February 12, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode of the What Sold Podcast, hosts Brandon and Matt (also known as Rusty) discuss Matt's recent experience of recovering from illness and the humor behind his temporary weight loss. They delve into the dynamics of selling Girl Scout cookies and share their personal challenges intertwined with humorous anecdotes. On the more serious reselling front, Matt provides an in-depth guide on effective eBay listing strategies. He emphasizes the importance of compelling titles, high-quality photos, and proper categorization to enhance visibility and sales. Matt also explains the benefits of relisting items periodically to keep them visible to potential buyers. The conversation covers various selling platforms like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and live auctions, detailing the pros and cons of each. The episode wraps up with a showcase of some intriguing items Matt recently sold, including a vintage bookend, colorful mineral slabs, and carved jade pieces, anticipating a busy week with nearly 100 items ending in auction soon.
0:00 Introduction and Catching Up 00:44 Southern Cooking and Weight Loss 02:37 Girl Scout Cookies and Name Changes 04:17 Listener Feedback and Podcast Goals 07:20 Listing Products: Platforms and Strategies 15:52 The Art of Listing: Titles and Photos 21:17 Relisting Strategies for Better Sales 23:34 Relisting Strategies for Part-Time Sellers 24:48 Analyzing Listings for Better Sales 27:15 Choosing the Right eBay Categories 29:26 Efficient Listing Techniques 36:36 Recent Sales Highlights 41:54 Upcoming Auctions and Final Thoughts The What Sold Podcast Subreddit #ebaylistings #listingonebay #gold #howtolistonebay #listingproducts #sellingonebay #vintage #whatsoldpodcast #rustythereseller #whatsold #reselling #ebaystoreRusty the reseller:
https://www.youtube.com/@RustyTheReseller What Sold: https://www.youtube.com/@whatsold Postcard Planet: https://www.youtube.com/@postcardplanet What Sold Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc513e2aPbloS20mTwuv8bA
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:38):
Welcome back to the What Sold Podcast
I am Brandon.
This is Matt.
Hello.
Some of you know him as rusty.
I was just talking to Matt,Matt, as we know, it's been well
documented on the show was sickfor the last couple of weeks, just.
So much weight that he can now eatwhatever he wants whenever he wants.
So I think, Oh, Rusty'sgoing full Southern cooking.
(00:59):
Like I'm thinking fried everything.
As long as it is a color in therange of white to Brown, right.
I can eat it.
Nothing green, nothingorange, nothing silly.
Come on.
It needs to have a batter onit, preferably deep fried.
Yeah.
I just got to, I got to put thoseI'm going to put those LBs back
on walking around like a frail,I feel like I should be holding
(01:23):
a, like a hand cane walk around.
Like what's going on with you?
By the way, our listeners right now arethrowing their phones out the window
or if they're watching on YouTube,they're like punching the screen.
Cause they're so mad at you.
Like, gosh, we all wish we could get that.
Okay.
Listen, it's genetics.
I've never, listen, I'mcertainly got lots of.
With things that I wouldlove to change about myself.
(01:46):
I got some of the genetic downers, Igot some of the, I got some of the
good stuff too, but one of the thingsthat I just, by no, effort of my own.
I just, I never have to lose weight.
That's just, whatever.
But I just, that's, I know.
And, but can you imagine what it'slike to have to weigh too little and
you need to like, that's probablywhat most people don't experience.
(02:08):
No, I can't imagine that.
No.
I gotta say it's like theends of the bell curve.
It's not that great on this side either.
So I don't know.
I do.
Cause I do like you, I do respectyou, I enjoy our time together.
I don't feel sorry for you.
I'm just going to put it out there.
I just, I'm speaking for, I think 94percent of our audience right now is like,
(02:29):
we are glad you're healthy, Rusty, but weall wish that we could weigh in on that.
But just get out of here.
Yeah, exactly.
I get it.
I get it.
Your girl's cat.
What, when we got on today, people,a girl scout, Matt was just stuffing
his ball that time of year, weboth have Girl Scouts in our house.
So we're selling cookies.
Do you want to venture to guess whichones, what type of, that I was eating?
I think that must've been Thin Mints.
(02:51):
It was, man.
It was the peanut butter patties.
Oh, yeah.
I find most Girl Scoutcookies not my favorite.
I'm not gonna lie.
I'm the same way, but you know what?
It's, because this is that time of yearour daughters come home with the boxes
and here they are sitting on the counter.
And it's just, it's just easy to grabone of those packages on the way.
They keep changing the names on it.
(03:12):
So it's like I can'tkeep track of anything.
It's one day in Samoa.
Then it's something else.
And I'm just like, what, whateverhappened to the not PC anymore, I guess.
I don't know what it is.
I was the Girl Scout cookie managerfor our daughter's troop, which was
the worst job I've ever had in my life.
And I didn't even get paid for it.
And it was amazing.
They sell different Girl Scoutcookie names for different
(03:35):
regions of the country.
I'm not sure why.
Huh.
Okay, interesting, but they changedthe names based on I guess some
people think that Samoas is bad.
So they changed it to caramel delights.
I think they're calledin some of the places.
So I think we call them caramel delights.
And I'm like, I will not call them carb.
They are Samoas.
(03:55):
So anyway, Yeah, we arein the midst of growth.
So it is, our daughters arelearning how to be resellers.
Let me tell you, it is acutthroat business out there
selling Girl Scout cookies.
That's right.
You got to put the elbows out and yougot to make some room for yourself.
That's right.
Listen, this is great intro.
I just really feel like I need to talkabout myself a little bit more though.
, I need to get into alifelong walks on the beach.
(04:17):
We have had rarely do we, wemostly get positive comments.
So we posted up the the podcastas a YouTube show just simply.
So that people could, it takes no time.
We just post it up there justso people could see the items.
If they were at all interested,not thinking that, Hey, I'm going
to listen to a podcast on YouTube.
Maybe they are whatever, butwe got this comment this last
(04:38):
week from somebody saying, Hey,why don't you two just shut up?
And talk, I was like, it was like someany, it's humbling, it's humbling.
I said to Matt before, I waslike, I really just want to say
this person's name, but I guessyou could look on the thing.
But I went back and looked at theirpage and they've posted nothing,
but it's sort of like, wait, soyou're mad that this free show.
(05:01):
That is purely here to help.
We get nothing from it that weput this up there that you're
mad that we talk about ourselves.
You know what, Matt and I have decidedwe're just going to filibuster.
It's okay.
We're just going to talk like our corns.
We're going to talk about whatever.
Thank you for the feedback out there.
And and we certainly will take itunder advisement and we're going
to, less about us more about.
(05:21):
The things that we soldand what you should sell.
And listen, you're coming youcan go to any type of channel.
If you listen to this, it's probablynot because of anything we're saying
about ourselves, probably about,the world of the work that we do.
And that is the main point of this.
It does help getting feedback,getting comments, getting reviews.
So definitely, we're, this is alltongue in cheek, but it does help
(05:45):
if you get on and say something and,it just be gentle, but if you have
suggestions, we'll certainly take those.
We want to give peoplewhat they want to hear.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that is true.
We could, I had a friend who said,it's like most podcasts that he spent
like first 15 minutes is yapping.
I want to get into this stuff.
I'm like, Hey, listen, there's a coupleof tricks and I use them all the time.
Seriously.
I'm being serious now.
(06:05):
I'm not even being tongue in cheek.
Just pull the bar forward, skip allthe nonsense and go right to, because
especially on the YouTube channel,there are chapter markers on there.
So we'll tell you whatwe're talking about when.
So if there's something you really want,one of the great things about podcasts
and about YouTube, whatever is that.
As opposed to the old days when youwere listening to a radio program, I
guess you could record it on a taperecorder, but by and large, that was it.
(06:29):
You couldn't go back and listen.
The great part is, we're puttinginformation out there, and if
you want to go listen to itagain, That's totally fine.
We do appreciate, in all sincerity, we'vegotten some really sweet and kind comments
and some great emails from people.
We appreciate the reviews you write.
All that stuff is super helpful to us.
Our goal with this show is to make, tohave this show make enough money that
(06:51):
it keeps, that we can keep doing it.
It's never gonna make us rich.
Yeah, essentially, Brandon can, But justpay himself for the time that he spends
on doing all this production work for it.
Because he does 99.
9 percent of the work here.
That's not true becauseyou're out schlepping, dude.
If we didn't have you slept it it's alabor of love for both of us for sure.
But bottom line is there anything youcould do to help is really appreciated.
(07:13):
All right.
Enough of that.
We are glad to be back.
I think both of us aremuch more on the mend now.
We both been, we've both been sick,but as a lot of people are, it's the
season So we are going to talk aboutthings bought and sold in this episode.
And we're going to start by talkingabout a couple episodes ago.
I think three or four episodes, maybe two.
(07:34):
I don't even remember.
We were talking about how to listproducts and I started thinking about it.
And I started looking, I'm like,man, there's a fine art to listing.
So Matt is going to regale us withsome more fine tuning of listing.
So think about it as youwant to sell a product.
What's the best way to positionyourself to sell that product?
(07:55):
How do we do that, Matt?
It depends on, the first, even beforeyou list is you have to familiarize
yourself with what platforms areavailable for you to list on.
Are you, some people really love Etsyand they just want to sell on Etsy.
Other people have, thereare different platforms.
Some people are like, I don'teven want to mess with those.
I'm happy just selling on Facebookmarketplace where you're really primarily
(08:18):
targeting people in your geographic area.
Yeah.
Within an hour or less.
Usually there are pros and cons withall of those online platforms like eBay
and Etsy, the advantage to using thosesites is that for the most part, their
platforms are pretty robust and prettyintuitive, pretty easy to use, especially
(08:39):
even if you're just starting out.
There are a lot of things youcan do, but don't have to do.
The advantage is you'regetting a large market.
You can potentially sell topeople all over the world.
And because there are morepeople, there's more competition.
So you potentially stand to make moremoney depending on what the item is.
Downside is they take apercentage fee of the sale.
Downside is there's a little bit ofa risk if you're a seller, because
(09:02):
as we've discussed in the past.
If it ever comes up that there's adispute, eBay is much more likely
to support the buyer, whetherthey're in the right or not.
And so you need to know that going in.
But there's advantagesof Facebook Marketplace.
Yeah you're tapping asmaller area and less people.
But when you make that sale,it's just whatever the price is.
(09:23):
You negotiate that with the person,you meet up, you sell it to them.
They usually will give youcash or whatever it is that
you're willing to accept.
And so you can have cash in handthat day if you sell something.
Whereas with eBay, not only do you haveto wait till it sells, you have to wait
till they pay, and you also have to waituntil the end of your return window to
make sure that item isn't returned andyou don't have to give the money back.
