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.
Resellers Mindset Podcast, Mike next to Johnny as always.
And full disclosure, he does not know the topic today because I want to get his
opinion brawl for you all.
Right. I can't tell him beforehand because then when I tell him now,
he's going to have a little bit of a different reaction.
Or you tell me the topic.
How many minutes do I have to wait before I can swear in our recordings again?
At least five to 10, but I don't think I don't think it'll be a lot of swearing.
I think this is an uplifting call unless your mind is in the gutter this morning.
So you never know what you're going to get.
Right.
Today's topic now is one of the best times to start reselling in general.
Is that a question?
Take it how you want to take it.
Then I'll go out.
Try them in.
I would say.
I would say it is harder.
Than it's ever been to be a reseller in this current year in any platform.
As far as the money you can make, if you do the right things, there's always
potential there.
Yes, 100 percent.
No disagreements or arguments.
The person who has the wherewithal to consume all the knowledge that's out there,
which is way more than when I first started, way more than when you first started,
Mike, because you've been at the game longer than I have.
And if we go back to Mr.
Tech, even way more knowledge than he had, there was no information.
There was nobody YouTubeing this.
There was nobody doing Twitter, Insta post, Facebook post.
There were no groups.
You have so much advantage.
Now, I'm in a lot of groups and I could tell you what I'm seeing for people to jump in.
They're not asking the right questions.
And some of their questions are new person questions, which are granted.
How does this work?
How do I do this?
I'm not talking about those.
I'm talking about how do I grow from here to here?
Here are my goals.
They're basically coming up with a business outline charter system of this is what I want to do.
This is why I'm doing it.
I need your guys' help on the how, because here's here are my little milestones.
I may not know how to get to each milestone, and that's why I'm here in the first place.
Usually, if you come in the game with that, I think you're going to really make it.
You're going to soar.
Because I know when I first joined my first group, I had an outline of like 50 questions along those veins.
And I think I threw them off when I asked.
This was back in daily refinement days.
It's my first morning call.
I didn't know how that morning call worked.
I thought it was a giant Q&A.
And they were talking about some metaphysical weird thing.
I raised my hand, right?
And I just start going down the list like, whoa, whoa, whoa, save some of those questions.
We got a Tuesday Q&A call.
But oh, I'm glad this is now explained to me.
Sorry, but not.
I swing the I'm going to swing the opposite way here and say today right now, if you wanted to start selling,
I'm going to be a little bit more specific.
You wanted to start selling media on Amazon.
I don't think there's any better opportunity than there ever has been.
Multiple factors.
I'm a big proponent of if everybody's running one way and you're running the other, you're probably doing something right.
And I've seen a lot of it lately.
A lot of resellers are kind of taking a step back and, you know, more people are struggling to make money reselling.
And I do think, you know, some of that does have to do with the times we live in.
But yet again, I find myself in a situation, Johnny, where it's a hard pill for me to swallow and just say and lay down that, hey, you know,
it's these things that are almost out of my control when I'm getting the results I'm getting.
And I'm not doing nothing special, right?
Like we don't have no secret formula that me and you have.
We only tell each other.
And that's the reason we can do over, you know, 10K a month every single month in sales.
There's no secret thing that we keep hidden locked away behind, you know, doors like it's all out there.
So for me, I'm like, why doesn't every single person start selling media on Amazon today?
If everybody's complaining that it's so hard to get started on Amazon, that's a good thing.
Less people are going to do it, right?
You know me, I always want to turn the eBay seller into an Amazon seller.
And the biggest gripe is, well, it's so big and scary.
And I got to do an interview when I sign up, those gates are only beneficial to you,
because if you're willing to jump through the little stupid hoops, you know,
Jeff's got set up for you, run the obstacle course, right?
Then all of a sudden, you're in the club.
Once you're in the club, the music's playing, champagne's flowing, right?
Like then you're in.
I think now it's just there's so much opportunity.
We saw the most garbage stuff.
I mean, CDs, cars don't even have the CDs that you have sitting behind you on the desk.
Like cars don't have the CD players no more.
But here we are selling thousands and thousands of dollars of it.
I always think when everybody is saying one thing, you start doing the other thing,
you're going to get results.
Now, this is, you know, we're just talking about the grand scheme of things.
It is a lot more harder, and you do have to beat business.
But it should have had to been this way all along.
The problem is most of us started when, you know, the lockdown happened,
we're stuck at home and we're getting these crazy results
because everybody has to shop online, right?
Like nobody's leaving their house open in their windows.
Everybody's shopping online.
So we had this idea of what reselling really was.
And that was the furthest thing from reality.
But yes, you got to be business savvy, you got to know your books, you got to know P&L.
But it's all out there now, right?
You said it yourself, the groups exist.
