.
All she did was figure out what worked best for her business,
which is not going out to sources.
She's sourcing online Facebook marketplace all throughout.
And she literally found three months of inventory
from one post.
Right, like me, I don't spend a great time
going out these days.
I have things come to me or I have my back stock of stuff
I'm going through my queue pile more or less.
And I think that is a game changer, so figuring that.
If I was the Benz guy or if I had a thrift store route,
that's a tough racket.
I mean, I know I'm exchanging processing time
for sourcing time and I'm not saying that's a bad thing
at all, but there are other opportunities out there
and I think exploring them all, at least for the first time,
please do that because we're speaking to the person
we got a handhold, right?
Explore outside of your bubble.
Maybe it's a different kind of sourcing
that you never got in the flea market.
Maybe you make an attempt to go to the flea market
to figure out things or you've never done an estate sale
or an auction either online or live.
Maybe try that, see what's up.
Because you don't know until you go.
Maybe you use summer just to get better sources
and go upstream.
Maybe it's like summer upstream.
I don't even know.
I got no good, no good basically acronym for that.
But I do think this idea of getting the inventory
from the actual person that bought it initially,
quality is gonna be better.
The price is gonna be better
because you usually can get it for less
than when it winds up at the thrift store.
That should be on the forefront of everybody's mind.
I don't care if you're thrifting,
I don't care if you're doing both.
You'll be there one day when you eventually run out
of inventory that you have.
If you're gonna be going upstream,
I'm sure you'd probably,
the only time you're gonna set foot in the thrift store
is if you go to a little mom and pop shop
and you walked in and say,
I got a $100 bill, I'll take everything off your hands.
That's gonna be the extent of it.
But in the reselling community,
it's people that just thrift.
They just rely on the thrift stores.
And I challenge everybody to,
all right, how does this stuff get to the thrift store?
Let's start backtracking the process
of from when that item was actually bought by the consumer
to winding up in the thrift store.
Cut out the thrift store.
You become the person that gets the stuff.
And I don't care what category this is.
People say, oh, well, you sell media.
So everybody's got book CDs.
Well, everybody's got used clothing.
Have you ever just been like,
hey, forget taking your stuff to Plato's closet
or the Goodwill, I'll come pay you XML
for the clothing you have.
I'll pay you more than Plato's closet's gonna pay you.
I think it exists in every category, honestly.
Yeah, if you're the guy who will go to somebody's home
to get the stuff instead of them having to leave their home
to get rid of it.
And if you couple that with you'll pay more,
like for your Plato closet example, you win.
You got a whole lot of work ahead of you, but you've won.
You've won.
That's it, dude.
I know you kind of wanted to have this topic
around doing work, because you work in the warehouse
and every day of the week.
I do think it does come with work, right?
So in our game, we secure a relationship.
I, you know, the past week I went to a new library
that I reached out to and they're gonna work with me.
It is a lot of work, you know, 535 pounds of books.
I gotta load into the Lamborghini.
I gotta drive it to the storage unit,
unload the Lamborghini, scan everything in the 150 degree
heat, it's a lot of work.
But I mean, if you want this business to go sooner or later,
and I don't work hard, right?
I don't sit here and tell anybody I'm the hardest reseller
when it comes to work, I'm like,
I wanna do less and make more.
But there are times when you're building
these relationships and if you wanna get
the best quality stuff, you're gonna have to bust your ass.
No doubt about it.
Donnie, why do you work so hard
so I can have more opportunities and speed up my business?
That's the thing.
I want to make my business go as fast as possible
without making mistakes or tripping up along the way,
which is a detriment to the business.
I want to make it go.
And the only real hack that I've been able to find
is I just work longer, or I get up earlier.
In my case, I do both.
Now, just the general thing of work,
in my opinion, it's a lot easier to go out to a thrift store
versus driving two hours to pick up 3000 items,
load it up, and then when you get back, unload it.
And then if you still got an ounce of energy left in you
after all that, start processing it.
I'm not saying that people do the thrift store route,
they don't work either.
There are people who have masses routes
that kind of do what I'm saying.
They're just having to go at all of what I'm calling bulk up.
They're creating their own bulk
by having a route of different locations.
And that's a way to do it, absolutely.
I don't think people realize that.
They see some YouTube videos or haul videos,
or let's go thrift with me,
or let's go to the fleet today videos.
And then they pick out a few things, call out what's cool,
go to the back of the car,
have it laid out at their garage or whatever,
their storage unit, and that's all you see.
You don't see the, okay, does this need to be washed?
Or does this need a wipe down?