(09:43):
So that's the first thing is to exploreand see what You enjoy using as far
as the platform, if you want to giveall of, that percentage and accept the
risks of selling on a platform likeeBay or something, then go for it.
But, marketplace is its own thing.
It's easier.
There's less information you haveto put on something like that,
(10:06):
but you do have to communicate.
Much more frequently with people.
People are contacting you, youneed to be available and by
your phone, that kind of thing.
And that's one of the reasonsI don't love Facebook places.
Cause I don't like to be tied to mydevice like that all day and have to
be responding, as, as fast as possible.
Some people dig that.
(10:27):
Other people do a quasi thing.
They have a YouTube channelwhere they have a Facebook page
and they'll run live auctions.
Now that really only works well if youhave a pretty big following, because
if nobody knows who you are, you canthrow up a live listing and you'll have
two people who pop in and that's notreally going to help your cause, but
if some of these YouTube channels thatalso do the stuff that we do with the
(10:50):
Rusty they have transformed and theirYouTube channel Is less, they're really
leveraging that in order to sell, not asmuch give information about the content.
It's more like, Oh, okay, likeyou're here, I've got whatever,
they may have 100, 000 subscribers.
And when they say next week, we'regoing to do this live auction
and they jump on at 7 38 PM.
(11:12):
They might have 150, 200 peoplesitting there waiting ready to bid.
And you just put it up saying,this is a starting bid.
I'm going to give this a minute.
Whatever the highestbid is who will buy it.
And they run through all other thingsand at the very end, they spend the
next few hours emailing out or messagingevery single person that, who had won.
(11:33):
Hey, by the way, you had the winningbid on this, blah, blah, blah.
This is the price.
This is how you pay me.
I'll give you tracking when I ship it.
So that's the, I know that's a lot, right?
That's a lot of information that Ijust dumped, but there's the art of
the listing itself, but then there'spossibly even more importantly is
like, where are you going to list?
And it might make sense if you'restarting out to dip your toe in several
(11:55):
of them, get some experience withall of them, compare and contrast.
I know you've sold on eBay before Brandon.
You may have had some decent experiences.
You've had some not so good experiences.
Most of us, if we've used a platformlike eBay long enough, we end up having
some negative experiences as well.
And that's, I, when I'm selling thousandsof things a year, statistically speaking,
(12:18):
someone's going to try to haggle me.
Someone's going to try to be fraudulent.
Someone's going to, there's going to besome disputes that have to be resolved.
So do you have the stomach for that?
Oh, to do it in that way, orwould you just say, I don't
even want to mess with that.
And there's no right or wrong.
It's just like a person's own preference.
It's funny because I had I talked aboutthe fact that I had a terrible experience
(12:40):
on eBay and it was because I was ignorant.
I didn't know honestly, if I'd havebeen working on this show or if I'd
have been listening to these episodes,none of that would have happened to me.
I didn't know that the buyercould just say, I don't want it.
Instead of that, I was like, wait, what?
Because obviously when you sellon Facebook marketplace and
somebody says, Hey, whatever,there's no recourse afterwards.
(13:01):
Hey, I decided I don't want this.
She just say thanks for letting me know.
But I don't, we've alreadymade the transaction.
And so yeah, it's done.
And whereas eBay iscompletely different beast.
I think I would probably go back moreinto eBay now and sell, knowing what I
know now, because I know how to protectmyself, I know how to list things,
I know how to say to make sure Hey,am I getting a real buyer right now?
(13:23):
Or is this just somebody, like theshipping and all that stuff, I would
have built in those kinds of thingsinto the sale that I didn't know before.
So it was like, okay,we're going to build it in.
But.
If I've got to eat it, I wantto build in enough profit that
it's not going to kill me.
And if make sure that somebody understandswhat the thing is, mine was remote.
(13:44):
So it was a little bit more, whenyou're selling things that have, I love
what you say about selling jewelry.
Like it's not a lot of complication to it.
Ultimately it works or it doesn'twork when you're selling electronics.
If it, if they don't know howto operate it, they were like, I
just don't know how to operate it.
I'm not going to mess around with it.
And that's really problematic.
(14:05):
When you're in an electronics world,because a lot of this stuff is, I
have a lot of electronic equipmentthat takes time to figure out.
And if somebody says, I don't want totake the time, they can just send it back.
And to be honest with you, thereare people who's their entire
store, their niche is electronics.
They love doing that.
But if you're going to buy and sellelectronics, you need to know ahead
of time that it's going to be on you.
(14:25):
You're going to have to do work morework than I do with the things I sell,
because you have to plug them in.
You have to test them all out.
You have to make sure that they work.
If they don't work.
And you're handy enough you'vespent the time or you figure out,
Oh, we'll just need to this otherpart or I'm going to fix it.
But see, now you've stepped intothis whole world of work and time.
Before you list something and if I, if Isee a really awesome deal on a piece of
(14:49):
electronic equipment that I don't havethe ability to link up and test, like if
I see a stereo system like a receiver.
I may not have speakers and otherthings that I need to plug in to make
sure it all works before I listen.
And if you list it andyou don't know what works.
You had better say that in the titleof the listening untested may require
repair or, or for parts or repair,because if they get it and they're
(15:14):
under the impression, it works and itdoesn't, even if it one button on it
doesn't work, you're facing a return.
So I don't like that because Megan,some people are really into electronics.
They like it.
They enjoy that piece.
And it's no different than how I feelabout, let's say, artwork or instruments.
Some people would be like, I wouldnever buy an instrument that's damaged
knowing that I have to repair it.
(15:35):
That's because they're not interestedin that thing, or maybe they
don't have the skill set to do it.
I have both, and so I do that from time totime, or with artwork because I enjoy it.
So if you enjoy a thing and you're willingto do the work, that's totally fine.
That's your thing.
Just know that ahead of time.
Know that.
What's going to be expected of you.
But I think this kind of leads into thenext phase of your question, which is
(15:56):
more specifically your question, whichis how do you list what's the important
thing I can really mainly speak fromexperience on platforms like eBay.
Or Etsy, but this wouldalso apply to any listing.
I would say that the number one and twomost important things, these are the
things that are going to either a get thatbuyer that you're looking for or not, or
(16:20):
are going to be the difference betweenwhether somebody buys yours and not.
One that someone else has, right?
The two most important things areyour title of the listing, your title
and the photographs, everything.
There's other information outthere, how you price things, whether
it's a buy it now or an auction,how you go about setting up, how
(16:40):
you're going to ship the item.
Those are all important things tosome of those have money attached
to them, like the shipping piece.
So you do need to figure that out.
But if you can get really good at knowing.
Who your buyer is and what they're lookingfor, what they're going to be looking for.
You need to put yourself in theirshoes and say, okay, right now I, I'm,
I want to sell this vintage watch.
(17:00):
I need to imagine who is theperson looking on eBay for a
vintage men's automatic watch?
What words, what keywords arethey going to use to find it?
And what are they going to want to see?
They're probably going towant to see the words vintage.
The words men's, if it's a men'swatch, make it specific, it's
a round or a rectangular dial.
(17:23):
It has the original elastic y metalband, the ones that are great for
pinching and pulling your hair out ofyour arm and stuff that everyone loved
so much back in the fifties and sixties.
Or whatever, and you photographthe things that are in your title.
So if I say, this is a black dial,bull of a men's automatic watch.
(17:43):
When they look at the pic of the veryfirst picture should be a closeup of
the dial showing that it says Boulevard,it's black and it is a watch boom.
Then if they're intrigued,they're going to go and look
at the rest of the images, but.
Not just all of your images, butspecifically the one you choose to be
the one that pops up first, the onethat everyone sees it needs to be the
most attractive Can you explain thatfor people that are just starting out?
(18:05):
Because that was one that I learnedwhen I was doing some pictures of
different things for you and like,Oh, there's, you can target one.
Can you talk about that real quickly?
You can.
And you need to pay attention toit because I make mistakes all
the time or rather I'll be goingthrough quickly and listing a lot
of similar items like watches.
And let's say each watch I take sixto eight pictures of, let's say, and
(18:26):
I upload all of them on my phone.
I'm doing it.
And I intentionally.
Click on the one that I wantto be the one displayed first.
The number one picture thatgoes in is the one that eBay
pulls to be the display photo.
Sometimes I'll go through there andfor whatever reason, it uploads in
opposite order of how I selected it.
So I'm not paying attention.
I look up there like, Oh shoot,I got to go revise that because
(18:48):
the very first picture is thepicture of the back of the watch.
Which.
A person interested in the watch probablywon't want to see that, but that's not
a picture that's going to draw them inthe back of a watch like that's boring
and it doesn't highlight the product.
So if whatever your closest up picture,best representation of that item,
(19:08):
best looking photo of that item,that's the one you want to select.
And if you, whether you're onyour phone or an eBay, you can.
Up.
Like I said, if you upload itfirst, the first one usually is
the one that goes in, but if not,you can drag and move those around.
You can order them any way that you want.
And right now with eBay, for example,you can do up to 24 photos per listing
(19:28):
without paying additional money.
If you want to even more photos,you can pay additional money
and to eBay to have more photos.
I never.
Almost never do I get to 24 pictures andfeel like, man, I wish I had like 10 more.
It doesn't happen hardly ever.
And something like a watch, forexample, I'll do a close up picture
of the dial of the face of the watch.
(19:49):
I'll do a larger, like a furtherback of the entire piece.
Left, right, the band ifit has it, and the back.
If it's a pocket watch, I'll usuallyremove the back and I want to show a
really good clean photo of the movementbecause it'll have a serial number and
things, and people can reference that todetermine the age of it, the grade, the
model, what year it was made, all of that.
(20:10):
Take really, really good photos.
Take closeup photos tobegin that draws people in.
Oh the face looks pretty good.
I wonder what the restof the watch looks like.
Then they go in and look at your photos.
And if they've spent time, they'vegone in, they've looked at photos.
They're much more likely to comeback and be interested in buying
than just scrolling by something.
Because this is in that world of mediaand everything where you're just always
(20:32):
bombarded with everything, right?
Like all these social media platformsare set up for you to watch it for two
seconds, within one or two seconds, ifyou want to keep watching it or not,
you just scroll, you move on past.
It's the same thing with eBay.
If I look up vintage men'sautomatic wristwatch, 76, 000
items are going to pop up.
Am I going to go through 70?
No.
Probably won't even go throughthe first page, of, of 200 items.
(20:56):
So you want to have somethingthat's going to draw attention.
That brings me to the next most important.
So the important things, probablynot in any particular order, but
tied are the title on the photos.
The thing that I think sets meapart as a full time seller.
