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 in to episode 22,
I believe that's what we said, 10, 10 and two.
We actually have help so we can do it today.
We have Joji on the podcast today.
This is a long awaited call for me.
He sells books, but in a completely different way
than me and Johnny B, right?
I'm the Amazon guy, Johnny B is the eBay guy.
Now we got the combo can down here.
Joji does basically, utilizes both platforms
to make his business work.
We're just gonna let him kind of take it away,
introduce himself, kind of a little bit about himself,
a little bit about his business.
And then me and Johnny will pick his brain here
a little bit because this is all brand new to both of us.
Yeah, thanks for having me first.
I appreciate it, Mike, Johnny.
This is a super awesome to be here.
Yeah, so my name is Joji.
I'm a high school chemistry teacher, 28 years old.
And basically I got in the game when I was like 22 years old.
So I saw Steve Rakin on YouTube back when I was 22.
So that's like six years ago now,
I think that would have been 2016.
And man, I was hooked from the beginning.
I think the first thing I flipped was a CD.
I think I bought it for like a dollar out of Goodwill,
flipped it for like 65 bucks.
And I was like, dude, this is crazy,
the power of Amazon FBA.
And a little bit later on, you know,
I was in my senior year of my undergrad year,
I realized that, hey, there's a lot of people
on campus that have textbooks.
And I honestly kind of completely missed the opportunity
during my undergrad because I didn't learn about textbooks.
I didn't really learn about Amazon FBA
till my final year.
But point is got my undergraduate degree.
Then I went to get my master's degree
because I was gonna get a teaching credential.
And I realized that, dude,
if you join the Facebook groups on campus,
like the textbook exchange group,
the free and for sell group,
there are people just posting up their textbooks.
And these are not cheap textbooks.
Like these are books, 70, 80, $100 plus.
And like a lot of these people are like,
hey, I want 20 bucks for this book that sells for a hundred.
So literally every single day, man, you know,
at this time I was also doing my internship
with teaching as well.
So I was also teaching a couple of days during the week,
but every day I was on campus,
I was just filling up bags and bags of textbooks.
And I sold, I mean, probably those two years
of my master's at least like 30,000 or so in textbooks.
So I basically cash-sold my college
and I graduated debt-free because of it.
And, you know, got out of college with my teaching degree,
went right into teaching high school chemistry.
And I was like, dude, I still wanna do Amazon.
Yeah, I still wanna do textbooks.
But the problem was like,
I don't really have the time to be on campus.
Like I'm not on a college campus anymore.
So I kind of had a transition.
That's kind of how went down the rabbit hole
of doing like offer up online arbitrage.
And then eventually go into eBay online arbitrage
and then learning about how to buy undervalued books
on Amazon and flip them back on Amazon.
So that's like a probably way too long way to explain
that what I do is I buy books online
and then I flip them online.
Yeah.
So I have a question for you.
How heavily or if any at all were you in thrifting
before you decided to kind of take it online?
Like, were you heavily out there, you know,
in the thrift stores at some point?
Or did you kind of just skip that whole step
that most of us kind of, you know,
your typical Amazon business is thrift stores
and then maybe you switched to something like you're doing?
Yeah, good question.
I did a little bit of thrifting, not a ton.
And I wasn't exclusively books.
In the beginning, it was just anything.
Because back in 2016, it was a wild, wild West, man.
You could send in anything to Amazon and they didn't care.
Like you can send in brand new board games,
half the seals off, like they wouldn't care.
Like it was a wild, wild West back then.
And I would say I did mostly garage sales and offer up.
And I don't even think Facebook marketplace
was a thing at that time where I wasn't aware of it,
but I was mainly just garage sales and offer up
because people would put a whole bunch of, you know,
people put a bunch of books up,
textbooks up and offer up locally.
But also I was really into video games.
So I did a lot of video game flipping,
offer up deals, Craigslist deals.
So yeah, I didn't really do much thrifting.
I was kind of more directly with just interacting
with people who had something that I wanted.
And I was just hustling like that.
Kind of the same as you, right?
Johnny, you really never got out there
and really hit the thrift stores like full-time, right?
Thrift store scene wasn't really my thing.
I would go places and do bulk pickup kind of deal.
And I still do that.
I've been into thrifts, don't get me wrong.
I just, it's slower, it's just slower.
So, I mean, that's a huge point that I say all the time is
you don't need thrift stores
and you shouldn't be relying on thrift stores.
Neither of these guys could care less
if they go into a thrift store in the next three months.
It does not matter to them.
And you might be somebody that's thinking,
well, I have one thrift store in my area.
So this business is impossible.
And you could be the furthest thing from wrong
with that kind of mindset
because these dudes are never interested.
They're never dealing with the riff-raff I got to deal with
just to get in and scan the shelf of books sometimes.
Well, yeah, because you never know
if the manager is going to be in to do the buy at all.
Because I do bulk, right?
And it's like, it's just,
take me two weeks to buy the thrift store.
Yeah.
I'm curious, Joji, when you first like,
because when you first got into eBay to Amazon,
I mean, was there somebody that kind of like,
you kind of looked into or maybe had a session with
to kind of understand it more?
Because there's not really,
at least that I see out there on YouTube,
there's not that many people that'll sit down
and kind of show you the way it's supposed to be done
like you do with your lives and everything on YouTube.
I don't know of anybody else on YouTube
that kind of would be somebody that you,
if you're not there,
who else is there to kind of show you the way?
How did you learn basically?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think you'd have to back up a little bit.
Have you, I'm sure you've both heard
of a software called E-Flip.
I'm sure you've heard of that.
E-Flip is in arbitrage.
So back in, I think E-Flip came out in 2017 or 2018,
but when that product came out,
I was super interested in that online arbitrage tool.
So that's why I started with.
And I think that's where I got the gear is moving with like,
okay, you have the opportunity to buy books on Amazon
and flip on Amazon.
So I think that was the beginning.
I think Caleb Roth, he's the one who created that software.
So it was kind of him.
He has a lot of recordings with that software specifically,
but the idea of being able to buy a book online
and then resell it online, the online arbitrage sort of like,
that's where that idea came from.
As far as eBay to Amazon flips,
that is actually something that feels a profit.
You've heard of Warner Fields?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he, I think he came out like maybe last year
with a video on like how to use Flipmine,
which is a software for eBay to Amazon online arbitrage.
So I looked at one of his videos and yeah,
he's also a great teacher.
He went through like how you could potentially find
some books.
So from there, that's kind of all I needed to know.
I just needed to know like what tool could you use.
And you know, if we back up back to 2017,
I was actually, back then I was buying books on Amazon
and reselling them on Amazon,
but kind of the way that I bought,
the way that I buy books now has kind of evolved since then.
But yeah, I think eBay's buying books on eBay specifically
was maybe about last year,
like early last year when I learned from Warner.
Do you ever go the other way around from Amazon to eBay?
Yeah, some people ask me all the time.
And I've never done that.
I've never tried doing that.
I think it's probably possible,
but I think it's probably just way more likely
to go eBay to Amazon rather than Amazon eBay
for a number of reasons, which we could talk about.
But yeah, I've never tried that,
but I'd be interested to know if someone has done that.
Will the software let you like say,
No, Flipmine will not let you do that.
Okay, we can't just hit the reverse button
and then it goes the other way.
Yeah, I mean, I'm curious.
So why would you guys,
so my understanding is Amazon is king, right?
So I'm curious to know both of your thoughts.
Like why do you think,
I have a couple of ideas maybe,
but I'm curious what your ideas would be.
Why do you think a book would sell better on eBay
rather than Amazon?
I'm guilty of doing this.
I send books on Amazon all the time that are signed
and I just put them under the normal price.
So maybe people are put in,
maybe they have a condition note.
