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 in episode 18, 10 for me, eight from JB.
Yes, we are almost at the point where we need a higher extra hands to throw up
our episode number at the beginning.
Today's episode is another one of our kind of fun ones where we ask listeners,
viewers on YouTube, uh, some topics or questions they have, and we are basically
just going to address every single one that was dropped over on the YouTube channel.
I think we have nine of them.
So this is going to be a pretty exciting.
There's some, some pretty in-depth questions, some simple ones as well, but
we're going to, we're going to, you know, every single one we're going to address.
So we're kind of going to, uh, jump into it.
Restock limits did go up this, this week, which is good.
I can finally send in an FBA shipment.
It's only been, you know, five months for me.
So that's, it seems like they kind of went up across the board a little bit.
Did they go up for you, JB?
No, but I'm under the threshold now.
So just not that under the threshold to sit in a box.
Yeah.
Mine, mine jumped up like 300, so I can send in like a hundred and something now.
So that's good.
At least it seems like quite a few people got to increase.
So it seems like they're kind of taking the pressure off of those,
but let's jump into these.
This is, uh, it's going to be fun.
So first up we have how, all right, this is, I'm just going to read this as it is.
So it's, I didn't do like any prep on these, right?
So I'm just reading it from a teleprompter basically.
How things were for you both before you hit the inflection point.
E.g.
Funds started to get low before profits really started to roll in.
You were losing motivation, et cetera.
Another topic.
How are, well, let's, let's address that first because this is like,
he's got a few of them rolled in here.
Question.
All right.
Uh, this is, I believe this is Paul from, uh, from the discord.
He just, he was an everything seller previously and he wanted to
kind of niche down.
So, um, the inflection point, how things were for you before
you started making profits.
Cool.
I don't know.
I mean, when you first start, you go days or weeks or a couple
weeks without getting that first sale.
Like I remember the, the, the limit on eBay, you had to get 10 in there
and you had to wait a while and sell something before you can call in
a request, uh, upgrade.
I would say it was probably month two before I started seeing, all right,
this money's starting to roll in.
Um, because for then I was learning how to list and I was doing it wrong.
And, and trying to list as many as I could.
And back then it was a piddly number, like 10 a day or five a day
or something silly like that.
Um, and that, and that was after that whole time period of where I
could only list 10 items at a time.
So for that 10 items a time off the gate, I mean, I didn't get a sale for weeks.
I remember that.
And then I got one.
I was so excited.
Wow.
Now that excitement is long gone.
It's, uh, I guess it's, it's a little bit different for him versus us, right?
Because he was already doing eBay as an everything seller.
So we had a business kind of established.
So he basically had to say, I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing and try
to switch it over in a timely matter where you can get your income back
to the level it was at when you were selling everything, even though you weren't happy.
Um, it was a little bit different for, for me, because I really, when I started,
I was still working full time at my job.
So I still had an income and I kind of built it up on the side.
So like the profits really never were like an initial focus for me
because I didn't need the money.
It wasn't something where, you know, I was going, I quit my job.
I was going, I quit CVS right away and now I'm trying to ramp up immediately.
It's kind of like almost what he's trying to do.
I'm sure he has some cash reserves, but it's, it's one of those things where,
you know, it takes time and you do lose motivation.
It happens.
I mean, that's probably like a monthly thing for every reseller.
You're going to have, you know, days where you're just not motivated
at where you're not getting the results.
Like I just listed 20 things on eBay and none of them sold the past three days.
Like you start second guessing everything.
But I think it just resellings a long-term game and it's, it's about, you know,
relationships and just, just building a, a whole standard operating procedure
for how things work easy for you and how, how you can maximize the profit.
So I think a lot of people get caught up kind of, you know, in the short-term
sale of things or, you know, this month was slow, this quarter was slow.
Start thinking ahead of how next quarter is going to be better.
Different things you're doing to kind of change the, the algorithm in your favor
to, you know, see the results you want to see, but yeah, it's, it's weird.
It, when I first started, you know, I would buy things and they wouldn't sell.
Especially as an everything seller, because you're buying everything.
I mean, it's just, it can be overwhelming.
And when you switch, you just got to, you know, kind of block out the noise
and just focus on what you're doing.
And the more you're focused, the more time you put in your results are going to come,
especially, you know, switching over to Amazon like he is.
Now I do, I do recall fondly by fondly.
I mean, not at all.
I didn't know how to do photo transfers.
Right.
So I get up at 5, AM do my photos.
And then I was still doing, I was still doing a large number of
photos per product back then.
These were different products, but I remember I didn't know how to transfer.
Right.
So I would email myself five photos at a time.
It took three emails per product that I listed.
And I had to wait like 15 minutes per email.
I don't know why, but it sucks so much because it would take me like half an hour
to do one listing, just waiting on the photos alone.
And then plus the listing itself.
I do not miss those days.
Yeah.
I think another thing you kind of can do where profits are, are kind of, you
know, tough in the beginning, especially because I know he's doing some bulk
buys and everything and you know, he's getting a lot of quantity.
It's just start flipping the page.
It's just start flipping that stuff local, throw it up on Facebook.
You're duds up on Facebook, you know, get that 20, 40, 80, a hundred bucks
and use that to buy inventory for your business.
So you're not always, you know, dipping into your bank account, kind of
like what I do with eBay, my eBay money gets turned into, you know, Amazon money.
You're basically just money laundering to get it where you want it to be
at the end of the line.
But yeah, cashflow, you know, you don't want to go out and, and really with media,
what, what, what he's doing, our buy call shouldn't be that much.
So you kind of can get away, but he is in a more expensive part of the country.