And someone that sells highervolumes is that I'm not just going
in and listing items day to day.
(21:17):
I do that, but about every secondto third day, I go in and pull
items out of my story, delist them.
So I take them from being a liveavailable item for people to buy.
And I essentially putit back in the system.
So instead of relisting it, which willcopy that same item number and put it
back up there and go back in the samequeue that was in, I click a button that
(21:41):
says sell similar, it copies it exactly.
And then I relist it.
Maybe I adjust the price.
Maybe I don't.
And as soon as that's over, I haveto remember to delete the ones
that I just copied, because if Itry to relist those, I would have
duplicates if eBay doesn't catch it.
And that'd be bad if you sell one andthen a week later you sell the same
thing and you go looking for it andyou're like, oops, it already sold.
You got to remember to do that.
(22:01):
But I do that.
And because what that does is itputs it back to the top of the queue.
So that day, when someone comeslooking for a men's automatic watch,
they're way more likely to see myitem today than they would have
been had I left it in the queue.
52, 000 deep in the queuebecause I listed it a month ago.
So how often do you relist?
(22:22):
Probably twice a week,something like that.
Okay.
And not everything, but you see mystory, it takes more time now because I
have three eBay stores and all three ofthem have over 3000 items in them each.
At any given time, I've goteight or 9, 000 active listings.
You can delist and relist 200 at a time,but that's the most that eBay allows.
So that does speed up the process some,but if I want to pull 3, 000 items out
(22:45):
or 2, 000 items out of three stores.
And then relist them all, that couldtake me an hour or over an hour.
And I'm not evenlistening to anything new.
I'm just pulling out old thingsand putting them back in.
But you would be shocked.
And I know this worksbecause it works for me.
And I've shared thison the YouTube channel.
And people have goneon and said, thank you.
Like I made three sales today.
I didn't do anything other than take theseout and relist them like you said to do.
(23:08):
And look at this, I've got these sales.
And it has everything just to do it.
There's way more things available for salethan any person has the Time to really go
through and look at every single option.
They're not going to look at every option.
They're going to look at the first 120options that eBay provides, and they're
not going to provide yours every time,unless it's one of the newest ones that's
(23:29):
been listed, as far as their system knows.
That's an important thing.
Now it may not be important if you have 20items, if you do this super part time and
you have a lot, but also 20 items is easy.
You could relist thoseevery day, in one move.
And you should, and you ultimately should.
You're going to have a better.
More people will be seeing your item.
The more people that see your item, themore likely you're going to get a sale.
(23:50):
It's not complicatedwhen it comes down to it.
What gets complicated is when youhave thousands of things and you're
trying to store them and you have 30or 40 items you have to fulfill every
single day and you have a timeframelike that's when it gets, Complicated.
You get to a point where you'relike I almost need another person
to help with some of these tasks.
But that's way down the road.
If you're part time, these things shouldbe easy and they shouldn't take long.
(24:14):
In fact, just build that into your day.
If you're going to do some work on eBay,first thing you do every day is delist
those items, sell similar, put them onthere, delete the ones you just copied.
And then now you can move on to newthings, but put those things out
there for people to see, becauseit will translate to more sales.
It does for me all the time.
Is there any limit on how manytimes you can relist an item?
(24:36):
As far as I know, there isn't.
Oh, so you could, if you were justa part time reseller, you could
list it every single day for a year.
Exactly.
And eventually someone's goingto come along and find it.
If you have had an item that's been upthere for over 90 days, most eBay people
who sell would say, if something sellswithin the first 90 days that's good.
(24:56):
That's above the curve.
But if you have something that'sbeen up for months, you've not
really had a lot of watchers.
No one's touching it.
You have some work to do.
You need to go back andanalyze that listing and see.
What's the problem here?
Do I have it in the correct category?
Do I, are my photos clear, crisp?
And really representing the item.
Do I have the best photo availableto be the showcase photo?
(25:18):
What's my title look like?
Am I really catching thosepeople that I'm looking for?
Or am I, have I omitted or notthought about certain words
that they're searching for?
And because my, that wasn't on mytitle, it's never popping up for
them and I'm missing these buyers.
What is it?
Is my shipping too high?
Is my, go back and look at sold itemsof similar things in the last 90 days.
Is yours priced above all of those?
(25:38):
That may be it.
Maybe it's just too high.
You need to lower the price, but youneed to go in periodically, especially
when things haven't sold for a whileand say, okay, is it just that I have
a high and that's, I have to sell itfor that, or I'm not going to sell it.
I just need, I have to make that amount.
Or are you like, I just,I'm not in a hurry.
I don't care if it takesme a year to sell it.
So I'm not going to make any adjustments.
Or do you have to be even more creative?
(26:00):
Clearly nobody wants this item byitself, but maybe if I put it with two
or three other similar items and make asmall lot, and then I raised the price
a little bit, I'm going to sell it.
And I'll move a couple other things too.
There's all kinds of things thatyou can do, and that's really
the more maintenance piece of it.
That's after you've listedthings, but initially listing, if
you can get really good photos.
(26:21):
If you can get the best photofirst, if you can utilize all the
characters in the title, which Ican't remember how it is, how many is
like 80, I think it's 80 characters.
So you can use words, you can useabbreviated words, you can use dashes,
whatever you need to do in that titleto highlight what you're, what it is and
also put the most pertinent words first.
(26:43):
It doesn't have to belike a perfect sentence.
I might say watch lot.
Vintage mixed men'swatches, 1950s to 1960s.
But you notice the veryfirst word was watch.
And the second word was lot.
So a person looking to buy watchesin groups, not just individuals.
(27:03):
That's the best two words to start with.
Yeah.
'cause that's what they're searching for.
Especially if that's theway you wanna sell it.
Exactly.
And question it struck mewhen I was listening to this.
It's playing again, theamateur sleuth that I am here.
. How do I know, you said something about,are you sure it's in the right category?
Mm-hmm how do I know ifit's in the right category?
How do I ascertain the right category?
(27:23):
So you, there are many categoriesand subcategories and sub
subcategories within eBay.
One category, let's say, might be.
Coins and jewelry and that's one big one.
If you were to click on that,there'll be like 10 more.
There'll be like foreigncoins, United States coins.
There'll be costume jewelry,fine jewelry, antique jewelry.
(27:45):
And then that's a subset.
So you click on that.
And then within that, withincostume jewelry, it'll say,
Brooches and pens or necklaces orbrooches or mixed jewelry lots.
And whatever is most, reflective of thething you were trying to sell, that's
the category you want to put it in.
Some people will search within categories.
(28:06):
For example, if I put in buttons,antique buttons, and I want to, what
I'm really looking for are sewingbuttons that are antique, and I
want to see what those have sold foreither individually or collectively.
Lots, because I got a bunch of buttonsthat I need to sell for somebody.
If all I do is just look up buttonsand I don't click on a category,
anything in any category thatsays buttons is going to pop up.
(28:28):
Electronic equipment that have buttonson them, or Remote controls full
outfits, jackets that have buttons.
If they write big buttons in thetitle, wherever that's going to pop up.
That's convoluted.
That's too much stuff.
No, on the side, I want to go toantiques or something like that.
The subcategory and the within antiquessewing, like collectible sewing.
(28:50):
There we go.
That's the category.
So if you're selling an antique buttonand you put in your photos and you put
in your title, the next thing is youselect the category that is how eBay
categorizes it within their system.
So if a person is searching, not onlyfor a keyword or words, and they're
also searching within a particularcategory, you don't want to have
(29:12):
it miscategorized because thenyour item may not pop up for them.
Okay.
And you want it to.
You can do that.
I make mistakes on it sometimes becauseI do lots of things to try to cut corners
and shorten time so that I can sellhigher and list more volumes of things.
One of the ways I cut corners is you don'thave to start a listing from scratch.
Now, if you're just starting out, Irecommend you do that because you need to
(29:34):
familiarize yourself with all the types ofinformation you can input to And knowing
what things are required to be put inthere as item specifics per category,
because every category is different.
If I have something in fine jewelryversus antique jewelry, one of those
categories may require me to put ina piece of specific information about
(29:54):
it, a brand or something like that,whereas the other category won't.
But what I sometimes get into trouble iscopy listings that have already sold of a
similar item So if I wake up today and Iwant to sell a bunch of antique hat pins
The first thing I do is I look up antiquehat pin in ebay I go to sold items and
then I scroll down until I find a picturethat most Closely, very quickly, closely
(30:17):
resembles the item I'm going to sell.
I click on the item.
It shows you how much it sold for,if it was auction or buy it now.
And there's a little button that sayssell one now or sell one like this.
I just clicked that itcopies the entire listing.
The only thing it doesn't copy isthe title, the photo and the price.
So all I have to donow is input my photos.
Actually, it keeps the title.
(30:38):
You can adjust the titleto match your item.
And then you go down and fix the priceor adjust the shipping, whatever.
And boom, I got it done.
Now, the reason I mess up sometimesis that I go through and I
adjust the title, the photos andthe price, but I don't always.
Remember to pay attention to the category.
Now I'm just having to assume thatthat person had the correct category
(31:00):
on the item they sold, but sometimesthey don't have the best category.
Sometimes they copy someone else's listingand they didn't pay attention to it.
Do you see what I'm saying?
And it's just like a domino thing.
And here I am.
So you got to pay attention.
When I sell gold, like a scrapgold, like in just by the weight,
I don't list that in fine jewelry.
(31:21):
Even though that's what it is, it'sfine jewelry with gold or gemstones.
I list it in a gold bullion category.
Why do I do that?
Because people who buy scrap metal,they sometimes get discounts when they
purchase in that specific category.
Something that eBay offersto them is like a discounted.
Even selling it in one category versusanother, not only are you maybe catching
(31:43):
a different type of buyer, but theremay be advantages for them buying
out of certain categories because ofdiscounts or things, coupons, things
that eBay is offering to the buyers thatyou won't even know about as a seller.
I only know about that because as I soldin the past and I had it categorized
something else they would say heyright this month I get 10 percent off
(32:03):
of buying in the bullion category.
So would you mind delisting this andrelisting it just in that category?
Oh, okay.
Oh, cool.
I do that.
10 seconds later, they've boughtmy item because I worked with them.
So category can be important as well.
And I don't know if people havebeen paying attention out there, but
because of President Trump's tariffson different alloys and metals,
(32:28):
gold prices are, I think they're thehighest they've ever been right now.
They're very, very high.
Highest it's been certainly sinceI've been selling full time.
Yeah, I didn't look today, butI want to say, 14 karat gold.
By the gram is like over 60 a gram.
So if you have a broken piece ofjewelry, that's 14 carat, don't pitch it.
