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's up everybody, welcome to episode 34,
Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Today's topic is only one single word
and you could argue that it is probably
the most important word when it comes
to having a reselling business.
And that word is consistency.
It's almost as if, you know, like on Sesame Street growing
up, they always cover like one word.
Like today's episode is around consistency, you know?
But unfortunately, all my workers in the back here,
they're all busy picking orders or not, you know,
messed up as Big Bird and Elmo and everybody.
But I do think consistency is, it's like,
it's one of those things where you need it
to be successful in reselling.
Even if, you know, even if you do Amazon
where consistency really, you know,
there's no immediate payoff, you would argue
in comparison to eBay, right?
Because if you're active on eBay, you know,
if you're logging in every day, you're listening every day,
eBay says, hey, Johnny B's on eBay every day.
Well, why don't we, you know, boost his items a little bit.
So it is different and you're gonna get
both perspectives here from the eBay and Amazon world.
But I just kind of wanted to talk about, right,
what does consistency almost look like
in a reselling business?
Hate to break it to you.
You can be consistent all you want in sourcing.
That is only, you know, 10% of the battle
when it comes to having a reselling business.
Yeah, I go out every day and find stuff.
You know, cool, you found it.
Well, what are you gonna do with it from there, right?
You can go out and find as much as you want.
It's all the other steps that are probably just as important,
but it's not more important because you can go source
and if you don't do anything else,
it doesn't matter how much you source,
how good the stuff is you source,
because it's just sitting there in your house.
So I'm gonna let you take away, you know,
kind of the eBay front here of consistency,
what it looks like for you.
Like, give me an example of one of your days,
like starting out, like how many listings to do a day?
Or like, just give me a few things.
You don't have to give me everything,
but everything, give me a few things you do
every single day in your eBay business
and you think that it matters.
All right, I'll give you a rundown of a typical day.
I'll do it quickly.
So wake up.
Used to wake up 4.30, I wake up at 5.30 now.
But anyway, that'll change once my listing goal
goes back up here shortly.
Right now I'm doing about 30 listings a day,
but when I wake up at 5.30, the first thing I do
is I create my daily coupon and then I create
the buyer groups to send out that daily coupon.
And then I send out three whole eBay newsletters.
There's five total, but I can only use three.
So after that, I launch my 30 listings from my draft bank
and then I do my customer service.
I'll send reminders to people that haven't paid
their invoices and or accept offers that have come in
and or answer messages that have come in for the day.
That's my start.
I'll usually end up around 6.30 or 7.00.
And then if I got a pile of books next to me,
I'll wait to, I'll do that until my employee
comes in around 8.00.
I do have a 7.30 clock meeting Monday through Friday.
It lasts about an hour.
So she comes in in the middle of that.
And then I point to her list that I have
on my photo booth over there.
She does her list.
And this is part of the consistency for the day.
She'll do the photo sets.
She usually does about 75 books a day.
She'll cut numbers that are these,
which are the skew numbers that go inside the books.
But before she does any of that,
she does the pulling and packing.
She also does the pulling and packing for any orders
that come in for her shift.
And then that'll last, because I'm still listing,
that'll last until round four.
She leaves around three, four.
I go to the post office.
And I'm usually done around 5.00, 5.30.
But I do some other tasks
that are outside of that consistency.
I have the non-important things at the very end of my day.
But that is a typical eBay day.
Do you ever switch it up?
So these are things you do every day.
Do they ever change in the order you do them?
No.
The only time things may change
is if I have an unplanned interruption.
When I try to count a little bit of buffer time
for unplanned interruptions,
let's say I have a source that calls me
and wants to talk shop numbers, wants me to buy things.
That's an interruption to my day
that's gonna interrupt my listings,
which is going to prolong
when I'm finished with my consistency for the day.
So I may cut off some of the things
I had planned to do at the end of my day.
That's the only real change.
The unnecessary but important things
at the end of the day may get chopped off.
That's the only real change.
Unless I have, like a couple of weeks ago,
I went on a sourcing trip.
So that changed, well, five days worth of work.
So things like that, yeah, there is things to change,
but that just changes the front.
Everything gets front-loaded
when I have an upcoming change like that, like a big trip.
So we busted out, I don't know,
a couple hundred listings in two days to account for that.
And then we did the photos before that in mass.
So when those five days came, nothing really changed.
The same eBay expectation was the same.
I could launch newsletters,
I can do my customer service all from my phone.
But everything was done.
It was front-loaded at the end to prepare for that.
That's why you want to usually buffer yourself
in your draft bank at least,
put more in than it's going out.