So, but there's, there's ways and he's, he's doing what he's got to do.
It just takes time with anything, right?
Amazon's not get rich quick, you know, unfortunately, as many people make it out
to seem going to take a few months for it to grow.
I am planning on doing an outside my shop book sale for like the, these are,
these are probably not even going to sell on eBay books and see what shape
there, so that'd be kind of fun.
I did one of those really early on when I overbought and this was still when I was
housing stuff in the garage and my room and every which way I could tuck books.
So I was like, I got to get rid of these somehow, some way.
And I'm pretty sure I sold some valuable things back then for really cheap,
but I didn't care.
I had so many books, so many, I have more books now, but I have the space for it
now, so it's a different story.
But back then I was like, I'm out of room.
I'm out of room. I got to get rid of some of these books somehow, some way.
All right.
He is the second part of his question is.
How has Resound affected your family and friend relationships?
You want to go first?
No, I mean, for me.
Not on the friend side, not so much as most of my friends work,
work colleagues, to be honest.
We still chit chat every now and then.
They tell me about their business.
I tell them about mine, how things are going.
As far as family goes, I mean, sometimes my pops will come over just to hang out
in the shop and we yell at each other because that's our relationship.
We like yelling each other.
It's how we communicate.
And you should do it this way.
No, you're stupid.
Go away, old man.
But no, I think it's for the better, honestly, because when I was doing my other
jobs before, I would I work all the time now, but I worked all the time.
Then here I could take a break to let's go for Sunday lunch or, hey, let's meet
up later in the week for like an hour somewhere near a place I'm sourcing.
So I think it improved mine, honestly, because before I was doing 120, 140 hours
a week, but I was glued computer and couldn't get away stuck in meetings.
Do you have a big family, like a big immediate family?
No, I don't.
It's very small, actually.
I mean, I got two brothers.
I got a sister.
I got my, my pops and my mom's and that's about the only people I really
socialize with my family.
I have other family members, but we don't really talk.
We see each other every five years for some family function.
That's about it.
Are you the only one that has like a non-traditional job like out of
your brothers and sisters?
No, my sister is an artist.
And this may sound funny to other people, but it's not really funny.
She has narcolepsy.
So this is the, she can't hold a regular job.
So this, her artwork is the only thing that can sustain her as far as
something long-term and that's hers.
My brother was a chicken farmer for about 25 years.
That was a non-traditional job.
He did the farm life.
My other brother worked for Clorox for like 15 years.
He works for some other person like that.
Basically he was the guy in charge of fixing the really complicated
machine when it broke.
So they don't think you're crazy for having a warehouse full of books?
No, not at all.
Cause they're all so crazy in their own different ways.
So this guy's one brother, except the responsible brother, he worked for Clorox.
He's like, yeah, whenever he meets somebody like, yeah, I got a crazy
family, you know, the narcoleptic artists.
We got some guy that lives in a warehouse, some guy chasing chickens around.
I mean, I mean, it's all normal.
What is normal these days, right?
So I guess it's a little different for me because most of my family, you know,
you're traditional, you have a job, you stay with it, you know, that's it.
You get a job, it turns into a career and that's it.
So like it does.
I kind of like, I say it all the time, every once in a while on the video, like,
my family basically thinks like I'm unemployed, right?
I do nothing all day.
I'm a reseller.
Like, oh, what do you mean you sell stuff on eBay and Amazon?
I'm like, well, in actuality, I'm making more money than you, but that's
not a conversation we're ready to have clearly.
So family and friends.
I will say this.
They don't understand the e-commerce side at all.
They get that I'm a bookseller and I've tried to explain them all the, the
finer points to that, but it's beyond them because all of them are not
technology savvy, like myself.
I'm the only one out of the group that really is.
So I'm the one that gets the call when they need the phone set up or the
computer's down, how to fix the kind of person.
All they know is I sell books and I have a lot of them.
That's all they can comprehend.
They don't understand anything else, how it works, even though I've attempted.
It's, uh, it can take its toll though, for sure.
And if you have a really close knit family and a lot of them are like, you
know, career, career oriented people, um, it's, it can, you know, you kind of, I
can see people kind of throw in shade and looking down on reselling because
it's like, people don't understand how the business works.
I mean, and I think we have to almost change, you know, when, when you go talk
to somebody and they're like, Oh, what do you do for a living?
Oh, I'm a reseller or, you know, I sell on eBay.
Like I guess the, the, the word you should be using is like, Oh, uh,
e-commerce, right?
I'm in commerce.
That's exactly what I do.
I don't say I'm a bookseller.
I don't say I'm a reseller.
I say I do e-commerce online.
There you go.
Any questions after that?
Cause they don't understand e-commerce.
They don't know e-commerce.
You got to kind of dress it up a little bit because just saying you're a reseller,
you know, basically a scalper, like people are just like, you get that immediate.
It sounds shady when you say it like that.
It really does to a commoner.
Yeah.
And it just sounds like, I don't, it just sounds like, it sounds like a crappy job,
right?
Oh, I'm a reseller.
Well, what are you reselling?
You know, like it's, it sounds like a set up a booth at the farmer's
market and ring a bell, come buy my books.
No, it's not at all.
So I think the way you get around that, even if you already have like a
identified yourself as a reseller, like with your family and friends, you kind
of can be like, oh yeah, you know, I'm doing e-commerce now, right?
You just, they don't know nothing, right?
What they don't know can't hurt them.
So you just dress yourself up a little bit.
And, and I think, I think reselling is a bad term anyway, because it's really,
you know, just kind of rolls everything into one ball and just, it's just, I
don't know, I don't like the term reseller as like your profession.