It could be worth a hundred bucksor more just like a, because
they'll buy it for the metal.
(32:50):
Yeah.
And it's there's a lot goingon in the alloys and especially
in the gold world right now.
And again, I'm not, I don't knowanything about it, I just, what I've
read, but there was talk about goldthat's in items that you throw away.
There's gold in them thar hills,is basically what the amounts do.
Old eyeglasses, the rims of oldeyeglasses, the nibs on old fountain pens.
(33:10):
You could, you'd be surprised,you'd be like, what?
Pull out an old pen that grandpa leftyou and it might say 14K or 18K on it.
And it's worth a lot of money rightnow, so start looking for gold.
That's basically the answer to that.
Any bricks of gold you'vegot laying around that you
just didn't pay attention to.
Banished to bloom.
It's just holding yourdoor open, the kickstand.
The treasure chest that you found inthe attic filled with gold doubloons.
(33:31):
The largest gold nugget, maybe that'sstill ever been found, certainly the one
of the largest that was ever found wasfound in, God, I want to say either late
1700s or early 1800s in North Carolina.
And they were using it tohold, like as a door prop.
They were using it.
It was like a boulder and they wereusing it just to keep a door open.
Yeah.
That's one does someone eventuallybought it, but back then you're
(33:53):
like , why can't I just use this foranother purpose too, until I need to
sell it for the, or yeah, why not?
Sure.
All right.
Anything else on listing thatpeople need to be aware of?
Or did you pretty much cover it?
I think we covered it.
I, I would say that the the way I liketo do listings because I'm very familiar
with the process now and it's fasterto do it on my phone because I take the
(34:13):
photos on my phone is I'll go through,I'll wait, I'll ideally, I wait until I
have multiples of the same type of item.
I had a hundred postcards here.
I got a hundred wristwatches.
I got a hundred pieces of costume jewelry.
They're all brooches.
I'll get up in the morning and I'll.
All I'll do is photographthem until they're all done.
Front and back, or however many photosyou need to take to represent that item.
I'll photograph all of them.
(34:34):
Then I'll go in and make alisting for costume brooch.
I'll find one that's sold, I'll copy it,I'll make sure that it all looks good.
Then all I have to do is inputthe new photos, adjust the
title or the price if I need to.
But let's say I'm going to run themall at 20 bucks on auction that day.
So I don't have to even change the price.
The only thing I have todo is change the pictures.
And change the title.
(34:55):
This one's got red rhinestones.
The other one had blue.
So I just swap out the color and I'm done.
And I can list hundreds of items in a day.
People are always like, Oh man,I like, if I can get 20 done
in a week, like I'm doing well.
You're spending too much time on stuff.
That's not important.
Just what I would say, that whateveryou're doing, that takes you that long.
It doesn't have to take you that long.
And it's not always abouta volume game, right?
(35:16):
If you have something that's reallyvaluable, it's probably worth you
spending a lot of time to makesure that listing looks perfect.
And do everything you need to do.
But for costume brooches thatare 20 bucks a piece or less, I
don't have to spend a ton of time.
I photograph them.
I put them in.
Everything that is neededto find that buyer is there.
And I don't need to do any more than that.
Because you havediminishing gains on that.
(35:38):
You're spending time that isnot going to translate in any
more sales or any more money.
So just don't do it.
Yeah.
And so I would say, you can doa lot more in a short amount
of time than you think you can.
Don't get, a lot of people just get hungup especially in the beginning because
they're a little nervous, I just wantto make sure I'm doing it correctly.
I want to make sure that I don'tsell it for too little or the
(35:59):
and all of those are valid.
Things to consider, butit's just a stats game.
The more things I have in mystore, the more I'm going to sell.
10 percent of 100 items is a lot lessthan 10 percent of 10, 000 items.
If I'm still always selling 10 percentof my stuff per month, the more I have
in there, the better I'm going to do.
You get more out of it,the more you get out there.
(36:20):
Not only that, but if you have peoplewho buy from your store and want to be
a repeat buyer and follow your store,Then they're always alerted to the things
and the more things you have availableas options, the more likely someone's
going to find something they want.
Oh, great.
Wow.
Talk about a knowledge dump.
That was awesome.
Boom.
Okay.
All right.
So in our last few minutestogether, what did you sell?
This show is about what we've sold.
(36:40):
It is.
What did you sell this week, Matt?
Now you're back.
You're going great guns.
You're out there again.
Yeah.
What'd you sell?
One of the things I sold was this, I'mjust showing you one and discussing it,
but it is a book end that is actually.
It is metal.
It is, I guess, technically abronze, but it's not real heavy.
It's a fairly thin coating, but it'sof a native, like a traditional.
(37:02):
Didn't you show us this a while ago?
When I got it and it sold, but thenthey decided they wanted to cancel the
order before I even was able to ship it.
So I had to relist it and it's okay.
It's sold for 60.
It's a native American with a dog.
It looks like he's huntingor he's just hanging out.
Cool.
Reminiscent of some of thoseolder Western artists like
Remington, people who had bronzes.
(37:24):
This isn't a horse or the cowboy onit, but it's the same general style.
60. I only paid 12 for thatpair at a thrift store.
So I thought that was a good deal.
I would like to have sold it for a littlemore, maybe if I had waited longer, but
again, I'm just trying to move stuff.
I have a bag full.
I bought at a Goodwill of all places.
It's been a couple of years now andthey're still selling, but I have a
(37:45):
bunch of slab cut pieces of like agateand jasper, like colorful thing, like
banded agate and stuff like that.
They're really beautiful.
Different colors.
I'm gonna put a little water on thisso you can see how much brighter.
It's really pretty.
It's slab.
It's probably a quarter of an inch thick.
And it's like semi translucent.
Like you can maybe even see as I'm holdingit, like light coming through some of it.
(38:06):
It's beautiful.
People like these.
Some people like them just as specimensto have like rock and mineral specimens
that they put out and display.
But actually a lot ofpeople buy these who are.
or they do crafts and things, they willtake these and then they'll sand them
down or they'll shape them to put theminto like rings or necklaces or jewelry.
(38:27):
Pendants are very common for big,like pretty pieces of agate and stuff.
And so I have a bunch of thesevarious sizes and weights.
So I just list them all.
I weigh them.
I showed them with water on them sothey can get the best possible color.
That's what my photos look like.
And they're selling various amounts,but this one is more in the reds
and oranges and peach color.
(38:47):
It's really pretty.
Most likely from the Pacific Northwest,probably Oregon or Washington, something
like that is where it was foundoriginally, it would have been a giant.
But they had cut little slabs out of,for the purpose of using in jewelry.
And this sold for 24.
I think I paid 60 for a bag of a lot.
Several pounds, eight or 10pounds worth of these things.
(39:10):
And they're just slowly selling.
It's easy.
That's not a lot of money, but over time,when I end up now having like, I don't
know, 50 or 60 bags of stuff like this,that I've already made my money back on.
And it's anytime these thingssell, it just, it gives me a grin.
Cause I'm like, okay, they'restill selling and they're just
going to sit there for a long time.
And it just helps.
(39:31):
Those are like the in between sales.
Just keep things moving.
I'm not expecting you'regoing to sell today.
Why would they sell today?
They've been up for a year and a half.
Probably because Idelisted it, relisted it.
Someone saw it and boom, there it is.
That's awesome.
That's nice.
Yeah, I'm still selling pieces ofthis jade that these jade carved like
pendants and different things thatI bought in that large lot I sold.
(39:52):
I actually have four, butI'm just going to, I'm just
holding up a couple of examples.
One is a mint green color.
It's flat on one side, but it's carvedout in the shape of like a mouse,
like a mice and some fruit on one.
And then the other one is moreof like a, just a floral design.
It looks like a bunch offlower petals and things.
(40:12):
It's like a whitishgreenish kind of mixture.
Jade, by the way, cancome in any kind of car.
Are these typically hand carved?
Yeah, these are carved.
I say hand carved, really old ones arehand carved, we have technology like
Dremel tools and industrial thingsand a lot of these are probably cut
out because they can do it quickly.
They can get more detail by usingthat kind of thing, but they
(40:32):
got to polish it a certain way.
If it's not polished a particularway, then you can tell, usually
pretty easily tell the differencebetween a modern piece and one
that's a couple of hundred years old.
Mm hmm.
But they're pretty, they're cool.
People use them as jewelry.
People again, just collectthem as display pieces.
They're selling on anaverage of about 40 a piece.
(40:54):
So this lot of four, I sold for like125 of, and they, it was the same
buyer, they bought four differentones because I could combine shipping.
And it would have been.
Like 20 some dollars shipping.
I reduced it down to six bucksbecause it's not going to cost,
it's going to cost between five and6 to ship those and that's easy.
And this person already has boughtabout a dozen of these from me and
(41:17):
they came back to the store to buy somemore and I've still got more available.
I probably sold, I don't know,40 to 50 percent of the ones that
I bought had about Oh, a littleover 200 pieces originally.
Yeah.
I remember that being a big lot of Jade.
It was.
Yep.
And I've not quite made all themoney back yet, but probably by
the time I sold half of them, I'llhave made all the investment money.
(41:38):
So the remainder iswhere I make my profit.
Gravy.
Yeah.
Pretty nice.
All right.
Anything else?
A handful of other things sold,but most of them are packaged up.
I tried to do that fulfillmentfirst thing in the morning.
I do have a lot of items though.
We'll have a lot to talk about next time.
Currently there are 96items that have bids.
On auctions that are all ending withinthe next two to three days a bunch of
(42:01):
old hunting licenses, a bunch of oldbadges, like fire forestry department
badges from like the forties and fifties.
There's a bunch ofwatches I mentioned from.
From a bunch of the stuff I sold,almost everything on there has a
bid of 40 more, and there's like 96.
So currently there's something around44 or 4, 500 worth of items that will
(42:23):
be ending in the next three days.
And that's assuming no more things getbid on between now and when they sell.
And I expect more will, and there'llbe some bids that outbid other people.
So this week I'm going to have ahundred plus items to fulfill by Friday.
And that feels good.
Get some of that stuff rolling in.
And next week's show will beabsolutely full of what sold items.
(42:45):
Yeah most of the show will be onactually looking at items that sold
we're looking forward to that I meanafter a 15 to 30 minute intro where
we just talk about ourselves a littlebit yeah, absolutely like the pain
night half and things like that.
Exactly.
All right remember folks if you geta chance to follow like and subscribe
that is always a great help Helpful.
(43:05):
We appreciate all of you thatare out there, even those of you
that are giving us advice helpfuladvice that may be not so nice.
We appreciate you.
So thank you guys for tuning in as theysay, Matt, any last words for the folks?