Or does this, here, let's have 20 minutes of me
unloading my vehicle.
You don't see that, because nobody cares.
Nobody wants to see that.
It doesn't make interesting content.
So that illusion, once you actually start,
is blown away the first time you do it.
And then maybe you don't want to do it anymore.
And nothing wrong with that,
but now you know there's work involved
if you've experienced that yourself listening.
Just in the media world, there's lots of work,
lots of lifting, lots of moving,
thousands and thousands of pieces, right?
We think about if you're gonna scan media,
you're looking at like a 10% accept rate.
So every 10,000 items you scan,
you technically are only gonna get a thousand
that you can possibly send in or sell.
So you start compounding that,
especially in books where your book's almost a pound
on average.
It is a lot of work.
And what Johnny said, I usually get my book by,
take it back to the storage unit,
and I process it right then and there.
So I don't play the game of,
well, I'm gonna let it sit.
I do think there is something to be said for that,
if you're part-time, but if you're full-time,
just get it done right away.
And it's work gets you to the point
where then you start falling into excuses.
And we all, listen, we're all not gonna be like
going ho about everything we do every day, right?
That's just, nobody's ever like that.
You're gonna have days
where you don't feel like doing nothing,
and you're beat up,
you don't want to deal with reselling, that's okay.
But overall, in the grand scheme of things,
it's gotta get done.
If you wanna make money, you gotta do work.
I know it's spun out there like,
hey, I tell all you,
I don't do this between 20 and 30 hours a week.
That's not the reality for the first three years
of your business, right?
Like, they don't see, you know,
when I started back in 2018 to where I am today,
like how many thrift stores I've been in,
how many conversations I had,
understanding my sources, tracking my sources,
building new relationships.
So you are right that it is misconstrued big time
when it comes to YouTube,
because nobody wants to see me unloading the ultimate, right?
Like, no one's gonna put that.
Even if you sped that up,
it still would not give a full picture
of the physical labor-cal-ity of everything.
Yeah, you couldn't,
because then I have to put like what's sold,
like, you know, screenshots on top of it, right?
Nobody's just gonna wanna see me unloading boxes and boxes.
But that's the reality of this business.
And you can get it to a point where you're not always
like 60-hour weeks in reselling,
but that's gonna take time and processes.
And summer, don't let it be an excuse for you to slack off
because there's less people shopping online.
I do agree there's less people shopping online
in the summer, everybody does.
Why do you think Amazon Prime Day
is coming up in like three days, right?
Amazon does it in the summer because it's slower for them.
So it's a nice boost to their bottom line
in the middle of the summer.
We agree with this.
But use this to your advantage.
Keep your business where you're doing.
If you wanna try something else,
maybe this is the time to try something else
to see if you get results.
But don't let your main part of your business,
your main squeeze, just kind of wither away
because it's summertime.
Right, and if you're a full-time person
and you know your slow times in the summer,
maybe that's a good time to bring on that staff member
you've been thinking about hiring,
to help with the upcoming months
that are gonna be more critical to your business
where you make more money.
Or even a part-timer or some guy comes in once a week
to, I don't know, do your packaging for you
for a day where you have extra hours
that you can allocate elsewhere to your business.
Another thing on summer slowdown,
talk to your peers and see if it's happening with them.
And if the answer is no, you've done something wrong.
Yes, I've said it.
Especially-
Don't ask me because I already gave my answer.
Ain't nothing slowing down over here, chief.
Yeah, I'm not having any issues on Amazon either.
But especially if you're selling the same things,
what are they doing right that I am doing wrong?
Or what are they doing more of that I could do more of?
If you don't ever answer those questions,
especially when you know they're performing better for you
and you can't figure out the reason, go ask them.
Honestly, resellers are pretty open
unless they specifically say,
I don't talk about my business,
then leave them alone, of course.
But if you ask your peers,
they're more inclined to help you
as long as they don't perceive you as a threat
if you try to take them out for whatever reason.
That's so true.
We talk about it all the time,
like being in groups where like-minded people
are around each other and it's kind of, I mean, it's tough.
Do I say summer slowdown is negative
when it comes to the connotations around it?
Yes, in general, but I do think it is a building block
opportunity for resellers,
no matter what platform you sell on,
to figure out what works in a summer, right?
If every summer we know that XYZ is gonna happen,
why don't we have some kind of plan to counteract XYZ?
It's just like, well, here we go again.
I stepped in the same pile of crap every single year
and we just wind up, I mean, I get it for YouTube,
it's good content because negativity and reselling
is gonna push the views on social media more than it is,
like me and you talking about July being our greatest month,
like nobody cares about that.