Even if we translate it to the eBay side of things,
like tech's got that on lockdown, right?
I'll take, you know, the Amazon media sellers,
we've seen a huge influx of members in our group,
and a lot of them are brand new.
And they start doing the work, and all of a sudden they start making sales.
And you're like, wait a minute,
this is as easy as it gets.
I've never responded to a single customer message on Amazon, ever.
I don't got to pack and ship my orders, right?
Well, like the fees, well, all that's accounted for when you're sourcing items.
So when you scan an item, you see exactly how much you're going to make after fees,
that includes shipping it in.
Oh, the returns, well, my return rate's 3%.
So if that's going to keep you away from making tens of thousands of dollars a year,
a 3% return rate, then at the end of the day, you're not going to make it.
I don't know, man, I'm ready to rock and roll.
I want everybody selling media on Amazon like yesterday,
because I see the opportunity.
It's everywhere.
You can buy it for cheap.
And the workload is a completely different, non-existent, basically,
it's the easiest workload you'll ever have as a reseller selling on Amazon FBA.
Find the books, put the books in the box, mail the box, and wait.
For your cash.
Dude, that sounds so scammy, right?
Like you literally just summed up the Amazon business.
I will put on my Roamer mask.
You can get a million books, dollars in books a year by doing this.
And he's not wrong, but there's more to it than the simplicity he makes it out sometimes.
Hi, Roamer, if you're listening.
Anyway, we had a woman on this week's media call, actually, she's a DVD seller,
Bless her soul, whoever she is.
I know.
And she says, times have been really bad this year.
And I'm like, well, we're out of COVID.
It's been a little bit.
She's not doing anything different.
She has a fairly medium sized store, in my opinion, several thousand units.
And she wanted to know how to get more sales.
First thing I told her, have you considered Amazon?
She outright refused to do Amazon with all the complications you just.
Outlined like, OK, I will try here,
but my best piece of advice to you is to do Amazon in your DVD business.
All she does is DVDs, nothing else.
Barring that, I told her, well, maybe you need to do luxury DVDs only.
We're talking criterion or set, steelbook, shop factory, scream factory, acorn, that stuff only.
It's like, well, I don't have access to that.
I just have access to these commons.
OK, you're making my life harder now to come up with a good answer for you.
Only thing I'd come up and tell her with is either a start cross listing,
and I would include Amazon in that cross listing scenario, at least on the merchant side,
or B, you do disc only or you try some variation listing like theme pack 1980s action movies
drop down, get 250 or romantic comedy drop down for your date night with your gal pals or guy pals, depending.
Whatever. Not going to get political here, but the.
Path of resistance, well, sometimes I'm just going to tell you,
it's been about five minutes to stop fucking resisting and just do it.
Don't resist, just do it.
Why are you getting in your own way of success?
Why? Just fucking do it.
I I don't know, man, it's it's the big, scary Amazon machine.
Right. And we all know, well, I mean, we talk about all the time.
Right. One day, you know, you can get jammed up and kind of lose your account.
I don't think that is honestly the truth anymore.
Like, you're not going to get banned over one DVD, one CD.
You can get jammed up with textbooks, which is why me or you don't sell them.
Right. We talk about this publicly.
But a DVD business on eBay.
Man, like that is like that's rough.
That is nightmare fuel, dude.
Like if I that's that's like I get on the elevator at the end of life.
And like if it goes down and I got to have an eBay business like that,
that's kind of like the equivalent of a non luxury DVD business on eBay.
You got to be pushing so much inventory in.
And she wasn't doing that.
She was doing the basic, I don't know, 20 or 30 a day, which is a good number to do.
But man, I can't even imagine.
That would be the struggle would be so real.
Now, if it was covid times, everybody stuck at home.
You're going to be doing bank.
And I didn't ask her that.
Did you start during covid and then like just like I did?
And then you realize after covid, your business model don't exactly work like it used to.
I fell into that and I tried to make it work for over a year.
And I had some marginal success with it.
But he read their marginal.
I wanted more margin.
So I had to go into eBay or switch niches.
And I didn't want to switch niches.
I got one more thing before I switched to the eBay side of this is Amazon sell through.
It's night and day compared to eBay.
It's not even relatively close.
So I understand, you know, you've been married to eBay for X amount of years,
decades, whatever it is.
At some point, you have to see what are you selling and what platform is it going to do best on?
If the best media platform was Bonanza, Pango, whatever it's called, then guess where I'm at, Johnny.
That's where I'm at.
We have to stop feeling like we're tied down to these platforms.
If it's the highest sell through platform.
And wait a minute, not only is the highest selling platform, sell through platform,
you get a lot more money for your stuff on Amazon versus eBay.
I'm just saying now I'm going to switch into the eBay realm.
Why I think now is a better time than ever.