Yeah it's a good time of year.
This is a good time of year to be,looking and sourcing February and into
(43:25):
March is usually a lower sale period.
So if you're experiencing lowsales, don't get stressed.
That is.
Very typical for most people, whetheryou're part time or full time, it's just
a slow time, people are trying to reinin their spending that they overspent
on vacations or things in Christmas.
Okay.
And they're well back into thesecond half of the school year.
(43:46):
So kids need new clothes andthey're, Basketball shoes and
all these different things.
So don't be alarmed.
I like to use this time to reorganizethings, be creative with how I sell
a lot of delisting and relisting,and then looking for deals.
Cause if you, if it's not a good timeto sell, maybe it's a good time to buy.
Drink your emergency before you getout in public, because it's, there's
(44:06):
a lot of stuff out there, nasty stuff.
So be careful.
Where you're at 95 masks.
All right.
On that note, we thank you guys.
We will be back with abrand new show next week.
Thanks for tuning in.
Take care.
Welcome back to the What Sold Podcast
I am Brandon.
This is Matt.
Hello.
Some of you know him as rusty.
I was just talking to Matt,Matt, as we know, it's been well
documented on the show was sickfor the last couple of weeks, just.
So much weight that he can now eatwhatever he wants whenever he wants.
So I think, Oh, Rusty'sgoing full Southern cooking.
(00:59):
Like I'm thinking fried everything.
As long as it is a color in therange of white to Brown, right.
I can eat it.
Nothing green, nothingorange, nothing silly.
Come on.
It needs to have a batter onit, preferably deep fried.
Yeah.
I just got to, I got to put thoseI'm going to put those LBs back
on walking around like a frail,I feel like I should be holding
(01:23):
a, like a hand cane walk around.
Like what's going on with you?
By the way, our listeners right now arethrowing their phones out the window
or if they're watching on YouTube,they're like punching the screen.
Cause they're so mad at you.
Like, gosh, we all wish we could get that.
Okay.
Listen, it's genetics.
I've never, listen, I'mcertainly got lots of.
With things that I wouldlove to change about myself.
(01:46):
I got some of the genetic downers, Igot some of the, I got some of the
good stuff too, but one of the thingsthat I just, by no, effort of my own.
I just, I never have to lose weight.
That's just, whatever.
But I just, that's, I know.
And, but can you imagine what it'slike to have to weigh too little and
you need to like, that's probablywhat most people don't experience.
(02:08):
No, I can't imagine that.
No.
I gotta say it's like theends of the bell curve.
It's not that great on this side either.
So I don't know.
I do.
Cause I do like you, I do respectyou, I enjoy our time together.
I don't feel sorry for you.
I'm just going to put it out there.
I just, I'm speaking for, I think 94percent of our audience right now is like,
(02:29):
we are glad you're healthy, Rusty, but weall wish that we could weigh in on that.
But just get out of here.
Yeah, exactly.
I get it.
I get it.
Your girl's cat.
What, when we got on today, people,a girl scout, Matt was just stuffing
his ball that time of year, weboth have Girl Scouts in our house.
So we're selling cookies.
Do you want to venture to guess whichones, what type of, that I was eating?
I think that must've been Thin Mints.
(02:51):
It was, man.
It was the peanut butter patties.
Oh, yeah.
I find most Girl Scoutcookies not my favorite.
I'm not gonna lie.
I'm the same way, but you know what?
It's, because this is that time of yearour daughters come home with the boxes
and here they are sitting on the counter.
And it's just, it's just easy to grabone of those packages on the way.
They keep changing the names on it.
(03:12):
So it's like I can'tkeep track of anything.
It's one day in Samoa.
Then it's something else.
And I'm just like, what, whateverhappened to the not PC anymore, I guess.
I don't know what it is.
I was the Girl Scout cookie managerfor our daughter's troop, which was
the worst job I've ever had in my life.
And I didn't even get paid for it.
And it was amazing.
They sell different Girl Scoutcookie names for different
(03:35):
regions of the country.
I'm not sure why.
Huh.
Okay, interesting, but they changedthe names based on I guess some
people think that Samoas is bad.
So they changed it to caramel delights.
I think they're calledin some of the places.
So I think we call them caramel delights.
And I'm like, I will not call them carb.
They are Samoas.
(03:55):
So anyway, Yeah, we arein the midst of growth.
So it is, our daughters arelearning how to be resellers.
Let me tell you, it is acutthroat business out there
selling Girl Scout cookies.
That's right.
You got to put the elbows out and yougot to make some room for yourself.
That's right.
Listen, this is great intro.
I just really feel like I need to talkabout myself a little bit more though.
, I need to get into alifelong walks on the beach.
(04:17):
We have had rarely do we, wemostly get positive comments.
So we posted up the the podcastas a YouTube show just simply.
So that people could, it takes no time.
We just post it up there justso people could see the items.
If they were at all interested,not thinking that, Hey, I'm going
to listen to a podcast on YouTube.
Maybe they are whatever, butwe got this comment this last
(04:38):
week from somebody saying, Hey,why don't you two just shut up?
And talk, I was like, it was like someany, it's humbling, it's humbling.
I said to Matt before, I waslike, I really just want to say
this person's name, but I guessyou could look on the thing.
But I went back and looked at theirpage and they've posted nothing,
but it's sort of like, wait, soyou're mad that this free show.
(05:01):
That is purely here to help.
We get nothing from it that weput this up there that you're
mad that we talk about ourselves.
You know what, Matt and I have decidedwe're just going to filibuster.
It's okay.
We're just going to talk like our corns.
We're going to talk about whatever.
Thank you for the feedback out there.
And and we certainly will take itunder advisement and we're going
to, less about us more about.
(05:21):
The things that we soldand what you should sell.
And listen, you're coming youcan go to any type of channel.
If you listen to this, it's probablynot because of anything we're saying
about ourselves, probably about,the world of the work that we do.
And that is the main point of this.
It does help getting feedback,getting comments, getting reviews.
So definitely, we're, this is alltongue in cheek, but it does help
(05:45):
if you get on and say something and,it just be gentle, but if you have
suggestions, we'll certainly take those.
We want to give peoplewhat they want to hear.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that is true.
We could, I had a friend who said,it's like most podcasts that he spent
like first 15 minutes is yapping.
I want to get into this stuff.
I'm like, Hey, listen, there's a coupleof tricks and I use them all the time.
Seriously.
I'm being serious now.
(06:05):
I'm not even being tongue in cheek.
Just pull the bar forward, skip allthe nonsense and go right to, because
especially on the YouTube channel,there are chapter markers on there.
So we'll tell you whatwe're talking about when.
So if there's something you really want,one of the great things about podcasts
and about YouTube, whatever is that.
As opposed to the old days when youwere listening to a radio program, I
guess you could record it on a taperecorder, but by and large, that was it.
(06:29):
You couldn't go back and listen.
The great part is, we're puttinginformation out there, and if
you want to go listen to itagain, That's totally fine.
We do appreciate, in all sincerity, we'vegotten some really sweet and kind comments
and some great emails from people.
We appreciate the reviews you write.
All that stuff is super helpful to us.
Our goal with this show is to make, tohave this show make enough money that
(06:51):
it keeps, that we can keep doing it.
It's never gonna make us rich.
Yeah, essentially, Brandon can, But justpay himself for the time that he spends
on doing all this production work for it.
Because he does 99.
9 percent of the work here.
That's not true becauseyou're out schlepping, dude.
If we didn't have you slept it it's alabor of love for both of us for sure.
But bottom line is there anything youcould do to help is really appreciated.
(07:13):
All right.
Enough of that.
We are glad to be back.
I think both of us aremuch more on the mend now.
We both been, we've both been sick,but as a lot of people are, it's the
season So we are going to talk aboutthings bought and sold in this episode.
And we're going to start by talkingabout a couple episodes ago.
I think three or four episodes, maybe two.
(07:34):
I don't even remember.
We were talking about how to listproducts and I started thinking about it.
And I started looking, I'm like,man, there's a fine art to listing.
So Matt is going to regale us withsome more fine tuning of listing.
So think about it as youwant to sell a product.
What's the best way to positionyourself to sell that product?
(07:55):
How do we do that, Matt?
It depends on, the first, even beforeyou list is you have to familiarize
yourself with what platforms areavailable for you to list on.
Are you, some people really love Etsyand they just want to sell on Etsy.
Other people have, thereare different platforms.
Some people are like, I don'teven want to mess with those.
I'm happy just selling on Facebookmarketplace where you're really primarily
(08:18):
targeting people in your geographic area.
Yeah.
Within an hour or less.
Usually there are pros and cons withall of those online platforms like eBay
and Etsy, the advantage to using thosesites is that for the most part, their
platforms are pretty robust and prettyintuitive, pretty easy to use, especially
(08:39):
even if you're just starting out.
There are a lot of things youcan do, but don't have to do.
The advantage is you'regetting a large market.
You can potentially sell topeople all over the world.
And because there are morepeople, there's more competition.
So you potentially stand to make moremoney depending on what the item is.
Downside is they take apercentage fee of the sale.
Downside is there's a little bit ofa risk if you're a seller, because
(09:02):
as we've discussed in the past.
If it ever comes up that there's adispute, eBay is much more likely
to support the buyer, whetherthey're in the right or not.
And so you need to know that going in.
But there's advantagesof Facebook Marketplace.
Yeah you're tapping asmaller area and less people.
But when you make that sale,it's just whatever the price is.
(09:23):
You negotiate that with the person,you meet up, you sell it to them.
They usually will give youcash or whatever it is that
you're willing to accept.
And so you can have cash in handthat day if you sell something.
Whereas with eBay, not only do you haveto wait till it sells, you have to wait
till they pay, and you also have to waituntil the end of your return window to
make sure that item isn't returned andyou don't have to give the money back.
(09:43):
So that's the first thing is to exploreand see what You enjoy using as far
as the platform, if you want to giveall of, that percentage and accept the
risks of selling on a platform likeeBay or something, then go for it.
But, marketplace is its own thing.
It's easier.
There's less information you haveto put on something like that,
(10:06):
but you do have to communicate.
Much more frequently with people.
People are contacting you, youneed to be available and by
your phone, that kind of thing.
And that's one of the reasonsI don't love Facebook places.
Cause I don't like to be tied to mydevice like that all day and have to
be responding, as, as fast as possible.
Some people dig that.
(10:27):
Other people do a quasi thing.
They have a YouTube channelwhere they have a Facebook page
and they'll run live auctions.
Now that really only works well if youhave a pretty big following, because
if nobody knows who you are, you canthrow up a live listing and you'll have
two people who pop in and that's notreally going to help your cause, but
if some of these YouTube channels thatalso do the stuff that we do with the
(10:50):
Rusty they have transformed and theirYouTube channel Is less, they're really
leveraging that in order to sell, not asmuch give information about the content.