So you can do those kinds of things.
If you're just flying by the seat of your pants
or gambling more or less,
and you're gonna list 30 every day and have no draft bank,
you can't really have the flexibility to do that,
unfortunately.
That never works out.
Whenever you have a plan like that and you're like,
you're going like down to the wire every single time,
it's never gonna work out.
Just my experience with reselling
and any other type of job I've ever had in my life,
if you try to plan things to go exactly perfect,
so they line up,
it never works in your favor every single time.
I want to talk a little bit about,
I hear it all the time, right?
Oh, you gotta be consistent on eBay.
I know what your thoughts are,
but I'm gonna let you explain it to everybody.
What are your thoughts on, does eBay reward you
if you're consistent yourself versus somebody like me
who hasn't listed in four weeks?
Yes, eBay would reward me for my consistency
versus your consistency.
However, both are gonna be rewarded in the fact
that we're still gonna make sales.
I'll just probably make more sales than you
is the only real difference.
And as far as the algorithm's concerned,
yeah, there's kind of price bumps
when you get certain numbers.
I mean, one of those numbers is like 10K listings,
which I'm probably gonna hit in the next couple months here.
I can't tell you how much of a pay bump I'm gonna get.
What I mean by pay bump is eBay is like,
okay, this guy's listed 10,000.
We're gonna give him X more traffic,
which should translate into Y more sales.
How many more sales you may ask?
I don't know.
I'll let you know when I get there.
And again, it's gonna be store specific.
Mine's all vintage stuff for the most part.
I mean, there was that month and a half period
where I listed a bunch of crappy newer books
like Nora Roberts.
So I'm not even gonna count those,
even though they're like probably 1000 plus items
in my store now, unfortunately.
But I'm back to listing what I know sells
versus trying to list everything.
So yeah.
Do you think like, all right, so you got,
you got 1000 Nora Roberts listed, right?
You went down that rabbit hole.
It's already listed, the work's already done.
You got the space.
We really don't care about that right now.
You accept the fact that it is what it is.
They sell when they sell.
But do you think like what you're doing now, right?
You're listing the good stuff.
Do you think that in turn boost the visibility
of your crappy Nora Roberts?
I would say when a Nora Roberts sale sells,
it would boost all other Nora Roberts.
I mean, I experienced this with Diane Palmer.
When I sold a couple, I started selling a couple more
and then a couple more.
Now I'll get a sale here and there.
One has to sell first for whatever cogwheel
up in algorithm land to make it start working.
Like I had a muzzle loader magazine sell yesterday.
I've had those things listed for four months
before one sold.
I expect now because of that,
a few more are gonna sell sometime this week.
That's just how it works.
The exactitude of how many will sell, I have no idea.
Only the algorithm does.
But the algorithm can't really know
because it's whatever the customer is gonna do, right?
It's gonna present it.
I think it's gonna present more visibility to the customers
that may be interested in that.
Like in somebody else's listing, like,
hey, here's a similar thing to what you're looking at.
I'm gonna get more track of that way.
That's what happens when a eBay item sells in your store.
So it's gonna get more visibility
for items that are like it.
Now the other benefit for that is my multi-quantity.
So maybe they're gonna buy four
because I do a buy two get two.
Oh, now that I've hooked them in to come over to my store,
they see my fancy little coupon.
I'm like, okay, I'll buy four.
It's a better deal.
So that's also added added benefit of selling one thing
that you have a small sampling of
like Nora Roberts, like you mentioned.
I gotta have one sell before some of the others
will start selling.
Now what, like, I got a curious question here.
So me and you, we got the same exact book,
same exact condition, right?
You know, my eBay store is broken
and somewhere down in the slums, that's fine with me.
I don't expect anything from it.
But we both list that same exact book
at the same exact price with the same exact everything.
Do you think when somebody like would search out that book
that eBay would put yours above mine
because you are, you know, a thousand times more active
on eBay than I am?
Probably.
But I'm also gonna, I'm gonna caveat that
with the more eBay check boxes you have with item specifics,
the higher you're gonna rank.
Now, if you came in and listed it sometime after me,
you're gonna get that 24 hour boost.
You're gonna be above me
because it's a newly listed item.
So there's something to say on that.
So if it was just the two of us with the same book,
you would be up higher than me for the day.
But after that day, I'd probably be above you
for the rest of the month.
We should try this out.
Okay.
But then we would have to find two of the same exact book.
Right, and we'd have to list it the exact same way.
You know how I have standards, so sorry, Mike.
