How to Sell on eBay for Beginners and Poshmark Sellers! Interview with Veteran eBay Sellers, eBliss!

hi everyone i think we are live i was just telling dave and laurie from ebless that i am super awkward at the very beginning because i never know if it's actually started or not i think it has i see veronica and antonia and kathy i almost said ginger your name is not ginger kathy and amber in the chat thank you guys so much for being here i have with me some wonderful people just a reselling power duo their names are dave and laurie and i'm going to let them introduce themselves and just kind of talk a little bit about their experience on ebay because basically we are here to learn how to ebay from people who are very good at doing the ebay so i'm gonna pass it over to them let them introduce themselves and we'll go from there okay awesome well thank you so much becky for having us on uh yes we have a full-time ebay business that started as a side hustle about seven years ago dave started it completely on a whim and he grew it from having one listing to probably about 1200 listings or so by the time i came on to join him and he built up a really good business by himself uh thrifting used uh winter clothes was the majority of the things that he sold at that time and then i came i looked at his business and said hmm that you may have something there uh what if i helped you and i i helped you list and i helped you source and ship and so that's what i did and about three years later we have grown into over 4 000 individual thrifted items over two accounts on ebay and we have a small warehouse five employees and uh we've never been happier yeah that's amazing um i cannot imagine four thousand i was like and i bet some people are thinking to themselves that's about what i have in my house right now because you know this is that's one of the things that people love about this business is being able to thrift and do all that kind of stuff um so yeah you guys have been doing this for a long time and now this is um your livelihood right like you guys don't have other like full-time jobs or anything like that like this is all that you do no not at all we were both in corporate america for 15-ish years and doing the grind thinking that was it and just waiting for something good to happen we moved out to colorado from new jersey eight years ago and uh when we came out here we worked remotely for a financial advisor back in new jersey so we were working from our house and it was uh we had some more free time because we were on east coast time so that's two hour difference so by the end of the day like the days would end around three in the afternoon most of the time and that's when i explored all the thrift stores out in colorado i was not used to that on the east coast there were a ton of goodwills and especially not goodwill outlet bins i never saw them anywhere in new jersey so i stumbled upon the goodwill outlet bins and i just couldn't get over the prices price per pound as many of your followers know which is amazingly low cost of goods and that's how it started it really started as identifying things that you could resell online and a good friend of mine is a full-time reseller on ebay so he was my mentor during that process that's amazing and it's always really cool to hear stories of how people have grown like you said laurie you know it started with one listing and it's grown to what it is today and i think some people forget that piece of it takes time you know they see a business like yours and they're like well i'm never going to get there well they didn't get there overnight either it took a lot of time and hustle and just kind of making mistakes and growing and learning um but it's really cool to see an example of what that could look like right exactly and it took a lot of investment in addition to time uh we started out with just two part-time employees actually dave started out with one part-time sort of quasi-employee a lister that he helped and that really helped him propel him to that 1200 because as you know when you're growing on ebay you have to list more than you're selling otherwise you'll never grow and that's a very difficult thing to do it's easy to do in the beginning it's harder to do as you get a little bit uh more established so we had we hired two part-time people and that just grew from there we took smaller steps into that when i first started he had to teach me how to list ship and uh and source too and even though most people love to source that wasn't my favorite thing to do but i knew it was part of part of the process and i had to learn how to do it and um but it's much more it's much better when other people are doing it for you yeah that's the dream right to not be boring stuff on your own um so if you guys are just joining us i have with me dave and laurie they are from english reseller solutions and um they have a thriving ebay business with correct me if i'm wrong over 4 000 listings you said right yeah yeah and one of the reasons i have them on my channel is because today we're going to talk about selling on ebay because there are a lot of people i know from my audience in particular who saw on poshmark they want to get into ebay but they are scared and i totally get that because i myself sold exclusively on poshmark for probably like a year i think i started dabbling in bukari but i was like never will i go to ebay like i was just too scared i had heard all the horror stories of like the scammers and how shipping is so difficult and how ebay will just shut down your store if you make an honest mistake or you know and so i was like i'm not gonna do it but after just kind of seeing that that's really the way to level up as a reseller i feel like like poshmark is great but um the audience