It's more like, Oh, okay, likeyou're here, I've got whatever,
they may have 100, 000 subscribers.
And when they say next week, we'regoing to do this live auction
and they jump on at 7 38 PM.
(11:12):
They might have 150, 200 peoplesitting there waiting ready to bid.
And you just put it up saying,this is a starting bid.
I'm going to give this a minute.
Whatever the highestbid is who will buy it.
And they run through all other thingsand at the very end, they spend the
next few hours emailing out or messagingevery single person that, who had won.
(11:33):
Hey, by the way, you had the winningbid on this, blah, blah, blah.
This is the price.
This is how you pay me.
I'll give you tracking when I ship it.
So that's the, I know that's a lot, right?
That's a lot of information that Ijust dumped, but there's the art of
the listing itself, but then there'spossibly even more importantly is
like, where are you going to list?
And it might make sense if you'restarting out to dip your toe in several
(11:55):
of them, get some experience withall of them, compare and contrast.
I know you've sold on eBay before Brandon.
You may have had some decent experiences.
You've had some not so good experiences.
Most of us, if we've used a platformlike eBay long enough, we end up having
some negative experiences as well.
And that's, I, when I'm selling thousandsof things a year, statistically speaking,
(12:18):
someone's going to try to haggle me.
Someone's going to try to be fraudulent.
Someone's going to, there's going to besome disputes that have to be resolved.
So do you have the stomach for that?
Oh, to do it in that way, orwould you just say, I don't
even want to mess with that.
And there's no right or wrong.
It's just like a person's own preference.
It's funny because I had I talked aboutthe fact that I had a terrible experience
(12:40):
on eBay and it was because I was ignorant.
I didn't know honestly, if I'd havebeen working on this show or if I'd
have been listening to these episodes,none of that would have happened to me.
I didn't know that the buyercould just say, I don't want it.
Instead of that, I was like, wait, what?
Because obviously when you sellon Facebook marketplace and
somebody says, Hey, whatever,there's no recourse afterwards.
(13:01):
Hey, I decided I don't want this.
She just say thanks for letting me know.
But I don't, we've alreadymade the transaction.
And so yeah, it's done.
And whereas eBay iscompletely different beast.
I think I would probably go back moreinto eBay now and sell, knowing what I
know now, because I know how to protectmyself, I know how to list things,
I know how to say to make sure Hey,am I getting a real buyer right now?
(13:23):
Or is this just somebody, like theshipping and all that stuff, I would
have built in those kinds of thingsinto the sale that I didn't know before.
So it was like, okay,we're going to build it in.
But.
If I've got to eat it, I wantto build in enough profit that
it's not going to kill me.
And if make sure that somebody understandswhat the thing is, mine was remote.
(13:44):
So it was a little bit more, whenyou're selling things that have, I love
what you say about selling jewelry.
Like it's not a lot of complication to it.
Ultimately it works or it doesn'twork when you're selling electronics.
If it, if they don't know howto operate it, they were like, I
just don't know how to operate it.
I'm not going to mess around with it.
And that's really problematic.
(14:05):
When you're in an electronics world,because a lot of this stuff is, I
have a lot of electronic equipmentthat takes time to figure out.
And if somebody says, I don't want totake the time, they can just send it back.
And to be honest with you, thereare people who's their entire
store, their niche is electronics.
They love doing that.
But if you're going to buy and sellelectronics, you need to know ahead
of time that it's going to be on you.
(14:25):
You're going to have to do work morework than I do with the things I sell,
because you have to plug them in.
You have to test them all out.
You have to make sure that they work.
If they don't work.
And you're handy enough you'vespent the time or you figure out,
Oh, we'll just need to this otherpart or I'm going to fix it.
But see, now you've stepped intothis whole world of work and time.
Before you list something and if I, if Isee a really awesome deal on a piece of
(14:49):
electronic equipment that I don't havethe ability to link up and test, like if
I see a stereo system like a receiver.
I may not have speakers and otherthings that I need to plug in to make
sure it all works before I listen.
And if you list it andyou don't know what works.
You had better say that in the titleof the listening untested may require
repair or, or for parts or repair,because if they get it and they're
(15:14):
under the impression, it works and itdoesn't, even if it one button on it
doesn't work, you're facing a return.
So I don't like that because Megan,some people are really into electronics.
They like it.
They enjoy that piece.
And it's no different than how I feelabout, let's say, artwork or instruments.
Some people would be like, I wouldnever buy an instrument that's damaged
knowing that I have to repair it.
(15:35):
That's because they're not interestedin that thing, or maybe they
don't have the skill set to do it.
I have both, and so I do that from time totime, or with artwork because I enjoy it.
So if you enjoy a thing and you're willingto do the work, that's totally fine.
That's your thing.
Just know that ahead of time.
Know that.
What's going to be expected of you.
But I think this kind of leads into thenext phase of your question, which is
(15:56):
more specifically your question, whichis how do you list what's the important
thing I can really mainly speak fromexperience on platforms like eBay.
Or Etsy, but this wouldalso apply to any listing.
I would say that the number one and twomost important things, these are the
things that are going to either a get thatbuyer that you're looking for or not, or
(16:20):
are going to be the difference betweenwhether somebody buys yours and not.
One that someone else has, right?
The two most important things areyour title of the listing, your title
and the photographs, everything.
There's other information outthere, how you price things, whether
it's a buy it now or an auction,how you go about setting up, how
(16:40):
you're going to ship the item.
Those are all important things tosome of those have money attached
to them, like the shipping piece.
So you do need to figure that out.
But if you can get really good at knowing.
Who your buyer is and what they're lookingfor, what they're going to be looking for.
You need to put yourself in theirshoes and say, okay, right now I, I'm,
I want to sell this vintage watch.
(17:00):
I need to imagine who is theperson looking on eBay for a
vintage men's automatic watch?
What words, what keywords arethey going to use to find it?
And what are they going to want to see?
They're probably going towant to see the words vintage.
The words men's, if it's a men'swatch, make it specific, it's
a round or a rectangular dial.
(17:23):
It has the original elastic y metalband, the ones that are great for
pinching and pulling your hair out ofyour arm and stuff that everyone loved
so much back in the fifties and sixties.
Or whatever, and you photographthe things that are in your title.
So if I say, this is a black dial,bull of a men's automatic watch.
(17:43):
When they look at the pic of the veryfirst picture should be a closeup of
the dial showing that it says Boulevard,it's black and it is a watch boom.
Then if they're intrigued,they're going to go and look
at the rest of the images, but.
Not just all of your images, butspecifically the one you choose to be
the one that pops up first, the onethat everyone sees it needs to be the
most attractive Can you explain thatfor people that are just starting out?
(18:05):
Because that was one that I learnedwhen I was doing some pictures of
different things for you and like,Oh, there's, you can target one.
Can you talk about that real quickly?
You can.
And you need to pay attention toit because I make mistakes all
the time or rather I'll be goingthrough quickly and listing a lot
of similar items like watches.
And let's say each watch I take sixto eight pictures of, let's say, and
(18:26):
I upload all of them on my phone.
I'm doing it.
And I intentionally.
Click on the one that I wantto be the one displayed first.
The number one picture thatgoes in is the one that eBay
pulls to be the display photo.
Sometimes I'll go through there andfor whatever reason, it uploads in
opposite order of how I selected it.
So I'm not paying attention.
I look up there like, Oh shoot,I got to go revise that because
(18:48):
the very first picture is thepicture of the back of the watch.
Which.
A person interested in the watch probablywon't want to see that, but that's not
a picture that's going to draw them inthe back of a watch like that's boring
and it doesn't highlight the product.
So if whatever your closest up picture,best representation of that item,
(19:08):
best looking photo of that item,that's the one you want to select.
And if you, whether you're onyour phone or an eBay, you can.
Up.
Like I said, if you upload itfirst, the first one usually is
the one that goes in, but if not,you can drag and move those around.
You can order them any way that you want.
And right now with eBay, for example,you can do up to 24 photos per listing
(19:28):
without paying additional money.
If you want to even more photos,you can pay additional money
and to eBay to have more photos.
I never.
Almost never do I get to 24 pictures andfeel like, man, I wish I had like 10 more.
It doesn't happen hardly ever.
And something like a watch, forexample, I'll do a close up picture
of the dial of the face of the watch.
(19:49):
I'll do a larger, like a furtherback of the entire piece.
Left, right, the band ifit has it, and the back.
If it's a pocket watch, I'll usuallyremove the back and I want to show a
really good clean photo of the movementbecause it'll have a serial number and
things, and people can reference that todetermine the age of it, the grade, the
model, what year it was made, all of that.
(20:10):
Take really, really good photos.
Take closeup photos tobegin that draws people in.
Oh the face looks pretty good.
I wonder what the restof the watch looks like.
Then they go in and look at your photos.
And if they've spent time, they'vegone in, they've looked at photos.
They're much more likely to comeback and be interested in buying
than just scrolling by something.
Because this is in that world of mediaand everything where you're just always
(20:32):
bombarded with everything, right?
Like all these social media platformsare set up for you to watch it for two
seconds, within one or two seconds, ifyou want to keep watching it or not,
you just scroll, you move on past.
It's the same thing with eBay.
If I look up vintage men'sautomatic wristwatch, 76, 000
items are going to pop up.
Am I going to go through 70?
No.
Probably won't even go throughthe first page, of, of 200 items.
(20:56):
So you want to have somethingthat's going to draw attention.
That brings me to the next most important.
So the important things, probablynot in any particular order, but
tied are the title on the photos.
The thing that I think sets meapart as a full time seller.
And someone that sells highervolumes is that I'm not just going
in and listing items day to day.
(21:17):
I do that, but about every secondto third day, I go in and pull
items out of my story, delist them.
So I take them from being a liveavailable item for people to buy.
And I essentially putit back in the system.
So instead of relisting it, which willcopy that same item number and put it
back up there and go back in the samequeue that was in, I click a button that
(21:41):
says sell similar, it copies it exactly.
And then I relist it.
Maybe I adjust the price.
Maybe I don't.
And as soon as that's over, I haveto remember to delete the ones
that I just copied, because if Itry to relist those, I would have
duplicates if eBay doesn't catch it.
And that'd be bad if you sell one andthen a week later you sell the same
thing and you go looking for it andyou're like, oops, it already sold.
You got to remember to do that.
(22:01):
But I do that.
And because what that does is itputs it back to the top of the queue.
So that day, when someone comeslooking for a men's automatic watch,
they're way more likely to see myitem today than they would have
been had I left it in the queue.
