Welcome back to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube,
along with my friend and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses
from the ground up.
We also have a weekly Zoom call and private Discord
for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash used book guy
to join the channel and gain access
to the full length podcast Zoom call
and private Discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up, everybody? Welcome into episode 19.
Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Today's episode is gonna be a good one.
We are gonna talk about shortcuts.
The good, the bad, the lazy, the efficient
and everything in between.
So I guess the first thing people try to shortcut is,
it's all like getting started, I think,
is like where you run into a lot of the shortcuts, right?
You just started reselling and you wanna,
you're already looking for ways to kinda game the system,
right?
It's not like, you know, you wanna put in the time
and effort.
A lot of people that get into reselling today,
they see usually some kind of social media video,
of, you know, Johnny B's making a million dollars
in his warehouse.
He's driving Lamborghinis, you know, it's just,
it's crazy.
And it works, right?
A lot of people have gotten into reselling
over the past few years more than ever.
And I think the unfortunate reality is a lot of people
look for shortcuts right away.
And that's probably the last thing you should do
when you start reselling as a business overall.
I guess we'll jump into like, what's the biggest,
if you started today and had to take one shortcut
from the beginning, do you have something like
that's on your mind that you would automatically
come to the top of your head?
Because I know what mine would probably be
if I went back, you know, to when I first started reselling
or maybe when I was a lot younger.
For me, it would be not using, not cashflow in the business.
Just signing up for a credit card and saying,
this credit card's my reselling business
and I'm gonna use this for everything.
And that would be probably a shortcut.
And I know a lot of people do that, especially,
not so much with media, but R-A-O-A,
a lot of people are just like,
well, I'm gonna go get a credit card
and this is how I'm gonna build my business.
And personally for me, I think that's a stupid idea
because that credit card has to be paid off every month.
You're not gonna turn your money
over that quick start and now.
So I think that's a shortcut
that kind of irritates me personally.
And I see a lot of people doing it.
You got a different one for me.
Like if you just started out with something that, you know,
maybe is like in the forefront of a shortcut
that you see people doing that maybe you would do
like in a different lifetime.
Right, I did this later.
I didn't do it at the beginning
and I was stupid for not doing it,
was getting all the free stuff.
Like the free Rolo, or they're not Rolo labels,
they're UPS labels.
I got five, 10,000 of them for free.
And there's also free pickups, like for tubs and stuff.
You see those tubs behind me?
I got those for a different reason.
But I could have started with looking on Facebook Marketplace
or Craigslist getting free equipment.
Cause you can search for the word free
and see what can apply to your reselling business.
I should have done that from the get-go
instead of let's head on down to Lowe's
and get what I need.
That would have been a smarter thing to do.
But I did that later.
Again, I was learning everything.
I was like, oh, I'll get tubs.
I'll get packing tape.
I'll get bubble wrap.
But you can find that stuff free or relatively cheaper
instead of going to a retail box store.
Yeah, so basically, a supply shortcut almost, right?
Be a little bit smarter when you're starting out.
But see, the problem is here, when people start out, JB,
they want to run.
They don't want to walk.
They want to be making 10K their first month.
They're not here to climb the hill slow.
They want to be at the top by the end of the month.
And I think that's why a lot of things like that
kind of get overlooked.
And it is, right?
It's crazy how much free stuff you see is out there.
We're all using the freebie app.
And it's every day people putting up things for free.
And I was the same way, buying these shelves.
Do I really need these shelves?
Probably not.
But hey, every other reseller on YouTube's got shelves.
So guess what?
The used book guy needs shelves or I'm inferior.
Right?
I think another thing with shortcuts is inventory.
People try to take shortcuts with inventory.
So you're probably thinking, how can you
get a shortcut with an inventory?
Well, for media, the big shortcut is, well, hey, JB,
where can I buy them Gaylords of books?
And that's the huge shortcut we deal with all the time.
Because it's a shortcut in your mind,
because you see it as I have 20,000 books showing up
to my front door.
It's a shortcut up front, right?
Because hey, you're really not worried about the money
you need the inventory.
But it's actually a long cut.
Because once you get your 20,000 books,
you've got to figure out what to do with them.
And regardless of what niche you're selling in, clothing,
shoes, if somebody dumps that much inventory on you,
you're going to be in for a world of trouble.
And it's probably going to slow your business down
more than if you were driving one hour one way every day
to go to a thrift store and cherry pick.
Now, I will play devil's advocate here,
though I do agree with you.