Now the other term I've used is online retailer.
That's a word that you can grasp that.
A little bit more, but then you get questions if you use it like that.
Oh, what do you retail books?
Oh, what you made money with?
And then spirals from there.
You also have to accept the fact that some people are just not ever going to
understand it and not ever going to want to be a part of it, right?
Because, you know, I could take any one of my friends or family members and,
you know, get them making six figures a year on Amazon.
Sure.
They just, they're not interested.
They don't care.
Like they don't care.
They get it.
They don't care, they could be working a minimum wage job.
They don't want to hear it.
It's whatever.
So you have to accept the fact that, you know, sometimes there's just some people,
family or friends that you can't win over and that's all right.
You know, you don't gotta, at the end of the day, you should just be, you know,
focused on what you have going on, your immediate family and everything
else will fall into place.
Right.
I mean, I think people are just naturally opposed to the unknown.
And when we talk about this to somebody who's never even watched a YouTube video
on it, they have no idea that it's completely foreign and they don't want to
know because the unknown is not necessarily scary.
It's just, they're preoccupied with whatever they're into and what we're
into, either into it or not, honestly.
And if you're not, or you have no inkling to be, ever be, or want to know anything,
it's different, you just can't.
All right.
Moving on to the last final part of his questionnaire he gave us.
This person?
Oh, wow.
And still Paul, if selling used media became impossible, what might you pivot to?
I think we talked about this a little bit before.
I would probably go some kind of electronics, I guess, or toys.
But I said I wouldn't do toys because I know you would like to do toys.
So I'll stick to my electronics answers.
I'm going toys all the way.
There's so many toys.
I see them all the time for so cheap.
It would almost kind of be the same thing where you have to list quantity,
like a lot of the littles, the smalls, one-offs.
I think you could, I think I thought about this all the time.
You could literally just have a business where you go buy board games and part out
the board games.
Right.
Or the accessories for all the action figures.
Right.
You can make a full-time business with that.
And way earlier on, I was planning on doing toys.
Like when I joined the daily refinement group, they have a toy call.
I was attending those.
I was really excited.
But I was still doing media and I was like, I can't, there's no time to do it.
Unfortunately.
Yeah.
Toys do take a little bit of kind of more of a knowledge base, I would say,
because you got to know the brands, got to know the, you know, I got stuck looking at
those bubble guppies for 30 minutes in the thrift store because I had no idea it was
bubble guppies, right?
If you know toys, you're going to walk in, you're going to know that right away.
But it does take more knowledge, but I would 100% switch the toys, use toys, new toys.
Probably, you know, I would even incorporate the board games because I mean,
I guess they're kind of considered toys.
I would 100%, you know, do the board games as well, piece them out.
And it wouldn't take up a lot of space.
I wouldn't get into big toys.
I mean, I'm not talking, you know, huge Fisher Price sets, but.
Or like the Air Carrier Craft, the six inch GI Joe's had two coffee tables.
Yeah, I kind of stick with, you know, just the small stuff in the toy category.
So you can have, you know, a few storage unit and you could have thousands of items listed
and kind of roll with that.
It's tough though, because, you know, shipping keeps going up.
First class keeps going up.
So kind of keeps eating into it.
I wouldn't do new electronics.
I would do vintage electronics, like the fancier like boom boxes and stuff.
Those are really cool.
And they go for good money, like several thousand dollars.
But finding them, getting the right parts for them, fixing it up and then shipping them,
hoping it arrives, not damaged.
There's just all kinds of failings that come with that.
And your full time customer support for that old electronic after that,
unfortunately, are some of the old Apple computers.
I think it'd be a lot of fun, but it'd be.
A lot more work than what I do now.
Well, I wouldn't say more work.
It'd be a different type of work, honestly.
Yeah, I mean, you could even go the route of vintage electronics and just parts, right?
Everything you get, you part out.
Or like those bulbs in the old radios.
Those are so cool when you look at them.
Yeah, there's so many different things you can do.
I just enjoy media. The ROI is good.
You can, you know, it's not cash intensive, right?
You can have, you know, six figure media business and spend, you know,
under fifteen thousand dollars a year easily.
So it's it's not cash intensive.
And you can grow it to a point where it's kind of, you know, everything runs smoothly.
There's no headaches. You're not testing nothing.
You're just, you know, it's easy peasy.
But yeah, toys for me, old electronics for you.
So I'm going to start saving all the old boom boxes I see.
In radios and vacuum things.
All right, we are moving on.
Next up, we have Sigil, also a YouTube member here.
That's him. I like him.
Sigil, come back to the calls.
He told he's busy. He got, you know, 14000 CDs.
He's got to scan through. We ain't going to see him for like 10 years.
He'll do it in like a weekend.
He will, because he's in the music.
So he says, best methods to scan through a lot of media items with no barcodes.
Amazon seller photo scanner seems to be the most accurate photo recognition,
but is very time consuming to go one by one,
while also having to go through the current offers of each item
and scan to see if it is profitable.
I mean, I have a non-traditional, traditional answer.
Hire a minimum wage employee and have him sit his butt down for 14 hours for $7.25 an hour.
I know exactly why he wrote this up,
because he's got all those CDs that have all those like specialty barcodes that don't scan.
They don't scan. The best way to do that.
It's called a scan.
That's not my funny answer. It's not really funny. I understand, but...
You guys have to think about this.
It's cover scan. I do it all the time.
Separate it. So here's how you got to attack it.
You need a pile of barcodes, pile of cover scans.
You're not scanning anything right away. We're separating, right?
So we're going to say, we're going to load up this table, stacks of barcodes up, stacks of cover scans.
