February 28, 2025 • 41 mins
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I help teach people how to make money selling books on Amazon, leveraging the platform's vast reach and the profitability of reselling used books. How to sell books on Amazon? Selling books on Amazon can be an excellent side hustle or a full-time endeavor, particularly if you enjoy thrifting through places like Goodwill for hidden treasures. How to start selling on Amazon is accessible, and with my guidance on how to sell books, DVDs, CDs, and other media, beginners can quickly learn the ropes. Utilizing Amazon FBA streamlines operations, allowing sellers to focus more on sourcing and less on logistics. As a reselling coach, I provide tutorials and guidance on navigating challenges like ungating and optimizing listings for maximum visibility and sales. Whether you're looking for a part-time side hustle or aiming to become a full-time reseller, I will teach you the ins and outs of thrifting books and selling books online and can pave the way to creating passive income streams and achieving business growth.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome back to another episode
(00:01):
of the Resellers Mindset podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube,
along with my friend and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses
from the ground up.
We also have a weekly Zoom call and private Discord
for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash used book guy
to join the channel and gain access
(00:21):
to the full length podcast Zoom call
and private Discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up everybody?
Welcome to another episode of Resellers Mindset podcast.
Mike sitting next to Johnny, his topic right here,
right now, we're gonna talk about pricing
in the realm of how do we price?
How do we think people should price their items?
(00:42):
Are you repricing your items
when it comes to Amazon and eBay land?
I personally have never really seen many videos
about eBay sellers doing like repricing on their items.
I know large eBay sellers have the dated markdowns,
but like just the video talking about going back in
and checking your items when it comes to pricing.
So that'll be cool to kind of get into,
(01:03):
but Johnny's gonna take us away,
lead us down this rabbit hole.
Yeah, I mean, it's probably the number one problem
in reselling as a whole, I think,
is just poor pricing strategy.
Either you're going in one of two spectrums,
either you're overpricing your items
and hoping for that once a year Christmas miracle sale
and that you're that person
(01:23):
and wishing upon a star if you're Pinocchio.
Which is just gonna make less to attractive buyers.
People are gonna undercut you.
They're gonna get all the sales, you're not.
The other end is, which just results in low profit margin
and potentially losing money on sales.
The other way to do it is pricing way too low
to try to move your product, but you're making no money
(01:44):
and you're working for less than minimum wage at that point
between all the boxes you're packing
or all the photography you're taking
or the listing you're doing.
It's just a nightmare.
And you're spinning your wheels.
And again, you're pretty much flipping burgers
at McDonald's at that point.
It's hard for me,
because I have such a strong stance on this
(02:06):
that the only thing that matters is selling your items.
I'm not gonna say it's the only thing
that's gonna contribute to you getting a sale,
but it is the biggest factor
that influences you getting sale on the item is the price.
So all the idea that,
well, my listing is better or my condition is better.
(02:29):
That is a piece of the pie.
But the pricing part is at least half of the pizza pie
than everything else.
In my eyes, it's more than half,
but I'm just being generous here.
Everything else kind of eats up the other part of the pizza.
So if pricing is the biggest concern,
the biggest thing people look for when they shop,
(02:51):
why do you think every platform lets you filter price,
low to high?
It's the same idea with other things you could filter by,
because it is important to the customer.
And in Amazon land,
I'll jump into Amazon land here because buy box,
buy box, you go on the listing, you hit buy now.
The biggest influencing factor is price of the item,
(03:11):
even if it's by one stinking penny,
one penny, 1.01 pennies, that's it.
And it's not even, it's one hundredths of a dollar.
So the idea you could have your item priced
one penny less than Johnny and get a sale
because of one penny,
but we are too stubborn to do this in the realm of Amazon
(03:34):
because, well, I'll just wait in line or Johnny's a nice guy
and I'm just gonna match his price.
Okay, so let's get all the naysayers out of the way.
Well, it's based on location.
Sure, if the buyer's in Texas
and they live by Johnny and his items
in the warehouse in Texas,
and he's got his price more than mine,
which is located in New York City
(03:56):
or somewhere in Pennsylvania,
then yes, he will have the buy box.
But yet again, let's get back to the majority talk here.
The majority is influenced by the price, not the location.
If this is what matters, this should be our only focus.
This idea that, okay, we sent our items in,
but items aren't selling, or I know what I got, right?
(04:16):
How many times do we, as resellers, send somebody an offer
to buy a bulk lot and they're like,
price is firm, I know what I got.
We are resellers, we're paying a dollar,
like we're getting this stuff for a quarter, 50 cents.
Do we always have to be like, I know what I got?
I don't think so.
I live in the realm now where, hey, it is what it is.
Maybe when I sent Barney in, it was a $20 DVD
(04:39):
and it sold for $11.
I still make my four or 50, I spent a quarter,
I spent 50 cents, that's all this game is.
Right, and I don't know, as a consumer, not a reseller,
as a consumer, who the hell sorts high to low?
They don't, period.
They're gonna sort low to high
after they do like maybe reviews or something.
(05:02):
So let's talk eBay here.
Okay, so person types in an item and the list pulls up.
They're gonna be looking at the price,
then they're gonna click in the listing.
That's where all the little other separators you've done
have come into play.
But to even get them to click on it,
it has to be in a reasonable price range.
It's when we get unreasonable or too low,
(05:24):
that's where our margins are gonna suffer.
So market competition.
So Amazon, there's usually one listing for the item, right?
So we're all competing on this one listing.
And the only separator we can do there is indeed price.
That's the only one.
Somebody may argue in the comments about,
(05:44):
oh, there's the collectible category, Johnny,
or there's the condition things.
Well, you can get to step in.
That does not apply.
eBay land.
Again, I don't think condition matters too much.
I think the additional photos will matter more.
But the number one thing, again,
to get them to click on it, it's gonna be price, honestly.
(06:07):
So market competition.
We do need to be priced competitively.
Mike talked about pricing maybe a little higher
waiting your turn in line.
If you're good with that,
and that strategy is working for you by all means.
But for a guaranteed, you're the next person in line
to get the sale, you need to be the lowest price, honestly.
But you need to clear some margin.
If you're wanting to send in items at $4
(06:30):
into the Amazon warehouse, again,
you're gonna make no money.
In fact, you're gonna lose money.
So you may have to price up above the $4 range
to maybe eight or nine to make money.
But why the heck are you sending in the item
in the first place?
Unless you're seeing something magical on the screen,
like 100% sell through.
But to me, that market's already too overly saturated
(06:51):
and overly competitive.
You should just leave it alone.
Nine times out of 10.
But again, unless you know something different
about the market, like maybe this thing balloons,
it's a seasonal item.
It's balloons during Christmas.
Great, fantastic.
That's for you in far between months,
the majority of items.
So competitive pricing also,
you gotta couple that with healthy margin.
(07:12):
If you're making 1% margin,
you're running not a great business.
If you can get in the 20% range or higher,
you're doing great.
Like the OA guys or the RA guys,
they love 20% margin.
Over here in just used product land,
we turn our nose up at 20% margin.
(07:33):
We shouldn't.
Money's money.
It all adds up.
Again, we're paying a dollar or less for most of the stuff.
If you're maybe a more expensive state,
maybe you're paying two to $3 per.
So margin's even more important to you.
What do you think about margin and market competition, Mike?
Well, that's why I've always stayed in media.
(07:55):
Like sure, I got the sources.
I know my routes.
I have the relationships.
But I think it goes back to the mindset of
no matter what category you're in,
this stuff's out there for the taking.
If you have the mindset,
oh, that you're not gonna be able to get out there
and find items.
So you're just gonna try getting the most.
(08:15):
And there are exceptions, like you said.
Like if you're the person selling iPhones,
you don't gotta be the lowest price.
If you're selling something that's a collectible,
you don't gotta be the lowest price.
You better have good photos on eBay
because that can be a differentiator.
But like Johnny said, if I'm looking for the phone,
I don't care what the photos are
if it's priced $800 when it's really a $100 phone.
(08:37):
You're never gonna click on that listing.
And I know it sounds crazy,
but I never went back and did any repricing
on my eBay items.
Maybe once or twice in my whole career,
whatever I initially priced it at,
which in my defense,
any product I ever listed on eBay,
I was always the lowest price
at the time of listing it.
But it's not like eBay lurched you
(08:58):
that somebody else came on the listing
and is now priced lower than you.
Or maybe they have a quantity of 50 of these things.
I used to sell vegan Reese's cups on eBay.
I'd go buy them from Hershey,
so I'm right by Hershey for like three bucks.
I was selling them for like $15 a piece on eBay.
And I could sell when somebody else came on the listing
(09:21):
because I would stop getting sales.
So then I could go in and manually under price.
But I know most people don't do that.
It's just like we list it,
we throw it in the bin,
we forget about it.
We're in Amazon land, we list it,
we don't reprice aggressively.
And then we have to deal with,
well, why aren't our sales what they should be?