But being the devil all of a sudden, that I am,
one of the bigger shortcuts down the road,
not at the beginning, like you're saying,
is to figure out how to make your supply come to you.
Because your time ends up being more valuable and more
precious.
Doing the Gaylord route outside right when you start,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't do that.
I mean, go into a garage sale and saying maybe buy it all.
And that's not an equivalent of a Gaylord.
Let's say they had, I don't know,
four or five totes of books.
That's a smarter play to get your toes wet, first of all,
and figure out how to deal in bulk.
And maybe make smarter plays.
Because going the Gaylord route, and I
don't know if a lot of people realize that, not all of it
is going to be profitable.
And I'm not talking about just pulling the greens out.
I'm talking about from batch to batch.
So your second Gaylord, your first one
may had 40 greens in it.
Great, I'm going to do this all the time.
Woohoo.
Your next batch may have 10 or five or none.
So you got to experiment with that.
And that's, again, a long term play.
Me, I don't deal in Gaylords.
But I do deal in bulk.
But I go out and pick up my inventory.
I can see my inventory.
I can touch it.
I don't play the freight cost game.
I mean, I'm playing the gas and time game.
Sure.
It does take time.
And sometimes it's two or three trips.
But I think what I do is smarter in the sense
of I know what I'm getting before it just suddenly
shows up on my front door.
However, I do trade off my time for that
and wear and tear my own personal vehicle.
I think you kind of hit a good point here.
It's like a lot of shortcuts come from people
that are just starting, right?
It's hard for me or you to come up with a shortcut.
Because we've been doing this for years.
Maybe we can refine a process.
But I think that's just a change in vocabulary
as you sell longer.
And as you take your business more serious,
it's not a hobby.
You treat it as a business.
I think your vocabulary changes.
So I'm never like, hey, I got a shortcut for you.
It's always like, hey, maybe do this to save yourself some time
or change your process.
I don't even think before this we've ever even
said the word shortcut to each other
in all the conversations we had.
I never use it.
I use the term refinement or my process.
That's what I use.
I don't say shortcut.
I mean, if you think about it, we'll
say the first three months you started reselling.
That goes for anybody out there.
If somebody dumped 20,000 items that you had to look through
and sell, you probably wouldn't make it past that point
because it would just be too much.
And a lot of people start out.
They go right into it.
They don't want to walk the steps.
They want to go right to the top.
And unfortunately, immediately, Skalords is that thing.
And other people do it where you just a whole bunch of clothes,
even if you're a clothes seller or shoe seller,
everything still has to be processed.
And just because you got 20,000 items sitting there,
that won't mean nothing.
Who cares?
They'll probably sit there for the rest of the year
because you're never going to get through it.
And what I hate in no offense the other YouTubers that
have actually done this and were successful doing it,
but I see them buy the Goodwill palettes or the Amazon return
boxes too.
And they say, woohoo, bunches of money.
These two items pay for the whole thing.
Well, the counter argument that a lot of people run into,
it's not even an argument.
It's just fact.
They'll get that same box from that same company
and there's no items that cover the thing of the box.
Or there's just a bunch of stuff that's
going to take you forever to get through,
especially if it's mixed like a Goodwill box would be mixed.
It's usually not as well it can be.
Usually it's just a box of mixed things.
Now you're an everything seller.
How do you deal with everything?
And that just puts you into a whole other whirlwind
of problems you got to deal with.
You got to get different boxes.
You got to figure out what you can sell on what platform.
And it's a nightmare.
Unfortunately, pal, nobody's going
to show their mystery palettes they bought and lost $1,000.
Exactly.
Nobody wants to click on that.
Nobody's going to click on that.
That's not good YouTube content.
I mean, it would be because people like that kind of stuff.
People kind of like seeing other people fail to an extent.
But I feel like people, especially some
of these people on YouTube, they're too proud to say
that I lost $1.
If I say I lost $1, that's the end of the line.
It's ridiculous.
Oh, man.
I would be more entertained by those videos.
That would actually teach me a lot more than what they won on.
Because I like to see what they lost on.
So I know what's not worth my time,
what's not worth my money.
I think that's a lot more valuable, actually.
Yeah, but sitting there recording yourself saying
you just lost $1,000 and people ain't got the guts
to do that kind of thing, at least not yet.
I mean, I'm sure there's some out there.
But like you said, I even seen like there's even
like reality shows about this stuff.
I seen them the other day.
It's like just people cutting open their palette
of Amazon returns.