Then you're going to knock out the barcodes first, get rid of those.
Then you're going to do the cover scan.
So the trick with this is it's time consuming to go one by one.
Amazon actually is pretty good with the cover scans for CDs.
And the current offer thing, that's just something you have to say, okay,
well, if you see on that homepage, the lowest offer, right?
Because it shows you the lowest offer.
If you see that number is, you know, 10 bucks, 9 bucks, 7 bucks, you know, you're not taking it.
It's going into the second in Charles pile.
You shouldn't be clicking through any offers.
Take a few CDs, put them in the revenue calculator, see where you want to be with your profits.
And then when you see, hey, if it's under, you know, 7 bucks, then it's in the dud pile.
If it's under 8 bucks, it's in the dud pile.
So all you have to do is scan that initial one and get to that main page of the CD offer.
And then you kind of can make that, you know, make that decision right then and there.
Keep going. That's what I do. I don't click through on any offers.
Sure. The problem is, well, Mike, well, what if, you know, what if Johnny B's the lowest offer at $5 and the next one's up $20?
Well, guess what? The time you're going to save, you know, especially when you have 14,000 CDs to scan,
it ain't going to, you know, the extra 10, 20, 30, 40 bucks you're going to miss ain't going to be worth the extra time of clicking through that 10,000 times.
I promise you that. So just kind of see what your minimum is for your offers.
Get it to that homepage.
Cover scanning is super quick, but you got to have the plan right.
You got to have everything separated when you're cover scanning.
You're just cover scanning. You're not going cover scan UPC, UPC cover scan.
Like you got to kind of have a method to it and just get that number.
And then you kind of can just it'll be just as almost as quick as barcode scanning, honestly.
I mean, it's funny you say that because I did the same thing with books.
I have my ISBNs, my barcodes and books. I got to open up. Right.
I'm talking from both my perspective, how am I going to do this? Right.
I don't go barcode or just be a crack book open.
No, I sort of in the pile.
And then I honestly start with the suckiest pile first, which is crack the book open because it may I tried it the other way where I go from hard to easy or I'm sorry, easy to hard.
And it sucks way more for whatever reason.
Maybe it's a mind thing. I go from hard to easy because I get excited by the end because it's going quicker. Right.
But as far as your particular thing goes, I agree with what Mike said and the ones that don't cover scan, I'm going to say it's you're going to throw away some money.
Sure. But there's going to be way more duds with those manual lookups and then taking the ASE and trying to plug it in your phone to green or red. Right.
I've done that. It's not worth it.
And I'm sure you're going to like I said, I'm sure you're going to throw away a few dollars, but your time that you're going to put in, you could have made so much more money.
It's not worth it.
Yeah, especially with him because he's got a second in Charles, so he shouldn't even be second guessing that he should literally just say, you know what, I'll go get my, you know, 20 cents back per CD and wash my hands of it.
Right. If you don't have a second in Charles, for those listening, you can lock them up by genre the best you can tell or just do a generic CD lot.
Hey, here's 100 CDs, either do an auction or a buy it now kind of thing on eBay or Facebook marketplace.
Try to resell your resell.
Oh, man. This next one is the story of my life so far this year.
We have from three lanterns garden merchant fulfilled versus FBA with newer fees and storage fluctuations is merchant fulfilled the way of the future for used books.
This guy wants the this guy or girl wants the answer to the universe here when it comes to selling media on Amazon.
And our answers are going to be completely different.
You go ahead, Mike.
I 100 percent think that merchant fulfilled needs to play at least if you're doing this full time, minimum 50 percent of your your business.
It has to almost be a 50 50 split between merchant fulfilled and FBA because I do believe that Amazon, it's not that they don't want book sellers because they want sellers of every kind.
But the way they they are skewing their metrics and reach stock limits and removal fees, it is making it next to impossible to be profitable.
Sell and use books, use media if it's selling for under twelve dollars on Amazon anymore.
So the way of the future, I would say, is as crazy as it sounds for me, it's probably going to be closer to 80 percent merchant fulfilled, 20 percent FBA.
It's just the way it is. Amazon wants fast moving stuff in their warehouses.
We can't afford to pay two dollars and change to have a book removed.
Right. Because think about that. Last year, I had close to a thousand books removed at two dollars and fifty cents.
You know, that's an extra twenty five hundred dollars out of my business.
So you can't you can't settle with selling 80 percent and getting rid of 20 percent anymore.
That doesn't work. So I do think that merchant fulfilled is the way of the future.
For used media in general, not just books.
Now, I'm going to preface this with I agree with everything this fine gentleman over here just said.
However, I tried to go bulk volume with merchant fulfilled once we got all these announcements from glorious Amazon.
And what I found is after 4000 merchant fulfilled listings and to clarify what I was doing, anything with an e-score of one or higher went to merchant filled that was not green for FBA.
Out of those 4000 listings and again, they range from an e-score of one to one fifty one. Right.
I have sold a total of eight over three weeks.
Now, what percentage is that, you may ask? That's around two hundredth of a percent.
So. You got to do FBM a little smarter.
You can't volume it is my call on that because I tried it.
It did not work and it was a lot of fun listing all those things.
Let me tell you. However, I'm still playing with the idea of maybe I do put them on FBM while I'm waiting to list them on eBay,
unlist them from FBM and sell off a few.
So I have less to list. Right. Still liquidating my inventory to some degree.
I may or may not do that. I haven't decided fully on that yet.
But everything he just said, you got to do FBM smart, just like you do FBA smart.
You can't volume it in my opinion.
And we can, but you're going to need a gigantic warehouse to get those daily sales,
because that's what I was trying to do with it. How do I get an FBM cell every single day?