I don't put in the condition note that is signed,
but maybe some people do.
So maybe there'd be a software
that can pull all the Amazon book listings
that are signed by the author.
And you're gonna get more for most likely
more for that stuff on eBay
because it's more of a collectible niche market
for those kinds of things versus Amazon
where they really don't care if it's signed,
it's gonna be your condition,
your good condition that's gonna sell.
Sure, you can put collectible,
but most people aren't gonna look through that.
But that would be my take on it
if I had to do it and try to figure out
a way to make it make sense.
And my reason, I've seen some stuff on Amazon
and I've taken a look and it's due to poor title structure
where it's buried and the customer would have to know
to type in certain things.
And then call it back to eBay sells the same week.
Interesting, yeah, that, yeah.
So yeah, those are both good ideas.
Start developing the software, Joji.
I mean, that's what we're telling you here, all right?
I mean, get the work behind the scenes.
That one's free, we'll charge you for the next.
All right.
I think my big appeal with this, right,
is you can kind of do this from anywhere.
And there's a lot of people that are on YouTube
and maybe they kind of live in the middle of nowhere
or they don't have as many sources
or they don't have as much time.
So the appeal for something kind of like a business you have
is that you don't have to leave the house
and it doesn't matter how many thrift stores you have.
It doesn't matter your competition in your area.
You're just sitting online,
dedicating a certain time to sit down
and look at these things to flip.
And I think that's the big attraction to it.
I mean, like what kind of attracted you to it?
Was it the time or was it the money you could make?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I think mostly it's just,
I just inherently didn't like going out places,
going thrifty, scanning a whole bunch of stuff.
I just would, I was always like,
I'd rather just buy fewer books
and sell them for way more money
than do a whole bunch more volume,
which could accomplish the same thing.
I mean, you just need a lot more volume
at lower ROI or lower profit.
So I think it was just me kind of naturally
not wanting to have to go places
because if you think about all the time,
like it takes for you to actually drive somewhere.
And then, if you make a map of all the Goodwills
and all thrift stores,
like it, and you go one day around,
it might actually take you like an hour and a half
or two hours just in travel time waiting around.
So it's like, that was all dead time to me
where it's like, okay,
I think online arbitrage could definitely work,
especially if you've built up some capital
because you can, with online arbitrage,
you're already kind of just getting rid
of so many people in this space
because most people won't do that.
Like they don't think to do that
or they're just not comfortable doing it.
But then when you raise your average buy cost as well,
you also reduce the number of people
who even do online arbitrage
that are willing to get in that space.
So I felt like there was just like a market
that was clearly available with plenty of room
for me to come in.
And I was like, you know, at this point in my life as well,
I don't have time to go thrift stores.
Like I wake up 6 a.m., I gotta be at school
teaching the kids by 8 a.m.,
then I get home at 4.35 and I spend time with my boy
and my wife, and then it's like,
I have to source 10.30 p.m. to midnight.
It's like, I can't go to a thrift store to do that.
You know what I mean?
It's crazy that the kind of numbers you can put up
if you're focused and understand what you're working with,
and I'm kind of gonna get into this,
I'm the cheapest person around, right?
So you might spend $40 on a book,
and I'm thinking to myself,
well, that's 40 books at the thrift store, right?
That's my cheap mind running.
But you really don't think about,
like you said at the time,
and the thrift stores are no guarantee, right?
You could go to the 20 thrift stores in a day
and get nothing.
So for somebody that has my cheaper mindset,
how would you go about, say for example,
I was like, hey, I wanna get into doing this,
but I'm super cheap with this.
Is it feasible to kind of start with little to nothing
and kind of build this business into
what you made it into today?
Yeah, I think, so just to give you some context,
the average book cost right now for me is about 20,
like just a little bit over $27.
So like per book that I buy, that's what I would spend.
Can you do it cheaply?
I think probably the best way for you to start
would be take the books that you've already sold on Amazon
and then take a look at them,
take a look at their keepographs.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with reading keepographs,
but take a look at their keepograph,
look at if in the past there's ever a point in time
where you could say, if I could have gone back in time
and bought this book at this price,
it would have been a good deal
knowing what you know now in the future.
And start with the books that you've already sold
because you already have a little bit of like security.
Like you know that you've already sold this book for 45 bucks.
So the one book that we were just talking about,
I won't mention what it was,
but the book that, the magazine that you had sold
before it came on here,
it's like, hey, look back at the keepograph,
maybe that book was 8.99 in the past
and you said a keep a tracker alert for that
and you get notified and it's like,
hey, I remember selling this for 45.
So maybe just investing the money in things
that have already moved for you in the past
that you have more, you know,
you have more confidence in selling.
You could totally buy books that are much cheaper,
but it's just that the average sell prices can be lower.
So yeah, you could spend, you know,
between five to $10 per book,
but you're probably looking more at like,
probably in the low end, like 25 to like 35 or $40.
So you could do it cheaply for sure.
And then build over time.
So, I want you to debunk a myth for me here
that an OA buyer is only a couple of bad buys
away from being out of business.
Yeah.
If you have no capital, yeah, 100%.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that kind of leads us into how you,
I'm gonna assume you use Be Cool as your repricer?
Correct, yes.
So just for clarification here,
that allows you to set minimum,
maximum prices for your items.
Correct.
So you can have a minimum set to maybe it's your break even
or a little bit under if it's been there
for X amount of time.
And, you know, you're selling one-offs, right?
You're not buying 100 copies of the same book.
So it does kind of alleviate the risk tolerance, I guess.
Just curious, like just in your experience
for like what you see when you buy that book off eBay,
say it says you're gonna make $50 on it.
How many times do you think you actually make close
or that amount or maybe even a little bit more?
Just like one out of three, one out of four?
Cause we all know when you scan a book in a thrift store
and it says $10 profit, you ain't getting 10 bucks, right?
That's just, it's gotta get there,
it's gotta get repriced, all that nonsense.
I'm just curious what you see
with like the higher priced dollar textbooks
so that the prices kind of stay more like
where they should be versus, you know,
the junkier stuff we're selling.
Yeah, I think it's, like you said, it's very variable.
It depends on the book for sure.
Textbooks inherently can be very volatile,
especially during textbook season.
So what I would say is that when I,
my thought process into buying a book
is I'm always trying to be super conservative.
So by conservative, I mean like
the absolute worst case scenario
should be that you break even on this book
because you're buying it so undervalued.
Obviously there are some books that I have to take losses on.
It's a very, very small percentage.
And, you know, some books would be like there are outside
circumstances that you couldn't have predicted.
Like here's a book that let's say over the last four
or five years, there's never been any,
there have been new third party sellers on it.
And then maybe they've always been at 150
and then just randomly somebody comes on with 100 new copies
at like 1599, like, dude, what the heck?
Like there's no way I could have accounted
for something like that.
But I would say overwhelming majority of the books do sell.
I do pick up books that are longer tail though.
So my average like sales rank is like 1.3 million.
Like those are books that take a while to sell.
It takes about three and a half months on average
to sell the books.
And yeah, I mean, I definitely have some books
that I bought from last year,
like almost a year ago that still haven't sold.
But if you look at the keepographs,
like they should still sell.
So I guess my mindset of when I'm buying books is
I'm trying to buy an asset.
So I'm trying to take the money that I have
and invest it in something that inherently holds value.
And I think one of the reasons why thrifting is so hard
is because if you're finding books
that are lower average selling price
and they inherently hold less value,
then the volatility means that they could basically
become worthless like very easily.
But if you think of a book that has been consistently selling
for 50 or $60 to the last five or 10 years,
and then you invest $25 in it,
it's like you're putting your money into something
that inherently holds value.
Like it's just a store of value that's not money,
but it's like an object, you know what I mean?
So I guess that's my thought process behind that.