And this might rustle some feathers.
And I honestly really don't care.
Everybody we have on here, Johnny, is pretty much eBay sellers, all the guests we have had on.
Yeah. So, like I said, like I struggle with kind of buying into this idea that resellings on a down swing.
And it's harder than it's ever been because of the results I get on Amazon.
On the eBay side, I struggle with it because the results I see the people we've had on the podcast are getting.
So what separates them from anybody else?
And I know the answer to this, it's the quality of goods they're selling, the amount of items they have listed.
So we used to say, find something you're passionate about as a reseller because it's going to make your life a lot easier.
Well, I'm here to tell you, unfortunately, if you're passionate about selling McDonald's toys,
like you're probably never going to be able to spend that into a real reselling business where you're making tangible money to pay your bills and put away savings.
So my argument is, hey, if this is a business you want to make money in,
then let's sell in a category that has desirable items that sell for a high dollar amount.
I know I'm not the craziest about iPhones.
I don't have an iPhone.
But how many people out there have an iPhone business and they just look at it like you do as widgets?
Everything's a widget. Everything's a 20 dollar bill into a 30 dollar bill.
Those people see the results. But we get so caught up with we got to be this everything seller.
Well, 95 percent of everything belongs in the landfill.
So that 95 percent of stuff you're sourcing shouldn't even be listed.
But it's fun to do this. I think this is the big hiccup.
It's fun to be a reseller until you're not making no money.
So you got to pick and choose a side here.
You're going to treat this as a business from from the get go.
All right. And see, all right, here's what I got to do.
These are the items I need to source or you can be the fun person.
I just get your drug along. You make a sale every once in a while.
And hey, but you can't say, well, this is, you know, this this isn't working because I've been trying to resell.
It's not I hate the brigade.
It's not the platform. It's you.
Right. And just recently, a video came out by a past guest that we had, Sabrina.
Magical World of Thrifting, I believe, is her YouTube channel.
Good content. Great creator on YouTube.
She's having to now get a part time job because her business didn't scale enough.
For her means, essentially, and she got the benefit earlier on being able to stay home
with her child. That was her big thing with the announcement.
Gave her the opportunity to grow up with her child.
And now her child of age where she doesn't want to really be around mom so much.
Right. And she may be, in my opinion, one of the most adult decisions I've ever seen somebody publicly announce.
Well, I crunched my numbers. It's not me.
My financial means my child is on the way out the door, more or less.
She's in teenage years. It's time for me to rejoin the workforce.
And that was one of the most adult things I've ever seen somebody do publicly.
I agree because, you know what happens?
Most reselling YouTubers that kind of throw in a towel, they just disappear.
Right. They just no longer post anything.
And I'm here to tell you, and you're probably in the same boat,
if we ain't making money to cover the bills reselling.
Yeah. You got to do something, dude.
Right. Like you need some kind of income from it.
And it is, you know, hard to take a real look and say, all right, well, this is what it was.
This is what it is now. And, you know, what can it be?
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all.
And I like the idea of, you know, she could just do this part time while working.
And for all we know, she'll make more money than she ever has reselling.
And she's cut back to part time hours.
Right. And that's exactly her plans and what she announced in her video.
She's going to do eBay part time, her job part time.
And whatever time is left over outside of her family, she will try to do her YouTube content.
She even prioritized her new J.O.B., then eBay.
I think family's number one up there, of course.
And then lastly, her YouTube content.
And then try to live a life in between those things.
And that's a hard task. So technically she is still very much full time.
She's got two part time incomes, which one half and a half equal a whole family time.
And then her fun thing, which is YouTube.
I it's it's tough out there.
I'm not sitting here saying that it's easy.
I'm not sitting here saying that, you know, it's you just start today and you'll be making five thousand dollars this month.
But I do think the tools and resources and opportunity is all out there.
Somebody brand new to start today, whether that's on eBay or Amazon, in a desirable category and understand the business to see results by the end of the year.
I firmly believe that if you're willing to actually sit down and approach this as I am building a business, here's my learning, my steps to learn exactly what's going on inside and outside of the business, how you're going to get the inventory.
And that gets me back to another thing is why is it why do we feel like it's so much easier for us than your average reseller out there?
Well, it's because we build relationships.
Me or you don't rely on the local thrift store.
Right. Like we're not just going to the Goodwill, the Goodwill bins, the savers.
And a lot of people see that.
And that's like the ultimate trap, I think, in reselling is just being that thrift store person.
I do think walk in the door and you walk out with a bag full of goodies.
It that infuriates me in today's world.
But continue. I interrupted.
I do think there is something to be said that you can make money flipping items from thrift stores still.
But it is I mean, everywhere like the stuff we sell media, every Goodwill scans every piece of media before it even hits the floor.
