Welcome back to another episode of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube,
along with my friend and fellow full time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses from the ground up.
We also have a weekly Zoom call and private Discord for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash used book guy to join the channel
and gain access to the full length podcast, Zoom call and private Discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up, everyone?
Welcome into episode six.
I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of fingers to count.
Yes. Wait, so we can go up to 20 because you got 10 fingers as well.
Today's topic is the importance and unimportance of the little things. Right.
So there's a million things that go on in your reselling business.
And there's a lot of little things and a lot of them can be very important.
And a lot of them are honestly just a complete waste of time.
I have a lot of opinions on this because, you know, I'm out there on YouTube.
So I get a lot of different things that come in my way.
So my perspective will be a lot different than yours on this.
So I'm going to start off here
the really important little thing that a lot of people kind of think
doesn't really matter when or kind of gets lost in the sauce, at least from what I see.
And that's like being descriptive with the items they are selling. Right.
So you can go list something on eBay or Amazon.
Amazon doesn't even make you put in a condition note, whether it's new,
used, good, use, acceptable, use, like new.
You don't have to. You could just leave it blank if you wanted to.
And eBay, you know, it automatically, at least on the phone,
you do it on the computer. Right.
So at least on the mobile device, the description automatically populates
to what the title is.
So you necessarily don't even have to put anything in the description there either.
So it's a little thing, right.
Because it only takes you maybe 10 seconds to do and it makes a big difference.
So that's an important one.
If you're not doing that, what's kind of
a give me one important little thing you think that people kind of don't do.
I don't think they use a receipt book.
And even if you do use a receipt book, are you putting that data
into your tax tracking, whether it's Excel or
what's the tax program you use? QuickBooks.
QuickBooks. Like even if you use a receipt book, file it away or upload the photo.
That that's an easy thing to do.
And this is mainly for your cash. You get that.
I have four of those.
But yeah, yeah, yeah. They you got to do it.
If you're in a cash business like we are most of the time,
if you're growing a garage sales or state sales, sometimes are cash only.
I've seen library sales that are cash.
Well, actually, most of mine are cash only library sales.
So you can't ask them to do a handwritten receipt.
But if you just have your receipt book, good to go, jot it in there
and then take a picture of it, upload it to your tax program or file away
in Excel when you get home or you're once a week when you do it
or you're once a month whenever you do your bookkeeping. That's important.
So this little I mean, I'm pretty sure you can get these at the Dollar Tree.
So a dollar twenty five.
You got 40 sheets here.
So this is 40 basically bank ATM withdrawals.
And these things are pretty descriptive.
I usually fill it out and put, you know, the name of, you know,
you're not going to have their full name or anything like that.
But if I know I'm buying a bunch of stuff off, you know, Bob,
you know, Facebook, I put Bob Facebook, you know, this is how much I took out.
And then, like you said, you're decreasing your tax burden.
So like a lot of people, I guarantee you, a lot of people don't use these
and they don't even think twice.
They think just when they take out cash that, you know, well, it's just cash.
So there's nothing I can do.
But I just doesn't know what you did with the cash you took out of the bank.
They have no idea.
Yeah. So this is like super important.
And it's a little thing, right?
This is something you either have or you don't.
And it only take you two seconds to go get in the store.
And I usually just leave.
I have one in the car and then one up here in the in the apartment.
So no matter where you're at, you've got one kind of taken care of.
So that's that's that's better than mine. Right.
I mean, you're you're going to save probably hundreds, thousands of dollars
by doing this, because, like you said, most resellers, it's cash, right?
We're going to the flea market on the weekend.
I'm taking out 300 bucks.
Well, something like this, you can track as you go.
I went to this flea market here, gave this vendor this much.
You know, and there you go.
That's a tax write off for you, which otherwise you probably wouldn't have.
The other one that's really akin to this is track your mileage,
because, again, that's a write off either use an app.
I mean, if you're old school and just want to write it down
and press the odometer, go from zero to whatever.
That's important, too. That's free money.
Well, not free money because you're spending money on your gas. Right.
But you'll get some of it back.
Would you like some of your gas money back?
Have you seen the price of gas lately? I would.