How much automation to manual work is your workflow like?
Is it like fully automated Skynet style
or you have to use some manual number punching
from time to time?
Yeah, I definitely have to do manual stuff.
Like I have a spreadsheet of every book
that I purchased exactly when I purchased it,
where I purchased it, how I purchased it.
And then I also, you know how you have a transaction
statement every two weeks that tells you
exactly what you sold.
So every day at the end of every day,
I'll go in and see what I sold.
And I don't sell very many books.
Like on average I sell five to six books a day.
But I should say between three to five books a day
is generally what I sell.
My average sale price is $99.
So it's like, I don't sell very many books.
What I do is I just will take that book that I bought,
I'll go over to my spreadsheet
and then I can just log it in individually.
So there's probably a much better way to do that.
So yeah, that's what I do manually.
Even with repricing with my Beat, would be cool.
I have to type in the min and the max price.
I have to look at every keep a graph
of every book that I buy.
So it's definitely not super automated.
I do have a couple of VAs now
that are helping me with helping me with sourcing.
So that's definitely helped.
But I would say I spend about like two hours a day
on this business and that's what I do.
Is it seven days or is it five days a week?
Yeah, like I said, no seven days.
I spend like two hours every day on it, yeah.
Okay, so we're looking at 14 hours a week.
Just throw, you don't even have to be exact.
Throw out like a monthly sales number that you recently had.
So January this year was 32K
and then last month was 13, just over 13,000.
So, and then basically all of last year.
So last year I did 105K in sales
and that was about $30,000 profit, yeah.
So, I mean, for people out there that don't have time,
I mean, he just blew up your whole argument.
He literally, you know, has a newborn,
works a full-time job and still finds a way
to kind of make this work.
What's the big motivator for you?
Is it just the financial freedom?
Because for me, that's what it was for me, right?
I grew up in debt.
I was in credit card debt my whole life.
And kind of, I said, well, I can have this side hustle
to kind of get me out of the debt,
get me out of the credit cards and kind of, you know,
just if I want to buy something, then I can buy it.
That was kind of my motivator.
I didn't want to have to, you know,
worry about if a cat needed surgery or something,
I ain't got the money to put it up.
So that was kind of, that was kind of like my motivator.
What was yours like?
Yeah, I think my motivator is that,
it is ultimately like financial independence.
So my wife and I are on a journey
of financial independence retire early.
And increasing your income is one way to be able
to become financially independent earlier in life.
I would say there are other aspects of it.
Like I genuinely just love flipping stuff.
It's like a game to me.
Like it's just super fun.
You know, I have, obviously have other interests and hobbies,
but it's like, you know, some people are like,
well, don't you ever want to take a break?
And in some ways I'm like, this is my break.
Like, this is fun to me.
Like, this is stress relieving.
Like, this is something that I generally want to do.
So maybe I'm fortunate that I was able to align a side hustle
with a hobby and like in those things, they co-mingle well.
And then I guess the other thing is like,
I do want to start a YouTube channel
because I, you know, somewhat selfishly would love
to put my name out there
and would love to meet people like yourselves.
Like there's no way we could have really met
if we both were on YouTube.
Like we live in different, we're in the US,
but in reality we live in different parts of the world.
Like we would never see each other.
You know, so I guess it's just, you know,
combination of things, but yeah, I think,
I want to become financially independent.
It's a hobby.
I really like to do it.
And then also selfishly, like,
I want to kind of get my name out there.
I want to kind of, I would like to be known.
I'd like to meet new people.
And I like to also teach people
because I think that's a skill of mine.
So is there a scenario where you would leave your teaching
gate to go do this full time?
Yeah, I think once we become financially independent,
I think that is what the goal is.
So our goal is to be financially independent by age 35.
Right now we're age 28.
So by 35 means that-
Mike, he's making me feel old.
So the goal is that by age 35,
we'd get to a point where we would no longer
need to work any longer based upon our current
living expenses because we live very frugally.
And at that point it would be probably just get out
of teaching because I love teaching high school.
It has its own challenges though.
And, you know, it's as much as I love teaching high school,
it is also, you know, emotionally it's also taxing.
Like it's not an easy job.
So yeah, I think I like to transition.
I think YouTube can help me with that as well.
Like helping get my name out there,
helping help other people,
hopefully also grow the business in that way.
Cause going back to your point, it's like last year,
you know, I sold a hundred thousand dollars in books,
made $30,000 a profit, but I had to bust my ass.
Like I had to do that two hours every day.
You know, I had to do that 10.30 PM to midnight.
I had to wake up at 6 a.m.
Do it, you know, so it was not like it's easy.
Like it's sacrifices.
So I know that education, coaching people,
that is also a way that you can generate more revenue.
So maybe kind of taking the pedal off a little bit
in terms of going so hard and like getting Amazon ramped
and maybe helping people more could be a way to segue.
That's still part of teaching.
You wouldn't be giving it up all to get.
Exactly. Exactly.
You're right, Johnny, exactly.
Yeah, I know I seen,
cause I'm in your discord and everything.
You just started your, you know,
offering one-on-one like coaching sessions.
Yeah.
I mean, as a teacher teaching you, right?
It's one of those things.
And that kind of gets me to like,
say if somebody comes along like myself,
I suck with computers, I suck with software.
Do you think it's possible for somebody like myself
to get into a business like yours
and start doing eBay to Amazon flips
with no really technology experience?
Just kind of run that down, right?
Cause I know there's a bunch of different programs
that you need and just kind of like the cost
of those programs as well for somebody out there
that's maybe just thinking about giving it a shot.
So it's gonna be a rundown of,
if you had to teach somebody from nothing today
and lay out the expenses of me starting.
Yeah, if you're just starting brand new,
the only software you need is Keepa, that's it.
Because Keepa is how you're gonna analyze
every single book that you come across,
really any product that you come across,
it tells you everything that you need to know about it.
And then also Keepa has these ways
for you to source inventory.
Like, not sure if you guys have used
the Keepa product finder, you used the Keepa deals page,
if you use Keepa alerts, but those three things,
independently, like if those were softwares
that were not part of Keepa,
I would easily pay a hundred dollars a month
for each of those individually.
So those are really powerful sourcing tools.
If anyone out there is familiar with like E-Flip
and Zen Arbitrage and Master Book Flippers,
like all those softwares, in my opinion,
are inferior to Keepa's ways to source books
that I just mentioned.
So all you really need to get started
is a Keepa subscription, which is about $20 a month.
Now going to what is required in terms of like,
you need to be able to analyze data.
So being able, like if you're not really able
to look at a graph and you're not really able to follow,
like look at, you know, make sort of relationships
between like how, like supply and demand,
which is things that it's not like it's super difficult,
but at the same time, it's like,
you have to have some analytical ability.
So I would say if you're someone who just,
you look at numbers and you look at graphs,
and you're like, oh, it just makes me crazy,
then I would say probably maybe start with thrifting,
start maybe a different model,
because I would lie if I said it wasn't analytical or heavy.
Like pretty much every book that I buy,
you have to read a Keepa graph,
because you have to know if it's a good buy or not.
So it may not be a good fit.
When you started it, like, did you like,
for maybe like the first month or two or three,
did you like go for like the lower value stuff
to see if you knew what you were doing, right?
I'm gonna assume you didn't just jump in
and start buying $50 textbooks from the beginning.
Yeah, I would say from the beginning,
because I already had that experience of being on campus
and being, I was willing to spend a little bit more for books.
Like for books that I knew that were selling for,
you know, 100 plus, I was willing to put up 30, 40,
maybe even 50 bucks from them.
I think I was able to come into like E-flip
and like spend a little bit more money.
I would lie though, if I didn't say that
it makes you anxious sometimes, it's like, man,
do I really wanna put 50 bucks for one book?