And the answer is to what he said and what he's been telling the group.
Honestly, you can't do it in volume. In my opinion.
I think quality over quantity is the new the new way forward for media sellers.
It's not, you know, you just send in a million things and, you know, nine hundred thousand of them are going to sell.
I think it's I think it's kind of been flipped on its head here.
And it was, you know, kind of even before the the whole new rollout of the fees and everything,
it kind of seen Amazon was trending towards that. Right.
You know, last year they went down to nine months long term storage.
This year it'll be six months soon enough, it'll be three months.
So I think I mean, you can continue to do FBA. Right.
But I would challenge you kind of you get in a situation where I was last year,
where you have four thousand books in inventory and restocked,
and that's it and your business goes away for five months. Yeah.
So do you want to keep changing your business model every single, you know, season?
Basically, no, you don't. I don't want to do that.
So you got to kind of get smarter with it.
But Merchant Fulfilled, I think, is the way that the way forward for those that are doing this full time
and kind of want to, you know, continue to do this, you know, unfortunately.
I mean, but if you're doing it part time, you should have enough space, FBA, that it makes sense.
You just got to, you know, be getting better quality stuff, not just, you know, three, four dollar profit.
We're talking ten plus dollars.
Agreed. All right. Yeah.
Here we go. This one's kind of directed at me.
So you're going to have to kind of figure this figure out a way to wiggle your one into this one or maybe, you know,
how how you got the free book deal with the library, how or who do you ask for that?
I got my own free deals. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. So how I got the free book deal with the library,
it was through my Craigslist ad that I make everybody post,
because if you're going to do this, you should be buying in bulk some way, shape or form.
They responded to the ad that I pay for books I pay by the pound.
I pay, you know, 15 cents a pound.
So you would think, well, Mike, why did they give them to you for free?
Well, a lot of people don't want to deal with books.
They're heavy. They're cumbersome. They take up a lot of space.
So they didn't even care whether I paid them or not.
They just said, hey, you know, can you be our book guy?
Because previously they had to take all their books, all the volunteers.
Most people that volunteer at the library, usually older, just to stay active, be involved in the community.
They had to load up their personal vehicles, take the all the donations at the library,
couldn't use to a thrift store and unload them themselves.
So it's crazy to think that that was even a thing before I came along.
But that that's how it was.
They, you know, the volunteers had to load up, you know, cars full of books, take them to the thrift stores and donate them.
So for me, you know, it was just having having the line out there.
I always say how many fishing lines out there sooner or later, you're going to get a bite.
That's how I got it. So if I was going to like.
So now let's approach the second part of this. How or who do you ask for that?
Now, you can't walk in, I can't walk in, you know, Johnny B's library and say,
yo, what are you doing with your donations? I can be that guy.
That's not going to work. You have to build some kind of a relationship with these people.
Go in. Most libraries have like a section where they sell books or free books, talk to people, kind of get to know the people.
Then you kind of can go in and shoot your shot. Right.
You don't want to do it the first day you meet somebody like, hey, Johnny B, nice to meet you.
By the way, you're doing a podcast later today, whether you like it or not.
Like first impressions, you know, they do mean a lot, but you can't go all in on your first impression when it comes to things like this,
at least in my opinion, you got to kind of, you know, wiggle your way in there. Right.
You know, kind of get infiltrate and work your way, you know, from the first. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, and a few people in the group that also, you know, are in libraries, it's the same way they go in.
They talk to the people working there, you know, buy some books, you know, go in there, show your face once a week.
And then after a while, you know, they'll say, hey, what are you doing?
And that's where you say, hey, you know, I I'm a small business.
I run my own online media store.
That's why you always see me in here buying the books and CDs and DVDs.
And then soon enough, once one of those people ask you that, well, they're going to say, hey, we've got a whole pack room of stuff.
We only put out a little bit, you know, at a time and then boom, you're in from there.
That's that's all you got to do. It's all about relationship building and not you can't just walk into these places and just be like,
hey, can I get in the back room? They're going to say, who are you?
Get out of here like security, security.
Well, since I was specifically asked, I'm going to flick on one of mine.
So my pops is a very religious man and he goes to church and they in the senior,
they group them off by age blocks for those that don't know.
And he's on the death row one or what I like to call it, because that's the last age bracket.
But there's only one other place to go after that Sunday school class.
Anyway, within that group, there's the guy who runs the community center for the.
For our town, pretty much, and they have a very small book library that all the seniors do the books, however, they rotate their inventory
and they were having to do what you said, take them to thrift stores and stuff, and they didn't want to do that.
And my pops talked to them, hey, he sells books, why don't you why don't you give them a call?
And they ended up being free after that. But it's so funny.
I've offered to pack them up so many times and they refuse.
They put them in these tiny boxes, which are like senior weight box, right?
They're a little tiny. There's maybe like 10 or 15 books in there.
They stack them in these giant cubes like a gaylord full of these tiny boxes.
And I just go in there. Books are so light. They're great. Right.
I love picking up these boxes and I put them on my cart, stack them up.
They stack nicely, too. But yeah, they prepack the boxes for me when they give me a call,
like once every three months when they're trying to get more inventory in and get the old inventory out, essentially.
I call it inventory, but it's just they're rotating books because they'd like to read seniors or readers.
And maybe. Yeah, so it's relationship based with libraries 100 percent now.
You know, the next one is kind of, you know, kind of hits right on top of that.
We got a Miss Lashay resales. She's a YouTuber. Go check her out.
She sells a lot of media on eBay.
How to approach businesses for backroom access.
Now, this is like this is it's it's it's a different beast than libraries.
Businesses, right. It's about money. The bottom line.