It's like the all the little things add up to being a big thing. Right.
You know, if you just had the receipt book, you track your miles,
you know, you did these little things at the end of the road.
It's it's 100 percent worth it.
And these aren't even a big inconvenience. Right.
Like it takes you 10 seconds to fill one of these out.
You can literally. It's not calculus here, guys.
We're not paying for the calculus test. We're not.
So it's like, you know, that I mean, that's good. Right.
There's these little things you have to do.
There's some you have to do, right.
Like the ones we just gave the two you gave the one I gave.
And then there's some like that are just a waste of time.
And I'm going to I'm going to throw mine out there.
And this covers both eBay and Amazon sellers.
And it is after you ship something,
basically tracking it every single day to see where it's at,
where it's at in the shipping process,
just wasting time basically on worrying about items that are already shipped.
Right. So I see it a lot, you know, especially with Amazon,
because when your box gets to Amazon, it gets checked in.
But, you know, 50 to 75 percent of that stuff gets shipped somewhere else.
So it shows in your inventory as zero.
So people are like, I don't understand what's going on.
Honestly, even when I started this, I'm going to stand by this.
I never I never even looked at any of that stuff.
Honestly, I figured out I said, hey, what does this mean? Right.
Where are my items?
I don't understand what's going on.
So you'd learn, hey, my items are being transferred after that.
I never looked at it again.
I know exactly what sooner or later it's going to get to its final destination.
And, you know, you're going to give perspective here.
I'm curious, do you look at all the eBay orders you ship out on a daily
basis to see where they're at in the USPS, you know, world out there?
Yes and no. I do it to mark off delivered.
And then I look, I scroll down to the bottom to see if it's been 14 days or longer,
because at 14 days it's supposed to have arrived.
And those I do actually need to follow up on.
But in my next day order, taking a look to see if it arrived.
No, no, I'm just I'm just removing delivered as that's my process.
Every day after my mail run, I come back, I archive the delivered.
I scroll down the bottom, make sure whatever bottom package
isn't past the 14 day mark.
And the ones that are, I've noticed a lot of those are just my overseas
orders and those I don't care about because they they'll arrive whenever
the heck they're going to arrive because it goes from me to Kentucky,
goes from Kentucky on a boat, goes from the boat to whatever carrier in Spain.
And there's too many variables.
It could take two months for that package to arrive and arrive in 14 days.
But I'm not liable because of global stripping program.
I did my part as long as it gets to Kentucky.
Exactly. The post office is going to do the post office, right?
Deb had a package the other day that was supposed to go to Tennessee.
So I went down to Tennessee and then the tracking updated and they shipped it
up to Massachusetts and now it's going back to Tennessee.
So it's one of those things, right?
If you see something that's been sitting out for a while, sure, you might be
going to click through, see what's going on because it happens, right?
They lose packages.
But in the grand scheme of things, I mean, how much time are we wasting
just looking at where our packages are at?
Like, you know, I'm heavy in a merchant fulfilled now and I'm not trying to
track in none of that.
I'm not going in every day and seeing where things I could care less.
Listen, if there's a problem, the customer will reach out, right?
That's the first warning sign.
Hey, it's been a week.
It's been two weeks.
It's different.
You know, a lot of the stuff we sell is media.
So media mail shipping takes longer.
But just, you know, the customer, if there's an issue, they're going to
bring it to your attention no matter what platform you're on, whether, you
know, you ship the wrong thing or whether it's taken too long to get there.
That's kind of what sets off the alarms in my system is if a customer
reaches out, they haven't gotten it.
Um, and then it's a problem, right?
So I'm going to, I'm going to lead you into another one here because I'm
curious what you're taking.
I got one more quick thing to say on this.
Even when they lose a package, here's a huge waste of time that I used to do.
I used to call in about it.
I don't do that anymore.
I just go, I'm not going to explain it because it's too complicated, but you
can go on a U of S site, put in the code.
It's filed away as missing and either you'll get it or not.
I used to waste 45 minutes on the phone, going through the automated system
to talk to a live human being and explain all this.
That's a huge waste of time.
Don't do that.