Well, listen, you can just create your list
and then send me a copy of it and I'll be good to go.
Screenshot by screenshot, yeah, we can do that.
Yeah, so we'll know like, all right,
this is the best possible listing for this book, right?
You know what, you will have a JB approved eBay listing
and we'll list it within the same 10 second period.
We'll do like a countdown on Zoom, launch.
Yeah, and then we'll just see like where it appears
when people search differently for that.
I'd be curious to see, but I do think you're right.
I do think eBay does reward you with consistency.
And it's funny because me and Deb
kind of have been talking about this.
She's a huge Etsy seller, 10,000 sales over on Etsy
with her dog and cat toys.
And I always think to myself like,
why doesn't Etsy reward its bigger,
larger sellers in comparison, right?
JB should always get more eBay traffic than me
because he's spending all his hours on eBay.
I am not, so it would only make sense for them
to kind of say, hey, this guy's hustling and busting.
Now there are caveats to this, right?
If you decide to list 30 items today
and the comps are $5 and you're listing them for $50,
that's not gonna work.
eBay is gonna be like, well,
you're way out of line with price.
They're just gonna sink your listing.
There are caveats to this.
You can't just list things.
And just because you're listing things,
even if the listings aren't done correctly
and the prices are out of whack,
it really doesn't matter if you're listing
a thousand items a day, if it's all junk
and it's not listed correctly,
the prices are completely wrong,
your consistency really translates to nothing.
You're using the word reward.
I think eBay works as normal when you're consistent
and you're punished when you're inconsistent.
That's how I view it.
But I think both ways, it's the same thing, right?
So my theory is eBay is gonna work the best it can for you
if you do check boxes every day.
Now, if you don't do a check box,
it's like a very, I don't know, private school.
Demerit for you and more demerits, more demerits,
the lower you sink in the results.
That's how I view it.
You're viewing it for more glass half full
and I'm gonna be viewing it for glass half empty
kind of perspective.
But I think both are right,
because it's the same glass, right?
I mean, that's us, right?
eBay's your go-to, Amazon's my go-to.
So if I get some kind of sale on eBay,
it's like, oh, I got a nice little token reward here.
When you, as an eBay seller,
that's your clear-cut expectations, right?
It's kind of the same like,
listening to Daily Refinement and Tekken is like,
they have this expectation of themselves
and what the platform expects,
because that's what they did full-time all those years.
So to them and yourself, it's expected
and it is really expected, right?
If you're gonna do something full-time,
you need to have a consistent checklist
of things you're doing.
But for all of us slackers over here,
part-timers or full-timers that really don't know
what they're doing on eBay,
we see it as a reward when eBay,
when we sell something on eBay
or we get an offer or something like that.
But, and that's just kind of,
it's just the mentality difference of somebody
that's like, fully blown eBay is my main business.
And somebody like me is like,
well, eBay is just an afterthought
or eBay is a business to me,
but I don't treat it like the business
that kind of expects to be treated like.
Do you think when it comes to consistency,
it has changed over the years for like,
what's almost expected of you to do
to be successful on eBay?
Do you think it's changed
or you think it's always been the same?
Like you have to be on their listing every day,
you gotta be doing all these different things.
I think it has changed back and forth on eBay
and I'm simply going to mention feedback, right?
Used to be impossible to get feedback removed,
but last three or four years until lately,
it's a phone call away to get a feedback room.
Now they're kind of reverting back
to the olden ways a little bit,
where it's a lot harder to get a feedback removed.
So having 100% positive feedback,
if you've been in it for a minute, you can maintain it.
Now it's going to get harder and harder and harder again,
unless they flip-flop again, they're entitled.
Also they do CEO cycles,
so we never know who's going to be in charge of eBay,
what changes they want to be made.
So I say it's the same game,
it's just the quality control and expectations by eBay,
it gets harsher or less harsher,
depending on the cycle of eBay.
Right now I think we're going into more harsher cycle
of eBay where the expectation bar is much higher.
Now they may drop a peg or two,
the next two or three years,
because I think eBay is still trying to figure eBay self out
and like I mentioned, they get a new CEO
who tries to do that every four to five years.
So don't know where we're going to land
at the end of the day,
but right now I think the high bar has been raised.
Has eBay ever formally come out and said,
if you list every day, we're going to boost your visibility,
or is this just something that's kind of like leaked
through the grapevines over the years
from different people having different connections at eBay
or just kind of understanding their numbers
from point A to point B?
Like have they ever come out and said,
hey, if you're on here every day listing items,
we are going to give you more visibility
than somebody that doesn't.