And that's a $100 bill.
And that's a $300.
But like, get out of here.
You guys are living in a fantasy world.
It's not even true like what they're saying it's worth.
All right.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, go ahead before I move on to the next topic.
I was going to segue us to the next topic.
But you go ahead.
It's your show.
No, no.
You went first.
You got to go.
All right.
Another thing I thought was a shortcut is space.
And I'm going to reference these tubs that I referenced earlier.
See how they stack all nice and neat?
Well, guess what?
They stack all nice and neat in my truck too.
And I can go about four high like that with zero straps
because they have divots in them and they stack like Legos.
And because of their weight, they
don't really shift around because they're books, right?
Now, if you're dealing in lighter products like DVDs,
I don't know if I do that.
But in books, I would do that.
So that was a shortcut because even when they come in,
I can stack them like that until I
get to them, which makes it more space efficient, honestly.
So how do you maximize, especially for your people
that are still working out of your home or your garage,
how do you maximize your small space?
Because even my warehouse is relatively small.
I don't think I spoke about it other than it is.
So even a whole warehouse, guys, it's half of one.
I share this building.
Mine's about on the interior 1,046 square feet.
It's small.
I got about 1,400 if you include the front porch.
But I don't use the front porch really.
But I literally have probably 40,000 to 50,000 books in here,
all things said and done in 1,000 square feet.
And I did it smartly because these bookshelves go pretty
much to the ceiling.
Those tubs go there.
And then I can stack the tubs to the ceiling
when they're empty.
I thought about how do I work in a small space?
And I think that's going to help me out
when I go to a larger space because I
can stay in my larger space or medium space
a lot longer learning how to use space efficiently.
I mean, you and I have talked about on the side
on your storage unit, here, Mike, here's
what I did when I worked out of storage unit
because I was like Mike.
I had one and then I had eight eventually.
Now I'm in a warehouse.
But it's how do you work with what you got?
Again, that's going to eat up some time capital
because you've got to put your think cap on.
But in my opinion, that's well worth it.
And that is a grade A shortcut.
Take some time to think about what you're doing
before you just do it.
And while you did it wrong, now you've
got to correct your mistake.
Yeah, I think that's a big one.
Is take your time and think ahead
where your business is going to be in the next month,
the next month.
Don't make the impulse decision today to just say, hey,
I'm going to go buy all this stuff that you don't need yet.
We will cross that bridge when the time comes.
And by the time that time comes, you're
going to have a lot more knowledge of what
your business looks like, what exactly you need.
Instead of just, it's like you get a warehouse today.
I get a warehouse today and I just
go buy random totes and shelving.
And you really don't know.
Does it fit in the actual shelf you bought?
It takes measurements.
It looks pretty, right, though?
You walk in, here's my whole warehouse with empty shelving.
You can't just take a picture of the warehouse
without shelving and things.
So it's weird.
It kind of pulls on just people's natural instinct
to just make things look pretty, I guess,
and have space filled up.
I mean, personally.
It's not OCD mentality.
It just looks nice and everything looks all organized.
Like I've seen people buy their shelves yay big, right?
You can't see my hands, but they're about a foot and a half
for people listening.
But then they buy totes about eight inches.
Well, you just lost some inches.
Wouldn't it be smarter to buy some totes
that fit in that shelf, make it its maximum?
And then enough room where you can pull it out easily,
maybe an inch on either side.
But I think they get caught into what you're saying.
They like it to be pretty and organized.
And who are you showing this off to?
I mean, other than yourself, you're showing your wife.
Look, hey, look, it's all pretty, wife or husband.
Hey, husband, it's all pretty.
So what you're saying is if I didn't have a YouTube channel,
my storage unit would be even more of a mess
than it already is.
And you're 100% correct because I don't want to come off
as a slob, right?
I don't want my just books everywhere in the background.
It's still a mess.
We've got posters on yours, but I get why you do that.
It's for YouTube.
And you like that stuff you have on your wall.
It's your studio, more or less.
Yeah, yeah.
It's more or less my studio.
And it's not just random stuff.
I'll keep those when I move out of my unit.
Those are going to stay with me wherever I go, right?
But yeah, I think a lot of people
kind of get caught up with that.
And it's not really a shortcut going out today
and buying something that you don't need.
That's a bad cut.
Like, hang on to your receipt because you're probably
going to return it because you're not going to need it.
One thing for me in my new bookcase
is all the shelves are adjustable.
There you go.