When I tell Deb what you just said after this call today, she's going to laugh at you.
She should, because I wasted so much time doing that.
She may laugh at me.
I encourage the laughter.
She, um, she does that exact thing.
You just said, uh, just go in and put in a missing mail search online and cut it loose.
She's never tried.
I think she's maybe tried to call once and was like, I'm never doing this again.
No, I think it was that fear of.
We're going to get banned if we do the one little thing wrong.
Right.
And so I, I'm still a little bit this way.
I'm just overprotective.
Like I'm using bubble mailers on my stay flats.
I honestly don't need to use bubble mailers on my stay flats.
It's good enough.
And as soon as I run out, I'm probably never going to use them again.
So on the topic of little things on eBay, I am going to say people that another
thing that I'm sure a lot of people do, not me, because I like things easy and
automated is feedback on eBay.
Um, you have a lot more experience than me.
You've been crushing feedback lately.
You've already got way more than me.
And I've been on the, I've been selling on eBay like 30 times the amount of years
you have, so, um, you're, you're more heavily into feedback, but I do have mine
set up to leave automated feedback when I receive feedback from a seller.
Um, and it's automatically pre-populated, but I'm going to say that there's a lot
of people out there that will go in and leave feedback and type in a different
message for every single item they need to leave feedback for.
No, that's, that's true.
I have a hot key that I just press a button for.
I've shown you this and that's it.
But the reason I do it that way instead of the auto is sometimes the buyer
will leave me a message and I'll include that in their feedback, whatever the
request is, like one time I had to write a gosh darn birthday card for somebody's
birthday and I put my standard message.
There's enough characters left over.
I wrote your birthday card, bro.
I got you covered.
Now, do you think it would ever be feasible to leave a different piece of
feedback for every single item you sold on eBay?
Why?
No, no, I don't think so.
No, no, I don't.
But why, why would you do this?
So it's one, it's a double edged sword, right?
Because feedback on eBay, you know, it means something and, you know, you're
going to get feedback on a lot more orders on eBay than Amazon.
So it's like, maybe people get too caught up with, you know, going in and leaving
specific feedbacks, you know, trying to remember, Hey, what was that order?
So what can I put in here to specifically like kind of coincide with that order
when honestly it just positive and you just put something in there?
I can think of one case where you would do that.
If you're that high end seller, you have a small store, but you're
selling thousand dollar items.
I could see you doing it there only because you want, you want to do that extra
special mile thing, but rest of us who aren't have that a thousand dollar an
item plus store in dollars, not a thousand items in your store, but you're selling
items for a thousand dollars or more.
Yeah.
I can see that, but only then.
Look money.
This guy's selling stuff on eBay as we're talking about it.
I mean, I mean, this is, this is fake news.
This whole thing is fake.
Um, it's a soundboard over there, but yeah, I think feedback's a lot of
things, something that a lot of people get caught up in.
You can go in, you can put as many, like, I'm not sure as many, but I have
multiple like pre-typed out ones.
So you can easily just click randomly apply one of your feedbacks and it'll
randomly apply as you get feedback.
Sure.
You want, I usually go in there when things are delivered once a month and
maybe leave feedbacks for items for people that haven't left me feedback,
because in turn they'll see they got feedback and then they'll leave you
feedback, but, um, I don't get caught up in any of that nonsense.
I don't want no parts of it.
My motto is I don't want to deal with none of the little things, right?
I don't, I don't want the little headaches.
I don't want the little nonsense waste waste of times.
And if there's a way it can be automated, then listen, I'm all for it.
I don't want to play no games and make my life any harder or have to go in
and, you know, click things all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, here's mine.
Here's mine guys.
Here's all it says.
Fantastic customer exclamation point knew what they wanted to win for it.
Name of my store is looking forward to doing business with you again.
Smiley face that it's as simple as that.
And it's literally a button I click on my keyboard each time.
And I have enough room to put the little special things when I have
to do special things for them, like the birthday card was another one I had to do.
Yes.
I used a box because you asked me specifically for a box.
And when people, they asked me for a box.
I do a box by the way, when they don't, I use my stay flats.
I got a, I got an, I got an important little thing that we should be, should
do and that's reprice your inventory.