Right. So like it's dead to us.
We could maybe get some of the slip through the cracks.
Non barcode books and this media, your only hope when you walk into those stores, even the disc media, dude, I'm telling you now, like the Goodwill is all but done.
And so that and that's what the main push is. Right.
And, you know, over in the group, me and you have the discord through the membership.
We almost make people do the opposite.
Like we haven't really talked about Rift Store, like how to source better at thrift stores in months.
We are pushing for people to get relationships, you know, whether you sell on Amazon or even when we were pushing thrift stores, it was all about backroom access.
Getting it wasn't go through the racks or through the bins or look on every shelf kind of deal is like, no.
How do you source differently from everybody else who's in the same store as you, which is getting backroom access?
You don't even need to mess with the front half there.
And no, I think you're right. I think we.
Sometimes going the opposite direction than everybody else is the best direction.
Sometimes not always, but a lot of the times, a lot of the times.
Yeah, more than more than half for sure.
And I think that's what kind of differentiates resellers in general is if you can have a source where you're getting it from, you know, directly from the person or the people, anybody can do.
That's the thing, dude. Anybody can do this. Right.
We put every single piece of information about how to sell tens of thousands of dollars a month of media on Amazon.
It's all out there. Any single person can do this.
Like I have a video covering everything on the YouTube channel.
Any single person could start today and have every resource they need.
So I struggle with understanding why doesn't everybody do it?
It's because Amazon's big and scary or I can't figure it out.
But I do think like now, like start today, if everybody's running the opposite direction, everybody's saying it's getting too hard to resell.
Then if you're willing to put in the work and understand the business, that's less competition, less competition.
And I think that's the thing, Johnny, you know, we're going to be making a little bit more money if we got less people selling the same items.
Right. And even reflecting back, kind of like we did at the beginning of the call, when I joined, I had the option to become a clothing seller.
It would have been easier, right? A lot easier because most of that group is composed of clothing sellers.
A lot of the information is catered to clothing sellers.
Not that there's not a lot of crossover and there certainly is.
OK, I chose a smaller group, not the smallest, but a smaller group, which was media. And that's how I got into media.
It was a toss up between the media guys and the toy guys.
We had some of the toy guys on recently. They were this close to having me on every call.
That close. They really were.
And. I don't know, it's just another thing that annoys me.
We see people come in and this is in all groups, honestly, and.
They ask the most basic, basic of basic Google questions.
And it's like, why did you pay a subscription to join the group when you didn't even do the most basic Google searching to try to figure this out?
And those kind of people, in no offense, if you were this person or are continuing to be this person,
but you shouldn't be investing money when you're not ready to invest money to grow yourself.
You do all the free things first and then make a monetary decision to better yourself.
In my opinion, wait a minute, do all your research first before I think people watch these YouTube things, jump in,
join a course and like, let's go. Yeah.
But you don't even know some of the terminology yet.
You even maybe you watched one video, maybe you should have watched all of the videos in order from oldest to newest.
I did that, like especially when I joined your channel, when I joined Daily Refinements Group,
when I joined, which is now Reseller Greatness's group, when I joined Max's group.
I don't know. I don't think people do their due diligence and homework anymore these days, and I don't know why that is.
I think you and I grew up differently where we needed to do that because there's less information out there, maybe.
Or I have trust issues where I need to trust the information being said, but I need to verify what is being said is actually true.
Trust but verify. That's a good motto I like to live by.
I think reselling has become cool, right?
Yeah, I do.
It's cool to do it, right?
Like I think that's like, but everything you just said, those are things you can easily,
they're barriers that you could easily knock down. We're talking about nothing hard here.
And it's free. It's free to watch all the videos.
It's crazy to me that we start, we have this idea that we want to start this business, but we treat it like,
it's nowhere even close to being in the realm of you treating it like a business.
But in your mind, it's cool because you're in the groups and you hang out with people that are selling things online,
and you see the social media posts.
If you just look a little bit past that, what you can do to actually make the money that you want to make or make the money,
the person you watch watches, you know, I watch, you know, tech, I watch Commonwealth flipper,
like I want to make the money these guys are making.
OK, well, then let's see how can we get there?
What are things we have to do?
And I do think a lot of the man is selling stuff that is desirable items and not just as much as I would love.
To like, you know, sell certain things that I'm passionate about, there ain't no money in it.
There ain't no money. Right.
And I mean, we were kind of loosely talking about this before the podcast, but back in your earlier how to videos,
you're one of the few guys, I don't know if it's changed because I don't watch a lot more YouTube content like I used to,
but you're one of the few guys that actually talked about net dollar terms, not sales dollars.
And all I see everywhere, at least in thumbnails, is sales dollars. Look, ten thousand dollars in sales.