I mean, if you're going to go that route
and you want to go buy things today,
then have something that you can change down the road, right?
Because some of these shelving units,
I have the huge plastic, the big plastic ones, right?
And you can't move those shelves.
And like you said, the spaces in between them are so huge.
For me, thankfully, I put all my packing material in there.
But you couldn't store any kind of products
on there efficiently because they're not all the same size
and they're huge.
The boxes, it would just be, it just wouldn't make sense.
But if you go to Home Depot, they're the cheapest ones
you can get because they're not adjustable,
they're not metal, and it'll cost you $40.
So I can see why people do it, but you don't really
think it through, honestly.
Now, I don't know if I talked about it on the podcast,
but I talked to our Discord group about it and you.
I had custom bookshelves built and three different models.
So I'm still going through the prototype stage.
But my requirements for all of them,
it's able to fit through the front door.
I don't have to deconstruct it.
It can just be carried out.
It's heavy, takes four of us to move it.
But it could just be carried out through the front door.
It's a standard size door.
These things are very tall.
They're close to 10 feet tall each.
That was part of the building thing
because I was planning for the long term.
I cannot, I'm not going to stay in my half-size warehouse
forever.
Everything I bring in here, I need
to be able to take with me.
So I'm investing in things that fit that metric
that I'm not just going to toss away
or I'm not going to just sell off down the road.
Everything that I'm getting now, even if I was in a storage
unit, same mentality.
Wherever I do my grow mode, that stuff has to come with me.
How does it come with me?
What fits that metric in order to make that jump?
So thinking a lot, getting that thought process in your mind
ahead of time will save you a lot of time and actual money.
Because I don't want to have to rebuy stuff down the road.
Why would I rebuy stuff?
Just because I moved.
I want to be able to use what I have forever.
I got the ultimate eBay shortcut I'm
going to throw at you, Mr. eBay guy.
Before I give you my opinions on,
I'm going to let you run it into the ground
or lift it up to the sky.
The big eBay shortcut is sell similar item.
Yes.
All right, give me pros and cons.
The pros are selling something similar off yourself
because you set it up properly.
Selling similar off somebody's listing
and you taking the risk of it being wrong
because you don't know any better or the information
is half right and you spend a lot more time correcting
somebody else's mistakes.
That's not saying you didn't make mistakes off
your own listing.
But I believe you can trust what you
did, the quality of your work, a lot more than what somebody
else did.
But you won't have sell similar off something brand new
in your store right off the bat.
So you have to build those listings from scratch
yourself the first time.
Today, I can sell similar off myself pretty easily.
But some of my older listings, even when I do sell similar,
I notice mistakes I made way early on.
I still have to spend time correcting my own past mistakes.
Past me was a lazy person.
But present me is not so lazy.
So something that I sold last month that I can sell similar
off of, even if it's genre based,
helps me out dramatically.
That's a huge, quote unquote, shortcut.
So do you sell similar off other people at all now or is it?
No, never.
Woo.
See, listen, that's an eBay pro you're listening to.
Only sell similar off itself.
Me, one listing a day, I maybe sold similar off myself
a few times with just certain things,
like my little metal bikes.
There's no listing.
So I just sold similar off that.
But I will sit here and say 100% everything he said is true.
Because when I sell similar, I'm not just,
you know, I think what a lot of people do,
you'll probably agree, is they're not double checking
Bozo the Clown's work from before, right?
They did a low quality listing and they're
going to sell it or you're going to sell it before they do.
And you're going to maybe get a return.
You're going to maybe get an item not as described.
It's not worth it.
You're 100% correct also when it comes to it
takes a lot more time when you're double checking
somebody else's work rather than just doing it yourself,
especially with books.
I see it all the time.
I just, people like, I don't even know what they try.
Some people try to put in the measurements of the books,
the page numbers, and everything is just wrong.
Like the publisher is wrong.
And I'm not even talking like, you know,
it's like a double day book publisher.
And they won't even have anything close to that.
It'll just be like, you know, the used book guy published
this, you know, in 1901 when it's really, you know, 1981.
It's a-
It's first in DVDs and CDs,
because in the title structure,
it puts special characters, commas, parentheses,
the eBay algorithm doesn't like special characters
if you're not in the know.
Exclamation points, star emojis.
Who wants those star emojis?
I sold something that had a fire emoji in the title.
How do you like that?
I mean, I'm not saying they don't sell.
I'm just saying eBay as a whole doesn't like it.
In my defense, it was a sell similar.