I think Mel from back from burnout
went to eBay open in Australia,
and she asked the very exact same question.
I think the answer is yes.
But what I recall specifically from that conversation
at that eBay open Australia was that they mentioned,
after nine months, your listings kind of toast
and you need to do something to correct that.
You need to get listing for it
to not be at the bottom barrel anymore.
And there's different, all across YouTube channels
are different ways, unlist, relist, update the photos,
update the price, do something to the listing
to get it to go back up.
Because they did say specifically, listings can go stale.
And after about a nine month cycle,
it's as bottom barrel as it can get.
Now, when it does come to consistency on eBay,
we talk about it all the time,
you don't have to be 30 listings a day
to get results on eBay.
If you sell desirable items for a profit,
you can find desirable items cheap enough,
you can list sporadically.
And if there's enough of a sell through demand for a product,
you will still sell your item on eBay.
You don't have to list every single day
if you're finding and listing desirable items.
But say, for example, you got the same exact books
as Johnny over there, and I decide to list one today,
none tomorrow, five the next day.
That's where you get yourself in trouble
because they're not really super desirable items.
And you have to really have a real expectation
of how long things take to sell.
I think that comes with consistency
is a lot of people might list a lot,
but they don't sell a lot.
And I think a lot of that boils down to,
you're consistent with listing,
but everything else is completely broken
and even if it goes to your expectations, right?
You can't expect to list something today and sell it today
unless it's a highly desirable item.
And I think a lot of people, everything they list today,
they think they're gonna sell it within the next 24 hours.
And to them, hey, Johnny, I'm being consistent.
I listed 20 items for the past seven days,
and I've sold 10 in the past seven days.
I listed 140, and I only sold 10.
I don't understand eBay is broken, it doesn't work.
I'm being consistent on my part.
What's your take on that?
Well, it takes about a year for eBay to acknowledge
you did that.
So did you do it for a year?
I'm sorry, a week's not good enough, first of all.
Second, if you're listing, well, gold bars or iPhones
or something that's going to sell every day,
no matter what, that's a lot different
than this naughty, naughty book I have in my hand
that needs nine months to sell.
It's not a desirable item, it's an impulse buy,
and it's a collectible impulse buy at that.
So it just depends what you're slinging up there.
Like gold bars is gonna sell a lot faster
than that paperback book I just showed you every day.
Even if you're at market, it's still gonna sell
probably the same day, because it's gold.
Everybody likes gold, it's desirable.
Now, as far as the listing goal,
I'm gonna debunk some stuff here.
You can list five items a day, that's great.
You could list seven items the next day, that's great.
Now, when you go back to five, here's where people freak out.
So you did five, seven, back to five.
eBay's not gonna punish you.
It's when you do five, zero, zero, five.
That's when they're gonna punish you.
That they're gonna go down as far as your consistency goes.
Going up and then back down is okay,
as long as you've established that base of,
per my example, five.
Missing a day, it's okay.
Two days is really when eBay's gonna break your store
for about a week.
So if you do that five, zero, zero, five again,
you're gonna need a whole week of fives
before eBay puts you back up to where you were.
So as far as that consistency goes,
that's what you really need to be aware of.
And that says that the algorithm today,
so 10 years down the road when you're listing this,
this information may not be correct.
So what you're saying is my listing habit of one,
four months ago, zero for the next three weeks and six days.
That's not the way to do it.
You're not gonna get the same amount of traffic
as you were for your one a day every day.
So if you look at your traffic,
you could probably see when you were consistent
and when you weren't consistent.
You're just gonna get less traffic,
which will translate into less possible sales
because you need people to look at your items
to be able to buy them.
Do you think consistency should be
within your expectations too?
Your expectations should be consistent?
Do you have a consistent expectation
for how much in sales is consistent to you
in a day, in a week?
I used to.
I don't no longer have that.
So it wasn't a misconception.
It was whenever they make a change on eBay,
what was true was no longer true
because they're breaking stuff in the backend,
which they may or may not have planned for,
which affects everything that was consistent.
Like October through February,
I could tell you within $200 how much money I'm gonna make.
After February, like March,
when they started doing updates and stuff,
it's all over the board.
I can't tell you what I'm gonna make month to month now.
It is what it is, especially in summer slowdown.
And they're continuing to make updates.
Then we got the stamp going up in less than two months here.
That's also gonna affect consistency.
So about August, I'll have a better gauge
on what I'm gonna be consistent up until October.
And then I expect Q4 to hit in
for the expectation to be exceeded.
So yeah, this year they've done a lot of changes.