If it was July was our worst months ever, like, okay,
then everybody's like, yeah, this is, yeah, forget it,
screw this, like I get that side of it being a part
of the YouTube world and social media world,
but that's not a real reflection of what's going on
in everybody's business behind the scenes.
Like that's just to get views, to grow a brand,
to make money on YouTube, right?
That's just a reality of it.
Right, I mean, getting people together in a room
who've been slighted, they'll have a lot to say.
Get people in a room that everything is going A-okay,
they'll have very little to say.
Dude, it's, we have, how many of our last guests
are doing six figures on eBay and not a single one of them
ever complained about the platform not working for them.
Every single person we have had on that sells on eBay
is like, yeah, it's working, here's how it works,
no excuses, do the work, it's amazing to me.
I'm like, oh my God, an eBay seller that's like out here
crushing it, not complaining about the platform.
That's because these people, they stay focused
on their business, they don't have the YouTube channel,
they're not looking to get the clicks, the views,
the likes, the subscribers, so they just do
their damn thing and they crush it, like it's crazy to me.
Right, I mean, they're consistent, all they're doing is
they're maybe doing more work than the next year
or this year than they did the previous year.
They have a formula that works and they don't really deviate
from that formula until it doesn't work
and then they've missed something
and then they readjust their business and they do it again
and have a new formula and they just continue
to grow, grow and grow.
I think that's the issue, I think I figured it out, Johnny.
In the beginning of this call, I said, I don't know,
I've never been a full-time seller on eBay during summer,
to be like, oh, summer slowdown is like a thing.
But the people we have on and the people that have been
on the podcast, I see their results, right?
Like I hear their story, I hear exactly what they're doing.
So it just solidifies it more that the summer slowdown
is basically bull crap at the end of the day
because I just got, they're sitting right here,
he or she sitting right here telling me
that they're doing X amount of dollars per month,
it's summertime and they're absolutely knocking it
out of the park.
So I'm like, well, listen, I'm not just making this up,
there's proof of it so I can't even.
Maybe earlier on in the career,
they had a summer slowdown issue
but they course corrected to not have it the following year
exactly like we're talking about
because, oh, it's gonna happen again.
So I guess it brings me back to art.
Are they anomalies?
I don't think they are.
I think they understand the class.
A lot of anomalies.
Yeah, yeah.
It's too many coincidences to be a coincidence, right?
That's kind of how we start looking at it
when we start piecing this case together.
So that's why I had this mindset
that there is no summer slowdown
because we had eBay sellers on here at least once a month
that are absolutely crushing it.
Don't matter if it's summer, winter,
some made up season, Y2K, 2012, the comments coming,
no matter what it is, they get the results.
So when I see it out there, I'm like, this is just BS.
And then all the comments are everybody complaining
that summer slowdown is,
they haven't gotten the sale in 25 days.
Well, Johnny said it earlier, if you were sold,
if you started flipping iPhones
who are 20% margins, 10% margins,
I mean, I listed something on eBay for $220 the other day.
Deb's getting rid of one of her electronics.
My only listing on eBay, I haven't listed on eBay in weeks.
I got an offer yesterday for $200 flat, took it.
It's a desirable item.
You sold, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
hold up, hold the phone.
This is groundbreaking.
Groundbreaking.
You sold something somebody wanted.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
I need to see what the sell through rate is for this item.
I don't know if I still have it here.
Now I don't, I'll look it up as you ramble on.
But yeah, I literally, my only listing in weeks
sold within two days of it being up on eBay
for almost full price.
I priced it at $220.
Your traffic is throttled.
Everything bad could happen
because of your bad listing habits on eBay.
You listed one item and sold it within two days
because it was that desirable.
I'm not even top sell, or what is it?
Top rated, whatever the hell.
Yeah, top rated.
I lost that dude.
I'm like.
You went down.
So eBay is doing this to you,
but you do this to eBay
because you listed a desirable item.
Good for you.
All right.
So I lost 55 listed and 185 sold.
Yeah, geez.
Okay, yeah.
I just cracked open the eBay code for everybody.
Sell items like that.
Sell items like that every day.
Find items like that and list items like that every day.
And you'll have no problems on eBay.
Even if you make less money,
if you have your processes aligned,
you can turn and burn through inventory.
And the cash you make, even though it's only 10, 20%,
especially in the Amazon world,
some of these OA guys wish they could get 10% returns
on what they're selling.
Your bank account goes up.
It just keeps going up, Johnny.
All of a sudden, you're like, all right,
I can get the dominoes large
instead of the medium to top it.