Why do I have all this inventory sitting around
(09:42):
not making me any money?
Well, the problem is the price,
because you could argue,
even if it's a super non-desirable item,
if the price is right, it's gonna sell a lot faster.
That's just, I just firmly believe,
even if it's something that sells once every six months,
and you got it at 50 bucks,
and you drop it down to $25,
yet again, you should have margin.
(10:03):
We are resellers.
It's not like we're paying retail price for these items.
If you don't have margin, you're belly up anyway.
The commerce, you don't even make,
I guess you do make it to this point,
but by then it's too late,
because you already spent all your money
and you're not getting anything back.
So if we have the margin,
let's leverage the margin to sell our items
because we don't get paid until the items sell.
(10:24):
The idea that having all these listings is cool.
And yeah, I got this many listings, zero.
I want zero listings.
I want it all sold,
even if that means I break even in Amazon.
I even lose money on some sales
because it's cheaper to just sell it for a dollar loss
and pay Amazon to remove the item.
So there are so many other factors that we don't think about,
(10:46):
and we just hang on to this idea.
Well, I know dude, Barney is 50,
Barney is gonna get me my 50 bucks regardless.
And then a year later, Barney still sitting in your inventory.
You could have sold them for 1999,
got 11 bucks at their fees on Amazon,
went and spent that $11.
And then you could literally compound that $11
(11:07):
into hundreds of thousands of dollars,
literally in the same year.
Here's where I think Amazon sellers get into trouble.
They'll scan it.
There's no FBA, no new.
There's maybe a few merchant people, right?
They wanna price it to the moon.
300 bucks.
I see go-to list are doing on defaults,
which is laughable when I have a, I don't know,
Nora Roberts book in my hand.
(11:28):
There's no way in special hell land
where that thing is gonna sell for 300 bucks.
I gotta come down to reasonability,
but what's reasonability
when there's nothing on the market?
Well, you do have tools like Kipa and whatever,
or you can use your book knowledge.
Yes, you Amazon sellers do have some book knowledge,
at least when things sell.
You've sold romance novels before.
(11:51):
How much do they typically sell for?
List it for that price, not 300 bucks.
It's like 1999, maybe 2999 on a good day,
depending on the book itself, honestly.
Now you got a history book
and there's some better indicators.
Like maybe you're seeing like 100 bucks
over in merchant land.
Maybe $300 isn't out of line at that point.
(12:12):
So you gotta use your book knowledge
and also your analyzing knowledge
when you're looking at things,
when you're scanning them or looking them up online.
Over on eBay, it's the same thing.
If you're looking at Soul Comp's,
what's it averagely selling for?
Not the Miracle Cell where one jack off got $500
(12:32):
and everybody else is less than 100 bucks.
Are you talking about my Disney Black Diamond VHS tapes, dude?
I'm not talking about your money laundering.
Money laundering is a separate podcast that'll never-
I mean, think about it.
I'm trying to put a timeframe on it
where if I list something at the ridiculous price
(12:57):
that something's listed or even the market price,
how long would I be willing to wait to get all of the money
or say take 50% of what I list the item at
the same day I list it?
I can't come to a number.
How long would I wait or what's the trade-off here?
(13:17):
If I could literally sell all of my inventory at 50% off,
right now, if there's a button that just popped up,
I would do it.
I wouldn't even think, Johnny,
I would click that button so fast
my bank account would just explode.
They'd be calling me saying
there's some type of fraud going on.
So-
I'd do that all day if it's instant sell like that.
How long are you willing to wait to get full price
(13:38):
for the Barney DVD?
That's the question you have to ask yourself
because you don't have to run to the bottom right away
like I do, but I'm fine with taking
some of the money all of the time.
So what's a reasonable timeframe for somebody
to list an item and then go and lower the price?
Because for me, I have my repricer set up to seven days.
(14:00):
So I literally, from the second I scan the barcode
on the back of an item, it's got seven days
to stay at that initial price.
And then after that, buckle up because it's tanking.
I'm tanking, listing down to my minimum.
So what's a reasonable time for somebody to wait
to try to get the full price when they list an item?
(14:22):
When it's saturated, there's multitudes of people in there.
Don't even wait, just reprice competitively right away.
If it's got a decent number of people on there,
and I'm talking about like the sales score,
the E score here, and a little bit of the ranking.
So if I'm seeing something like with a hundred
and there's 50 people on the listing,
to me, that's a reprice right away.
(14:44):
If I'm seeing same scenario, 50 and 10,
maybe I wanna wait three months, maybe six months,
because that's when Amazon's the cheapest
to see if I can flip it for maximum.
If I'm seeing two and 50, I'm leaving it at maximum price.
The odds are in my favor.
Until probably again, after six months, I'll reassess.
(15:06):
Maybe a bajillion more people came
to the listing since then, who knows?
But most items on Amazon or that middle ground,
they're overly saturated.
So seven days to 30 days is probably
where you wanna lean to on most items.
After that, let it rip and go.
All right, so you have an item, you're gonna list it.
(15:27):
You look on eBay, there's one, none listed,
one sold for $50.
Where are you gonna list that item at?
What's up, Amazon sellers?
I wanted to take a second to talk about GoToLister,
the software me and Johnny both use to list
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(15:48):
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I'm gonna look at the item and see if it's item
(16:11):
that's either scarce or has some other cool factor
going along with it.
If not, I'm probably gonna go 20% below market
of that 50 bucks.
If it's got those other two metrics I mentioned,
I'm probably gonna list it for the $50.
Like if it's scarce or it's got something other cool
going, like a signature or something.
Okay, so now my idea with this,
(16:32):
where I was taking you here is what percentage people,
what percentage of resellers do you think
are gonna price it above the $50?
Because I think your typical reseller sees
there's none listed, one sold for 50,
that they got a $75 bill in their hand.
Like I would, if I was a betting man,
I would say more than half of resellers
(16:54):
would list it more than the $50 sold comp
because there's no other ones listed.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't do that.
Yeah, you, not you, but I'm saying
you're your average person that just reselling and sees,
oh, look, I got the only one on the market
and one sold for 50.
The immediate thought is to go up in price, right?
And you could argue in some cases, that would be right.
(17:16):
But yet again,
There's some outlier scenarios
where that's perfectly a-okay.
I'd say that's only a-okay.
And we kind of talked about this before.
There's three tracks.
This is the slowest one.
If you're in the storage game and holding out
for maximum dollars, and that is your business model,
that is a-okay to do.
But for most resellers, that's not a-okay to do.
(17:36):
You need to flip it.
You either need to be at or below market
in order to get the flip in a timely fashion.
Because if you don't and you're just holding on
in the storage game,
you're potentially waiting for your money
and you can't spin up your business by getting that money,
taking a little bit for yourself,
reinvesting the rest into more inventory,
(17:57):
rinse and repeat over and over again.
There's no rinsing and repeating
in the long-term storage game and holding.
If you're holding, you have another business going on
that's paying all the bills.
And again, that's the only real reason to do it.
The comic guy, Skyline Comics or whatever,
(18:18):
he's famous for just holding at maximum dollars
above market dollars, because he doesn't care.
I don't think he wants to sell his gigantic comic collection
he got 40 years ago in some obscure warehouse in New York.
I don't think he cares.
He just likes the cool factor of saying,
I own pretty much all the comics in the world.
Congratulations, my dude.
I, it's funny.
(18:39):
So now we got to deal with the idea that,
I got a crazy, I got a crazy idea
I'm going to throw out there for the eBay,
the eBay executives.
And you can thank me later when you decide to do this.
What if eBay, like Amazon started charging a fee,
if you had a certain amount of listings listed
for a certain amount of time.
(18:59):
So in Amazon land, you have six months
until an item becomes long-term.
Once it hits long-term, you pay more in storage.
There's also a storage utilization ratio,
which is how many of your items have been sitting for how long.
And you pay more in monthly storage fees based on this,
because Amazon wants you to sell your items.
In eBay land, you got a garage, like Johnny said,
(19:21):
a lot of people don't want to sell their stuff.
You list it and then you forget it and it just sits there.
And you wind up with all these bins full of junk
that's never going to sell.
So I would be curious if eBay did something like this
and said, okay, if you have items,
but then again, I guess you could just delete and relist
because that's the super hack to fix your eBay store anyway.
(19:41):
But if that wasn't the case,
if people's mindset would change a little bit on eBay,
if they said, hey, if your item has been listed
for more than six months,
then you're going to have to pay an extra 10 cents a month
on that listing.
I don't know if they want to do that
because they get paid, just like Amazon,
they get paid for all the sales.
(20:03):
They do have those injection prices, as does Amazon.
You get out of Amazon with their sub, their $40 sub on eBay,
whatever store size, you kind of get out of it.
If eBay did that, I don't think it'd be eBay anymore.
It would just be,
because people wouldn't list anything
and everything at that point.
They wouldn't.
Nowadays, that's what you got.