I don't know if anybody's aware of that,
but they've done a lot of changes.
So when things settle back down, when they go into more,
okay, no changes for a little while,
then I can have a better clear image on what's the normal.
All right, before I switch over to Amazon consistency,
I got one last thing for you, right?
So you say all these changes you can predict
after the October to February.
Like one thing I will say,
like you're consistent with not complaining about it
and you just continue to do the work.
Now, when nobody's around and you're alone in the warehouse,
are you cursing eBay's name up to the seven sons?
Or like you just like, it is what it is.
This is my business.
No matter what the platform decides to do,
I'm gonna continue to be consistent.
And even if they change this, they change that,
no views, none of that.
I'm still gonna continue to do everything I do.
And you fully expect to continue
to get the same consistent results,
whether that's sales, item sold,
whatever kind of metric you're worried about.
In your mind, you being consistent,
it takes care of itself basically.
No, I don't yell and scream, but two,
and this is probably not what you're expecting.
I consider eBay a giant game.
And when eBay does a change,
I wanna know how to play the game better
because I was really good at it.
Now I'm okay at it.
How could I be good at it again?
So like that, I don't know,
the international shipping thing
through a whole lot of kinks and a lot of areas on eBay.
So during that time, I just listed more.
I was doing like 50 listings a day
until I figured their stuff out
because I gotta depend on outflow or output essentially.
So I'll sit down, okay, I'm not making as much money
this month than I was the past six months.
Why do I need to source higher average sales price items?
Probably, should I have been doing that anyway?
Probably.
So it's a matter of me tweaking myself and my business
to play the eBay game better.
And again, I consider it very much a game.
Don't hate the player, hit the game, pretty much.
Yeah, that sums up consistency for eBay.
You heard it here from the horse's mouth.
It's all this guy does, lives, eats, sleeps, breathes
in old dusty crummy paperback books.
And hey.
Sale, sale, I just heard sale.
And it's a business forum, it treats it like a business.
And I think that's kind of why you get the results
when you treat things like a business
and you understand how a business should operate,
you're gonna be successful.
Now we're gonna get into Amazon consistency,
which is a completely different ball game
because you can send in one box of items today
and you're automatically in the listings.
If you're priced the best, Amazon really doesn't care
how long your items have been sitting there,
you will still get the buy box.
But the buy box comes with consistency.
And without the buy box, you're basically not selling
on Amazon, even though you have an Amazon account.
It's one of those things.
So the buy box is basically just for those who don't know,
when somebody hits buy it now, the buy it now button,
that would be your item.
So when you start selling on Amazon,
if you're selling used items, you have to acquire
this buy box and acquiring the buy box comes
with lots of consistency.
Everything we know today is that when you start selling
used media on Amazon, you wanna send in fast moving items
because you're never gonna be the buy box.
You're never gonna be the buy now button
where 90 plus percent of the sales come through.
So you have to basically sell items that are gonna sell
every single day.
So even though you don't get the buy box,
somebody hits see more options, winds up buying your item.
And that's how you basically establish rapport with Amazon.
And then one day you log on to your account and you see,
hey, you are buy box eligible or featured offer eligible now.
But that required basically trial error.
And it does require consistency.
You can't just send in one box.
You just start on Amazon, you send in one, two, three,
10 boxes even, and you still don't have the buy box.
So you just call it quits.
You have to follow through with things.
And I think a lot of people are just like so hesitant
to just stick with one thing, right?
Especially with Amazon world.
There's so many different shiny business models
that pop up, online arbitrage, wholesale, eBay to Amazon,
Amazon to Amazon, drop shipping.
There's like a million different shiny business models.
And like, that's why I get the results I get
because I just stick with media because it's what I know.
I have the relationships.
Yeah, sure.
Oh, look at all my sales.
I could care less about anybody else's business model
as long as I'm making the money I need to make to live.
So it all comes with consistency with Amazon.
You can't complain about sales
if you're not consistently sending items in.
And like we said on eBay, 99% of items we list today
are not going to sell today, you know, even on Amazon,
especially in the media world, it's just not realistic.
So it's a lot of it is a quantity game
and you can't get quantity unless you're consistent, right?
You gotta be sourcing consistently.
And then you have to send everything in consistently.
And we really didn't even hit on that.
Like when it comes to consistent habits
of actually doing everything in the reselling business.
So we'll jump into that next though,
but Amazon is just as important to be consistent.
Sure, if you're buy box eligible,
you don't have to send stuff in every day.
You don't have to send stuff in every week.