Because there's a lot of things
that can inherently go wrong.
And in the beginning, like even when I was flipping books
on college campuses, when you don't know what you don't know,
it's like, man, am I really gonna spend 25 bucks
for this book?
It looks great, it looks like it sells for 100,
but you don't actually know it until you do it.
And so I think it was kind of just building up
the confidence with starting slow.
And once you start slow and you're like, okay,
you start to notice patterns,
like these books are actually selling, they are moving,
I am making money.
Then I was able to go a little bit deeper.
And like now I get to the point where
I feel comfortable with my keep abilities.
Like if I look at a book and it looks like it holds value,
like I've definitely bought books for over $200 on eBay
and flipped them for 400 or 500.
So I'm not, at this point, I'm willing to do that,
but it took a long time to get to that point.
And what would be your biggest advice
to someone just starting OA
or the biggest mistake you've made to avoid?
Yeah, I'd say the biggest mistake for OA booksellers is,
is the, is the, you know, the way, like the business model,
the way that you think you're gonna make money.
So like E-Flip, Zen Arbitrage, Master Book Flippers,
the goal for those softwares is to find
the lowest merchant offer and then flip lowest FBA,
which would be in the buy box.
In other words, exploit the prime bump.
So I would say most people go wrong
in buying books for eight or $9 on Amazon
as the lowest merchant offer,
thinking they're gonna sell them
for 45 or 50 bucks in the buy box.
In other words, the way that they make money
is exploiting the buy box.
And what you learn is that, okay,
you have to understand when the buy box
is actually reasonable.
Yes, people are 100% willing to pay more money
to get it in two days, but you gotta think logically,
like, is someone really gonna pay 40 or 50 more dollars
to get that in two days?
Probably some small percentage of people,
but the overwhelming majority of people are not.
So it's like, what I had to learn quickly was that,
okay, all these initial buys in the beginning
when I was like trying to buy these books
at the lowest merchant offer, flip them for the buy box,
like I was like, this isn't working.
These books are not selling,
the buy box eventually comes back down, it tanks.
I end up barely making money or I basically break even.
So then I had to learn, well, how do you fundamentally
buy undervalued books?
Because the way that, at least my thought process on it
is now is that I'm trying to find books
that are cheaper than they should be,
and therefore the way you make money is just by buying them
and then reselling them for what they should be sold for.
Like that's how you make the margin, so yeah.
Are you on any other platforms for selling
other than Amazon?
Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bit on eBay.
I'll usually sell books on eBay.
If I have some restricted books that I can't sell
to a buy back company or I can't sell
the restricted inventory, I'll sell them on eBay.
But very, very small percentage, yeah.
I was gonna say that since your main focus is textbooks,
what is your gating situation look like, right?
Because kind of when we created our Amazon accounts,
years and years ago, there was really none of this nonsense
of every publisher is gated, but now every day,
somebody needs to get ungated in McGraw Hill, Pearson.
Do you have any big gates that are still up for you?
Or are you actively still trying to ungate some publishers?
What's it kind of look like for you?
I've ungated everything that's ungatable at this point.
I still cannot sell the popular textbook categories,
which are the Cengage, McGraw Hill, Pearson,
like the specific books.
And those are, a lot of people complain about that,
but it's actually the silver lining to that
is that all those books are highly likely to be counterfeit.
So story time, back in early 2021,
I was selling textbooks.
I sold three counterfeit textbooks.
I got test-buyed out by a company.
They sent me basically letters that said,
hey, you're selling counterfeit textbooks.
They gave me no proof that the books I sold
were actually counterfeit.
And even at that time, I wasn't even aware
that counterfeit textbooks were a thing.
And as a result of that,
basically my account got suspended on Amazon.
I had to hire an attorney.
I had to pay like $1,500 to write plan of actions,
which tend like actually end up
to not be very good plan of actions.
And I could probably just done a better job myself,
but I basically had to wait for those counterfeit claims
to fall off my account after 180 days.
Eventually my account went back to green
and I'm no longer suspended anymore.
But the point is that those specific categories
of textbooks that everyone's gated,
and it's actually a good thing,
because those are books that are highly likely
to be counterfeited.
And if you're not gated in those right now,
and you are selling textbooks,
you should probably expect to get test-buyed
at some point by those companies.
And from my understanding,
they don't have to provide any evidence whatsoever
that the books that you actually sold to them are counterfeit.
You have to prove to them that what you bought
is not counterfeit.
And you cannot do that if you bought it from a student
or you thrifted it or you got it from a bulk buy.
The only way you can do that is with an actual invoice
from a distributor, which no one has.
So yeah, I basically can sell everything else,
just I can't sell those,
which is not necessarily a bad thing, but yeah.
Well, dark cloud scenario, if the suspension become,
would ever become a permanent thing
for lack of unforeseeables,
what would you do?
Would you still book flip?
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, probably I would.
I'd probably get my account,
my wife to form an account in a different address
in a different bank account.
That's not tied to me.
Probably use a VPN so the IP address is different.
So that's probably what I would try to do.
You would still go back just to sneakily.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like it. I'm not in the wrong here.
These guys, I mean, yeah,
I would try to get an account somewhere.
If I couldn't get an account with someone I knew,
then I'd try one of my friends
and probably try to work out like a commission deal
or something like, hey, can I sell books
under your name on your account?
And I'll give you 10% of whatever I make.
Yeah, I like it.
I'll even do the mail run for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So hopefully Jeff Bezos isn't watching this or.
I think those older accounts are in the free and clear now.
They only go after the newbies it seems like overall.
Yeah, hopefully we'll see.
I don't know.
I mean, hopefully.
He just jinxed it.
I was gonna ask you if you buy books off eBay,
if you're inspecting them,
but you use a prep center, don't you?
Correct, they use a prep center.
So what I do is I use Books Run as a website.
It's a buyback company.
They also sell books on their website.
They have a counterfeit probability check.
It's not perfect, but what I'll do
and I have my VAs just run that ISBN
through that counterfeit probability check.
And if it comes back likely or unlikely,
I just don't even mess with it.
If it comes back unlikely,
which most books do come back unlikely,
then I'll just send it to a prep center.
And I have a, I think a really good prep center,
the Central Virginia Prep, that's my prep center.
They do a really good job of inspecting books
in comparison to I think other prep centers.
Not saying that they're opening every book
and they're like check marking every,
they're just doing a better job
comparatively to other people.
And I've been using a prep center
for the last year and a half
and so far I haven't had any issues with more counterfeits,
but one of the big reasons that I cannot sell the books
that are very likely to be counterfeited.
So probably that's one of the reasons why as well.
So-
Go ahead, Mike.
I was gonna say, so checks and balance wise,
you actually run every one of your books you buy
through this software just to err on the side of caution,
even though, like you said, most 99% of the time,
it's not counterfeit.
You just wanna cover all your bases on your end.
And is that like a paid software or what?
No, it's actually free.
And I would step back and say it's not 99% like,
actually there are a ton of counterfeit books out there.
It's actually more than you would think.
I just, so there are books every day that I'll run through
that say likely or very likely that I just won't buy.
So I come across them.
We come across them every day, but it is a free,
it's free, it's not a software, it's just a website.
You can just type it, type in books run,
a counterfeit probability check.
And like I said, it's not perfect.
Just because something says likely or unlikely,
or sorry, just because something says likely
or very likely doesn't mean it's counterfeit.
It just means there's a good chance that it could be.
And just because it says unlikely doesn't mean
that it's not counterfeit.
So it's just kind of like you said,
it's a preventative thing.
I catch books that probably could have been counterfeit
and that's the goal is to prevent those from
getting to the warehouse.
Well, textbooks gets all the glory, right?
Are there other books besides textbooks
you'd like to go after?