(20:23):
And that's what people like about eBay.
Everything and everything in the store.
Yeah, you can, yeah.
eBay would fold up shop.
They would go to, I don't know what's
the next closest thing to eBay.
Is it Bonanza?
I don't know.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
But it would benefit sellers
because it would make them take an extra second to think,
well, should I list this item or not?
(20:45):
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it would never happen,
but I think it's just a mentality thing.
And yet again, that's why
I've always repriced aggressively on Amazon
because they punish you for it on the back end.
That's just the reality of it.
And sure, six months is a good amount of time,
but I like the fact that my stuff's selling.
(21:06):
So once you drop your box off at UPS
to go to Amazon's warehouse,
some of your items become available for sale.
There's no better feeling than having your items scanned,
getting home and saying,
oh, I've been looking at Barney all week
and he already sold and he's literally
not even out of the UPS store yet.
That, I literally think that's the only reason I exist, Johnny,
(21:27):
is because I repriced so aggressively
and it has allowed me to grow the business
and my bank account in ways.
If I was the person that said,
I'm fine being second in line,
I'm fine matching the price of everybody else.
I think my business looks completely different
and I don't even know if it exists today.
(21:48):
And that's just, that's my mentality around pricing, dude.
I wanna sell everything.
I don't even care.
Like just give me my 50 cents into $2.
I will go find more of this.
There's plenty of it.
I'm A-okay with it because not every item,
I'm gonna get $2 on.
The majority of my items,
I'm gonna get between seven and $12 profit on.
Doesn't sound like a lot,
but when you're sending in thousands of units
(22:08):
every single month, it adds up.
And yeah, it happens.
I lose money sometimes on Barney.
Other times, most of the time, I win.
It's the idea of, let's focus on the bigger piece of the pie,
which is the price, which is winning more than you lose.
That is how you actually grow a business and make money
because I don't do this to store my stuff,
like this comic guy.
(22:30):
And how many people out there, Johnny, are like that, right?
Like they're the collector or they're super passionate
and they love, you know, they love that.
They're such a Barney aficionado
that this is one of my favorite DVDs.
And I'm gonna put it, I'm gonna list it,
but it's gonna be for something
that's just an exuberant amount
because I'm so passionate about this stuff.
And with books, I know this happens
(22:51):
because so many book sellers are so passionate that,
oh man, this is by, this is an Ernest Hemingway book.
And this is such a great book.
I read it and you think it's worth more than it actually is
because of your personal experience and your personal,
I guess, idea of what something's worth
instead of just going off with the markets telling you.
Yeah, I'm gonna throw this at you.
(23:11):
So if you can get,
let's just take what you did last year, the number of sales.
If you can get three to $5 more per item
and sell 20% less, would you do that?
You're gonna sell 20% less units,
but you're gonna go, instead of undercutting,
you're gonna either match or go up
by a slight number on each item.
(23:33):
No, I want it all gone.
You want it all gone still.
I mean, that's fair.
That is a legitimate business model.
The people who want to price at or above,
you're gonna wait a little bit longer.
I think with the way, if you're not up to date on the store,
upcoming storage bills, you may want to take a look, my friend.
They're going up by 30% this year,
(23:54):
and the removal's going up by another 30%.
So long-term and removal is gonna be no joke.
A 30% increase in one physical year is insane.
Absolutely insane.
That is Amazon telling you they want you to turn the items.
They don't want to store 100% of everything anymore.
(24:17):
And in books, they're heavy.
Most of them are heavy.
So you gotta be pretty picky on what you're sending in.
Those fees are gonna eat you alive.
I think, dude, I think I wanna hit on that real quick
because I think the idea that you just said, like,
hey, would you sell 20% less,
(24:38):
but make an extra two or $3 per item?
I think that exists in a lot of eBay stores,
and I don't think it's necessarily wrong,
but I do think you create this job for yourself.
All right, I know.
You know, reselling, it's a job.
I understand that argument, but for me,
I see reselling as like a fun hobby
(24:58):
where I can make a shit ton of money, right?
Like, it doesn't feel like a job.
Sure, I have days I'm like, this sucks.
I'm driving an hour and a half, whatever.
But overall, I'm like, this is fun, right?
Like, I enjoy reselling.
I enjoy going out to the pawn shops
and finding the Barney DVDs, right?
Like, so sure, that model works,
but I think it's a line where all of a sudden,
you can quickly become miserable at reselling,
(25:21):
and I think this is what happens with a lot of people,
because yes, if you wait,
you might get a few more shekels for your items,
but I guarantee you, your mindset will be a lot better
if you're selling more items, even if it's for less money,
because it's continuous cash coming into the bank account,
even if it's just a little faucet
that's got a little flow coming.
(25:42):
If you see the faucets on every single day
versus every other day,
every single person in the history of the universe is,
what reseller isn't motivated
to go do some work in their business
when they hear that stupid eBay cha-ching
that I really never had the, I guess, glory of dealing with,
because I never had an eBay store
where I could just be sitting here
(26:02):
and it's cha-chinging around the clock.
That motivates people.
So if you don't get that every day,
you're gonna be a little bit defeated,
versus when Johnny used to have this store
and we're sitting here on the podcast
and the thing's cha-chinging, I'm like,
dude, I'm gonna come over there
and mute your phone permanently, right?
It's a good sound.
I think it's like a mentality thing too, man,
getting the sales every day.
(26:23):
Seeing items are selling every single day
that you send in super fast,
is super motivating for you to get out that next week
and do the same exact thing
versus the person who doesn't get sales every day
because they wanna hang on
and try to stick it out for the higher price items.
At some point, do you pass the threshold of,
okay, now I have 10, 15, 20,000 items.
(26:45):
It's kind of like the eBay business you were building
where you were getting more based on your descriptions
and your photos and your quality,
but you've said it plenty of times.
This is a long-term play.
People don't have to wear a thal
and they don't start reselling to say,
this is gonna take three years
to get it where I want it to be.
Right, and brief segue,
(27:05):
if you need the satisfaction
with the cha-chinging sound for Amazon,
we have instructions in our Discord,
so please subscribe to it
and you can get the cha-ching satisfactory sound in Amazon.
I don't even have that turned on, dude.
It's-
It's like 50 steps to set up, but it's doable.
But anyway, back to what you were saying.
Now, in eBay land, this does not apply to Amazon folks
(27:28):
because we get sent offers, right?
And they're usually lower than what we listed for.
So going slightly up to counteract those offers
I think is okay, but you doing so,
you realize you're gonna wait longer if you do that.
Now, if you price correctly,
and a similar percentage off offer is gonna come in,
yeah, it's gonna be less dollars,
(27:49):
but you're gonna turn your items quicker.
So there is that to consider.
So you need to understand your numbers all around
and what's affordable and your margins and all that.
Additionally, what we have in eBay and not Amazon
is promoted listings.
How much are we willing to crank up that dial
to try to move our items slightly faster,
to get ranked a little higher, to get clicked on?
(28:10):
But even then, I still think it's gonna come down to price
unless they got leaded from some external source.
If they're pulling it up on eBay and you're ranked high,
like in the top five,
if those top five, before they even click on it,
they're gonna click the lowest price
out of that five, guaranteed.
Then next is gonna come photos,
and then after that, item specifics and description,
(28:31):
bottom line, condition maybe.
It's so hard.
And Johnny, I'm gonna make you talk for the next two minutes
because I have a real life example I'm going to go grab
and we're gonna discuss it here,
and I'll show everybody here.
So you gotta talk for the next two minutes
while I get my recent eBay purchase, which was a book,
and I will give the full story once I get back.
(28:52):
Okay, if anybody wants a free item,
you need to guess right now in the comments,
pause the video of what he's bringing back.
I don't know what Mike's gonna give away,
and this isn't my giveaway
because I don't wanna give you guys anything,
so I'm electing Mike to give away a free item
of something he chooses, if you can guess what it is,
(29:13):
to the T.
If you do, Mike will send this on his dime.
Hopefully he could mouth me,
but I have a real life example from this past week.
All right, so I'm not a big reader.
Every once in a while, I do enjoy buying a book.
So there was a book I had been wanting to get,
and I'm gonna show it here.
(29:34):
It's called Taking Shape 2, the ISBN,
so you all can go look it up.
It's 978-057-874-5268.
Okay, so I go to Amazon.
I'm an Amazon seller.
I'm gonna support Amazon.
And it's like, it's going for like 30, 33, $34.
(29:55):
All right, I know eBay, Fleabay.
I gotta be able to get it for cheaper over there, right?
So I go over, there's a few listed.
Oh, this little guy's got best offer on, Johnny.
He's already the lowest price.
It's already cheaper than Amazon, right?
It was like $28 if I didn't even throw an offer out there.
(30:16):
So this guy's the lowest price.
He's got best offers on.
I shoot him an offer, hey, 18 bucks, sold.
That guy is me in a different universe.
He's already got the best price
anywhere out there on the internet.