On Amazon and eBay.
I bugged you about how you reprice your inventory on eBay.
I did it this past week and I actually sold something I repriced basically
within a day, so that was a good thing.
It's a little bit, you know, it's, it's hard on Amazon and eBay,
unless you're using software.
So it's, it's, it's one of those things that kind of gets overlooked, right?
I'd be willing to say how many people actually go back on eBay and look at the
price of their inventory and change it.
Just like, just in general, I don't think it would be that high because I really,
honestly, I never see videos about people repricing their inventory on eBay or
like strategies or things they do besides like coupons and promotions.
That's different.
I'm just talking about repricing in general.
We'll let you finish before I chime in here.
Go ahead.
No, I'm, I'm, I'm ready for it.
I hear about this all the time in a couple of other groups.
But you're right.
It's not in the public.
It's in the private groups that you'll see this.
The thing about repricing your inventory is anybody following or has ever followed
gets a message when you lower that price.
And when you're doing your search for it, you're, you may have lowered it
to a new audience of people because they're never going to go on above 25 bucks,
but 24.99, Hey, you're in their search now.
Cause that left hand navigation stuff.
So here's what I do, but keep in mind guys, I do older media and I, I realize
that they're all long tail items.
I leave it up there for 90 days.
After 90 days, I start decreasing the price on things.
So if it hasn't sold in that first 90 day window, odds are it's
going to be really long tail.
Honestly, is there a way to automate it?
Is there a way to automate it?
Yeah.
Yes or no.
You can use an ebay will take an Excel spreadsheet.
Did you upload do it?
There is the bulk editor, but in my opinion, these two have problems.
Cause if you make a mistake and you upload or use that bulk editor, you
have essentially you're grabbing the coffee at that point, cause you got to
undo the 500, the thousand, the 10,000 things with that one little human error
that you did, it did what you told it to do, but you told it wrong, right?
I go through it manually on the price column.
You could just edit it from the active listing page one at a time, but
I sort it by price and date.
So if I got something for 14.99, I'm changing it to 12.99.
It's pretty seamless.
I have several thousand items in my store.
It maybe takes, and I do this one day, once a month, and it maybe takes me two
to three hours for thousands and thousands of items, if you got less than that,
you're going to be done way quicker.
It's just copy paste on the price.
Well, I use pricing buckets.
If you got unique, exact, the penny prices on everything, it's
going to take you way longer.
I'll admit that.
But if you have pricing buckets like I do, it's I only, and I am lowering
it five bucks or two bucks for each pricing buckets.
So it's quick.
So do you, so you, you know, maybe like, maybe tomorrow's the day you go
in and look at your prices.
I'm just curious for me and everybody out there that day you repriced, do you
see some of those items sell within like the next 24 hours?
No, it would be 48 hours is when I start seeing it.
Okay.
Occasionally I'll see something in 24 hours, but that could be an anomaly,
but I see it.
I see an uptick of what I repriced within about 48 minutes, sometimes 72 hours
if it's the weekend, because I don't know how they're out there and it works exactly.
But if I, if I have ever done it on the weekend, it's usually a longer
time that I see it start to work.
So that kind of covers the little simple thing of going in once a month and just
repricing your inventory on eBay.
Now we're going to talk about repricing your inventory on Amazon, right?
So you can kind of, you can do the same exact thing, right?
You can go in and you can reprice everything manually.
The benefit with Amazon is you can have software that does it all for you.
Now it's a two way, it's a two way street, right?
So when I first started, I used a software where you had to go in and
basically still it would show you the prices and you would click on what you
wanted to change your price to.
So it was still basically manually, but you had the information in front of you.
And we all know Amazon's different than eBay, right?
If you're selling something for 20 bucks and you have one picture and it's a
stock photo and it's a used item and I'm selling something for $25 and I have
12 photos with a description, I'm most likely going to get the sale over you.
On Amazon, it's completely different.
It's, it's, it's whoever has the, it's whoever has the lowest price, most
likely gets the buy box, which then in turn, you're going to get the sale when
it, when it occurs.
So it's, it's, it's a big difference from eBay to Amazon.