That's how you that's how you get backroom access at businesses.
That's not even like what really backroom access, because I don't think anybody's really going to let you cherry pick their backroom anymore.
I think when you walk into a business and you have something set up, it's hey, I'll take everything you got.
Kind of deal versus you being able to go in and kind of take through what they have in the back that they haven't put out.
Give me your thoughts on this one. No, absolutely.
And I've done this and I still do this. It's a take it all scenario or take none of it.
However, I do agree that you have to.
You don't have to, but I recommend that you kind of buy a few things there first before you make that initial approach.
Yeah, you should on those initial feeling you out kind of buys.
I would always talk to the manager, ask you to manage on duty, just ask them.
Don't even approach that question. Save it.
Ask them for general things like, hey, when you get new books and hey, when you because then they're building in their mind that you want books a lot.
And try to work it that way. You could walk in there and I've done this too, and it has worked like how much for all of it.
I'll take it all right here right now.
I'll take what you got in the back to plus what you got in the floor.
Take it all today. What's your number?
I have done that where I've been really more aggressive.
But again, on some of those, I watched and observed the manager and I hate to say it.
Some people are pushovers and on those pushovers, I make the big play right then and there because the fold like a leaf, honestly.
But that's a judgment call.
And I'm hyper aggressive and I'm very extroverted, so I don't mind doing that for you more people that are a little bit more reserved.
You may want to do it the first way I said, just ask a couple of initial questions and then approach it that way.
But I don't mind walking in there like Billy Badass and doing what I just said, either.
That's pretty smart. You kind of you basically insinuate that you want to be in the back room without saying it, right?
You know, hey, when you guys put out your books, is it weekly? Do you have a specific book person?
You know, CDs, DVDs or whatever you're doing.
And you kind of you don't say, hey, you want it.
You're not saying directly, hey, can I go in the back room?
But you're saying, hey, I'm interested a lot in your media.
Show up a few weeks, talk to if it's the same manager, then maybe you can say, hey, you know, you have anything in the back room that you haven't put out yet?
And that's another way you can do it, right?
You have anything in the back you haven't put out yet, you know, like.
You're not really saying you want to be in the back skin and everything, you don't care.
You're just like, yeah, we got a lot. I'll bring it out.
That's fine. It's basically the same as back room access.
Yeah, but it is a little bit different, I think, for businesses to library, because the businesses,
you know, they're about making money if they want to keep their doors open.
So you have you do have leverage when it comes to just walking in and just being like, hey, I have a media business.
And, you know, I see you got a whole bookcase of DVDs.
If I buy every single one at 10 cents a piece, is that fine?
And then, you know, you really ain't got nothing to lose.
It is one of those things, though, for sure, like going in and just saying that is like takes a little bit of guts to do it.
And not a lot of people are kind of into that thing.
So the relationship way is the way to go and just kind of chatting up, you know, when when when you get new stuff,
how often you put out new items, you know, things like that.
That'll probably be the more efficient route that most people would go versus going in, you know, and just saying you want everything.
Now, here are a couple tips for you guys.
You may or may not know them, but here, take them anyway.
Who speaks the first number automatically lost that negotiation.
So you want them to speak the first number like how much we take for.
Oh, I don't know.
Stare at them, they'll give you a number eventually.
Another thing to do is ask before you even get to the by question when he is ask,
well, how many books do you think you sell a week?
Ask these kind of questions that way when they give you the high number, you can well, honestly throw it back in their face.
Well, you said you only sell like 10 books a week.
Are you sure that's as low as you will go?
So you want to have some leverage built up before you get to the negotiating table.
That's how you do it.
Yeah, most people, you know, most these places aren't selling books like that frequently,
at least in my observations in the years I've been doing this, you know, you never walk into a place and they're like, oh, somebody just bought all the books.
It's always you always see the same, you know, same book sitting there on that shelf that's been there for months.
So you definitely have leverage when it comes to media because a lot of it's slower moving items and it's cumbersome and it takes up a lot of space on the sales floor.
So you can leverage that as well.
Right. Even to what you said, how often do you put out books?
If they say we never have to put out books, they move slow.
Well, that's a lot of leverage right there.
Yeah, I don't even want them that I'm believing.
All right. So moving on here, we have a number, a number, another member, Thomas here.
Lost my tap here says, how to get to 100K in sales, what it looks like, realistic expectations, the numbers and systems you need to reach.
This is a loaded question.
I basically did 100K last year between Amazon, eBay, all my media stuff.
So I kind of can give you a quick breakdown of my last year numbers.
I sold right around 4200 items total across the platforms.
Now, that was, you know, that's a that's a lot of volume and that's that's a lot of work.
That's a lot of thrifting, a lot of prep and a lot of shipping, a lot of everything.
But that was the business model where I was taking, you know, five dollar profit books and sending them in.
So it's kind of a little bit different now for me.
But last year, you know, it's kind of what you're looking at, you know, four, four thousand sales, give or take some average sales price of right around like sixteen, seventeen dollars.
And you literally just have to keep keep going like you can't slow down.
You always got to have your foot on the gas because you're doing volume.
Now I'm kind of looking for higher profit items.
So it's a little bit different. I won't have to do nowhere near as much volume because the items I'm selling are selling for a higher average sales price, you know, close to double what it was last year.
So I would have to sell half of that. But you're looking at minimum, you know, to two thousand probably sales.
If you're going to do media minimum on the high end, two thousand sales in a year, I think is kind of just me.
Like I'm not there's no prep for this. Right. I'm just kind of spitballing what's on my mind here.
Two thousand sales and you're going to have to have a really nice average sales price.