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
So, you know, at eBay, basically with Flipmine,
I should say that software,
anytime a new book is listed on eBay,
or really anything in any product because,
or any category, because Flipmine isn't just
for books specifically,
it's for any product category out there.
But whenever anything new is listed on eBay,
what Flipmine tries to do is take that UPC code
and match it to something on Amazon.
And the goal is if there's a price differential
between the two, then potentially you could buy it
on eBay and flip on Amazon.
So yeah, there are tons of books that have value
that are not textbooks.
And an easy way to see how many books out there
that are not textbooks would be just to use
the product finder tool.
You can basically input parameters and say,
hey, find me books that have a value over the last
180 days above $75.
And then you can, down below, you can say,
I don't want this to be McGraw Hill.
I don't want it to be Cengage.
I don't want it to be this.
So then you can basically filter out,
there's tens of thousands of books that have a ton of value.
And those are books that I would also flip as well.
Nice.
You only like books?
Are you into flipping other things?
Or does it even interest you?
Or are you just staying,
being the book flipper guy with this
and not really trying to get into other categories?
Yeah, I think I used to be into video games a lot.
Like I said, I was doing a lot of like offer up
and Facebook marketplace, video game flipping.
And I kind of just realized that the amount of time it takes
in comparison to me buying books is not worth it.
Like in many ways flipping video games is so much fun.
Like the hunt is so, I'm not sure if any of you guys do,
but the hunt of going out there,
finding video games like garage sales
and even thrift stores, like it's really awesome.
But at the end of the day, like when you sit down
and you run the numbers, like selling books is way up here
compared to flipping video games.
So that was one of the reasons.
Another reason is from what I've read,
like there's this book I read called The Pumpkin Plan
that I'm not sure if you heard about it.
It's by an alternate Mike McCallewitz.
He also wrote, he also wrote Profit First.
But the idea is like, if you think about
those pumpkin farmers that win these big competitions
for like the biggest pumpkin,
the only thing that they think about
is growing the biggest pumpkin.
They think about like, well, what's the exact soil I need?
What's the exact seed that I need?
What's the exact sunlight?
What's the exact amount of water?
So they really hone in on one thing
to try to grow one big pumpkin rather than to try to grow
some, I guess, larger, have more quantity of larger ones.
So I think the idea is that focus can really help you
grow something big rather than being distracted.
And now actually that I'm becoming more automated
with the business, that I do have a couple of VAs
that are helping me.
Once I get books completely automated
and I feel like my VAs are buying
at the same capacity that I am,
I do kind of want to transition
to just normal traditional OA
because I think that could be very lucrative as well.
Cool.
I would love to be a video game flipper like yourself,
but there ain't enough product out there.
I think, I would say like,
do you feel like one reason you kind of stick with books
is a lot of people kind of undervalue their books
versus say video games, if you're on eBay,
like people more likely to put an astronomical price
on a video game than a book,
just some crazy person that decides to list something.
Yeah, 100%.
People in general, I'm sure both of you agree,
like they see books and it's a really weird dichotomy
of books because people don't see them as having value,
yet they don't want to throw them away.
So it's weird that you would see something that's like,
oh, this has no value,
but also I'm not going to throw it away.
Most people when they think it has no value,
they just toss it.
But yeah, 100%, if you're somebody who is flipping books,
I would say look at Facebook marketplace,
offer up in your local area.
If you're living in some place that's populated,
I'm sure throughout the week,
there's got to be at least three or four pretty good deals.
Like I'm talking spend 20, flip it for a hundred plus.
Like there's got to be a couple of those
because I've been, like even now on my YouTube series,
I'm doing a zero to thousand series.
And I'm trying to show people like if I had zero,
like if I actually had $0, what I would do.
And I'm still finding like four or five deals a week
where I can literally go drive out
and meet someone in my local area.
Now granted, I live in a kind of more populated areas
so that helps, but definitely don't sleep
on those great opportunities.
And yeah, a lot of people just,
they just don't see books as having a lot of value, I think.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I see that also in CDs and DVDs.
Well, more so in CDs, less so in DVDs.
Because I think the video games
have that general public stereotype, they're valuable,
but everything else in media, not so much.
Yeah, 100%.
I think you started, didn't you like
with that series on YouTube,
you just got books from your neighbor, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And the lady was looking to get rid of her books
and you're just like, I'll take them.
Yeah, I literally, so I literally made a,
I spent like five minutes making a little thing on Canva,
just like, I'll pick up your books.
I put it in my apartment complexes, laundry room.
There's like 100 units here.
And I was like, that's all I'm gonna do.
I could put it on Craigslist, on Nextdoor.
I could put on Facebook marketplace.
I could do a whole bunch of stuff,
but I literally left there for about a month
and someone finally messaged me.
And so then, yeah, I went down and grabbed her books,
sold them to a buyback company
because most of the books actually weren't worth anything,
but I was able to get like 12 bucks
and then that's where I snowballed it from there, but yeah.
$12 and a dream.
That'll be a movie.
It'll be like one of the ESPN 30 for 30s.
$12 and Joji's dream.
And it's crazy to think about though, right?
The volume you're doing, the amount of sales you're doing.
I think you're kind of,
you're trending in the right direction,
but on the topic of trends,
you were doing eBay to Amazon and these kind of flips
before it kind of took off here in the last year, right?
So how do you feel about it kind of being like,
because to me right now,
I would say it's the hottest reselling trend.
eBay to Amazon is the hot thing right now.
Like how has that affected your business
because you were there before
and you're gonna be there afterwards.
I'm just curious what your mindset is
on everybody trying to get in on it.
Yeah, I think it's a lot harder to find books on eBay now
using Flipmine because there are a lot more people
looking for books specifically.
It's a low hanging fruit.
It's really not that hard to do it
in the grand scheme of online arbitrage.
So yeah, it's been harder to get books on eBay.
With that said, I'm still finding books on eBay.
And then also I think what's something
that most people are not doing is Amazon to Amazon flips.
So I think in that space, it's still very, very wide open.
And most of my books I buy are from Amazon directly.
And that's still something that is every day.
Like, I mean, even during our podcast right now,
I'm getting alerts right now on Kipa
for books that are potential leads.
And it's like every day I buy two or three books
just from alerts that I set in the past.
And those are books that have become undervalued
that you could buy on Amazon, flip back on Amazon.
Well, speaking of fads, have you ever done any sourcing
from a good old whatnot?
Oh, no, I didn't even, I have not.
I mean, I've heard of whatnot,
but I've never done any sourcing there.
But should I be doing that?
I've looked at it, at least in the book market
in my vintage game.
You definitely could.
Now, I haven't done any specific investigation
on textbooks over there.
Because that's the thing, they'll hold up a book
and it's not like you're getting alert about it or anything.
So you have to attend and know what they have.
I think that would be the hard part to unravel.
Yeah, I could see how whatnot would be
a super lucrative thing for a bookseller
that gets a lot of textbooks.
Like if somebody has a honey hole from a college
or somebody who actually has like hundreds and hundreds
of textbooks and they get a consistent flow of them,
I can see how as a seller, whatnot would be great.
Because if you attract a whole bunch of Amazon book flippers,
I'm sure you could just move stuff
for obviously cheaper than what you could sell for on Amazon,
but you could just move stuff so quick.
But I haven't looked into that.
I'd be curious to know how fruitful it would be
for the time that would be invested for it though.
Right, I am too, especially if you're sitting into Amazon.
It's like for me, I know I could do that easily for eBay,
but on Amazon, that's a question mark.
Yeah, that is a question mark, interesting.
I'm curious here, so you wanna transfer kind of into
your standard OA kind of deal.
Do you have a timeframe for that?
Because right now, you're the hottest thing on the block here,
eBay to Amazon, these are the glory days, right?