is so much smaller so i finally took that leap of faith i feel like i've gotten better at it but i for sure do not have anywhere near the experience that you guys have so we're gonna dive into some questions and stuff and just kind of get their take on how to run a successful ebay business and just so you guys know too um you know it says under their video eblis reseller solutions and that's because they have a business now where they are helping resellers with the shipping and inventory aspect of their reselling business so um and maybe they'll talk about that more later but essentially you ship them your inventory they store it they ship it that's how good they are at shipping is that they not only do it for their own 4 000 items but they do it for a ton of other people as well so um with that being said um we have one question that already came in and then we'll kind of get into starting first about shipping because i think that's the number one thing that when i asked people on instagram what are you most scared of when it comes to ebay like hands down i would say the majority of the responses was i'm so scared of shipping but before we do that resell junkie asks do you guys have an average profit margin per product that you like to hit resell junkie also has a really cool youtube channel that you guys should check out um a lot of cool ebay content and whatnot but yeah um i don't know what you guys think about that question and your thoughts yeah no it's a it's a good question we when i started out um it was strictly on ebay we just to let you know we're strictly on ebay we don't sell on any other platforms although we did dabble in uh selling books on amazon for a while so it's not like we're against other platforms it's just you you stick with what works for you and ebay works for us based on what we sell they just used electronics we forgot to mention that we do sell some clothing items some shoes occasionally um yeah and but ebay worked for us because of the audience there's 180 million buyers on ebay so we don't have to go to makari to supplement uh but back to the question um the average profit margin per product when i started out it was always i want to just triple my money whatever i'm purchasing something for at least sell it just sell it for triple for what it is that's fine um we're not that stringent when it comes to uh average pro profit margin as you could imagine we're selling thrifted items so the cost at most for us is 20 to 25 and that's because we are buying from other people we're buying from other pickers sourcers that are out there in the field so we pay a premium for that and it's about building relationships and that's what we've done over time so that's our that's our cost of goods sold and then we have overhead so it goes back to tripling uh what we purchase things for i like that yeah because you know before when you guys were selling at the bins and you're picking things up for like 80 cents a dollar you know it's like you make 10 on something and you're like cool you know and that's more than tripling your money obviously most likely but when you are you know you've evolved now to where i don't know if you guys are still going to the bins but now you are also mixing in like you know buying from people who have picked items and you're kind of getting the best of the best but like you said paying a premium now your cost of goods is higher but that profit margin is also higher you just want to make sure you're at least tripling your money yeah profit is profit that's how we look at it yeah we're a volume based um operation um just starting out you you could have two approaches you can look for the treasures um which is great they're they're always going to be out there you'll stumble upon them but um for the most part we are a value type of hunter yeah okay that makes sense all right so resell junkie hopefully that answered your question um like i said earlier let's talk about shipping i had someone on instagram i like laughed out loud when i got this comment they said explain shipping to me like i'm a five-year-old and i get it like they were like there are so many videos out there about it and i still just like don't get it so i would say let's break it down even farther let's start by um let me ask you what are some of the essential tools that resellers need in order to get their shipping right when selling on ebay what kinds of things do they have to have at home in order to make sure that they're set up for success when it comes to getting their shipping done well the first thing they need to do i think is understand the very basics of usps shipping fedex probably and those are the those the ones we use you could use ups substitute ups for fedex uh you have to understand what how that works on a very basic level and it's really hard to explain something that to like is that you're a five-year-old that isn't five-year-old level stuff right so um i would love to be able to say do this this this and you'll be great but it really isn't that simple um it is um shipping i will will admit is one of the things that is probably the biggest learning curve when it comes to ebay because they make you do it all right they don't help you whatsoever in terms of figuring out how to do it how to price your items in order so you're not losing money on your shipping um but it's not impossible because if you break it down to those simple elements of you if usps is basically first class and priority and so if you could understand that the the sub categories or what your options are in reference to those two types of of shipments then you're well on your way especially if you sell smaller clothes items you know if you're a fashion seller uh the majority of your items probably will go via usps now when you get