And I don't know, that's kind of like the Amazon eBay side for me.
I wasn't nowhere near investing as much in eBay last year. So that's my take on it.
What do you think? I'm going to get the answer.
Not going to make a lot of people happy. Thirty a day for six and a half years if you're strictly doing books,
you can make that time frame different and your ASP has to be between twelve and eighteen dollars, by the way.
Roughly that's sixty thousand listed items active.
You can make that quicker by doing fifty a day. You can shave some time off.
You can also make that quicker by figuring out how to master your volume and sales with like their coupons and their other marketing.
Multi-quantum devise is the key. So as you get closer eBay compounds, that's the secret to eBay.
It compounds with your consistency. So you can do that.
Again, you can increase the amount of listings you do, sure. Or you can figure out how to get multi-quantum devise.
It's both roads lead to the same end result. You figure out how to do both.
Well, you can make that and.
It's hard to push it. You can do it in one year, you can do it in two years, but I could say to do the least amount of work be thirty a day for six and a half years every day.
That's how you would do that. And you're going to make more than 100K because, like I said, eBay compounds.
So you don't just stop after six and a half years.
So that 100K year one or that first year you make it will probably end up being one twenty five, one fifty the second year.
And they'll just continue to grow up from there.
Eventually, you're going to reach a point where you're selling more than you list and then you have the choice at that point to either maintain the amount you're listing or to increase it to continue that compounding because you're going to reach that critical mass point at some point.
Yeah, I think I think one thing here is, you know, I think it's much more feasible to do 100K on Amazon versus eBay.
You would agree, correct? I agree 100 percent. It'd be much faster to do it that way.
And I don't I mean, I think the number you can max out as a one person operation is a lot higher on Amazon than eBay as well.
Maybe I mean, Amazon kind of shuts down for five months out of the year and eBay never shuts down.
And again, I think it'd be the amount you can put out on eBay and then on Amazon is the quality, like you mentioned, sending in the quality things to reach that number.
If you're sending in one dollar profit items and do it, but you're going to that's a grind, man.
I mean, eBay is its own grind. It's different kind of grind. Sure.
But I think I think the easiest way to earn 100K between the two is definitely Amazon, I would say.
But you can you definitely can have 100K media business on eBay, Amazon, one, not the other, one, not the other. It works both ways.
You just have to refine your process. I'd be willing to say here, we're going to have a few of us that are going to cross 100K this year in the in the discord,
just the way people have been rocking and rolling already. And that's going to be a huge jump from their numbers from last year.
So it's definitely possible. You just have to put in the time and just you've got to find the stuff right. Because, you know, you can put in the time.
But if you're not finding stuff, it doesn't matter because you're just wasting your time.
Right. And for me, I hired employees to list a hunt collectively. We're going to launch 100 active listings a day.
So that speeds up my track to get to where I want and to get a compounds after after that date a year or two later. So.
There's ways you could do it more efficiently, like higher e-scores, higher profit books like an Amazon world or more listings on eBay or more multi buys on eBay.
And now here's the fun part, if you can do both 100K on both or 50K on each one, you made your 100K.
Yeah, I mean, it's all money, right? It doesn't matter how you make it, it's whatever works.
And it's whatever you have in your area. Right. If you have a bunch of antique books and, you know, eBay has to be the play.
But that's perfectly fine because you can have old business built around that alone.
Right. And that's kind of like me. Well, I'm not antique. I say I'm more vintage than antique. That's what my business is.
Yeah, yeah. Yours is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not strictly antique. I'm more in that vintage period.
The vintage stuff is trash to me. I'm either antique or barcode. Anything in between. Get it out of here.
Yeah, just mail it to me, Mike. It's cool. All right. So that was kind of a loaded question.
I mean, and whatever you whatever you're dealing with, Thomas, like if you feel like you're kind of, you know, at a choke point and you can't grow anymore, just hit me up.
We'll figure something out that works best for you. All right. Now we have our last group of questions from Josh.
Josh is also a YouTuber. He sells everything on eBay. He is pretty heavily into media, though.
Josh Graf over on YouTube. Check him out. Getting ungraded in McGraw Hill. Is it trouble or easy?
I have two hundred fifty dollars in books. I need to decide what to do with published by them.
So I reached out to Brian. Brian's a member of the discord. He got ungraded, ungraded.
He ungraded like cheese. He got ungraded in McGraw Hill through Christian Book. So I pulled it up here.
Now you're going to have to find one you're actually gated in.
But the cheapest one they have currently is six dollars and thirty two cents a piece.
You buy 10 of them and put you at sixty three dollars shipping, probably put you to seventy dollars.
So if this was one you were gated in from McGraw Hill, it's going to get you ungraded for your two hundred and fifty dollars.
The seventy dollars would be a good investment. So you can use Christian Books just to find a McGraw Hill you're gated in.
That's what he did. It worked for him. Others in the group as well.
But he kind of was the guinea pig that jumped in to do it.
So, yeah, just use Christian Book. Wait for a good sale and definitely do it because you're always going to come across McGraw Hill textbooks and are probably going to be valuable.
So sooner or later, you're going to want to get ungraded.
And if you can do it for under one hundred bucks, I'd say it'd definitely be worth it.
And you already have two hundred fifty bucks sitting there. So that's how I would go about that one.
That's kind of like, you know, I don't know what you want to add to that because there's really nothing to add sucker.
I mean, you're right. And for me, I just think about it instead of being ungraded.
But each their own buyback your books is this next one profitable or waste of time.
So buyback companies overall. What's your take on these?
Your take going to be different than mine because you got a warehouse and you kind of just list anything.
I read my own buyback program. It's called eBay.