Nobody cares about us thrifters, right?
Our thrifters are a thing of the past.
Everybody wants to do what you're doing currently.
So do you have maybe, I know you're talking about
financial independence, actually switching over to OA,
is that when you're gonna switch,
when you clear everything and you're ready to go,
or you're kind of just gonna dabble in it
and kind of work your way into it?
Yeah, I'm actually starting to dabble in it a little bit.
I got my first box over there of some OA products
that I bought, so I'm just starting to dabble in it now.
And the reason why, like I said,
is I feel like my book business is at the point
where it's almost completely automated.
I've got a prep center and I've got VAs purchasing books
for me and I have them also doing some work behind the scenes
to kind of take a little bit of time off me.
I'm currently still also buying books, though,
which is the thing.
But at some point I feel like, okay,
maybe I could start transitioning out of buying books
and could go towards more traditional OA.
And why do I want to do that?
I just think that there is a lot of opportunity
in the OA, traditional OA space,
that I never got into for mainly just fear.
I knew it existed, but I was like,
you know, I wasn't really sure how to get engaged in things,
wasn't really sure about IP complaints.
So there's all these unknowns,
there's these things that I didn't know what I didn't know,
and so that kind of prevented me from going into it.
And I was also really good at books.
So I said, you know what, let's just focus on books.
But having gotten on YouTube and gotten to meet
a lot of people who are in the OA game specifically,
I realized that, wow, these things are a lot easier
than I thought they would be.
So I feel like I'm missing some opportunity,
especially if I can sort of delegate
so much of the book buying business to my virtual assistants
to carry over.
So for your book buying,
I know you're targeting probably individual books,
but is there cases where you target book lots perhaps
to get that one or two gem
and then you're stuck with 48 other things?
Yeah, mostly just one-offs.
Yeah, mainly Amazon, eBay,
they're generally just people listing individual books.
There are some books that I'll buy multiple copies of,
that there are some books that are replans,
like I've sold four or five times in the last year
that I'll buy once I get to a certain price.
Just to buy kind of things, yeah.
Yeah, but generally I don't do many bulk buys
or I don't really do any bulk buys.
Yeah, one-offs.
All right, you're either gonna blow up
my whole business model here or not.
How do you condition your books?
Do you care about condition?
Do you just roll, do you do what,
I say everything good condition or like,
because your stuff's going to a prep center,
so your answer is gonna be a little bit different
because you don't physically see the book
and I'm gonna assume a lot of the books you're buying
are probably stock photos maybe, I don't know.
That's another thing you kind of can answer here
if most of it's stock photos,
but just your conditioning of your books when you're selling.
Yeah, that's funny, I remember you,
I don't know if it was a video that you had
or it was a comment that you said
basically you list everything good in that.
Originally I was like, huh,
that's an interesting perspective.
And yeah, I actually really appreciate that perspective
once I heard of like once I actually took some time
to process it, but basically what we do now
is like whenever we buy a book,
we just take whatever the condition is
and we put that on the spreadsheet
that the prep center looks at.
And when they receive the item,
they actually do the conditioning.
So they open up and they go, okay,
this is in good condition and they match it.
So if mine says very good or good,
they'll be like, okay, we'll just list this as good
because we think it's in good condition.
So the real reason why I would just take
whatever the condition was and put on that spreadsheet
is in the case that we bought a book
that was supposed to be very good
and it's like acceptable.
And so there's like something that we could maybe return
to the seller if they basically misrepresented what they had.
But generally now I'm kind of taking more
of your perspective.
It's like, it's either good or acceptable.
So I use this good or acceptable.
That's like what I do.
And I'm also not convinced the customers
ever read that condition.
I'm really-
Yeah.
I mean, I can't remember when I was buying textbooks
on Amazon when I was in college, if I read them,
I think I just-
Did you ever read?
I don't think so.
I never read a condition note on our product
if I'm from Amazon.
No.
Yeah.
I'm another thing here.
Like I am my, all right.
So I don't have a prep center.
I never used one.
I kind of seen videos, people talking about prep centers
and it usually seems like it's kind of always negative.
People always like, oh, this prep center sucks,
yada, yada, yada.
But it seems like the one you have is like, I don't know.
They just seem like if I had a prep center,
that's what I would do for my customers.
It's almost as if like they kind of go the extra mile for you.
I don't know why or what, but I mean,
the fact they're inspecting your books for you
is, I mean, that's crazy.
And the fact, so say you buy a book
and it's just water damaged.
They're willing to actually send it back
to the eBay customer for you.
Right.
I mean, I'm gonna be the one who has to contact the seller
and has to get them to give me a free return shipping label.
But what they'll do on the spreadsheet is
they'll basically highlight the entire cell red.
And that basically says, hey, this is like a,
hey, you gotta do something with this
because this was supposed to be very good.
It came in acceptable.
It's water damaged, the spine's broken.
They're basically saying it's unsellable.
So we're not going to send it in
because we don't feel good to send this in.
Like we don't think the customers would be happy with this.
And so then I have to go back and figure out,
okay, where did I buy it from?
That's why tracking the books is very helpful
to know where you bought it from, who you bought it from.
And then you would contact the seller and just say,
hey, you know, I was supposed to receive this
in good condition.
It's an unsellable condition for this reason.
Please send me a free return shipping label.
And then all I would need to do is email
that return shipping label to them
and they'll go ahead and put that on the package
and they'll go ahead and send it off.
And they charge like a dollar 50 or something.
So, I mean, at the end of the day, it's better than,
you know, you sending in a book
that you get negative feedback on or, you know what I mean?
But.
So we've had this come up in Mike's group here.
Could a person do what you do that's homebound,
let's say doesn't have a vehicle or is handicapped
for whatever reason, you can't leave the home.
Can they do what you do from their home,
never leaving their home?
If they had a prep center.
Yeah, it would still be a little bit difficult
because you have returns.
Like there's that some level you're gonna have to touch
some amount of products.
But like for me, like 95% of what I buy, I don't ever touch.
It just goes right to my prep center.
It goes to Amazon, then it goes to customer
and most books don't get return.
But there are gonna be some books
that you sell the customer gets returned.
Amazon says unsellable.
Then you have to obviously get sent back to your house.
And then you'd have to like, go leave your house,
go down to your mailbox and get it.
So I would say pretty much you can make it
so that you don't ever have to leave the house.
But there's gotta be some point
at which you're gonna have to touch some books.
Like for those listening that have had questions.
I mean, it just goes to show like kind of,
and that's another benefit of why a lot of the OA people
are heavily into OA because you can do it
from anywhere in the world, right?
Yeah, 100%.
You could be, you know, where he's at today
and tomorrow he could be on the moon and then Mars
and then the Bahamas and then, you know,
anywhere he can do this from.
And that's a huge appeal, right?
A lot of us want to get our time back.
A lot of people enjoy traveling.
And this type of business, right?
Listen, I gotta be in my storage unit every day, you know?
Joji, you don't gotta be at the storage unit every day.
I gotta go pick up the books, you know,
when someone calls me, you're not really worried about that.
And I think another thing that kind of is appealing is,
you're not, you know, your prep center,
how many books you say you send them in a week?
Yeah, we buy about, usually like the average
is about five books a day.
And so it could be 10 one day, it could be three one day.
So, I mean, that's just based off of last year's numbers.
It was about five books a day.
So, I mean, basically they're getting about, you know,
35 books on average a week.
It's actually starting to increase a little bit more now
because in the last few months,
I actually picked up a couple of VAs.
I'm still sourcing.
So it's probably, they're probably getting more
around like 10 books now,
but the average last year is about five books a day.
That's how many books I bought last year.
So for people-
Last time I was gonna ask you if you had a budget,
monetary budget, a daily one or not,
but it sounds like it's just a passive personnel
kind of thing.