It's listed brand new.
It's in great shape.
And he still takes the offer,
(30:36):
which is like $6 less than what he had it listed at.
This is a real life example
of what exactly we were talking about.
Now, he could have sat there.
He could have waited how long to maybe get all the money.
He was the lowest price, but he got the sale that day.
Don't we want money today?
So it's the whole argument here.
I want you to get paid today.
(30:57):
I don't wanna have you wait two weeks, two months.
Some of these cases, the item never sells.
And then by the time you get around to repricing it,
the market's saturated.
There's no value in it.
It's crazy to me.
We're literally talking about real life examples here.
I literally did exactly what I'm talking about.
And the person, he didn't even counter.
(31:17):
He just said, give me that 18 bucks right here, right now,
even though I'm the lowest price.
It's crazy to me, man.
I don't know.
I wanna sell it all.
He probably got that from the bins.
It was on top of the pile,
light beaming down from the ceiling on it.
And he paid less than 30 cents for it,
or 80 cents or whatever.
Your $18 even after fees, he like, I don't know,
(31:38):
8X, 10X his money, didn't care.
And you just go do it again.
And you go do it again and you stay in business
because there's actual money coming into the bank account.
And it's not a garage full of items listed
that are overpriced, that just never sell.
I mean, like you said, there's rare cases
where somebody buys the more expensive one.
(31:59):
But in Amazon land, nobody's clicking through
to see what the condition is, right?
They're just clicking buy now.
I mean, you talked about it.
You don't even put condition notes.
You don't gotta put anything in there.
It does not matter over there.
But here we are as resellers.
We can't keep anything simple, Johnny.
It's all gotta be like we're trying to get to Mars
(32:20):
and figure out how to build life on Mars.
And I'm just here to tell you,
price your things competitively,
even if your photos suck on eBay,
even if your condition isn't the greatest on Amazon,
your stuff's gonna sell regardless.
It's crazy.
The only time I think it matters on Amazon
(32:40):
is when it's customer user error.
They legitimately think they're buying a new item
and they get your crappy used item
and they leave you a negative review for that.
But that isn't on you.
That's the customer not understanding
how Amazon works so they didn't realize
it defaulted to the used copy.
That isn't on you at all.
That's just, I don't know.
(33:03):
I've had a few of those pop up more than I thought,
but it's just a thing.
The customer still doesn't understand Amazon.
What the customer understands is what's on the buy box.
They're gonna add to the cart
and move on with their merry little day.
And if you're not the lowest price
or you aren't the only listing
so you can command a few more premium dollars,
(33:23):
you're not gonna get the sale.
There's a very small percentage of Amazon sellers
that shop by the lowest price, I think.
And I know some bulk sellers
who are defaulting more to merchant.
They make a lot of money
because they are indeed the lowest price.
They're even on merchant to maintain being the lowest price.
But that's their business model.
(33:44):
They're all in on being the cheapest one
as long as they can clear a little bit of money.
They have tremendous volume, tremendous storage,
and a tremendous work day.
They got to pack 100, 300 items a day.
That's their business model.
And more power to those guys.
They work a lot harder than us putting, I don't know,
40 to 100 items in a box and shipping it out.
(34:06):
We got to ship one thing.
They got to ship hundreds of things a day.
You gotta be efficient.
Most of us are just solo entrepreneurs
or maybe we have a significant other helping us.
And we need to get paid for the work we put in.
It's just a reality of anything.
Any business.
You need money coming in to sustain the business.
And for those of us that are full time
(34:26):
to sustain our real life expenses,
like not even just sustaining the business.
So I got $10 to go source, right?
Like I need to be able to buy cans of cat food.
I need to be able to buy food for myself
and pay the electric and all these other things
that go into this.
So I can't afford to hold out.
I guess that's what this comes down to.
(34:47):
I don't want it.
You don't got a shoe box of candles under your bed?
You've been waiting to burn these?
I don't want it.
And I can't afford to try to get all the money
some of the time or all the money all the time.
I need some of the money all of the time,
every single time,
especially if it means I'm gonna have a higher sell through
and things are not gonna sit in my inventory.
And even if it's a few dollars trickling in
(35:09):
multiple times a day,
it's better than no dollars and living on, you know,
a hope and a prayer that eventually
you're gonna get the extra five, $10 for the item
because you just, you know what you got.
I know what you got too.
You got a business that isn't gonna be around
for very long because without money,
what are you gonna do?
I mean, I guess you can just keep,
I mean, I know this is people just work full-time jobs
(35:31):
and just continuously put money into reselling
and never even make a penny of reselling.
So, I mean, I guess if you wanna be that person
that's a okay, I'm in the business of making money
and not just, you know, fiddle faddling around
listening to things just to listen to them.
And if pricing is what controls my business,
then guess what?
I'm the lowest price every single time.
And everybody, you know,
(35:51):
ever since I came out with that,
my repricing video years and years ago,
everybody still gets bent out of shape.
Every once in a while, I get a comment on there like,
you're destroying the market by telling everybody
to undercut and I just say, sure, I know, I know.
But if I don't do it, like Johnny said,
what do you think the mega sellers are doing?
(36:11):
You think the mega sellers are here to play nice.
You think they're like, oh, it's Mike, you know,
let's cut him a break.
He's on this listing.
Let's not drop it to $5 and lose money.
They don't care.
They sell stuff at a loss all the time.
It's just part of doing business.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I'm gonna correct a few of you who have heard us,
(36:32):
but not listened to us.
When you see things like from these mega sellers
on the Amazon listing or even on the eBay listing,
four or $5, let's just say they're the one-off.
We're not saying price below the one-off bottom lister.
We're not saying that at all.
If you do that, you're gonna make no money.
So, okay, what's the next guy?
(36:53):
Okay, this is much more reasonable.
This $4 item, everybody else has got it at 12 to 30 bucks.
That's in the realm of reasonability.
That $4 or $5 guy, he just wants that out of his inventory.
He's gonna take a little bit of a loss.
He's probably gonna use it as a write-off.
Congratulations, weird, low margin seller.
You're probably one of the big operations we just mentioned
and they got different finances
(37:14):
than the rest of us bottom line.
So a few write-offs here and there, they don't care about.
Or maybe they have special postal rates that you don't have.
That's probably the bigger factor there.
They can just go lower than you, plain and simple,
and still clear, I don't know, a quarter.
But they're happy to clear a quarter.
You shouldn't be happy to clear a quarter
because unless you're shipping out five to 600 items a day,
(37:37):
those quarters ain't gonna add up for you for your time.
They simply aren't.
So take what we say
and actually hear what we're saying, please.
You don't get paid until the item sells.
It's all resell-ness.
You can have it listed for whatever price you want,
but you're not getting money back into your bank account.
It literally costs you money not to sell items.
(37:58):
I know, you don't think about it like that.
But I'm here to tell you, that's what it is
because you paid something for that.
And even if you got it for free,
because all you little free buggers out there
get all bent out of shape too.
Even if you got it for free,
you paid your time to list the thing,
which is probably worth more than the money
you're gonna get paid on the backend anyway.
But that's a whole nother discussion
when it comes to value and your time.
(38:20):
I gave some advice in a tech group
maybe two or three months ago.
I don't think she listened to me.
But anyway, she was like, I'm gonna need a bigger space.
And I'm like, why?
Because her space could hold 10,000 items,
but she was doing lots and bundles.
Like, I'm running out of space.
So I asked her realistically,
how much of that stuff selling?
It was a really low number, really low percentage.
(38:41):
I was like, well, instead of adding
another overhead line expense to a, I wasn't kind,
a business model that's failing, let's not.
And let's utilize the space we had
to make a faster moving selling space efficient.
Instead of doubling or tripling our overhead
to do more of, again, what's not working.
(39:02):
She was determined to do lots.
I think she's still doing lots.
I do think she threw out some trash,
what she's named trash.
That's the thing.
When you start out, you don't know what's trash.
You try things and you experiment.
But once you get out of that,
you shouldn't stick to the trash anymore.
Let it, let it go.
Don't even pick it up.
If you do pick it up,
(39:22):
because it came with a bulk thing,
throw it away, make it go away somehow.
But doubling down on what's barely working
or not working at all is never a good idea.
You need to make it working before doubling down
to expanding.
Because if she had listened to me,
she would be in the same space
(39:43):
and having trouble filling the space.
That's a beautiful place to be.
When you have a decent sized space
and things are moving at such a speed,
that to me means, okay, I need to either
bring on employee or work more hours.
That's a beautiful position to be to try to fill it,
then go up upstairs to another bigger facility.
(40:07):
But if you're just constantly listing,
listing out of 30, selling two,
listing 30, selling two, that's not working.
Don't do that.
No, at some point you should be selling
just as much as you're listing every single day.
And if you don't see progress towards that,
then you got a problem going on.
So that's gonna do it for this episode.
Reprice your stuff.
And when you initially price it, be aggressive.