So I think, I think that's a shortcut
that when you start out, if you're going to go that route,
just make sure you're double checking everything.
Listen, you don't know who is creating these.
It's not like, you know, they're eBay, eBay, you know,
listing some professional eBay person's doing this.
You know, this is Johnny B 2.0,
lives in a different timeline, don't know what he's doing,
and just putting whatever numbers he thinks.
He looks at the book and says,
that is probably 200 pages in this, 200 pages.
And this is probably, you know, published in 1960.
Well, I think what happens is,
funnily enough, we're going to tie Amazon into eBay.
Funnily enough, I think a lot of those sell similars
that are scanned are the scans from the eBay scraping
when you use cross-listing software.
When it's sold so much, eBay takes it,
okay, this is the default thing
when it's scanned on eBay, right?
But that Amazon listing is wrong.
So people, it's like a fax machine, right?
A copy of a copy of a copy.
But the starting copy was wrong to begin with,
even though it still sells, but the information's wrong.
And it just takes a couple of bad returns
if you do this in scale to, oh, I'm in trouble now,
boys and girls.
Yeah, I think it's a good tool.
You just have to double check the work
if you're going to be selling similar off other people.
Unfortunately, that's just the reality of it.
And it doesn't take that long anyway.
So don't just hit sell similar
and just scroll past all the item descriptions
right to the bottom, right?
It's like, I could see so many people doing that.
And I see it all the time because there's no difference
in the description of the items.
It's the same description.
Oh yes, you know, there's no change in anything.
So you can go look on eBay for anything now.
You'll see 10 of the same listings
and they're all wrong because they all hit sell similar.
They're all using the same stock photo, right?
And that's, and like I was saying at the beginning,
when you're starting, you're not going to have anything
to sell similar off yourself off
because you're still building your store.
Take the time to learn it
instead of trying to sell similar off somebody else.
So you can do, I think you should do a better quality job
than a quantity job at the end of the day.
Now there's other arguments for just throw enough up there
and law of averages will take effect.
You'll sell stuff.
You'll sell more than the guy taking his time.
However, for me, I disagree with that mentality
and I like doing a quality job with my listings.
And I'm not saying the quantity guy's wrong
when it comes to mathematics
and how much profit they're going to pull in
if they throw up 30,000 listings in four months.
I'm not, but I'm saying the risk versus reward
long term, like two or three years down the road,
your metrics are going to be that great
or you're going to make so many mistakes
off of that quantity game
where you could get your account shut down
if you're not monitoring what's going on.
If you're trusting in your software so much
that you're not monitoring a mistake,
but it's a mistake compounded by like 3000 items, right?
And those 3000 items sold and those 3000 returns come in,
that may shut your account down and you're screwed.
That's going to get us into software, software shortcuts.
These things exist heavily on Amazon, eBay,
there is cross-listing software, like you said.
So it does exist on eBay as well
when it comes to cross-listing.
But on Amazon, I've actually seen it a lot more recently
is when it comes to repricing items, right?
The shortcut for this would be when you list an item,
I'm going to list everything at $75
and my repricer is going to take care of it
and price my thing accordingly.
At first you're on the outside and you're thinking,
well, I don't got to put in a price for every single item.
I can just have it set to price everything
and that's going to save me X amount of time.
And it might look good from the outside,
but once you even open that door a little bit,
you realize like this is not a good idea at all.
I've seen it, I've personally known people
that have done this and it's literally destroyed
their Amazon store and they literally just wound up,
you just stop Amazon altogether because, you know,
when you mess with software
and messes with every single thing,
like software is good, but it can also be really bad
if you don't have it in line.
No, 100%.
And I'm not going to discredit anyone currently using
software because I know a lot of my big seller friends
that are in media, they use cross-listing software
and I've thought about it heavily.
I could shift to that route,
but I know the damning effects that come with that.
If the software goes down,
well, you're kind of screwed for the day,
but you'll recover the next day
or over the course of the week, sure.
But if they go out of business,
you got to pivot to another listing software.
That's a whole lot of money lost during that game.
However, there's a lot of gains.
Honestly, you could just sling up so much more,
so much faster.
Bottom line, no questions there.
The software doesn't complain.
The software don't need to take a sick day.
The software doesn't need to take vacation.
It's always there.
There are a lot of benefits with software.
And the other negative I would say,
you can't really do custom photos that much.
I mean, some of them you can,
you can go back in and edit them,
but for by and large, a lot of them don't allow photos.
So you're stuck with the stock photos
with everybody else using stock photos
or the same listing software, right?