Yeah, for me is like my average profit per book is $49.
So it's like, how many books would I need to buy
to make a certain amount of profit?
So like for me, it was like, I need to buy five books a day
to kind of get to where I wanna be.
Yeah, so for me, it wasn't ever like a spend goal.
The average book cost is $27.
So it's like, if I buy five books,
I'm spending over a hundred dollars a day.
And if you spend over a hundred dollars a day,
that's over $3,000 a month.
So like it obviously, that's just the average.
Sometimes you buy more,
but between three to $5,000 a month
would be like what you're spending or what I'm spending.
Yeah.
I mean, you kind of build up to it, right?
You know, it's not like the first day you're doing it,
you're gonna find 30 books you're gonna buy.
And I think it intrigues me the fact
that you don't have to send large quantities, right?
If I'm thinking Prep Center,
I'm thinking I gotta send X amount of units per week,
per month or something like that.
So that's kind of good to see that you don't have to
send so many units for them to actually take care of you
as a customer for somebody out there
that maybe doesn't wanna prep.
I'm just curious, why do you utilize a Prep Center?
Yeah, because at the end of the day,
it's like you gotta think about
what works for you in your time.
For me, it's like I have about two hours a day
that I can do stuff.
So do I need to spend that two hours?
I need to do in that two hours
what makes me the most money
and what makes me the most money is buying.
It's actually not as difficult to be able to unpackage,
you know, a book, condition it, list it.
Like that's not something that's making the money,
it's the actual buying the book.
So for me, it was that if I didn't have a Prep Center,
I don't know how I'd do it.
Because literally, as soon as I put my boy to bed,
I'd have to go down to the mailbox,
I'd have to get five, seven books,
I'd have to haul them up doing this at 10.30 at night.
Unpacked, so it'd just be like,
it'd be a lot less sourcing, I guess is what I should say.
So for me, it was like, okay,
how do I automate that part
of not having to send the books in Amazon?
And what I will say is it took me forever
to get a Prep Center because I was fearful,
I was anxious, because I didn't know what I didn't know.
You're all about all these people saying,
yeah, if you have a Prep Center,
like those must be those guys doing
hundreds of thousands of dollars,
like it must be really hard.
But I will tell you, every single step
that I've taken in my Amazon business
has always been, every single big step has been
me coming to conclusion like, wow,
that really wasn't that difficult.
Like I should have done that so much sooner,
but it was like the fear of the unknown
that kind of stopped me, prevented me.
So what I'll say about the Prep Centers,
if you're someone on the fence,
if it comes down to it where it's like,
you're running out of time,
you should absolutely get a Prep Center
because if you have enough capital leftover
to go buy more products,
that's probably going to be a job
that makes you more money in comparison
to actually doing your prep.
And in reality, you could get a Prep Center set up
within one day, like literally within three hours,
you could email Prep Center,
you could go ahead and say, this is my model,
this is how many things I plan to send you.
You would literally give them access to your accounts
so that they can list things for you.
And literally within a day,
you can get a Prep Center set up
and send them stuff starting the next day.
So it actually is way easier than you think.
Same thing with VAs,
I thought getting a VA would be so crazy, so hard.
You had to be this next level person,
but it boiled down to it again being,
I don't have enough time,
I need to buy them back more time.
And I realized again,
hiring a VA is not really that hard.
It's just taking the first step,
you learn along the way,
now is everything.
Starting Amazon seller account,
that's hard for a lot of people,
but you realize after you do it,
it's not really that hard.
Same thing with selling eBay,
it's like that first product that you list,
you think it's really hard,
but at the end of the day, once you do it,
you realize, okay, it really wasn't too bad.
So I'm guessing with your business model,
since restock lemons were a big talk this year
because of things,
you're not really affected by restock lemons,
or I'm not thinking.
Yeah, I mean, I was actually affected by restock limits
about two weeks ago.
I actually hit a thousand.
So my base was actually a thousand,
and the reason why is because my average selling price
against $99.
So if I have a thousand books in there,
a thousand times a hundred is a hundred thousand dollars.
So you have like a hundred thousand dollars
of inventory in there.
So for me, it wasn't really a problem
because I was doing the model fewer books
that are worth more money.
They also move very slowly,
three and a half months on average
takes a long time for a book to move.
So just recently, yeah, two weeks ago,
that was the first time
that I couldn't send any more inventory in,
and then they changed the storage capacity.
What was that like for you?
It was great.
What do I do?
Yeah, I mean, I actually was starting to go back,
and I mean, I knew that this capacity limit thing
was coming up, so I was like, you know what?
I'll probably just wait for two weeks
because I knew that once, again,
I was gonna have the minimum 100 cubic feet
that that was gonna be well over a thousand units for books.
So I was like, okay, I'm still good.
So it's kind of something I'm kicking down the road.
Eventually, if I get to that point
where I have probably it's gonna be close to 2000 books
is my estimate based upon the numbers.
Like when I would get to that hundred cubic feet capacity,
then maybe I'll think about,
I think I'll have to think about another strategy
of how to get things to move faster.
I mean, I know that you can bid for space,
I'd probably look into that.
If we're at the club and they're like,
hey, anybody that's been really affected by restock limits,
you're not allowed in that line
just because you had to suffer for one week.
Yeah, one whole week.
Two weeks.
Two weeks, the worst two weeks of my life, man.
I'm like sitting there for six months.
I'm still outside in the line shivering,
waiting to send my stuff in.
Yeah, I got very fortunate.
I'll say that, very fortunate.
I mean, we're all kind of following in your suit, right?
And we all want to have a higher ASP.
I'm not sure, like,
had your mind changed at all with sell through?
Like, are you thinking about maybe going
for a little bit faster selling items
now that you kind of got smacked with restock limits
for the first time?
Has it even like come across your mind?
Like, maybe I only start doing stuff
that's two and a half months or three months
versus, you know, three and a half months.
Yeah, I definitely have changed some things.
Like originally when I would be buying a book,
where I'd buy maybe like three or four copies of,
and it's inherently a book
that doesn't really move very frequently,
I would just send all three books to the prep center
and they'd send it to Amazon.
Now it's like, you know, I'll send one book
to the prep center and I'll send the other two to my house
and I'll let it sit on a shelf.
And as soon as this book sells and I'll just replenish it
when I have to,
because I eventually have to make shipments myself as well.
Because, you know, I'll get books here again
that get returned because they got returned by the customer.
So there are, you know, every,
usually like once a month I have to send a shipment
of like 30 or 40 books into Amazon's warehouse.
So that was one way that I transitioned.
Yeah, also I was thinking,
I've actually started to buy books that,
or I guess this is just to say,
I started to buy books,
stop buying books that wouldn't move as, you know,
that would move more slowly, I should say.
So I've tried to transition to buying books
that would move a little bit more quickly.
And then going back to online arbitrage, traditional OA,
inherently you're buying products
that have a much lower ROI, but turn much quicker.
And the idea is that having a little bit of OA
in there will probably help with sell through a little bit
and that will therefore,
hopefully increase capacity limits a little bit.
So I had a curious question
because we talk about college textbooks a lot.
You never hear a lot about high school textbooks.
Yeah.
So what's the game like there, my man?
Yeah, I think most high school textbooks
are generally not worth anything.
There are some, like most of the AP textbook editions,
those books generally tend to be worth something,
but just, it's weird.
Like in my experience selling books,
like there's just not very many high school books
that actually hold a bunch of value.
Interesting.
Yeah, but there are definitely some out there
and their textbook season is usually June, July,
rather than August or September.
They even have a different season, okay.
Yeah, they have a different season
because they buy right before the beginning of the textbook
or right before the beginning of the year,
which, yeah, I don't know why.
It's just a little bit, it's a little bit sooner.
That's weird.