Well, I think people want,
and I'll describe what I'm doing.
They want a vertical straight line upward
when it's more of a gradual wavy curvy line
going in an upward way, like on a line graph,
if you're following along for those just listening
and not seeing what I'm doing with my hands right now.
And I'm doing something obnoxious with my hands right now
to hope you come watch the video.
But anyway, yeah, I think people's expectations of,
it needs to be like a rocket ship,
just straight up into space kind of success.
Where it's no, it's more,
we're going up the hill in our 1944 Ford pickup kind of deal.
You're still going up.
That's the point.
As long as you're going up and never backwards
in reverse or the rocket explodes and everybody dies.
Yeah, it's tough.
I understand, we have ups and downs in our business.
What it shouldn't be every year,
we have this expectation that it's just gonna be dreadful
and you're not doing nothing to counteract that, right?
So like-
Right, like even me, in my paperback game,
I was going up, but it wasn't enough inclined for me.
And I decided to swing into something
that had a more vertical incline, which was Amazon.
I think that was the right play for me,
but it's not like it wasn't working.
It was working just very slowly, very, very slowly.
So I think that's the thing, I think it's a good thing.
But I think, I truly think people just need to
do some research too, because you took a quick minute
just to look at the sell through rate.
If you did that before you bought, or even better,
if you did this at home,
you just spent like a month researching.
Let's say you're a day one reseller.
So if you spent the first 30 days,
we're gonna go to the 100,
100 days just in pure research, writing down,
exploring every category, the best items,
that there's less items listed, but more items sell.
You have curated lists like that, a BOLO list for yourself.
I think day one, you actually went out to source and list it.
You are gonna be a phenomenal eBay seller.
You should, you figure out what the quality items are, right?
Like, for example, in the book world,
like Eastern press or whatever,
like I only found one of these things in a while.
So you know, anytime you see Eastern press,
it's guaranteed to sell.
Well, your next step is,
where can you find Eastern presses that are for sale?
It's always going to the next level.
You figure out what's good,
you figure out where to get the good stuff,
and pay to market it, or store.
Usually ain't it.
I mean, we can get away with in the media world,
because there's lots of it out there,
but you're rarely gonna find an Eastern press
in a thrift store, right?
It's gonna be somebody's collection.
It's gonna be a bookstore.
You're gonna have to pay up for this item,
but you still can make money faster,
because there's a desire for the item.
Right, I'm gonna give you a lower margin item
that has the same thing as Eastern press.
And we're gonna go with author here.
If you just source this one author,
follow everybody, I'm gonna shock you.
Stephen King, I guarantee you,
you're going to sell everything you have of Stephen King.
You may only get five here and there,
eight here, 10 there,
but if you just accumulate that stuff,
and you're now the Stephen King eBay seller,
whether it's books, audio books, graphic novels,
hell, even a t-shirt with the dude's name on it,
you're gonna be A-okay.
I thought about doing this for Halloween.
I could just be the Michael Myers seller, right?
I just sell everything and anything
that's related to Halloween.
And I got a kind of analogy.
I just thought of this on top of my head.
Don't ask what goes on in my head
that I come up with these, right?
So Johnny said, you're gonna take a dollar someday.
Some days, some days you're gonna get $3, $4, $5.
Just imagine every time, you know,
you're cool eBay sellers get your little ching ching.
I ain't gonna lie, Johnny,
I do miss your ching chings during the podcast, right?
Like those were the good old days
when you had like fake sound effects
of Johnny getting fake sales.
He does a ching ching like he used to.
Imagine every time you got that ching ching,
somebody slaps you with a $5 bill, right?
Yeah.
You just get slapped with a $5 bill.
Like, you know, all of a sudden,
you get slapped 20 times a day,
you got an extra hundred bucks, things are looking up.
I'm like, all right, here we go.
We're rocking and rolling.
Desirability, I guess, I don't know, man.
This is kind of a controversial take in the media world
because people love selling long tail items.
I do too.
Yeah.
But I do think selling something that's gonna sell today
and making a dollar is better than waiting a year
to make a hundred dollars.
Because if you do the compound interest
and anybody that's invested in any kind of retirement plan,
your dollar turns into two, your two turns into four,
because you're buying the same items
that are gonna sell within the day
that you're gonna make $1 on.
Easily that hundred dollars you might make in a year,
that 365 days, your money, you'll be rich,
you'll be retired.
Right.
So I think there are,
I agree with what you just said.
There are like three trains on the ground, right?
The model you described, the dollar guy,
he's gonna sell his like every day or every minute.
He's gonna start off really fast.