Well, how much of that ten thousand went into your bank account?
Was it one thousand dollars? You ain't making no money, my friend.
Yeah, dude, it's I'm due for another one of those videos just so I can catch the YouTube algorithm.
But it is true, right? Your your bank account ain't going up, you're reselling and like a ten thousand dollar number in sales is meaningless.
It's the stupidest number, but it gets talked about the most.
It's it's crazy to me how we just kind of overlook this idea that when people talk about sales, that doesn't include anything.
It's literally just what the item sold for.
It's like the furthest thing from the truth.
But all these obstacles are easily able to be knocked down for you to get started, whether that's selling more desirable items on eBay.
Let's focus on eBay a little bit more because Amazon's kind of straightforward and a lot of the flack has been around eBay lately.
I think with eBay.
I know, like, people think the platform, like, flips the switch on and off your accounts, blah, blah, blah.
There's glitches, yada, yada, yada.
I yet again, I'm here. I feel like I sit like every every month I sit down and I go about all in about how crappy my eBay stores.
I had two books returned from Amazon because Amazon has a stupid fair pricing policy.
They want me to list a hundred dollar book at a dollar.
Well, it's clearly worth a lot more than that.
So I got it sent back. I had zero listings on my eBay store.
None. Not a single listing.
I listed this book, only listing in my store.
No promoted listings sold for 70 bucks within three or four days.
Now, was that offer you do you sell for what you listed for?
Sixty nine, sixty nine.
Yeah. So for a full price, not even an offer.
I do have offers turned on.
It was a book that was rare, a rarer book that had more sold than are listed.
Right. All of a sudden, these are things you everybody should be looking for when they're sourcing.
We shouldn't be looking to sell the Adidas, you know, water bottle here when there's five thousand listings, Johnny.
And there's only three hundred sold.
Yeah, it has to sell.
And the best items you need to look for are items that sell not only every day, but sell more than what's listed.
If you find those items, you've won, you've won.
Those are good items. Now, here's where people fall off.
This is this is step two point out of that.
Make sure it continues to sell in that ratio, because trends come and go.
If the sell through drops on it, well, maybe you stop picking that up,
because it used to be a banger seller, but it's not anymore.
So you need to pay attention to that.
Just like the Bolo list. How long are they really Bolo's for?
Yeah, you know, like the Furby of the year, like the Furby's only going to be hot for a few weeks until they the shipping containers from China get here.
And there's three million of these Furby's available on every single store.
Now, on eBay's end, I think the game's changed.
Long gone, unfortunately, are the days of listed and forget it.
Let's do anything and forget it, really.
We're past that. So now we're listing desirable items.
We're talking about how how many times can you turn over your store, meaning everything you sell, get sold within an X amount of time frame of your choice.
You can have a three month sell through. You can have a six month or a 12 month or two years if you want.
Unless you're financially independent and have money coming in elsewhere,
you can't afford to wait the one, two, three year model unless you were what I just mentioned.
You don't really need eBay's money. And why the heck are you doing eBay if you don't really need eBay's money in the first place?
So you need to find fast moving items.
But if you're doing low margin stuff, you've got to list a massive amount.
I'm talking you need a thirty thousand plus item store if you're going to do that.
And you're going to list a lot of crap and your money is going to trickle in quarters at a time
that eventually you change those quarters into dollars, but it's going to take a significant amount of time until you get the number I mentioned or more up.
You could go the premium item route where you're going to sell items once in a while, but it feels really good to get one hundred dollar plus sale.
But again, I think you still need some amount of volume to do that.
Or you do a hybrid model, which in my opinion is probably the best eBay model at the moment,
where you have decently valuable things, probably around the thirty dollar mark or maybe forty dollar mark, and these higher hundred dollar, thousand dollar plus items.
These over here, these lower end things are going to sell more frequently than your higher end things.
So the higher end things, that's kind of like a bonus. That's the gravy on top when those things sell.
But your store is really dependent on these items over here.
And I don't care what you sell. I think it's that way and everything, unless you're selling bars of gold or iPhones, which is technically I'm going to say plastic gold.
So question I have for you is if I see everybody complaining that eBay is not the same and you can't make money on eBay anymore, why doesn't everybody just migrate to Amazon?
Um, people have items that are not Amazonable, some of them like Amazon does have certain criteria where they need to be new only.
You can't sell used of this category and that that there are some people's eBay models.
Now, could they move into eBay out of eBay and play the Amazon game of what they could sell?
Maybe depends if they have access to the material.
They're in a place with. I don't know, brand new car parts. Maybe they can move into Amazon or they're a different country where Amazon really isn't a thing.
This I give that I give them people a pass. All right. Like I foreigners are excused. OK.
Yes, I'm I'm. It gets back to what I said. Are you going to attempt to sell stuff that you enjoy selling?