52, 000 deep in the queuebecause I listed it a month ago.
So how often do you relist?
(22:22):
Probably twice a week,something like that.
Okay.
And not everything, but you see mystory, it takes more time now because I
have three eBay stores and all three ofthem have over 3000 items in them each.
At any given time, I've goteight or 9, 000 active listings.
You can delist and relist 200 at a time,but that's the most that eBay allows.
So that does speed up the process some,but if I want to pull 3, 000 items out
(22:45):
or 2, 000 items out of three stores.
And then relist them all, that couldtake me an hour or over an hour.
And I'm not evenlistening to anything new.
I'm just pulling out old thingsand putting them back in.
But you would be shocked.
And I know this worksbecause it works for me.
And I've shared thison the YouTube channel.
And people have goneon and said, thank you.
Like I made three sales today.
I didn't do anything other than take theseout and relist them like you said to do.
(23:08):
And look at this, I've got these sales.
And it has everything just to do it.
There's way more things available for salethan any person has the Time to really go
through and look at every single option.
They're not going to look at every option.
They're going to look at the first 120options that eBay provides, and they're
not going to provide yours every time,unless it's one of the newest ones that's
(23:29):
been listed, as far as their system knows.
That's an important thing.
Now it may not be important if you have 20items, if you do this super part time and
you have a lot, but also 20 items is easy.
You could relist thoseevery day, in one move.
And you should, and you ultimately should.
You're going to have a better.
More people will be seeing your item.
The more people that see your item, themore likely you're going to get a sale.
(23:50):
It's not complicatedwhen it comes down to it.
What gets complicated is when youhave thousands of things and you're
trying to store them and you have 30or 40 items you have to fulfill every
single day and you have a timeframelike that's when it gets, Complicated.
You get to a point where you'relike I almost need another person
to help with some of these tasks.
But that's way down the road.
If you're part time, these things shouldbe easy and they shouldn't take long.
(24:14):
In fact, just build that into your day.
If you're going to do some work on eBay,first thing you do every day is delist
those items, sell similar, put them onthere, delete the ones you just copied.
And then now you can move on to newthings, but put those things out
there for people to see, becauseit will translate to more sales.
It does for me all the time.
Is there any limit on how manytimes you can relist an item?
(24:36):
As far as I know, there isn't.
Oh, so you could, if you were justa part time reseller, you could
list it every single day for a year.
Exactly.
And eventually someone's goingto come along and find it.
If you have had an item that's been upthere for over 90 days, most eBay people
who sell would say, if something sellswithin the first 90 days that's good.
(24:56):
That's above the curve.
But if you have something that'sbeen up for months, you've not
really had a lot of watchers.
No one's touching it.
You have some work to do.
You need to go back andanalyze that listing and see.
What's the problem here?
Do I have it in the correct category?
Do I, are my photos clear, crisp?
And really representing the item.
Do I have the best photo availableto be the showcase photo?
(25:18):
What's my title look like?
Am I really catching thosepeople that I'm looking for?
Or am I, have I omitted or notthought about certain words
that they're searching for?
And because my, that wasn't on mytitle, it's never popping up for
them and I'm missing these buyers.
What is it?
Is my shipping too high?
Is my, go back and look at sold itemsof similar things in the last 90 days.
Is yours priced above all of those?
(25:38):
That may be it.
Maybe it's just too high.
You need to lower the price, but youneed to go in periodically, especially
when things haven't sold for a whileand say, okay, is it just that I have
a high and that's, I have to sell itfor that, or I'm not going to sell it.
I just need, I have to make that amount.
Or are you like, I just,I'm not in a hurry.
I don't care if it takesme a year to sell it.
So I'm not going to make any adjustments.
Or do you have to be even more creative?
(26:00):
Clearly nobody wants this item byitself, but maybe if I put it with two
or three other similar items and make asmall lot, and then I raised the price
a little bit, I'm going to sell it.
And I'll move a couple other things too.
There's all kinds of things thatyou can do, and that's really
the more maintenance piece of it.
That's after you've listedthings, but initially listing, if
you can get really good photos.
(26:21):
If you can get the best photofirst, if you can utilize all the
characters in the title, which Ican't remember how it is, how many is
like 80, I think it's 80 characters.
So you can use words, you can useabbreviated words, you can use dashes,
whatever you need to do in that titleto highlight what you're, what it is and
also put the most pertinent words first.
(26:43):
It doesn't have to belike a perfect sentence.
I might say watch lot.
Vintage mixed men'swatches, 1950s to 1960s.
But you notice the veryfirst word was watch.
And the second word was lot.
So a person looking to buy watchesin groups, not just individuals.
(27:03):
That's the best two words to start with.
Yeah.
'cause that's what they're searching for.
Especially if that's theway you wanna sell it.
Exactly.
And question it struck mewhen I was listening to this.
It's playing again, theamateur sleuth that I am here.
. How do I know, you said something about,are you sure it's in the right category?
Mm-hmm how do I know ifit's in the right category?
How do I ascertain the right category?
(27:23):
So you, there are many categoriesand subcategories and sub
subcategories within eBay.
One category, let's say, might be.
Coins and jewelry and that's one big one.
If you were to click on that,there'll be like 10 more.
There'll be like foreigncoins, United States coins.
There'll be costume jewelry,fine jewelry, antique jewelry.
(27:45):
And then that's a subset.
So you click on that.
And then within that, withincostume jewelry, it'll say,
Brooches and pens or necklaces orbrooches or mixed jewelry lots.
And whatever is most, reflective of thething you were trying to sell, that's
the category you want to put it in.
Some people will search within categories.
(28:06):
For example, if I put in buttons,antique buttons, and I want to, what
I'm really looking for are sewingbuttons that are antique, and I
want to see what those have sold foreither individually or collectively.
Lots, because I got a bunch of buttonsthat I need to sell for somebody.
If all I do is just look up buttonsand I don't click on a category,
anything in any category thatsays buttons is going to pop up.
(28:28):
Electronic equipment that have buttonson them, or Remote controls full
outfits, jackets that have buttons.
If they write big buttons in thetitle, wherever that's going to pop up.
That's convoluted.
That's too much stuff.
No, on the side, I want to go toantiques or something like that.
The subcategory and the within antiquessewing, like collectible sewing.
(28:50):
There we go.
That's the category.
So if you're selling an antique buttonand you put in your photos and you put
in your title, the next thing is youselect the category that is how eBay
categorizes it within their system.
So if a person is searching, not onlyfor a keyword or words, and they're
also searching within a particularcategory, you don't want to have
(29:12):
it miscategorized because thenyour item may not pop up for them.
Okay.
And you want it to.
You can do that.
I make mistakes on it sometimes becauseI do lots of things to try to cut corners
and shorten time so that I can sellhigher and list more volumes of things.
One of the ways I cut corners is you don'thave to start a listing from scratch.
Now, if you're just starting out, Irecommend you do that because you need to
(29:34):
familiarize yourself with all the types ofinformation you can input to And knowing
what things are required to be put inthere as item specifics per category,
because every category is different.
If I have something in fine jewelryversus antique jewelry, one of those
categories may require me to put ina piece of specific information about
(29:54):
it, a brand or something like that,whereas the other category won't.
But what I sometimes get into trouble iscopy listings that have already sold of a
similar item So if I wake up today and Iwant to sell a bunch of antique hat pins
The first thing I do is I look up antiquehat pin in ebay I go to sold items and
then I scroll down until I find a picturethat most Closely, very quickly, closely
(30:17):
resembles the item I'm going to sell.
I click on the item.
It shows you how much it sold for,if it was auction or buy it now.
And there's a little button that sayssell one now or sell one like this.
I just clicked that itcopies the entire listing.
The only thing it doesn't copy isthe title, the photo and the price.
So all I have to donow is input my photos.
Actually, it keeps the title.
(30:38):
You can adjust the titleto match your item.
And then you go down and fix the priceor adjust the shipping, whatever.
And boom, I got it done.
Now, the reason I mess up sometimesis that I go through and I
adjust the title, the photos andthe price, but I don't always.
Remember to pay attention to the category.
Now I'm just having to assume thatthat person had the correct category
(31:00):
on the item they sold, but sometimesthey don't have the best category.
Sometimes they copy someone else's listingand they didn't pay attention to it.
Do you see what I'm saying?
And it's just like a domino thing.
And here I am.
So you got to pay attention.
When I sell gold, like a scrapgold, like in just by the weight,
I don't list that in fine jewelry.
(31:21):
Even though that's what it is, it'sfine jewelry with gold or gemstones.
I list it in a gold bullion category.
Why do I do that?
Because people who buy scrap metal,they sometimes get discounts when they
purchase in that specific category.
Something that eBay offersto them is like a discounted.
Even selling it in one category versusanother, not only are you maybe catching
(31:43):
a different type of buyer, but theremay be advantages for them buying
out of certain categories because ofdiscounts or things, coupons, things
that eBay is offering to the buyers thatyou won't even know about as a seller.
I only know about that because as I soldin the past and I had it categorized
something else they would say heyright this month I get 10 percent off
(32:03):
of buying in the bullion category.
So would you mind delisting this andrelisting it just in that category?
Oh, okay.
Oh, cool.
I do that.
10 seconds later, they've boughtmy item because I worked with them.
So category can be important as well.
And I don't know if people havebeen paying attention out there, but
because of President Trump's tariffson different alloys and metals,
(32:28):
gold prices are, I think they're thehighest they've ever been right now.
They're very, very high.
Highest it's been certainly sinceI've been selling full time.
Yeah, I didn't look today, butI want to say, 14 karat gold.
By the gram is like over 60 a gram.
So if you have a broken piece ofjewelry, that's 14 carat, don't pitch it.
It could be worth a hundred bucksor more just like a, because
they'll buy it for the metal.
(32:50):
Yeah.
And it's there's a lot goingon in the alloys and especially
in the gold world right now.
And again, I'm not, I don't knowanything about it, I just, what I've
read, but there was talk about goldthat's in items that you throw away.
There's gold in them thar hills,is basically what the amounts do.
Old eyeglasses, the rims of oldeyeglasses, the nibs on old fountain pens.
(33:10):
You could, you'd be surprised,you'd be like, what?
Pull out an old pen that grandpa leftyou and it might say 14K or 18K on it.
And it's worth a lot of money rightnow, so start looking for gold.
That's basically the answer to that.
Any bricks of gold you'vegot laying around that you
just didn't pay attention to.
Banished to bloom.
It's just holding yourdoor open, the kickstand.
The treasure chest that you found inthe attic filled with gold doubloons.