It is weird.
Yeah.
Stop saying.
Mike, do high school textbooks.
You walk in first day of class
and there's new textbooks for you in the class.
Are you scanning that barcode?
The barcode?
100%.
Yeah, there we go.
I knew it.
I mean, just to know, not that I'm gonna sell them,
but I just, I wanna know, like if, you know, if.
At the end of class, you have a little donation bin,
drop off your textbooks.
Yeah, I mean, it was funny.
My first year of teaching,
they were throwing a whole bunch of textbooks
into the dumpster.
And so after school, I went back
and like was scanning some of them from the dumpster.
I'm like, I felt so,
I think I felt like weird about it
because I was like, I don't know if I should be selling these.
Like these are from the school.
You absolutely should.
But like in my defense, I was thinking,
what's the worst case scenario that's gonna happen?
They're gonna write a newspaper article that says,
teacher selling books from the dumpster to make ends meet.
I'm like, that's not that bad of a headline.
Like that'd be actually.
No, it's gonna be teacher was dumpster diving
to sell textbooks.
That's a much better headline.
No, I got it right here.
This would be it, right?
He's no longer Joji Davenport, he's dumpster Davenport, right?
And all the kids and teachers and faculty point and laugh
at dumpster Davenport every time he shows up.
But when he drives up his Mercedes,
the name calling is not so bad.
That is true all of a sudden.
They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, he was on the song.
It's true, I'm dumpster Davenport, it's cool.
Have you like personally tried to get other people
that you know in real life into the business, right?
Because you kind of, you have proof of concept
and everything.
And I can admit, I've tried to get, you know,
some of my in real life friends and it's just not for them.
Have you tried ever going that route and be like,
hey, you know, like, this is something you could do
to make money?
Yeah, I mean, I got my dad into it.
My dad's been selling since like 2017.
So I taught him how to do it.
He doesn't do books, he does all like DVD
and he does like ties on eBay.
So it is ties on eBay and he does DVD.
So he goes to his local, you know, local thrift stores
in the area and he'll literally just pick up a whole bunch
of sealed DVs and flip them that way.
And he got ungated early on in the game
when it wasn't so easy, when there wasn't this guy,
you know, Mike, the used book guy,
just telling everyone how to get ungated for free.
So that darn guy, he's, but anyways.
I ruined it.
You did ruin it.
But I think my dad, like back in the day,
I think he paid like $250 to get ungated in DVD
because back then, like it's become so much easier
to get ungated and stuff because the information out there
has, you know, there's people like Mike out there
willing to give that information out for free.
And so I got my dad into it.
I got my mom into it a little bit as well.
Like after the pandemic, she got furloughed.
And so I taught her how to do some textbook flipping as well.
She got a new job.
It wasn't necessarily for her.
Yeah, I've tried to teach some of my friends.
Like I still remember 2017, 2018,
I could go into the campus bookstore
and they had a clearance section.
And some of the books on that clearance section
were like great books.
Like I probably made at least a few thousand dollars
from the textbook store where they were just taking
a hundred dollar books and putting them on clearance
for 20 bucks because they were no longer being used,
but they still had value with them.
So I remember taking one of my friends into the bookstore
and scanning the books with the Amazon seller app.
And at that time, Amazon would offer back gift cards for,
they would actually do buybacks themselves.
So I said, hey man, take this book, buy it for 20,
slip it back to Amazon.
They'll give you a $75 gift card.
And I think he found that super interesting,
but then he never did anything.
So yeah, going back to what you said, Mike,
I think just most people are not really interested.
They don't have that mindset, which is not bad.
It's just, I just don't think,
I think we're a unique kind of breed.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, it's one of those things where you gotta kinda,
kinda get into it and you know, yeah, sure.
Somebody can flip something once,
but that's really not gonna get them hooked on, you know,
convincing somebody, right?
You know, you tell your family and friends like, yeah,
I make a full-time income selling books
and they're like, you're nuts.
Like that doesn't even make sense.
Like we-
Get a real job.
Yeah, get a real job.
Like it's crazy to think about.
So like, kinda here to round this out for somebody
that was on the fence and they kinda wanted to start doing
what you were doing, eBay to Amazon flips.
Like what would kinda be like your best advice
for somebody that wanted to start today
and just get into the business head on
and fully commit to it?
Yeah, I mean, I'll back up in saying that
most of my business is not actually eBay to Amazon.
Most of it's Amazon to Amazon.
I'd say about 25% of the books I sell is eBay to Amazon.
Then the other 50% is like,
50, 60% is more Amazon to Amazon.
But if it was somebody who's just getting started,
I would, specifically with Amazon and selling books,
I would actually not recommend doing online arbitrage.
I'd recommend going to thrift stores,
library sales, Offra, Facebook marketplace,
your local area and learning cheaply
because you're gonna make mistakes
and it's best to learn them more cheaply.
So I would say if you're somebody who's thinking
about long-term transitioning into this sort of work,
then keep your nine to five job,
go out and hustle when you have some time
and learn the ropes and then maybe transition.
But I also wanna give people some context.
I sold $105,000 in books last year.
It's only $30,000 in profit.
And if you think about $30,000 income,
that's not like an amazing income.
That's not, I mean, that's probably like,
I mean, I don't know, minimum wage is like $20,000
or something.
So it's not like it's an amazing income.
But I also did that basically two hours a day
throughout the whole year and I have a nine to five job.
So when you add $30,000 onto what you already make
at your normal job, then it is pretty significant.
So if, I don't wanna come across
like I'm making butt loads of money,
it's like, just put it into context.
People who have massive orange bars
usually have very, very low margins.
So, you know, think of, I have people like comment
on my Instagram when I show what I sell
and like, dude, your margins are insane.
And they think an insane margin is
you sold $105,000 in books and you made 30 grand profit.
So for guys out there that are doing
hundreds of thousands of dollars,
like they're still making good money,
but also know that that's not a profit
and it's not easy either.
It's like, you gotta put in the work,
you gotta put in the reps.
And I would just say, yeah, I don't know
if that's good advice, but learn from these guys.
Obviously they're teaching you how to do it.
Ask good questions and just learn from your mistakes
and scale slowly, still scale sustainably.
Don't wanna be any last questions for Joji.
What has been the biggest thing you learned during 2022?
2022.
I would say the biggest thing,
it's not even related to books.
It's more online arbitrage.
I learned that online arbitrage, traditional OA
is actually much easier than I thought it would be,
which is why I kinda wanna start transitioning
into that a little bit,
because I see that it can be very lucrative.
And I think that, yeah, I think that's one thing.
YouTube space, I learned that networking with people
is actually really big.
I went to the Miami Seller's Conference,
which was huge for me.
I was able to meet some really cool people.
I was, yeah, so I would say networking with people
is really key, meeting cool people like yourself
is actually really helpful as well.
When you leave books, we will miss you, Joji.
And we will look-
Well, I'm never, because I'm never leaving books.
I'm just also gonna have books on top of it, so yeah.
You'll be doing one book a week,
and I'm still flipping books.
900 deodorant sticks, yeah.
Yes, 900 deodorant sticks.
Yeah.
So if anybody's interested in finding out,
Joji's whole thing,
he does live streams on YouTube all the time.
If you're listening, Joji, J-O-J-I, Davenport,
D-A-V-E-N-P-O-R-T, if you're watching on YouTube,
it's literally his YouTube channel, it's just his name.
He doesn't try to be all fancy like me
and put the used book guy,
because I gotta tell people exactly what I do, right?
It's like, it's the only way somebody comes to my channel.
If I had just my name, I'd be nobody.
I never ask you what you do, like dude, it's in the name.
Yeah.
So we appreciate you all listening to this episode,
and we'll talk to you guys next week.
Awesome, thanks guys, appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to another episode
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