Right. Because clearly you're not making money or are you going to sell items that aren't the most exciting to you?
That's what I do, dude. I don't care about books. Books excite me.
Right. Like there's like one book out of the 50 trillion that have been written that excite me.
So like I sell things that don't excite me. The bank account should excite you at the end of the day.
Who gives a crap if you're the most passionate Furby seller, but you ain't even a Furby seller because your stuff ain't selling.
That's why you're complaining about the platform.
And I have asked the shoe sellers and the clothing sellers, why don't they do Amazon?
Because I see that apparel category and I think they need them to be new is the issue.
Why they have Amazon and they don't have access to new clothing or new shoes.
But that's not to say they couldn't move in a different car to do clothing.
They could run they could run two businesses.
They can run their clothing shoe business on eBay and their whatever business on Amazon, honestly.
But then it comes down to time and profit per hour when they've already got a functioning business model over here.
Why deviate from that? Because we've had people.
But it's not functioning.
We're talking about the eBay sellers that are running a dysfunctional, unprofitable store.
Sure. Those guys need to switch it up in eBay and move into something different and or new platforms, just like you said.
We know people make money on eBay, right? Like the proof is out every category.
There's somebody who's had tons of guests that are very successful on eBay and eBay alone.
Yeah. And every basic category, there's people out there making tens of thousands of dollars a month on eBay.
Yeah, it's the people that don't see the success, but they don't want to change anything.
It's like if you're not selling stuff, you're not making money.
Why are we still sourcing, you know, the Nora Roberts?
Why are we still sourcing the polo shirts that everybody's trying to sell?
Why are we still doing the same things and we're still complaining about the same things when there's a whole new world out there?
Whether that's a different category of desirable items.
Sure, you might not be excited about it.
But I'll tell you what, you know what excites people, Johnny, is when payouts start hitting the bank account.
Then all of a sudden, you don't care what you're selling.
The bank account's going up. It's exciting, right?
Like, no matter who you are, the money coming in is going to excite you.
But we can't get that into our thick skulls as resellers.
We just have to stick with, well, it doesn't work.
Well, I'm here to tell you, get on the train now.
Like, this is the craziest time we live in.
You think about how many packages Amazon ships a day.
How many more media items you could sell on Amazon and make money on.
Let's just throw it into perspective.
You sell a DVD on since you were talking about the DVD lady.
You sell a DVD on Amazon, you make three dollars and 40 cents.
So you source it.
Maybe you pay, you know, with the way we talk about it, you're buying a bulb, pay 20 cents for it.
Right. Three forty, we're going to make after fees.
You're not shipping it to the customer. There's no customer service.
Right. So if you did the same thing on eBay,
I did 9.99 free shipping, it would probably be close.
And the sell through on Amazon just going to be a lot higher.
I think everybody needs to just buckle down, treat it like a business.
And if you're if you approach it as a business from bottom to top.
And the only thing that matters, you having a business is if you're making money, you're not making money.
It's not a business if it is, it's a bankrupt business.
Might not be today, might not be tomorrow, but you're just going to keep buying stuff
and listed stuff that never sells like sooner. You're literally losing money.
I don't think resellers realize this either because they go out, they buy the items.
Right. You know, you got your bond, Joby. Right.
You're like, oh, well, I'm going to list this.
Well, if it never sells, whatever you paid for that, it's lost money.
Just sitting there, it's doing nothing for you.
And literally your eBay business, your Amazon business is costing you money.
And we just think, well, eventually it'll sell. That's not the case.
Yeah. And maybe I can offer a better perspective because I kind of live this for a minute.
First year, covid year of eBay, really great.
And then I went into the following year.
Hey, I'm just going to scale this. Moved into this warehouse, got some employees.
After my settling on five employees, we were gung ho cranked up the eBay gears.
We were doing more eBay than we ever have.
But I was making roughly 10 percent more than the previous years with the final number
ended up being. And that wasn't good enough, not based off our efforts gained because times had changed.
The system had changed. And I arguably.
Waited too long, I do believe, because every now and then, just like what you said, I get a had a really good day on eBay.
OK, I just need to figure out how to make every day a good day on eBay.
Maybe I haven't figured it out yet. And I tried a bunch of things to try to do that.
And it came down to I just need to sell different types of items still in books, but different kind of items.
And those kind of items I didn't want to fool with because there's even more work involved with them.
Very much antiquarian style or do lots. And I hate lots.
I can't do it. It drives me nuts. Or option B, Blue Pill.
Let's go do Amazon. So I went I went Amazon and put in the same amount of effort that I put into eBay,
maybe even a little bit more at the beginning. And I'm getting the results of that.
What do you think was the motivating factor for you to jump back into Amazon?
The easy answer is money, but it's really not about money.