And then we have a person kind of doing long tail
and what the first guy was doing.
His train's not going as fast.
But eventually I think he'll outpace the dollar guy,
give it enough time.
And then we have our third train.
Its engine hasn't even started.
He's the long tail, only lists $10,000 books.
And the other people have already finished the race.
And this guy, the last train has just started
when the other two have finished.
Those are the business models you can do.
What's a good overall sell through rate for eBay?
Like 90 days, what's the percentage?
Because as media sellers on Amazon,
we shoot for like 20% of our inventory every single month.
What's the correlation on eBay if you know?
Or like, I don't know, because you're over in text groups.
So that's like the eBay beckett.
I mean, it's gonna be different per business per category,
but a 90 day sell through rate is a good target.
So like everything you list sells within 90 days,
is that what you're saying?
Yeah, with maybe like a 2% margin of error, I suppose.
Cause you're gonna have some anomalies in there
that just ain't gonna sell for whatever reason.
Either you did something wrong on the human error side,
or for whatever reason,
in the conga line of who's gonna sell what,
you just got shuffled weirdly kind of deal.
So let's say it sells a hundred times, there are 50 people
listed, while it's cycling through those 50 people,
a new batch of people are coming in listing that same item.
And for whatever reason, you didn't get in the shuffle.
That's why quality listing, you wanna be ranked higher.
So in that shuffle game, you sell your item.
That's pretty crazy to the idea that you sell everything
you've list within 90 days.
Like, I mean, you gotta find some desirable stuff.
I mean, I know people like you,
but I know people out there,
the majority of stuff they're buying, they're reselling eBay,
doesn't have a 90 day sell through.
Right. It's hard to do.
And then again, especially in the clothing game,
you got those trends and it falls out of trend.
So it was a desirable item for four months,
but a month five rolls around,
we're starting to see it sell less.
So your 90 day item may become 120 or 180 day item,
unfortunately.
And that's why there's a margin of errors there.
Yeah.
I give a lot of credit to the clothing guys,
even though I rarely talk about them.
They got so much more to think about
than I do as a media seller, honestly.
Cause they got seasonality, they got trend,
they got fashion.
There's some similarities,
like brands are like publishers to me.
Also I can feel book quality,
just like they can feel a clothing quality kind of deal,
which is neat to think about how similar,
but also different.
I think they have more variables to account for, honestly.
And then everybody I know,
at least in texture is pretty much a clothing seller.
So it's competition, right?
Are they all selling the same thing?
They're all getting the same kind of information?
No, some of them are doing this, that and the other.
And others are doing that.
And other people like me
are doing different categories entirely.
But the people that are doing the exact same thing,
they're doing okay, I suppose.
And they're interesting to watch on their market spaces.
I don't know what else to say on that.
It's just-
I'm gonna join and I'm gonna join the clothing sellers,
but I'm only gonna sell one sock.
You're gonna be the solo sock guy.
Solo sock guy.
I was just gonna show up,
maybe that'll be my username.
And I'm just gonna type in there,
hey, I just started this solo sock selling business.
And I wanna see what kind of business advice I get
from tech and everybody else in there, right?
Please do this, please.
You're gonna be crucified.
What do you mean, dude?
Nobody's ever done it.
And I say all the time, if nobody's done it,
then it's probably something you should do.
I mean, there's probably a market out there for it.
No, I've heard of people doing, not socks,
I've heard them doing shoes like that.
Cause they'll sell to people who have lost a leg
for reasons or more than just one leg kind of deal.
So it makes sense why they have a right shoe listing
and a left shoe listing.
But socks, that's actually gonna be a hard battle for you,
man.
I mean, bravo to you if you make it work.
Like tech, I want 100% sell through rate
as the solo sock guy.
I wanna see how that plays out.
That's next time you're on a call with them
and just throw it out there.
Hey, I'm thinking about starting this new business
and I'm sure it'll give you,
I think there are solutions for everybody's business,
no matter what you sell,
no matter what platform you sell.
You just gotta get smarter,
get better at your processes,
find a better quality inventory.
I say it all the time, it's out there.
You just gotta go upstream.
More upstream you go, the better the stuff's gonna be.
You usually pay a lot less.
And even if you pay more,
it's more desirable stuff that you actually know
you can sell in a whole lot less time.
The quicker you sell things,
the quicker the money comes back to you.
You can redeploy it,
actually buy yourself Domino's Pizza
when you wanna buy yourself Domino's Pizza
and grow your business in that manner.
So that's gonna do it for this week's episode.
Appreciate you all listening
and watching over on YouTube
and we'll talk to you next week.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
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