So the reprice on Amazon really isn't, you know, doesn't care about the
quality of your listing, right?
You know, it doesn't, none of that stuff matters.
You're not, you're using the stock photo, even if you're selling used items.
So that none of that really matters.
It's all price related.
So repricing on Amazon is like a million times more important than eBay.
I mean, if you're not repricing on Amazon, you're, you're, you're not going to
last, you're not going to survive because everybody is and everybody's probably
using a software and that's where you get into the race to the bottom, right?
You hear it all the time.
It's a race to the bottom.
All my listings tanked.
It happens because that's how you get to sale on Amazon.
You have to be the lowest price and people just, you know, you got to keep the
cash flowing, you know, if it's you break even, you lose some money, it's going to
happen on some listings, you're not going to make a lot of money on everyone.
But there's a lot of people out there that'll sit there all day and reprice.
Right?
So you're going to reprice manually today.
We're all me and you are on the same listing for all your items.
You've got 300 items in Amazon and you're going to reprice manually today.
It's going to take you about an hour and a half to do.
And what's going to happen the next hour, my automated repricer is
just going to undercut all your, so all the work you just did is gone.
I guess I got a state of computer 24 seven penny minus penny minus penny
minus, but now screw that.
It's funny because when I used to use a new price and click it on the prices
and everything before I realized it was automated, sure.
You can kind of see, you understand the market more.
You see what's happening on the listings, but in honesty, like you need to have
some kind of software if you're going to be repricing on Amazon and it's super,
it's super easy to set up, right?
You set up your repricer once and you're done, but a lot of people, I guess
it's one of those things right where you don't trust the software to work.
Right. You think that you can do a better job than a software program can,
but at the end of the day, the software is going to work better than you
because it has the actual numbers.
It sees what's going on.
So it's like something that small is so important and it's, it's,
it's a requirement on Amazon.
I don't care what anybody says.
You have to have a repricer once you get over, you know, 200, 300 items.
Right.
Yeah.
If you're less than that, don't bother repricing, you do the manual
and it's whatever at that point.
And you're not really going to see, and I think some people do it cause if
they're not seeing sales and if you don't have got the buy box, I spent six
months staring at those screens, man, if you don't have the buy box, those
cells just slowly trickle in and it's okay.
Just be patient.
Let the repricer do its thing.
Your time will come and the rain of money will happen.
So I got five dollar rain and sometimes it'd be $50 rain.
You don't know.
All right.
I got, I got a big pet peeve little thing that I don't waste time on.
And I know a lot of people do, and I talk about it all the time in the videos.
Prepping your prepping anything for Amazon, especially used items.
How much time do I waste prepping my books, CDs, DVDs?
If I don't have to run it through the resurfacer.
None.
None. When I first started, I guess, I guess when I first started, I, maybe
I cared more about the items I was saying.
I've watched all your older videos and I'm watching you use that heat gun
and I'm cursing you.
It's like, I'm still heat gun, but in my defense, I go to a lot of smaller
stores now, so like they don't even have the price tags that I got the real
ones you can easily peel off.
I don't even need the heat, heat guns basically for those goodwill stickers.
So it's such a waste of time on Amazon.
And I'm willing to say it's even a waste of time on eBay.
Now, don't get me wrong.
If there's something wrong with an item on eBay, because you're
uploading the exact pictures of the item.
If it's going to take you five minutes and it's going to make the biggest
difference in your pictures, then it's worth it.
But I can see people out there literally wiping everything down clean.
I mean, I bought those bubble guppy toys like two weeks ago for eBay.
I literally just look at them, make sure they're clean.
I'm not wiping every toy down, licking it clean, doing all that nonsense.
It's such a waste of time and it drives me nuts when I see.
I just think about how much time do you waste wiping every book down?
What I do, I literally have a book.
I flip through it, make sure there's nothing inside, no pages or dog
years, anything like that, and it's done.
Okay.
I'm going to say this condition doesn't matter as much on eBay.
It's more critical on Amazon because of the buy box.
Is that acceptable?
You don't get the buy box.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's, that's great.
You can, but it's like, I think it's under 10%.
Right.