So all listings looks the same.
You don't really stand out.
That's morally important to eBay,
less so on Amazon,
because everybody's buying off the same listing, right?
But anywhere else you branch off into,
you need to separate yourself somehow some way.
And it's harder to do that with cross-listing software.
Software is deadly.
I mean, if you screw up,
I mean, just think about like every pricing software.
If you mess up one of those boxes,
I mean, that's it.
It's gonna reprice every single item you got
probably where you don't want it to be.
And it can get ugly quick.
And just trying to take shortcuts
when it comes to messing around with software,
I think it's not good.
I mean, I think I'm kind of glad
that I'm not great with technology
because like when I set things up like that,
it takes me two hours
because I wanna make sure everything
is the way it's supposed to be.
Because I know if something goes wrong,
everything's going wrong.
And how do you go back and fix it?
Well, that's hours, days of your life
you're not gonna get back.
I mean, that's like your thousands of books
you have on eBay,
if there was a software that had the pricing
and you put 1999 instead of 999,
everything would be screwed up.
And how do you go back and fix that?
Because the software doesn't have fail-safes in place.
Once you hit submit, that's it.
Skynet's taken over, you're at the will of Skynet.
Whatever happens, happens.
Right, let's say you're trying to reprice to 3999
and you said 399, free ship, ouch, ouch.
And you are sorely mistaken
if you don't think people have bots out there
that are looking for items
that are priced way under $0.
They will buy every single one
and then you are even stuck with more of a headache.
I mean, you're basically, I mean, what happens on eBay?
Say if I had a thousand items,
I meant to sell them for 39.99,
I put in 399 and someone bought them all.
What would happen if I said,
hey, I don't wanna fulfill these orders?
Would eBay cancel your account?
Well, probably actually,
because your metrics would get dumped so low.
Your store is basically broken to the point
where you can't make any money.
You actually get higher fees on top of that
when you get so many claims.
I think you can go up to like 50%,
but you're already selling it a lot.
Well, say you cancel them,
you're still gonna owe somebody a lot of money,
whether it's eBay or the customer, right?
It's not worth it.
Now, I have heard of this.
What happens when a seller dies?
What happens to their eBay account, right?
I think we were kind of talking about this on the call,
but funnily enough,
we were also talking about it in the other group.
I didn't bring it up, it just happened.
What happens is those items are still for sale
and you don't fulfill the order
and your metrics just go down, down, and down, and down.
And your feedback,
this is the really sad, tragic part of this.
Your feedback gets filled with all this hate messaging
and spouses come along.
They have no idea how to do eBay
because their other spouse that died
did not tell them how to shut down the account.
eBay's no help
because they don't have access to the account itself.
All they could see are these horrible message
about the loved one that died.
That's the last,
that's all they know about this person.
That's who they are now, this horrible person.
And that's sad.
That's crazy.
That's just crazy to think about.
I know on Amazon,
I've actually seen and heard horror stories
where they accidentally repriced their item
or they were doing this international, right?
So you got to list it in Canada or Mexico
and you got to put in the amount in like pesos, right?
Because it's not US dollars.
And they put in the wrong thing
and somebody bought every single one
and it was thousands of units.
It wound up costing the company like well over $100,000.
And Amazon's response was,
the order's already placed, it's FBA.
There's nothing we can do.
So like-
Right, the eBay, Amazon and Macari, Poshmark,
all of them, they stick to the policy.
They do not care about accidents.
Your mistake.
They don't care about your mistakes.
They don't care about accidents.
They don't care about anything other than their policy.
They will stick to that no matter what.
Another shortcut here.
We kind of talked about like listing a little bit,
but I think photos get short-cutted a lot.
100% they get short-cutted.
People may view one, two or three.
Well, it doesn't matter on Amazon, I guess,
but on eBay, stock photos, I see them so much.
And I can't tell,
because they do zero descriptions on top of the no photos.
And I can't tell anything about the book
other than the title, right?
It's supposedly the right title.
I think you're right.
It's hard to tell like why people do the way.
Better than the stock photos, I'm gonna one-up you here.
People that have blurry flip phone photos for their items.
Their 1997 phone, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or like the photos that have like the date and time
on the bottom, like it was like a Polaroid they uploaded.
You know, it'll be like, and the photos like 10 years ago,
it'll be like, yeah, you know, it's crazy.
And I think the photos are,
the photos and the description and the title
is what's gonna sell your item.