But the more you send, the more you make, the more you sell.
It's not, it's really not rocket science
as much as people try to make it out to be.
The more you source, the more you list,
the more you're gonna sell,
as long as you're listing correctly.
And with Amazon, the listings out of your hands,
the listings already there.
So there's no Johnny B, you know,
10 out of 10 listing styles.
There's one listing and all you have to do
is be the best price and you're good to go.
So it's a lot more easy.
I'm gonna go back to Amazon and make my own listings.
Screw you guys.
It's like, it's so much easier than eBay
when it comes to being consistent with Amazon,
because all right, well, for me at least, you know,
I pick one day a week where I do all my packing,
pack up all my boxes, get them out the door.
You can list thousands of items within a day on Amazon
and have them sent out, you know,
the next day or whatever for yourself,
versus eBay is completely different.
So I think a lot of people almost,
because the pressure isn't there to like, you know,
there's no Amazon algorithm that says you have to send in
stuff weekly for you to, you know, to make sales.
I think people like to take their foot off the gas
and kind of just like sit back and see what happens
instead of continuing to send stuff.
And then you get to a point where you're like,
well, I'm not selling stuff.
Well, what's your active inventory, right?
You got 200, 300, 400, 500 items, you know,
even up to a thousand.
If you're sending in low dollar media,
you're not going to make much money.
You might have, you know,
you might be selling these books for 10, $12 a piece,
but you're bringing home a buck from that if you're lucky.
That's crazy to think about, you know,
Amazon's taking 90% of your sale.
That is the reality of it.
And a lot of people get caught up with,
well, I sold all this, but I'm only taking home with us.
Well, you got to get consistent within your business model.
And it's not just consistent and doing work.
There's other things that go into having a successful
reselling business when it comes to consistency.
You got to be consistent with what you're buying, right?
You're not going to keep buying junk.
If you're consistently buying junk,
then you're going to get rewarded with junk.
And now if you're consistently buying, you know,
Eastern presses like you, you know, dream of,
then you're consistently going to get rewarded
with Eastern press profit.
That's just the way it is.
So it's not just being consistent with doing the work.
It's being consistent from beginning to end,
from start to finish.
When you're out there sourcing, right?
Kind of can break it down.
We'll break it down from the beginning.
You're out there sourcing.
You have to be consistent with the quality
of items you're taking, right?
You're not going to walk into a store and buy a bunch
of junk just because, just so you can have things to list,
right?
You're not going to buy stuff just so you have work to do.
Right.
And here's a question I've always had for you, Mike.
Do you have a weekly or monthly or quarterly quota
as far as either boxes you send in or units you send in?
I used to.
When I was pushing volume last year,
I would have won at least six boxes on the low end.
And I had weeks where I was doing, you know, 14 boxes.
And that was when I was really pushing volume.
But now since I've changed my business model to a higher ASP,
I can send out one box, two boxes a week.
And with my higher ASP,
I'm making the same amount that I was
when I was sending in 14 boxes.
As crazy as that sounds,
if you understand how Amazon fees work,
it's 100% attainable where my two boxes can equal 10 boxes
of lower value stuff.
So I don't have one as much as I used to.
I still, I mean, minimum,
you better be getting out one box a week
if you're doing this full time,
even if you're finding, you know, expensive stuff.
But I don't have one like I used to.
When I was pushing volume,
I always just went off how many boxes I was sending in.
Now, since I've been sending in higher value stuff,
whatever I can get out, you know,
a few boxes every single week, three boxes,
I'm fine with that because in those three boxes,
I probably have, you know, $700 in profits
sitting in each one.
So it doesn't really concern me as much,
but it is one of those things, right?
Where, like you said,
are you consistent with sending items in?
Even if it's higher value stuff,
you're only sending in one shipment a week,
that's fine as long as you're consistent with it.
I don't think I've ever had a week
where I didn't send anything in.
Like as long as I wasn't restocked out, right?
I mean, that was my life for six months,
I couldn't send anything in,
but ever since the restock limits opened up,
every week something's going out the door, you know?
That's a good point you made.
I would make the argument that Amazon sellers
would have to be more consistent than eBay sellers
because at eBay, we don't get locked out of listing items.
Amazon sellers do.
There's a period of time, like six months,
four to six months,
and you have an inkling of when the cutoff time is
and no inkling of when the open gate season is.
So you gotta send it as much as you can,
as quickly as you can, until you're locked out,
in my opinion, if you're doing it full time.
I'm gonna blow your mind right now.