It's making a functional business, making a business that transcends beyond me to other people, employees and.
Getting things that are part for my portfolio, which are other businesses, and could I do that by staying in eBay?
And the answer at that time was no.
And then jumping into Amazon, the answer was a probably yes.
So I went with the probably yes, which is becoming more true every day.
I could have done it in eBay, but I would have to change up my whole business model to stay in eBay.
I didn't want to do that. So I just again, what I mentioned earlier, the path of least resistance, I stopped resisting.
I tried to make something work, force it to work. It was never going to work.
Did the idea that I was working a quarter of what you were and making.
Annoyed the fuck out of me.
I'm I'm glad I want everybody to realize that, right?
Like, if you're the person that's putting all these hours in eBay, selling media,
and then you hear about me when I talk, you know, 20, 25 hours, 30 hours is like an overtime week for me.
Right. Like and I'm doing over 10K in sales.
And like Johnny said, you know, 10K in sales. What does that mean to you?
It means five thousand dollars in my bank account.
So let it annoy you that somebody as lazy as the used book guy has a stupid YouTube channel where every piece of information is available.
Who has done me and Johnny done a podcast for almost 100 weeks in a row now.
I guess it all comes down to consistency and understanding what you're doing.
But I'm glad I annoyed you. I kind of felt like you kept nagging me.
You're just going to go over to Amazon.
I want to say shut up. You shut up. I'm over here trying to make eBay work.
You just shut up, Mike.
Well, I mean, it was it's the perfect example of everything we're talking about today because you were knee deep in eBay, dude.
Like, very much, I'll tell you right now, I mean, you look a lot more happier today that you're not listed 50 items on eBay.
Right. Like you could probably list a thousand items on Amazon and not be as miserable as the days when you were listing 50 items on eBay.
So like you're the perfect example of everything we talked about.
Right. The grind, both are grind. They're just different.
The grind on eBay instead of a 50 pound backpack of rocks, more like a hundred.
That's how it felt moving over to Amazon.
I felt like somebody took a 50 pound weight off that 100 pounds.
This is this is much easier to grow up the reselling ladder with.
This is great. I love this so much easier.
And it's not that I work a little less than I did on eBay, but I get way more money than I did on eBay in a short amount of time.
It was it was like three months.
And I know the effort on eBay, it's about a year to if you even decide to double up on your inventory.
It's the same amount of overhead I have. I'm still in this facility.
I mean, a little less because Cecilia left about two months ago.
So I have a little less in employee overhead because there is no employee.
But more money in the pocket. Stay the same on expenses.
This is great. I love it.
Zero to ten thousand dollars a month in sales in three months.
That's like you struggle.
I would challenge anybody to start an eBay business with zero listings and do 10K in sales in three months.
Unless you got access to that iPhone palette we mentioned. Good luck.
That would be, you know, way more listings, way more work.
It's it's crazy because you were literally the example of this and I think it took.
I am the example. If you are of path of least resistance, I wasn't on it for a minute.
I resisted for over a year. You think. All right.
So the path of least resistance, because like a lot of eBay sellers, like they never have done Amazon.
Like it sounds so like fake and cheesy. Right.
Like we're sitting here telling you we're both working less and making more money than we ever have.
So on that perspective of it, like somebody that's on the fence and hesitant when it comes to getting out of eBay,
like what were your biggest worries when you said, all right, I'm going to all in on Amazon.
Like was it just like getting banned like overnight for one stupid book or like not being in control of like the customer service and the shipping?
No, it was more of I put all of me into eBay and once you put all of yourself into something,
I still haven't cut the umbilical cord from that.
I'm still doing my one listing a day because that's my store.
Blood, sweat and tears. That's my fucking store.
I'll never let it go because that is mine, even if it's just one listing a day.
But no, that was the thing. Like, I still want to do eBay, but I need to make money and I have to put most of my time.
So the amount of eBay and it was when I was doing Amazon was kind of a big number and trying to do Amazon.
But that number slowly decreased into my one listing a day now because we were still trying to do like 30 a day or something,
because we went down from 72 to like 30. We did that for a minute.
But once the money started rolling in for Amazon, OK, let's just put more into Amazon and do a little bit eBay.
Those are hard decisions to make because, again, you put too much of yourself in something, you can't let it go, really.
And somebody told me, why don't you just list all your drafts and be done with them?
I can't do that. I still can't do that.
But maybe one day I can do that and just say goodbye to eBay entirely.
But I still want to include it in my business model, but in a different way.
I want to do a cross listing way and the quality I once upon a time put in my store.
I don't know, Tom's the only one I've heard that's actually doing cross listing, but he's uploading his own photos.
That appeals to me. I like that, even though it's more work, but that appeals to me because I don't know.