(40:29):
I promise you, if you hate making sales reselling,
you can come back to this podcast and yell at me about it
because nobody hates making money reselling.
And the main way we can do it is by price.
So we'll talk to y'all in next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Today's full episode and all previous episodes
(40:49):
are available to all YouTube members,
along with the weekly Zoom call and private Discord.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy
and consider joining for as little as 2.99 a month.
Welcome back to another episode
(00:01):
of the Resellers Mindset podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube,
along with my friend and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses
from the ground up.
We also have a weekly Zoom call and private Discord
for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash used book guy
to join the channel and gain access
(00:21):
to the full length podcast Zoom call
and private Discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up everybody?
Welcome to another episode of Resellers Mindset podcast.
Mike sitting next to Johnny, his topic right here,
right now, we're gonna talk about pricing
in the realm of how do we price?
How do we think people should price their items?
(00:42):
Are you repricing your items
when it comes to Amazon and eBay land?
I personally have never really seen many videos
about eBay sellers doing like repricing on their items.
I know large eBay sellers have the dated markdowns,
but like just the video talking about going back in
and checking your items when it comes to pricing.
So that'll be cool to kind of get into,
(01:03):
but Johnny's gonna take us away,
lead us down this rabbit hole.
Yeah, I mean, it's probably the number one problem
in reselling as a whole, I think,
is just poor pricing strategy.
Either you're going in one of two spectrums,
either you're overpricing your items
and hoping for that once a year Christmas miracle sale
and that you're that person
(01:23):
and wishing upon a star if you're Pinocchio.
Which is just gonna make less to attractive buyers.
People are gonna undercut you.
They're gonna get all the sales, you're not.
The other end is, which just results in low profit margin
and potentially losing money on sales.
The other way to do it is pricing way too low
to try to move your product, but you're making no money
(01:44):
and you're working for less than minimum wage at that point
between all the boxes you're packing
or all the photography you're taking
or the listing you're doing.
It's just a nightmare.
And you're spinning your wheels.
And again, you're pretty much flipping burgers
at McDonald's at that point.
It's hard for me,
because I have such a strong stance on this
(02:06):
that the only thing that matters is selling your items.
I'm not gonna say it's the only thing
that's gonna contribute to you getting a sale,
but it is the biggest factor
that influences you getting sale on the item is the price.
So all the idea that,
well, my listing is better or my condition is better.
(02:29):
That is a piece of the pie.
But the pricing part is at least half of the pizza pie
than everything else.
In my eyes, it's more than half,
but I'm just being generous here.
Everything else kind of eats up the other part of the pizza.
So if pricing is the biggest concern,
the biggest thing people look for when they shop,
(02:51):
why do you think every platform lets you filter price,
low to high?
It's the same idea with other things you could filter by,
because it is important to the customer.
And in Amazon land,
I'll jump into Amazon land here because buy box,
buy box, you go on the listing, you hit buy now.
The biggest influencing factor is price of the item,
(03:11):
even if it's by one stinking penny,
one penny, 1.01 pennies, that's it.
And it's not even, it's one hundredths of a dollar.
So the idea you could have your item priced
one penny less than Johnny and get a sale
because of one penny,
but we are too stubborn to do this in the realm of Amazon
(03:34):
because, well, I'll just wait in line or Johnny's a nice guy
and I'm just gonna match his price.
Okay, so let's get all the naysayers out of the way.
Well, it's based on location.
Sure, if the buyer's in Texas
and they live by Johnny and his items
in the warehouse in Texas,
and he's got his price more than mine,
which is located in New York City
(03:56):
or somewhere in Pennsylvania,
then yes, he will have the buy box.
But yet again, let's get back to the majority talk here.
The majority is influenced by the price, not the location.
If this is what matters, this should be our only focus.
This idea that, okay, we sent our items in,
but items aren't selling, or I know what I got, right?
(04:16):
How many times do we, as resellers, send somebody an offer
to buy a bulk lot and they're like,
price is firm, I know what I got.
We are resellers, we're paying a dollar,
like we're getting this stuff for a quarter, 50 cents.
Do we always have to be like, I know what I got?
I don't think so.
I live in the realm now where, hey, it is what it is.
Maybe when I sent Barney in, it was a $20 DVD
(04:39):
and it sold for $11.
I still make my four or 50, I spent a quarter,
I spent 50 cents, that's all this game is.
Right, and I don't know, as a consumer, not a reseller,
as a consumer, who the hell sorts high to low?
They don't, period.
They're gonna sort low to high
after they do like maybe reviews or something.
(05:02):
So let's talk eBay here.
Okay, so person types in an item and the list pulls up.
They're gonna be looking at the price,
then they're gonna click in the listing.
That's where all the little other separators you've done
have come into play.
But to even get them to click on it,
it has to be in a reasonable price range.
It's when we get unreasonable or too low,
(05:24):
that's where our margins are gonna suffer.
So market competition.
So Amazon, there's usually one listing for the item, right?
So we're all competing on this one listing.
And the only separator we can do there is indeed price.
That's the only one.
Somebody may argue in the comments about,
(05:44):
oh, there's the collectible category, Johnny,
or there's the condition things.
Well, you can get to step in.
That does not apply.
eBay land.
Again, I don't think condition matters too much.
I think the additional photos will matter more.
But the number one thing, again,
to get them to click on it, it's gonna be price, honestly.
(06:07):
So market competition.
We do need to be priced competitively.
Mike talked about pricing maybe a little higher
waiting your turn in line.
If you're good with that,
and that strategy is working for you by all means.
But for a guaranteed, you're the next person in line
to get the sale, you need to be the lowest price, honestly.
But you need to clear some margin.
If you're wanting to send in items at $4
(06:30):
into the Amazon warehouse, again,
you're gonna make no money.
In fact, you're gonna lose money.
So you may have to price up above the $4 range
to maybe eight or nine to make money.
But why the heck are you sending in the item
in the first place?
Unless you're seeing something magical on the screen,
like 100% sell through.
But to me, that market's already too overly saturated
(06:51):
and overly competitive.
You should just leave it alone.
Nine times out of 10.
But again, unless you know something different
about the market, like maybe this thing balloons,
it's a seasonal item.
It's balloons during Christmas.
Great, fantastic.
That's for you in far between months,
the majority of items.
So competitive pricing also,
you gotta couple that with healthy margin.
(07:12):
If you're making 1% margin,
you're running not a great business.
If you can get in the 20% range or higher,
you're doing great.
Like the OA guys or the RA guys,
they love 20% margin.
Over here in just used product land,
we turn our nose up at 20% margin.
(07:33):
We shouldn't.
Money's money.
It all adds up.
Again, we're paying a dollar or less for most of the stuff.
If you're maybe a more expensive state,
maybe you're paying two to $3 per.
So margin's even more important to you.
What do you think about margin and market competition, Mike?
Well, that's why I've always stayed in media.
(07:55):
Like sure, I got the sources.
I know my routes.
I have the relationships.
But I think it goes back to the mindset of
no matter what category you're in,
this stuff's out there for the taking.
If you have the mindset,
oh, that you're not gonna be able to get out there
and find items.
So you're just gonna try getting the most.
(08:15):
And there are exceptions, like you said.
Like if you're the person selling iPhones,
you don't gotta be the lowest price.
If you're selling something that's a collectible,
you don't gotta be the lowest price.
You better have good photos on eBay
because that can be a differentiator.
But like Johnny said, if I'm looking for the phone,
I don't care what the photos are
if it's priced $800 when it's really a $100 phone.
(08:37):
You're never gonna click on that listing.
And I know it sounds crazy,
but I never went back and did any repricing
on my eBay items.
Maybe once or twice in my whole career,
whatever I initially priced it at,
which in my defense,
any product I ever listed on eBay,
I was always the lowest price
at the time of listing it.
But it's not like eBay lurched you
(08:58):
that somebody else came on the listing
and is now priced lower than you.
Or maybe they have a quantity of 50 of these things.
I used to sell vegan Reese's cups on eBay.
I'd go buy them from Hershey,
so I'm right by Hershey for like three bucks.
I was selling them for like $15 a piece on eBay.
And I could sell when somebody else came on the listing
(09:21):
because I would stop getting sales.
So then I could go in and manually under price.
But I know most people don't do that.
It's just like we list it,
we throw it in the bin,
we forget about it.
We're in Amazon land, we list it,
we don't reprice aggressively.
And then we have to deal with,
well, why aren't our sales what they should be?
Why do I have all this inventory sitting around
(09:42):
not making me any money?
Well, the problem is the price,
because you could argue,
even if it's a super non-desirable item,
if the price is right, it's gonna sell a lot faster.
That's just, I just firmly believe,
even if it's something that sells once every six months,
and you got it at 50 bucks,
and you drop it down to $25,
yet again, you should have margin.
(10:03):
We are resellers.
It's not like we're paying retail price for these items.
If you don't have margin, you're belly up anyway.