So on eBay, you're looking at acceptable, good, very good most of the time,
unless it's shrink wrap and yeah, sure.
Go for like new.
We got an invoice so you can do new, right?
But the people buying these books, as long as it's in good, even as acceptable,
most of my inventory is an acceptable condition and I sell, I probably sell
close to 400 books a month on eBay with just acceptable books.
Cause my books are all raggedy.
They're torn.
Some are missing the back covers.
I got writing in them.
I got highlighting in them.
I got some stains.
It smelled pretty funny.
It smelled like a book.
I got some stains that smell pretty funky in them, but they still sell.
Do I clean a single one of them?
Hell no.
No, I haven't got time for that.
First of all, the most I will do if I see a dusty book, here's my cleaning process.
That's it.
Okay.
So do you have Mr.
Hotkey over there?
Do you have a hot key basically condition note for eBay?
I'm just curious.
I have a boiler crate one for really acceptable ones.
They're in the acceptable condition.
And then I just add to that because let's see, general, general corner and shelf
where stains on interior and exterior that covers any stain, any area.
Yep.
Right.
And then for some of them, I have a huge collection of things.
There's a piece of tape on the spine, everyone that he handwritten things.
So I include that in those.
I literally have 10,000 books from this dude and they're all that way.
And he signed his name on each one.
So I include that one in there.
But for just general other things and acceptable spine has issues,
see photo three for details.
So my spine photo is photo three every time.
And that's for any acceptable book, even outside this collection, I'm mentioning
because I guarantee you there's a flaw on the spine of some kind, but if I were to sit
there and detail it out each and every time, it would take me longer.
So I just say see photo or spine has some issues, parentheses, see photo three for
details.
And then at the very end, I have the generic, you have any questions, please send
me a message and see photo for details.
And then the in between those two, the generic, you have any questions and then
the boilerplate, I include any additional flaws is what I do.
Okay.
So here's, here's, here's a question that I'm going to learn from you right now.
And if you have the answer, because I don't know, this is another thing I never
heard people talk about.
Does condition of your item matter when somebody is searching on eBay?
Yes and no.
If we have the same exact title, same exact item.
Is it rare is my question.
Is it, or is it just you and me selling the thing?
It's it's it's no, no, there's other people.
Okay.
I'm just curious if yours was listed as very good and mine was acceptable, do you
think that would have anything to do in the algorithm?
Do you think they would show, you know, yours above mine?
Cause you're very good and I'm acceptable.
If we're the exact same and the only difference is condition, let's say we
both did 12 photos, I think you would have a slight edge, but not much.
So the con, the years would sell and then I'm next in line to sell.
Okay.
So, I mean, it's, it's kind of, we'll transfer that over to Amazon where
your condition doesn't mean nothing.
Unless it's new, you have the new category, which is completely different,
but used you're either acceptable, which you're, you shouldn't even
be sending an acceptable stuff.
Sure.
It happens.
You, you know, you get a huge profit item.
You don't check it out.
That's our story.
You get home and you know, the pages are real beat up inside and you
know, it's a $50 profit item.
Sure.
You still want to send that in as acceptable.
I've done that, you know, a handful of times here and there, but everything
else from good to like new means nothing.
Right.
So if Johnny B's on the same listing as me, he's got a very good book.
I mean, this thing's basically, you know, super clean.
I got a good one.
It's got, you know, some markings in it.
He's priced, you know, he sees me on the listing, right?
So I'm, I'm the lowest price at $15.
Well, he's like, well, Mike's only good.
Mine's is very good.
I'm going to price it at $20.
Amazon doesn't care.
They're going to give me the buy box every single time.
So it's literally that alone just proves that conditioning your
books is a waste of time.
I can't figure out, try to figure out a way where conditioning your
books makes sense on Amazon besides good, just cutting everything is good.
Right.
It very, it only matters very slightly on eBay.
If you're dealing in generic books, if you're dealing with high
ended collectible or scarce things, well on scarce, there's only like three of you.
So it doesn't matter.
If you're dealing more in collectible things, it matters a little slightly a bit
more, but not much unless you're like in the comic game or collectible card game.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast.
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