I put pride and integrity in my eBay store and I want to figure out a way to do that within cross listing.
But that may be impossible. Who knows?
I got a shameless statement, dude. Who cares about the pride of your eBay store?
If it ain't making you no damn money. I know.
I still got it, even though from financial sense, it makes zero sense.
I understand. I think when you click on an eBay store, it should show you their monthly sales, their monthly profit after fees.
How much they're earning. And how much they're paying for the store.
So like we know, yeah, dude, I'm telling you, that we can just put a big fat.
The seller profile. This seller is making negative dollars.
All of a sudden, that pride is going to go out the window.
You see more eBay accounts deleted than in the history of the universe because, hey, it's fun.
It's exciting. It's cool to be a reseller, right?
I'm out at the Goodwill taking my photos. I found this, you know, toaster.
It's going to sell for a trillion dollars. I get it home. I never listed.
I never make money. I listed. I don't list it correctly.
Hey, listen, for all you eBay slackers, come to Amazon where you can get away with slack.
And right. Like and you're going to make a whole lot more money.
I guess that that's my my final thought is if you're a slacker on eBay,
you could slack on Amazon and still make pretty penny because I'll be straight up.
When I first started this, I was a slacker, right?
I was just sending a box in a box there and I was making hundreds of dollars a month after everything.
So slackers, you're better off on Amazon.
You just got to get through the initial hurdles of setting up your account.
And, you know, Amazon does have standards.
So if you're the person that wants to pack and ship all of your items,
the same like eBay, where you can just ship it in whatever you want.
Amazon wants no labels on boxes or poly bags.
You can't reuse packing materials. The standards don't be scared of them.
They weed out the bad players. I love standards.
I love when there's more rules on Amazon for new sellers,
because it means less people are going to give it a shot.
Even though I'm sitting here telling everybody listening to go sell media on Amazon.
I know most people won't do it because they're scared of the big machine.
You saw other things besides media, people listening out there.
And I want to say something to the eBay sellers.
And I'm excluding the people that are making bank on eBay right now.
So you people that are that, you can ignore me right now. Good for you.
But you people that are struggling and were like me and were just pumping in the hours,
you're still pumping in the hours with hope and prayer.
We're going to call it a false hope, but a real prayer.
I'm sorry with false hope, you can't really do anything with that.
And I know you want to will it to work.
But if you've tried everything under the sun and you think it's just a waiting game,
if you wait long enough, you will you will wait out into cash flow.
You're wrong. This is your wake up call.
You are fucking wrong.
If it ain't cash flowing from the get go, it ain't ever going to cash flow.
I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. I'm going to rephrase that.
I am not sorry to tell you that I'm going to be honest with you right now.
Change it. I don't care if you're changing niches within eBay to go to something more profitable.
You're switching into Amazon, like Mike's saying, or you want to you still want to have your pet project.
But, dude, get get some money. Do a supreme.
I get a part time job or do a dabble in Amazon while you're trying to get your model working.
But I'm telling you, if it's broken right now,
stop trying to unbreak it and try to fix it in a fixable way.
Salvage your time because your time is worth money.
Profit per hour. We say it on this thing all the time.
Thanks, Jack. Fake news.
Profit per hour is fake news. Oh, he's going to listen to these.
He's going to say you know, I do think, though, you hit it on the head.
This idea that all of a sudden, like things are just going to turn around when you've been doing the same thing.
You're going to be doing the same thing forever and you're not getting results.
It's just not going to happen. Like, let's be real with it, right?
If you're not stop now, do something better.
And it's it's OK to switch. You don't have to be like solely committed to like doing something.
You don't got to be like, well, I started as a bookseller, so I permanently forever have how many booksellers on Amazon?
They start with books and media and then they graduate on to, you know, so many bigger, better things.
And then primarily this media now, I'm sorry if I outed you just now.
Me, I was always just books and books only. But look behind me, there's DVDs and CDs there now.
There's books over here. Don't worry, guys. Don't worry.
There's still books, but we've changed. We've evolved.
Yeah, you got to keep adapting. We're going to wrap it up here.
So start today. Forget all the naysayers.
I know you're out there. You're listening to this on YouTube, watching on YouTube or whatever, you know,
podcast platform you're on there is always going to the negativity is always going to seem louder than the positivity.
That's why I wanted to do this, because I believe if you start today selling media on Amazon three months,
I know a guy who got a sales up to 10K. I know a guy.
And guess what? This guy's readily available. You can ask him any question under the sun.
So even if you do want to stick with eBay, get shoot people messages, right?
Like you can message any single person that's an influencer, a YouTuber.
The biggest names out there will give you an answer for absolutely zero dollars and zero cents.
So leverage that. So that's going to do it for this week's episode.
We'll talk to you all next week.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast.
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