The commerce, you don't even make,
I guess you do make it to this point,
but by then it's too late,
because you already spent all your money
and you're not getting anything back.
So if we have the margin,
let's leverage the margin to sell our items
because we don't get paid until the items sell.
(10:24):
The idea that having all these listings is cool.
And yeah, I got this many listings, zero.
I want zero listings.
I want it all sold,
even if that means I break even in Amazon.
I even lose money on some sales
because it's cheaper to just sell it for a dollar loss
and pay Amazon to remove the item.
So there are so many other factors that we don't think about,
(10:46):
and we just hang on to this idea.
Well, I know dude, Barney is 50,
Barney is gonna get me my 50 bucks regardless.
And then a year later, Barney still sitting in your inventory.
You could have sold them for 1999,
got 11 bucks at their fees on Amazon,
went and spent that $11.
And then you could literally compound that $11
(11:07):
into hundreds of thousands of dollars,
literally in the same year.
Here's where I think Amazon sellers get into trouble.
They'll scan it.
There's no FBA, no new.
There's maybe a few merchant people, right?
They wanna price it to the moon.
300 bucks.
I see go-to list are doing on defaults,
which is laughable when I have a, I don't know,
Nora Roberts book in my hand.
(11:28):
There's no way in special hell land
where that thing is gonna sell for 300 bucks.
I gotta come down to reasonability,
but what's reasonability
when there's nothing on the market?
Well, you do have tools like Kipa and whatever,
or you can use your book knowledge.
Yes, you Amazon sellers do have some book knowledge,
at least when things sell.
You've sold romance novels before.
(11:51):
How much do they typically sell for?
List it for that price, not 300 bucks.
It's like 1999, maybe 2999 on a good day,
depending on the book itself, honestly.
Now you got a history book
and there's some better indicators.
Like maybe you're seeing like 100 bucks
over in merchant land.
Maybe $300 isn't out of line at that point.
(12:12):
So you gotta use your book knowledge
and also your analyzing knowledge
when you're looking at things,
when you're scanning them or looking them up online.
Over on eBay, it's the same thing.
If you're looking at Soul Comp's,
what's it averagely selling for?
Not the Miracle Cell where one jack off got $500
(12:32):
and everybody else is less than 100 bucks.
Are you talking about my Disney Black Diamond VHS tapes, dude?
I'm not talking about your money laundering.
Money laundering is a separate podcast that'll never-
I mean, think about it.
I'm trying to put a timeframe on it
where if I list something at the ridiculous price
(12:57):
that something's listed or even the market price,
how long would I be willing to wait to get all of the money
or say take 50% of what I list the item at
the same day I list it?
I can't come to a number.
How long would I wait or what's the trade-off here?
(13:17):
If I could literally sell all of my inventory at 50% off,
right now, if there's a button that just popped up,
I would do it.
I wouldn't even think, Johnny,
I would click that button so fast
my bank account would just explode.
They'd be calling me saying
there's some type of fraud going on.
So-
I'd do that all day if it's instant sell like that.
How long are you willing to wait to get full price
(13:38):
for the Barney DVD?
That's the question you have to ask yourself
because you don't have to run to the bottom right away
like I do, but I'm fine with taking
some of the money all of the time.
So what's a reasonable timeframe for somebody
to list an item and then go and lower the price?
Because for me, I have my repricer set up to seven days.
(14:00):
So I literally, from the second I scan the barcode
on the back of an item, it's got seven days
to stay at that initial price.
And then after that, buckle up because it's tanking.
I'm tanking, listing down to my minimum.
So what's a reasonable time for somebody to wait
to try to get the full price when they list an item?
(14:22):
When it's saturated, there's multitudes of people in there.
Don't even wait, just reprice competitively right away.
If it's got a decent number of people on there,
and I'm talking about like the sales score,
the E score here, and a little bit of the ranking.
So if I'm seeing something like with a hundred
and there's 50 people on the listing,
to me, that's a reprice right away.
(14:44):
If I'm seeing same scenario, 50 and 10,
maybe I wanna wait three months, maybe six months,
because that's when Amazon's the cheapest
to see if I can flip it for maximum.
If I'm seeing two and 50, I'm leaving it at maximum price.
The odds are in my favor.
Until probably again, after six months, I'll reassess.
(15:06):
Maybe a bajillion more people came
to the listing since then, who knows?
But most items on Amazon or that middle ground,
they're overly saturated.
So seven days to 30 days is probably
where you wanna lean to on most items.
After that, let it rip and go.
All right, so you have an item, you're gonna list it.
(15:27):
You look on eBay, there's one, none listed,
one sold for $50.
Where are you gonna list that item at?
What's up, Amazon sellers?
I wanted to take a second to talk about GoToLister,
the software me and Johnny both use to list
and manage our inventory and grow our businesses.
(15:48):
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and built-in profit analytics, it's a no-brainer.
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or using the link in the description below.
I'm gonna look at the item and see if it's item
(16:11):
that's either scarce or has some other cool factor
going along with it.
If not, I'm probably gonna go 20% below market
of that 50 bucks.
If it's got those other two metrics I mentioned,
I'm probably gonna list it for the $50.
Like if it's scarce or it's got something other cool
going, like a signature or something.
Okay, so now my idea with this,
(16:32):
where I was taking you here is what percentage people,
what percentage of resellers do you think
are gonna price it above the $50?
Because I think your typical reseller sees
there's none listed, one sold for 50,
that they got a $75 bill in their hand.
Like I would, if I was a betting man,
I would say more than half of resellers
(16:54):
would list it more than the $50 sold comp
because there's no other ones listed.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't do that.
Yeah, you, not you, but I'm saying
you're your average person that just reselling and sees,
oh, look, I got the only one on the market
and one sold for 50.
The immediate thought is to go up in price, right?
And you could argue in some cases, that would be right.
(17:16):
But yet again,
There's some outlier scenarios
where that's perfectly a-okay.
I'd say that's only a-okay.
And we kind of talked about this before.
There's three tracks.
This is the slowest one.
If you're in the storage game and holding out
for maximum dollars, and that is your business model,
that is a-okay to do.
But for most resellers, that's not a-okay to do.
(17:36):
You need to flip it.
You either need to be at or below market
in order to get the flip in a timely fashion.
Because if you don't and you're just holding on
in the storage game,
you're potentially waiting for your money
and you can't spin up your business by getting that money,
taking a little bit for yourself,
reinvesting the rest into more inventory,
(17:57):
rinse and repeat over and over again.
There's no rinsing and repeating
in the long-term storage game and holding.
If you're holding, you have another business going on
that's paying all the bills.
And again, that's the only real reason to do it.
The comic guy, Skyline Comics or whatever,
(18:18):
he's famous for just holding at maximum dollars
above market dollars, because he doesn't care.
I don't think he wants to sell his gigantic comic collection
he got 40 years ago in some obscure warehouse in New York.
I don't think he cares.
He just likes the cool factor of saying,
I own pretty much all the comics in the world.
Congratulations, my dude.
I, it's funny.
(18:39):
So now we got to deal with the idea that,
I got a crazy, I got a crazy idea
I'm going to throw out there for the eBay,
the eBay executives.
And you can thank me later when you decide to do this.
What if eBay, like Amazon started charging a fee,
if you had a certain amount of listings listed
for a certain amount of time.
(18:59):
So in Amazon land, you have six months
until an item becomes long-term.
Once it hits long-term, you pay more in storage.
There's also a storage utilization ratio,
which is how many of your items have been sitting for how long.
And you pay more in monthly storage fees based on this,
because Amazon wants you to sell your items.
In eBay land, you got a garage, like Johnny said,
(19:21):
a lot of people don't want to sell their stuff.
You list it and then you forget it and it just sits there.
And you wind up with all these bins full of junk
that's never going to sell.
So I would be curious if eBay did something like this
and said, okay, if you have items,
but then again, I guess you could just delete and relist
because that's the super hack to fix your eBay store anyway.
(19:41):
But if that wasn't the case,
if people's mindset would change a little bit on eBay,
if they said, hey, if your item has been listed
for more than six months,
then you're going to have to pay an extra 10 cents a month
on that listing.
I don't know if they want to do that
because they get paid, just like Amazon,
they get paid for all the sales.
(20:03):
They do have those injection prices, as does Amazon.
You get out of Amazon with their sub, their $40 sub on eBay,
whatever store size, you kind of get out of it.
If eBay did that, I don't think it'd be eBay anymore.
It would just be,
because people wouldn't list anything
and everything at that point.
They wouldn't.
Nowadays, that's what you got.
(20:23):
And that's what people like about eBay.
Everything and everything in the store.
Yeah, you can, yeah.
eBay would fold up shop.
They would go to, I don't know what's
the next closest thing to eBay.
Is it Bonanza?
I don't know.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
But it would benefit sellers
because it would make them take an extra second to think,
well, should I list this item or not?
(20:45):
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it would never happen,
but I think it's just a mentality thing.