So my payouts over the past, you know, basically month,
when I really started going back out,
sourcing higher profit items,
my payouts are already in line
with what I was doing last year
when I had 3,600 items in stock.
And I just went and looked now.
I currently have 489 products in stock at Amazon.
That's like what?
Six to seven times less?
Yes.
So I'm doing six to seven times less work
and I'm already making the same amount of money
I was last year.
That's fantastic.
Now, are the hours sourcing or processing the same or more?
It's probably the same.
I mean, I have been really, I've been,
I hate to use the word grinding.
That's so like cheesy.
I've been out there grinding.
I've been going to lots of thrift stores,
but with us looking for a house
and you were just down in Philly yesterday,
seeing the family,
I haven't been out there as hard as I have been,
but my sources, I got my sources narrowed down to where,
if I go to three of my best sources in a week,
I'm probably coming out with two or three boxes
of profitable, highly profitable items to sell.
So I've basically refined everything almost.
And one of those things where if I was,
if I wasn't doing the same business I was last year,
I'd be sending in 10 boxes a week,
making $400 a week and I'd be miserable.
It's just a reality of it.
So consistency has changed for me.
I'm consistent.
Speaking of, like I said, eBay was a game.
Amazon is its own game.
Now they changed the game a little bit where you can,
that lockout may not be a thing
if you choose to do that bidding thing they got going on.
Are you considering that and continuing to source
all year round and just playing the big game
during quote unquote closing season?
It shouldn't really matter because the amount I've sent in
since I've been really out there sourcing
and the amount I've been selling,
it's basically balanced itself out.
Like if they drop back the limits down to 1,000 units
or whatever, I don't think it's gonna be an issue
because I'm sending in only the faster moving items.
So there's no things that only sell once a month
in my inventory.
So that's kind of why we changed.
That new forecasting tool is like two months out the road.
So you have an idea at least this time.
Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, and you know, it's Amazon,
so they can do whatever they want.
They can say, oh yeah, you're forecasted for 100.
The day of they drop you down.
Love it.
Yep, yep, that's how it is.
But that's why we had to change our whole business model
and say, hey, we can't continue to have 5,000 items,
you know, sitting at Amazon,
but it all comes with consistency from the beginning.
You gotta be consistent across the board.
And with Amazon, it even goes with your software, right?
So your trigger set has to be consistent
with your repricing, right?
You can't have, you can't be scanning for, you know,
three dollar items and then your lowest price on reprice,
it is $15 because your three dollar profit items
are gonna be below your minimum.
So you're automatically never gonna get
those items repriced.
They're never gonna sell.
Everything has to coincide with itself on Amazon
when it comes to this software.
You can't have two completely, basically,
business models within your software.
And it's possible, people do it all the time.
Why aren't my items selling?
Well, what's your trigger set at?
What's your repricer minimum set at?
There's so many little things that factor into this.
So you can't really pick and choose.
I don't think you can just be like, well,
I wanna be half like Johnny and half like Mike.
No, you gotta be all one way or the other.
You can't kinda do that.
And that kinda brings us to the next thing
I wanna talk about here is just consistency
with your business model.
Just overall, you have to, they say the riches
are in the niches, people argue against it.
There's plenty of people that sell everything
that make a great income doing it.
But I don't think you can, it's harder
to do multiple platforms.
I don't think you can 100% be consistent at eBay
and Amazon in the same aspect of things.
I tried and I knew I wasn't giving either one
the attention they needed.
And I made the call to take a step back
for Amazon for me here and then see what I wanna do
next year.
Yeah, it's the opposite for me, right?
I was, you know, I got locked out of Amazon
and I had to basically say, all right, eBay,
it's time for you to come back to life.
And now it's back on the back burner.
So it's, I don't think even if you're getting results
on both of them, I still think if you just focus
on one over the other, you're gonna get better results.
And that's the same with business models, right?
Like I can't, you know, do the thrifting model
and then, you know, do the online arbitrage model
and the retail arbitrage model and be successful.
You'll be successful as long as you, you know,
have a good business plan.
But I don't think you can be successful
if you decided just to go with one of those
and focus on one of those.
Right, now here's the thing I've been thinking about
since making that change over this last year here was,
okay, when I get eBay to its maximum potential,
then I think it's time for me to diversify into other things.
But until that point, if I can't make eBay the best it can be,
I shouldn't focus on things that will distract me
from making it the best it could be,
is my personal take on it.
Now there's plenty of people that would disagree with me
and there's plenty of people say,
you're leaving money on the table.
There's plenty of people that do the opposite
of what I'm saying and make a pretty good living at it.