(33:31):
The largest gold nugget, maybe that'sstill ever been found, certainly the one
of the largest that was ever found wasfound in, God, I want to say either late
1700s or early 1800s in North Carolina.
And they were using it tohold, like as a door prop.
They were using it.
It was like a boulder and they wereusing it just to keep a door open.
Yeah.
That's one does someone eventuallybought it, but back then you're
(33:53):
like , why can't I just use this foranother purpose too, until I need to
sell it for the, or yeah, why not?
Sure.
All right.
Anything else on listing thatpeople need to be aware of?
Or did you pretty much cover it?
I think we covered it.
I, I would say that the the way I liketo do listings because I'm very familiar
with the process now and it's fasterto do it on my phone because I take the
(34:13):
photos on my phone is I'll go through,I'll wait, I'll ideally, I wait until I
have multiples of the same type of item.
I had a hundred postcards here.
I got a hundred wristwatches.
I got a hundred pieces of costume jewelry.
They're all brooches.
I'll get up in the morning and I'll.
All I'll do is photographthem until they're all done.
Front and back, or however many photosyou need to take to represent that item.
I'll photograph all of them.
(34:34):
Then I'll go in and make alisting for costume brooch.
I'll find one that's sold, I'll copy it,I'll make sure that it all looks good.
Then all I have to do is inputthe new photos, adjust the
title or the price if I need to.
But let's say I'm going to run themall at 20 bucks on auction that day.
So I don't have to even change the price.
The only thing I have todo is change the pictures.
And change the title.
(34:55):
This one's got red rhinestones.
The other one had blue.
So I just swap out the color and I'm done.
And I can list hundreds of items in a day.
People are always like, Oh man,I like, if I can get 20 done
in a week, like I'm doing well.
You're spending too much time on stuff.
That's not important.
Just what I would say, that whateveryou're doing, that takes you that long.
It doesn't have to take you that long.
And it's not always abouta volume game, right?
(35:16):
If you have something that's reallyvaluable, it's probably worth you
spending a lot of time to makesure that listing looks perfect.
And do everything you need to do.
But for costume brooches thatare 20 bucks a piece or less, I
don't have to spend a ton of time.
I photograph them.
I put them in.
Everything that is neededto find that buyer is there.
And I don't need to do any more than that.
Because you havediminishing gains on that.
(35:38):
You're spending time that isnot going to translate in any
more sales or any more money.
So just don't do it.
Yeah.
And so I would say, you can doa lot more in a short amount
of time than you think you can.
Don't get, a lot of people just get hungup especially in the beginning because
they're a little nervous, I just wantto make sure I'm doing it correctly.
I want to make sure that I don'tsell it for too little or the
(35:59):
and all of those are valid.
Things to consider, butit's just a stats game.
The more things I have in mystore, the more I'm going to sell.
10 percent of 100 items is a lot lessthan 10 percent of 10, 000 items.
If I'm still always selling 10 percentof my stuff per month, the more I have
in there, the better I'm going to do.
You get more out of it,the more you get out there.
(36:20):
Not only that, but if you have peoplewho buy from your store and want to be
a repeat buyer and follow your store,Then they're always alerted to the things
and the more things you have availableas options, the more likely someone's
going to find something they want.
Oh, great.
Wow.
Talk about a knowledge dump.
That was awesome.
Boom.
Okay.
All right.
So in our last few minutestogether, what did you sell?
This show is about what we've sold.
(36:40):
It is.
What did you sell this week, Matt?
Now you're back.
You're going great guns.
You're out there again.
Yeah.
What'd you sell?
One of the things I sold was this, I'mjust showing you one and discussing it,
but it is a book end that is actually.
It is metal.
It is, I guess, technically abronze, but it's not real heavy.
It's a fairly thin coating, but it'sof a native, like a traditional.
(37:02):
Didn't you show us this a while ago?
When I got it and it sold, but thenthey decided they wanted to cancel the
order before I even was able to ship it.
So I had to relist it and it's okay.
It's sold for 60.
It's a native American with a dog.
It looks like he's huntingor he's just hanging out.
Cool.
Reminiscent of some of thoseolder Western artists like
Remington, people who had bronzes.
(37:24):
This isn't a horse or the cowboy onit, but it's the same general style.
60. I only paid 12 for thatpair at a thrift store.
So I thought that was a good deal.
I would like to have sold it for a littlemore, maybe if I had waited longer, but
again, I'm just trying to move stuff.
I have a bag full.
I bought at a Goodwill of all places.
It's been a couple of years now andthey're still selling, but I have a
(37:45):
bunch of slab cut pieces of like agateand jasper, like colorful thing, like
banded agate and stuff like that.
They're really beautiful.
Different colors.
I'm gonna put a little water on thisso you can see how much brighter.
It's really pretty.
It's slab.
It's probably a quarter of an inch thick.
And it's like semi translucent.
Like you can maybe even see as I'm holdingit, like light coming through some of it.
(38:06):
It's beautiful.
People like these.
Some people like them just as specimensto have like rock and mineral specimens
that they put out and display.
But actually a lot ofpeople buy these who are.
or they do crafts and things, they willtake these and then they'll sand them
down or they'll shape them to put theminto like rings or necklaces or jewelry.
(38:27):
Pendants are very common for big,like pretty pieces of agate and stuff.
And so I have a bunch of thesevarious sizes and weights.
So I just list them all.
I weigh them.
I showed them with water on them sothey can get the best possible color.
That's what my photos look like.
And they're selling various amounts,but this one is more in the reds
and oranges and peach color.
(38:47):
It's really pretty.
Most likely from the Pacific Northwest,probably Oregon or Washington, something
like that is where it was foundoriginally, it would have been a giant.
But they had cut little slabs out of,for the purpose of using in jewelry.
And this sold for 24.
I think I paid 60 for a bag of a lot.
Several pounds, eight or 10pounds worth of these things.
(39:10):
And they're just slowly selling.
It's easy.
That's not a lot of money, but over time,when I end up now having like, I don't
know, 50 or 60 bags of stuff like this,that I've already made my money back on.
And it's anytime these thingssell, it just, it gives me a grin.
Cause I'm like, okay, they'restill selling and they're just
going to sit there for a long time.
And it just helps.
(39:31):
Those are like the in between sales.
Just keep things moving.
I'm not expecting you'regoing to sell today.
Why would they sell today?
They've been up for a year and a half.
Probably because Idelisted it, relisted it.
Someone saw it and boom, there it is.
That's awesome.
That's nice.
Yeah, I'm still selling pieces ofthis jade that these jade carved like
pendants and different things thatI bought in that large lot I sold.
(39:52):
I actually have four, butI'm just going to, I'm just
holding up a couple of examples.
One is a mint green color.
It's flat on one side, but it's carvedout in the shape of like a mouse,
like a mice and some fruit on one.
And then the other one is moreof like a, just a floral design.
It looks like a bunch offlower petals and things.
(40:12):
It's like a whitishgreenish kind of mixture.
Jade, by the way, cancome in any kind of car.
Are these typically hand carved?
Yeah, these are carved.
I say hand carved, really old ones arehand carved, we have technology like
Dremel tools and industrial thingsand a lot of these are probably cut
out because they can do it quickly.
They can get more detail by usingthat kind of thing, but they
(40:32):
got to polish it a certain way.
If it's not polished a particularway, then you can tell, usually
pretty easily tell the differencebetween a modern piece and one
that's a couple of hundred years old.
Mm hmm.
But they're pretty, they're cool.
People use them as jewelry.
People again, just collectthem as display pieces.
They're selling on anaverage of about 40 a piece.
(40:54):
So this lot of four, I sold for like125 of, and they, it was the same
buyer, they bought four differentones because I could combine shipping.
And it would have been.
Like 20 some dollars shipping.
I reduced it down to six bucksbecause it's not going to cost,
it's going to cost between five and6 to ship those and that's easy.
And this person already has boughtabout a dozen of these from me and
(41:17):
they came back to the store to buy somemore and I've still got more available.
I probably sold, I don't know,40 to 50 percent of the ones that
I bought had about Oh, a littleover 200 pieces originally.
Yeah.
I remember that being a big lot of Jade.
It was.
Yep.
And I've not quite made all themoney back yet, but probably by
the time I sold half of them, I'llhave made all the investment money.
(41:38):
So the remainder iswhere I make my profit.
Gravy.
Yeah.
Pretty nice.
All right.
Anything else?
A handful of other things sold,but most of them are packaged up.
I tried to do that fulfillmentfirst thing in the morning.
I do have a lot of items though.
We'll have a lot to talk about next time.
Currently there are 96items that have bids.
On auctions that are all ending withinthe next two to three days a bunch of
(42:01):
old hunting licenses, a bunch of oldbadges, like fire forestry department
badges from like the forties and fifties.
There's a bunch ofwatches I mentioned from.
From a bunch of the stuff I sold,almost everything on there has a
bid of 40 more, and there's like 96.
So currently there's something around44 or 4, 500 worth of items that will
(42:23):
be ending in the next three days.
And that's assuming no more things getbid on between now and when they sell.
And I expect more will, and there'llbe some bids that outbid other people.
So this week I'm going to have ahundred plus items to fulfill by Friday.
And that feels good.
Get some of that stuff rolling in.
And next week's show will beabsolutely full of what sold items.
(42:45):
Yeah most of the show will be onactually looking at items that sold
we're looking forward to that I meanafter a 15 to 30 minute intro where
we just talk about ourselves a littlebit yeah, absolutely like the pain
night half and things like that.
Exactly.
All right remember folks if you geta chance to follow like and subscribe
that is always a great help Helpful.
(43:05):
We appreciate all of you thatare out there, even those of you
that are giving us advice helpfuladvice that may be not so nice.
We appreciate you.
So thank you guys for tuning in as theysay, Matt, any last words for the folks?
Yeah it's a good time of year.
This is a good time of year to be,looking and sourcing February and into
(43:25):
March is usually a lower sale period.
So if you're experiencing lowsales, don't get stressed.
That is.
Very typical for most people, whetheryou're part time or full time, it's just
a slow time, people are trying to reinin their spending that they overspent
on vacations or things in Christmas.
Okay.
And they're well back into thesecond half of the school year.
(43:46):
So kids need new clothes andthey're, Basketball shoes and
all these different things.
So don't be alarmed.
I like to use this time to reorganizethings, be creative with how I sell
a lot of delisting and relisting,and then looking for deals.
Cause if you, if it's not a good timeto sell, maybe it's a good time to buy.
Drink your emergency before you getout in public, because it's, there's
(44:06):
a lot of stuff out there, nasty stuff.
So be careful.
Where you're at 95 masks.
All right.
On that note, we thank you guys.
We will be back with abrand new show next week.
Thanks for tuning in.
Take care.
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