Those things are non-negotiable for shortcuts
when it comes to eBay selling.
And you just can't do it.
There's why even bother just shortcutting those.
And then, you know, in a month,
you'll be complaining that, well, reselling sucks.
I made no money.
Well, how many shortcuts did you take
along the way here your first month?
If you look like everybody else,
and let's say everybody else had the same price too,
just all things are equal.
How long is your item gonna sit?
Especially when you're talking about 20 or 30
of the same item on eBay.
How, I mean, you got a one in 30 chance, right?
Are you willing to play that game,
especially if you're not listing that many things?
You gotta stand out a little bit,
especially for your smaller guys
who are just getting started on eBay.
Maybe you're listing one to five a day.
You gotta make yours look the best.
Do a quality listing with a quality price.
Like you can't do a quality listing
and then charge five times as much.
I mean, sometimes you can,
but a lot of the times you cannot play that game
because nobody's gonna buy it
because you outpriced yourself,
even though you've got the best listing out there.
It doesn't matter in some cases.
You gotta bring your item more in line
with the market price of the day.
So that requires you to do a little bit of research.
On top of all the work you put into your listing
to know what the market will bear
and what the market will purchase.
Again, you can't have your,
you look like clone B, C through Z, right?
I will admit when I first started eBay,
I was 100% lazy with the photos.
And if I would have been into books and eBay
when I first started,
I probably just would have took a picture
of the front of the book and the back of the book
and that would have been it.
I mean, that's just honesty.
I mean, that's just how I was when I started.
You're a peg above the stock photo people, slightly.
You're slightly above those people.
Yeah, but it's like, is that even any better
than stock photos, right?
Just the front and the back.
I mean, that's basically your own stock photo.
Right, I mean, but you got two, they got one
and theirs is the same as everybody else.
So you're slightly, but take it a step further.
You then have 12 photos or 10 photos.
Now you're a step above a lot of the two photo guys, right?
You gotta think along those lines.
You don't have to be the best.
Some people aim to be the best,
but you gotta stand away from the majority.
You gotta be in that top 90%
to guarantee your item will move, in my opinion.
Why would you move in a relatively quicker amount of time?
And now I'm taking nine photos per single book at least.
So, I mean, you learn, but that's one of those things, right?
We kind of hit on at the beginning of this.
Shortcuts only exist when you first start.
I mean, there's really nobody that's doing this forever
and just tries to shortcut something.
Down the road because they know it doesn't make sense.
So it's tough because you wanna start,
you wanna get results fast,
but you have to do things the right way.
So like another shortcut that comes to Amazon
is basically condition notes.
You don't gotta do condition notes on Amazon.
That's the shortcut that'll save you time every single time.
Don't waste time with condition notes on Amazon
because you don't have to.
Nobody's really looking at condition notes on Amazon.
So there are shortcuts that make sense, right?
When you have your repricing software set up correctly,
that makes sense, it works correctly.
So there are shortcuts.
And when you have your own set of listings, drafts,
like on eBay, you can shortcut yourself
and use self-similar.
So there are ways you can shortcut
to save yourself time correctly.
It's just avoiding the huge pitfalls
that a lot of people jump into,
especially when they first start out.
You can cut corners, but if you do it the wrong way,
your results are just gonna tank
and you're not gonna get it, especially starting out,
and you're gonna wind up quitting.
That's all it comes down to is you take,
if you take these shortcuts we talked about,
your business is gonna go nowhere, I guarantee it.
If you do every shortcut we talked about.
Now here's a big one I wanna talk about
is your pre-processing both for Amazon and eBay.
We'll go to Amazon first.
Like we were talking about this a little bit with the CDs,
having your things you need to photo scan,
your ISBNs, the ones with the barcodes
and the ones you need to crack open, right?
Set all that up on one table first
before you do any kind of scanning or attempt to scan.
Take all of them, whether it's one box or 50 boxes.
This is the same mentality
of getting that pre-process set up.
Now on eBay it's a little bit different.
I set it up by genre,
or I set the things up as similar as I can.
So genre, let's say sci-fi.
And then within that, okay, sci-fi by publisher.
Okay, and then sci-fi by publisher by this author.
Or then again, sci-fi publisher,
this author hardback paperback.
That's gonna make your photo time go faster.
It sure as heck is gonna make your listing time go faster.
And the more similar the item that you're doing for the day
or the segment of the day,
it just makes the day so much better.
Cause I used to just grab 30, 40 books or whatever,
just try to list through them, right?