And yet again, that's why
I've always repriced aggressively on Amazon
because they punish you for it on the back end.
That's just the reality of it.
And sure, six months is a good amount of time,
but I like the fact that my stuff's selling.
(21:06):
So once you drop your box off at UPS
to go to Amazon's warehouse,
some of your items become available for sale.
There's no better feeling than having your items scanned,
getting home and saying,
oh, I've been looking at Barney all week
and he already sold and he's literally
not even out of the UPS store yet.
That, I literally think that's the only reason I exist, Johnny,
(21:27):
is because I repriced so aggressively
and it has allowed me to grow the business
and my bank account in ways.
If I was the person that said,
I'm fine being second in line,
I'm fine matching the price of everybody else.
I think my business looks completely different
and I don't even know if it exists today.
(21:48):
And that's just, that's my mentality around pricing, dude.
I wanna sell everything.
I don't even care.
Like just give me my 50 cents into $2.
I will go find more of this.
There's plenty of it.
I'm A-okay with it because not every item,
I'm gonna get $2 on.
The majority of my items,
I'm gonna get between seven and $12 profit on.
Doesn't sound like a lot,
but when you're sending in thousands of units
(22:08):
every single month, it adds up.
And yeah, it happens.
I lose money sometimes on Barney.
Other times, most of the time, I win.
It's the idea of, let's focus on the bigger piece of the pie,
which is the price, which is winning more than you lose.
That is how you actually grow a business and make money
because I don't do this to store my stuff,
like this comic guy.
(22:30):
And how many people out there, Johnny, are like that, right?
Like they're the collector or they're super passionate
and they love, you know, they love that.
They're such a Barney aficionado
that this is one of my favorite DVDs.
And I'm gonna put it, I'm gonna list it,
but it's gonna be for something
that's just an exuberant amount
because I'm so passionate about this stuff.
And with books, I know this happens
(22:51):
because so many book sellers are so passionate that,
oh man, this is by, this is an Ernest Hemingway book.
And this is such a great book.
I read it and you think it's worth more than it actually is
because of your personal experience and your personal,
I guess, idea of what something's worth
instead of just going off with the markets telling you.
Yeah, I'm gonna throw this at you.
(23:11):
So if you can get,
let's just take what you did last year, the number of sales.
If you can get three to $5 more per item
and sell 20% less, would you do that?
You're gonna sell 20% less units,
but you're gonna go, instead of undercutting,
you're gonna either match or go up
by a slight number on each item.
(23:33):
No, I want it all gone.
You want it all gone still.
I mean, that's fair.
That is a legitimate business model.
The people who want to price at or above,
you're gonna wait a little bit longer.
I think with the way, if you're not up to date on the store,
upcoming storage bills, you may want to take a look, my friend.
They're going up by 30% this year,
(23:54):
and the removal's going up by another 30%.
So long-term and removal is gonna be no joke.
A 30% increase in one physical year is insane.
Absolutely insane.
That is Amazon telling you they want you to turn the items.
They don't want to store 100% of everything anymore.
(24:17):
And in books, they're heavy.
Most of them are heavy.
So you gotta be pretty picky on what you're sending in.
Those fees are gonna eat you alive.
I think, dude, I think I wanna hit on that real quick
because I think the idea that you just said, like,
hey, would you sell 20% less,
(24:38):
but make an extra two or $3 per item?
I think that exists in a lot of eBay stores,
and I don't think it's necessarily wrong,
but I do think you create this job for yourself.
All right, I know.
You know, reselling, it's a job.
I understand that argument, but for me,
I see reselling as like a fun hobby
(24:58):
where I can make a shit ton of money, right?
Like, it doesn't feel like a job.
Sure, I have days I'm like, this sucks.
I'm driving an hour and a half, whatever.
But overall, I'm like, this is fun, right?
Like, I enjoy reselling.
I enjoy going out to the pawn shops
and finding the Barney DVDs, right?
Like, so sure, that model works,
but I think it's a line where all of a sudden,
you can quickly become miserable at reselling,
(25:21):
and I think this is what happens with a lot of people,
because yes, if you wait,
you might get a few more shekels for your items,
but I guarantee you, your mindset will be a lot better
if you're selling more items, even if it's for less money,
because it's continuous cash coming into the bank account,
even if it's just a little faucet
that's got a little flow coming.
(25:42):
If you see the faucets on every single day
versus every other day,
every single person in the history of the universe is,
what reseller isn't motivated
to go do some work in their business
when they hear that stupid eBay cha-ching
that I really never had the, I guess, glory of dealing with,
because I never had an eBay store
where I could just be sitting here
(26:02):
and it's cha-chinging around the clock.
That motivates people.
So if you don't get that every day,
you're gonna be a little bit defeated,
versus when Johnny used to have this store
and we're sitting here on the podcast
and the thing's cha-chinging, I'm like,
dude, I'm gonna come over there
and mute your phone permanently, right?
It's a good sound.
I think it's like a mentality thing too, man,
getting the sales every day.
(26:23):
Seeing items are selling every single day
that you send in super fast,
is super motivating for you to get out that next week
and do the same exact thing
versus the person who doesn't get sales every day
because they wanna hang on
and try to stick it out for the higher price items.
At some point, do you pass the threshold of,
okay, now I have 10, 15, 20,000 items.
(26:45):
It's kind of like the eBay business you were building
where you were getting more based on your descriptions
and your photos and your quality,
but you've said it plenty of times.
This is a long-term play.
People don't have to wear a thal
and they don't start reselling to say,
this is gonna take three years
to get it where I want it to be.
Right, and brief segue,
(27:05):
if you need the satisfaction
with the cha-chinging sound for Amazon,
we have instructions in our Discord,
so please subscribe to it
and you can get the cha-ching satisfactory sound in Amazon.
I don't even have that turned on, dude.
It's-
It's like 50 steps to set up, but it's doable.
But anyway, back to what you were saying.
Now, in eBay land, this does not apply to Amazon folks
(27:28):
because we get sent offers, right?
And they're usually lower than what we listed for.
So going slightly up to counteract those offers
I think is okay, but you doing so,
you realize you're gonna wait longer if you do that.
Now, if you price correctly,
and a similar percentage off offer is gonna come in,
yeah, it's gonna be less dollars,
(27:49):
but you're gonna turn your items quicker.
So there is that to consider.
So you need to understand your numbers all around
and what's affordable and your margins and all that.
Additionally, what we have in eBay and not Amazon
is promoted listings.
How much are we willing to crank up that dial
to try to move our items slightly faster,
to get ranked a little higher, to get clicked on?
(28:10):
But even then, I still think it's gonna come down to price
unless they got leaded from some external source.
If they're pulling it up on eBay and you're ranked high,
like in the top five,
if those top five, before they even click on it,
they're gonna click the lowest price
out of that five, guaranteed.
Then next is gonna come photos,
and then after that, item specifics and description,
(28:31):
bottom line, condition maybe.
It's so hard.
And Johnny, I'm gonna make you talk for the next two minutes
because I have a real life example I'm going to go grab
and we're gonna discuss it here,
and I'll show everybody here.
So you gotta talk for the next two minutes
while I get my recent eBay purchase, which was a book,
and I will give the full story once I get back.
(28:52):
Okay, if anybody wants a free item,
you need to guess right now in the comments,
pause the video of what he's bringing back.
I don't know what Mike's gonna give away,
and this isn't my giveaway
because I don't wanna give you guys anything,
so I'm electing Mike to give away a free item
of something he chooses, if you can guess what it is,
(29:13):
to the T.
If you do, Mike will send this on his dime.
Hopefully he could mouth me,
but I have a real life example from this past week.
All right, so I'm not a big reader.
Every once in a while, I do enjoy buying a book.
So there was a book I had been wanting to get,
and I'm gonna show it here.
(29:34):
It's called Taking Shape 2, the ISBN,
so you all can go look it up.
It's 978-057-874-5268.
Okay, so I go to Amazon.
I'm an Amazon seller.
I'm gonna support Amazon.
And it's like, it's going for like 30, 33, $34.
(29:55):
All right, I know eBay, Fleabay.
I gotta be able to get it for cheaper over there, right?
So I go over, there's a few listed.
Oh, this little guy's got best offer on, Johnny.
He's already the lowest price.
It's already cheaper than Amazon, right?
It was like $28 if I didn't even throw an offer out there.
(30:16):
So this guy's the lowest price.
He's got best offers on.
I shoot him an offer, hey, 18 bucks, sold.
That guy is me in a different universe.
He's already got the best price
anywhere out there on the internet.
It's listed brand new.
It's in great shape.
And he still takes the offer,
(30:36):
which is like $6 less than what he had it listed at.
This is a real life example
of what exactly we were talking about.
Now, he could have sat there.
He could have waited how long to maybe get all the money.
He was the lowest price, but he got the sale that day.
Don't we want money today?
So it's the whole argument here.
I want you to get paid today.