No, that's my real answer on that.
But if I didn't do eBay and I was just an Amazon seller looking at you from that perspective, I would say and I still did bulk.
Just to clarify, I would say it can recoup you some money.
And I didn't have a second in Charles or a place that would buy books from me.
And I didn't want to bother Facebook. I'd say you could recoup some money with these buyback program.
But overall, you're going to lose out because everything else is better than these buyback programs.
eBay, Facebook, garage sale. You're just going to get more money out of it.
However, if you just want out of your life because you just have no other option or you're out of time, time is a real factor, too.
If you still have time to do the other things, I would say sure, use it.
OK, I got a question for you.
Would you take 20 cents from a buyback company today or take a dollar in three weeks?
If you know, you know, sold it yourself.
20 cents versus a dollar, take a dollar.
There you go. So me and him are, you know, we think opposite when it comes to this.
I don't want to see it, right? I don't want no parts of it.
I see it once. I want it out of my life.
But I'm going to give my dollar.
So he's still hung up on it three weeks from now.
He's going to be asking for his dollar and I ain't got it.
It's I think it's what you want to do, right?
And I know you sell everything on eBay over there.
So it's kind of like if book books interest you and it's something, you know,
you kind of, you know, kind of excite you a little bit when you're listening.
I know you have tons of eBay listings.
You got a he does have an antique booth.
Now, I'm not sure what he's played with when it comes to that.
But that could be another way where, you know, instead of getting your 20 cents,
you just sell all your books for a dollar, things like that.
So he does have a little bit more factors at play.
But I really think it comes down to what you want your business to look like. Right.
Are you fine selling a lot of low profit stuff?
You know, but, you know, that comes with a lot of things.
You got to be cheaper with, you know, just Polly bags.
You're not going to use bubble mailers for an eight dollar book.
That wouldn't make sense.
So it really comes down to what you want your business to look like.
Buy back your books.
100 percent does buy back companies do work great for a lot of people in the group.
A lot of people have, you know, their sell back your books
box in their sourcing room and they fill it up after you get over 750.
It's free shipping, things like that.
So they they do have a place.
A lot of people use a lot of the different services.
There's so many of them now.
It's kind of like Amazon software.
It's like they're probably used to only be like one guy, you know, the clutter,
just one guy in his basement somewhere.
And now there's like 50 different buy back companies.
So I'll give a little scenario to justify.
I really defend my point because I don't really need to defend it.
It is everybody's business is different.
Your business sucks.
My business is more your business is dead.
My business takes three weeks longer.
Yeah.
But now, like I think I mentioned it before about my ranch romances, right?
They listed back in May.
Now, everybody in the brother would have told me just put those things in a lot and.
And the three or four hundred dollars and sure.
Sure, but I ended up selling mine for more than four times that amount
because I did not do that.
But I had to wait way longer to get that.
And this justifies Mike's question.
He asked me 20 cents today or a dollar tomorrow or a dollar in three weeks.
I'm that dollar in three weeks guy for that very point.
I'll wait for my money a little longer, but I'll get more money that way,
at least on the eBay side.
That's how my brain thinks.
You don't have to agree with me.
It's fine if you don't.
It really is.
It's your business.
Do it how you want.
But I just want to give some insight into how I think.
Yeah.
And you know, you have the space.
It's kind of your business model.
What you do is unique, right?
I mean, nobody else does eBay listings like you.
So it's like you got to figure out what you want.
You know what?
What?
You know, what excites you?
You love you writing up these crazy descriptions for these books.
That's like, you know, it's like a passion, right?
So you don't mind if you got a thousand things to listen,
even if they take forever to sell.
You enjoy the process.
For me, I don't want no parts of that.
I'm just like, get it out of here.
You know, it is what it is.
I'll take my nickel 10 cents and turn it into something else.
But especially at scale, and I know he does buy a lot of bulk.
The buyback companies can be a huge benefit to you
if you don't want to deal with it.
If you already have a lot of moving pieces behind the scenes
and if you want to get your time back,
then just have a box set up and then get rid of it.
Once it's full, it's that easy.
I do know a guy in my other group.
He does really well with his antique booth
and it's all full of books.
He has it like 500 at a time.
And these are his non-eBay books that look cool at face value,
but they just have no value on eBay itself.
And it's also a heavier foot traffic antique mall.
It's like one of those is between three different states.
It's like one of those borderline.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, it gets a lot of traffic.
So that was a great play for him.
It was the right place, the right venue.
And it got rid of it.
It still gets rid of his, quote unquote, eBay duds.
Yeah, it's one of those things.
It's tough, right?
Because if you're getting them in bulk,
then you're really not worried about recuperating
as much of your money, right?
Because when you pay a nickel, 10 cents, who cares?
You get what you get.
You're not really worried about whether or not
you can turn that bulk into profit
because you're playing the scale game.
You're not playing a single flip game.
So it definitely has a place in a lot of people's businesses.
Personally, I don't use it as much.
I just cherry pick eBay, Amazon, Second and Charles, donate.
That's my method.
I really don't mess with buyback companies that much,
but a lot of people do, and a lot of people
make decent money doing it.
If you're restricted in something,
you could get your money back that way,
giving it to a buyback company or something like that.
Absolutely.
All right.
Dude, that's a good one.
Dude, that's it.
It's the end of the line.
He wants more.
And maybe next time you'll get more.
I'm going to make everybody put one in.
We need more.
It'll be like a 12-hour podcast episode.
As always, we appreciate every single one of you listening.
Sorry, members.
We don't hide nothing behind the members' paywall
with these kind of listener questions.
So we will see you guys next week.
Thanks for hanging out.
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