But I had, this one has a dust jacket.
This one has, this one's a romance novel
by this weird author.
Then my next one be, I don't know,
some non-fiction biography book.
And this made everything take so longer.
Cause the thing with the publisher,
especially if you're doing photos in kind of a uniform way,
the title page isn't necessarily
in the same place each time.
The copyright date page may not be in the same place
or you gotta take the dust jackets off.
There's just all kinds of problems
when you don't account for that.
Now, I'm not saying you can't mix things up
during your process,
but it's a lot easier if most things are the same.
Your day will be a lot less hellish, honestly.
Yeah, so the shortcut to that would be,
I'm just taking everything out.
I'm not looking at what it is and just stacking it
and going through it one by one.
That shortcut might seem good, right?
Because hey, he's wasting time.
He's separating these books on the table
before he does anything with them.
Me, I'm just getting them up there
and going through them one by one.
You're gonna be sorely mistaken
when you realize that,
hey, this has taken way longer than I thought it would.
Right, even in Amazon, doing that barcode,
ISBN, non-barcode, cover scan, crackbook open file,
such a time saver, it really is.
I don't think you can shortcut processes.
I think processes are called processes for a reason.
And there are steps that have to be done.
And if you try to shortcut processes,
basic processes here,
you're gonna lose every single time.
It might seem like a good idea,
but I promise you that after the first day of you
trying to shortcut something that needs to get done,
you're gonna be like, that was a complete waste.
I don't even know why I bothered.
But then you learn from it.
Hopefully, hopefully you learn from it.
Hopefully you learn from it.
Just stop with the nonsense shortcuts
and just accept the fact that any business takes time
to develop processes, to develop,
you're basically a brand new starter business from $0.
It's gonna take time.
Unfortunately, I don't care what Bozo's telling you
on what social media platform
that they're a billionaire overnight
because they do it this way.
That is not the reality of your reselling business
or anybody's reselling business.
Right, and I think since you brought up the YouTubers,
I'll segue into them.
Just because it worked for them
and not saying they're wrong, whoever you're watching,
doesn't mean it'll work for you.
And people take a YouTuber's word
as the law of the land, it's as stone.
You and I can watch a video,
we know either it is gonna work for us or not,
or maybe it'll work when we watch it.
And most of the time it's no these days
because you and I have been at this
a little longer than most.
Like I've seen some ones where I just shake my head,
like he's wrong, because I've done that.
I know he's wrong, but he's saying he's right.
And he's telling all these other people he's right.
And I feel bad for those people that believe he's right,
because I know he's dead wrong.
Or she.
Take influences from people,
but do not think that it's the way of the land.
You can kind of develop your own thing.
And no matter what,
you're gonna have to develop your own thing.
So whether or not JB does something or I do something,
maybe you can take a piece from it
and see if it fits in your business.
But at the end of the day,
your processes from start to finish
are gonna be completely different
than any other reseller on the face of this earth.
Like you and I had a discussion about coupons the other day,
it may or may not work for you based off the size
of your store and you decided not to do it.
That's okay, because I kind of agree with you,
the size of your store,
you wouldn't see a huge benefit for the time investment.
Mine, it works great because of the size of my store.
And most things are the same, it's mostly all books.
And they're mostly, I have a huge variety,
but within set variety, there's a lot of the same thing.
But it's simple things like that.
Again, may work for me, may not work for mine,
just based off your personal business circumstances.
Be smart with the shortcuts,
do things that make sense.
Processes are not meant to be shortcutted.
You can refine processes, you can't shortcut processes.
I think that's like, you know,
kind of a good slogan to kind of live by here.
Yeah, so be smart with shortcuts,
do things that make sense.
Overall, don't do things you see online.
If you see something basically out there,
you can see maybe, oh, let me go try this, try that,
see if it fits in your business.
But don't think just because somebody else is doing it
and has success with it, or, you know, success,
they show success, that doesn't really mean, you know,
that's the real picture of what's actually going on
in their business.
Right, when I see something that intrigues me,
I don't go, wow, that's cool, I'm gonna do it.
I always have that reservation, because I used to do that.
I always had that ration,
that sounds like a really cool idea.
I'm gonna try it out for a little while to see if it works,
because I honestly don't know.
Because I tried a lot of things where
it's gonna work for me, because it worked for them,
and guess what, it did not work.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Today's full episode and all previous episodes
are available to all YouTube members,
along with a weekly Zoom call and private Discord.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy
and consider joining for as little as $2.99 a month.