(30:57):
I don't wanna have you wait two weeks, two months.
Some of these cases, the item never sells.
And then by the time you get around to repricing it,
the market's saturated.
There's no value in it.
It's crazy to me.
We're literally talking about real life examples here.
I literally did exactly what I'm talking about.
And the person, he didn't even counter.
(31:17):
He just said, give me that 18 bucks right here, right now,
even though I'm the lowest price.
It's crazy to me, man.
I don't know.
I wanna sell it all.
He probably got that from the bins.
It was on top of the pile,
light beaming down from the ceiling on it.
And he paid less than 30 cents for it,
or 80 cents or whatever.
Your $18 even after fees, he like, I don't know,
(31:38):
8X, 10X his money, didn't care.
And you just go do it again.
And you go do it again and you stay in business
because there's actual money coming into the bank account.
And it's not a garage full of items listed
that are overpriced, that just never sell.
I mean, like you said, there's rare cases
where somebody buys the more expensive one.
(31:59):
But in Amazon land, nobody's clicking through
to see what the condition is, right?
They're just clicking buy now.
I mean, you talked about it.
You don't even put condition notes.
You don't gotta put anything in there.
It does not matter over there.
But here we are as resellers.
We can't keep anything simple, Johnny.
It's all gotta be like we're trying to get to Mars
(32:20):
and figure out how to build life on Mars.
And I'm just here to tell you,
price your things competitively,
even if your photos suck on eBay,
even if your condition isn't the greatest on Amazon,
your stuff's gonna sell regardless.
It's crazy.
The only time I think it matters on Amazon
(32:40):
is when it's customer user error.
They legitimately think they're buying a new item
and they get your crappy used item
and they leave you a negative review for that.
But that isn't on you.
That's the customer not understanding
how Amazon works so they didn't realize
it defaulted to the used copy.
That isn't on you at all.
That's just, I don't know.
(33:03):
I've had a few of those pop up more than I thought,
but it's just a thing.
The customer still doesn't understand Amazon.
What the customer understands is what's on the buy box.
They're gonna add to the cart
and move on with their merry little day.
And if you're not the lowest price
or you aren't the only listing
so you can command a few more premium dollars,
(33:23):
you're not gonna get the sale.
There's a very small percentage of Amazon sellers
that shop by the lowest price, I think.
And I know some bulk sellers
who are defaulting more to merchant.
They make a lot of money
because they are indeed the lowest price.
They're even on merchant to maintain being the lowest price.
But that's their business model.
(33:44):
They're all in on being the cheapest one
as long as they can clear a little bit of money.
They have tremendous volume, tremendous storage,
and a tremendous work day.
They got to pack 100, 300 items a day.
That's their business model.
And more power to those guys.
They work a lot harder than us putting, I don't know,
40 to 100 items in a box and shipping it out.
(34:06):
We got to ship one thing.
They got to ship hundreds of things a day.
You gotta be efficient.
Most of us are just solo entrepreneurs
or maybe we have a significant other helping us.
And we need to get paid for the work we put in.
It's just a reality of anything.
Any business.
You need money coming in to sustain the business.
And for those of us that are full time
(34:26):
to sustain our real life expenses,
like not even just sustaining the business.
So I got $10 to go source, right?
Like I need to be able to buy cans of cat food.
I need to be able to buy food for myself
and pay the electric and all these other things
that go into this.
So I can't afford to hold out.
I guess that's what this comes down to.
(34:47):
I don't want it.
You don't got a shoe box of candles under your bed?
You've been waiting to burn these?
I don't want it.
And I can't afford to try to get all the money
some of the time or all the money all the time.
I need some of the money all of the time,
every single time,
especially if it means I'm gonna have a higher sell through
and things are not gonna sit in my inventory.
And even if it's a few dollars trickling in
(35:09):
multiple times a day,
it's better than no dollars and living on, you know,
a hope and a prayer that eventually
you're gonna get the extra five, $10 for the item
because you just, you know what you got.
I know what you got too.
You got a business that isn't gonna be around
for very long because without money,
what are you gonna do?
I mean, I guess you can just keep,
I mean, I know this is people just work full-time jobs
(35:31):
and just continuously put money into reselling
and never even make a penny of reselling.
So, I mean, I guess if you wanna be that person
that's a okay, I'm in the business of making money
and not just, you know, fiddle faddling around
listening to things just to listen to them.
And if pricing is what controls my business,
then guess what?
I'm the lowest price every single time.
And everybody, you know,
(35:51):
ever since I came out with that,
my repricing video years and years ago,
everybody still gets bent out of shape.
Every once in a while, I get a comment on there like,
you're destroying the market by telling everybody
to undercut and I just say, sure, I know, I know.
But if I don't do it, like Johnny said,
what do you think the mega sellers are doing?
(36:11):
You think the mega sellers are here to play nice.
You think they're like, oh, it's Mike, you know,
let's cut him a break.
He's on this listing.
Let's not drop it to $5 and lose money.
They don't care.
They sell stuff at a loss all the time.
It's just part of doing business.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I'm gonna correct a few of you who have heard us,
(36:32):
but not listened to us.
When you see things like from these mega sellers
on the Amazon listing or even on the eBay listing,
four or $5, let's just say they're the one-off.
We're not saying price below the one-off bottom lister.
We're not saying that at all.
If you do that, you're gonna make no money.
So, okay, what's the next guy?
(36:53):
Okay, this is much more reasonable.
This $4 item, everybody else has got it at 12 to 30 bucks.
That's in the realm of reasonability.
That $4 or $5 guy, he just wants that out of his inventory.
He's gonna take a little bit of a loss.
He's probably gonna use it as a write-off.
Congratulations, weird, low margin seller.
You're probably one of the big operations we just mentioned
and they got different finances
(37:14):
than the rest of us bottom line.
So a few write-offs here and there, they don't care about.
Or maybe they have special postal rates that you don't have.
That's probably the bigger factor there.
They can just go lower than you, plain and simple,
and still clear, I don't know, a quarter.
But they're happy to clear a quarter.
You shouldn't be happy to clear a quarter
because unless you're shipping out five to 600 items a day,
(37:37):
those quarters ain't gonna add up for you for your time.
They simply aren't.
So take what we say
and actually hear what we're saying, please.
You don't get paid until the item sells.
It's all resell-ness.
You can have it listed for whatever price you want,
but you're not getting money back into your bank account.
It literally costs you money not to sell items.
(37:58):
I know, you don't think about it like that.
But I'm here to tell you, that's what it is
because you paid something for that.
And even if you got it for free,
because all you little free buggers out there
get all bent out of shape too.
Even if you got it for free,
you paid your time to list the thing,
which is probably worth more than the money
you're gonna get paid on the backend anyway.
But that's a whole nother discussion
when it comes to value and your time.
(38:20):
I gave some advice in a tech group
maybe two or three months ago.
I don't think she listened to me.
But anyway, she was like, I'm gonna need a bigger space.
And I'm like, why?
Because her space could hold 10,000 items,
but she was doing lots and bundles.
Like, I'm running out of space.
So I asked her realistically,
how much of that stuff selling?
It was a really low number, really low percentage.
(38:41):
I was like, well, instead of adding
another overhead line expense to a, I wasn't kind,
a business model that's failing, let's not.
And let's utilize the space we had
to make a faster moving selling space efficient.
Instead of doubling or tripling our overhead
to do more of, again, what's not working.
(39:02):
She was determined to do lots.
I think she's still doing lots.
I do think she threw out some trash,
what she's named trash.
That's the thing.
When you start out, you don't know what's trash.
You try things and you experiment.
But once you get out of that,
you shouldn't stick to the trash anymore.
Let it, let it go.
Don't even pick it up.
If you do pick it up,
(39:22):
because it came with a bulk thing,
throw it away, make it go away somehow.
But doubling down on what's barely working
or not working at all is never a good idea.
You need to make it working before doubling down
to expanding.
Because if she had listened to me,
she would be in the same space
(39:43):
and having trouble filling the space.
That's a beautiful place to be.
When you have a decent sized space
and things are moving at such a speed,
that to me means, okay, I need to either
bring on employee or work more hours.
That's a beautiful position to be to try to fill it,
then go up upstairs to another bigger facility.
(40:07):
But if you're just constantly listing,
listing out of 30, selling two,
listing 30, selling two, that's not working.
Don't do that.
No, at some point you should be selling
just as much as you're listing every single day.
And if you don't see progress towards that,
then you got a problem going on.
So that's gonna do it for this episode.
Reprice your stuff.
And when you initially price it, be aggressive.
(40:29):
I promise you, if you hate making sales reselling,
you can come back to this podcast and yell at me about it
because nobody hates making money reselling.
And the main way we can do it is by price.
So we'll talk to y'all in next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Today's full episode and all previous episodes
(40:49):
are available to all YouTube members,
along with the weekly Zoom call and private Discord.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy
and consider joining for as little as 2.99 a month.
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