I know myself and I know what I'm capable of
and I want to see what I can do with one platform
for me personally in my business,
factoring, not factoring in anybody else's business
and how they do things.
I wanna see what I can do.
And I think that's, a lot of people like to copy
what other people are doing
because they see the success that they are having.
And that doesn't necessarily translate
into your own success in my opinion.
100%, I'm kind of gonna wrap up the consistency topic here
is you have to be consistent,
but you have to give things a certain amount of time
to get results, right?
If I started today and I wanted to do the 30 listings a day,
Johnny B method, this is something like he said,
you can't expect it to get Johnny B results
within a month, within two months, within three months.
This is a long game.
Unfortunately, everything you hear out there,
everything you see out there
that make it seem like you can get rich overnight doing this,
selling used items, common items,
it is not, it's not realistic at all.
I don't care what anybody says.
If you're selling used items that are in high demand,
that are selling multiple units every single day,
this is a business that takes years to build.
And I know a lot of people don't wanna hear that,
especially if you're just starting out.
But if you stick with this and you're consistent with it,
you can get it to a point where,
you can make a comfortable income,
you have processes in place.
Johnny B, one day he wants to just show up to the warehouse,
make sure everything's running smooth.
And then he heads back out the door.
So there are ways,
you're not permanently sucked into the business.
It's not like a jail sentence, right?
It's not like I've got to resell
for the next 60 years of my life.
Let me out, Mike, let me out.
There's ways you can, you know,
just step back from your business,
but still have it and it still runs.
But you gotta choose what you wanna do.
And I know if you're just starting out here,
you're really not thinking that far ahead,
but you are thinking about results, right?
If you start something today,
you wanna see results today.
And I can admit, everybody's the same way, right?
If we list something, if we start something new today,
we wanna get some kind of results.
So it was social media, YouTube, anything like that.
You know, you wanna click, you wanna view,
you wanna sell, you want, it covers every aspect of life.
But I promise you, I mean, perfect example here,
my YouTube channel, all right?
I'm not a big shot by any means,
but starting out with, you know, 10 subscribers
that were basically my real life friends and Deb, right?
It's like, I had zero.
That's not your friend.
That's when I got out of that.
She's my arch nemesis.
I owe it all to Deb, right?
She's over there listening,
and hopefully she didn't just hear what I said.
But yeah, it's like, you have to realize
anything and everything that is good
when it comes to business takes time.
Sure, you might strike lightning in a bottle.
You might catch this bolo, right?
You know, the used book guy, Furby,
the hot item of the year, but that always goes away.
And what always wins at the end of the day
is the people that are consistent across the board, right?
A few years ago, the big thing was chlorine.
All the Amazon sellers are flipping chlorine in pools.
And then the next year came and everybody,
there was so much chlorine available
that those people are dead in the water.
They thought they were gonna make a hundred grand again.
Those people go away and everybody that was consistent
the whole time are still there,
still growing their business slowly.
So I don't know, you got any last thoughts
for being consistent with your business?
It takes time to be consistent.
I mean, I didn't, you gotta make your goals
to be able to be consistent, I think.
I don't think we touched on that.
We probably should have.
So I'll just make it real short and sweet for you.
Set attainable, consistent goals for yourself
and don't set the bar too high for yourself
because you can't be consistent if you can never do it.
So start small and then build up
to get gigantic consistency, I guess.
Goals should be item-based, not monetary-based.
You agree?
I agree with that.
So you'll be able to do the work.
You can't do the work, you can't get your goal.
And once you're consistent with your target quantity goals,
then the money magically starts to appear.
It's like a little leprechaun.
A little leprechaun shows up in the yard.
He's like, hey, I've seen you enlisting 20 a day, Michael.
Here goes a bar goal for you.
But yeah, so he did cover that.
Goals should be quantity-oriented.
And if you're consistent with it, sooner or later,
the money will be, you know.
It is one of those things, though, right?
With eBay, you've got to do it the right way.
You've got to be consistent the right way with eBay.
And the same with Amazon.
Just being consistent just for the sake of being consistent.
That's not enough to survive in this game,
especially the way the margins keep getting squeezed overall.
You have to do things the right way.
Even if it takes you a little bit longer,
you'll refine your processes.
Just because it takes you an hour today, next year,
it'll probably only take you 10 minutes,
because you're getting better, you're getting smarter,
you're refining your processes.
So just be consistent across the board.
And I promise you, you'll be a billionaire
and have a huge fake warehouse like I do behind me.
So we will talk to you guys in the next episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Resellers
Mindset podcast.
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