into the bigger items and we sell some bigger items fedex is sometimes more economical so we always sometimes have to do that debate which one is the more economical way to send it um so you have that that's the first thing you have to do you just can't uh well i guess you could just dive into it and just wing it which is kind of what dave did in the beginning well it was interesting because you were you didn't have a really full understanding of the way usps worked in terms of things right and so it he he limited it himself in terms of like uh if i'm gonna send it priority it has to be this way and then and i came on i'm like well well really does it but what about this and to be perfectly honest and full disclosure we have hardly shipped in how many years oh my gosh four years four years i mean on a regular basis because we have our employees doing it and it's awesome so i mean if you want to top shipping we really should have had our shipper on which maybe we could do in the future because she really knows the ins and outs because she's doing it every day but if you just wanted to break it down into big uh picture it really comes down to understanding uh the usps first class priority at fedex so i mean we could literally talk about shipping for an hour so i don't want to ramble about that too much yeah so if we were to break that down even further when we say first class generally speaking not generally speaking it means one pound or under correct yes but the thing about that some people don't realize is that's only if you're shipping through ebay and ebay labels yes if you take that same package to the post office counter they have a different i forget what the exact number is but it's not 16 ounces and that's huge let's forget 13 ounces maybe yeah that might be right so that's you that's a big that's one thing that people sometimes don't understand that if they're not shipping through ebay and using ebay labels they're missing out on a little bit of that benefit um lucky charm wendy said 12 ounces or lower for first class so yeah if you're trying to i know a lot of people like to go and that was one of the questions actually with shipping was is it better to ship through ebay or through pirate ship and i mean that's another conversation for another day maybe we'll get to it but um lucky charm 1d is saying 12 ounces or lower for first class media mail for any media without advertising most items can be shipped in a priority envelope or padded envelope i'll tell you one mistake that i made with this first class thing was with poshmark you can literally ship in most usps boxes except for the express mail so you can ship using um regional boxes you can ship using flat rate boxes and so i remember when i shipped something out first class i just went ahead and put it in a flat rate envelope like a padded flat rate envelope and i was like it's fine and my husband took it to the post office and he was like they they said they won't take it i'm like it's fine just leave it there and of course it got sent back to me because i was so ignorant so not only is ebay first class um someone was confused they were like i thought it was 16 ounces for first class if you're shipping through ebay um what i have on the screen right now is if you're taking it off ebay like you're going straight to the post office or something correct um not only is it under a pound but also you cannot use any of the usps boxes or bags or anything that say priority mail because that's not already male right correct yes yes that's correct yes awesome um and so can you talk us really quickly through what kind of goes on in your mind when you're deciding you know you're looking at an item and you're asking yourself do we ship this out usps or fedex and like you said that's probably most likely something that's a little bit heavier you know we're not talking about like clothing and stuff so when do you make that call of like you know what this is better fedex than it is usps yeah i'll answer that just because i source i'm in the field a lot sourcing so if as someone who's in the field uh selecting items to buy if it makes sense it comes down to as you just mentioned either weight or size um if if that does not fit into okay first off if that's over a pound or 16 ounces then i already know that i i'll have to go into the priority mail category where that that's going to be like seven dollars and seventy cents-ish so yeah right so it or more if it's large it's and it won't fit into a pet of flat rate usps envelope then i know it's going to be probably a couple bucks more so that's that's how i look at i just simplify it that way i don't really get down into how many cents i'm making on every sale it's because we're heavy volume we just want to make sure we're adhering to our basics of going back to what i said originally tripling the the sales price and that includes shipping on ebay when you sell something uh for twenty dollars plus eight dollars shipping that's what i'm looking at i'm looking at 28 as the sale price so that's how i look at it nice and kind of going along with that because laura you mentioned too like um you know when it comes to shipping you also have to make some really good decisions as your listing because when you list is when you um decide what shipping is going to look like and dave you're kind of talking about building it into your price versus charging for shipping um and i know everyone has a different school of thought there's no necessarily right or wrong answer as to do you charge for shipping do you build it into your price as far as how you list the item i know i'm kind of playing around with both right now and seeing what works for me but what would be your advice when it comes to listing on ebay for beginners with shipping in mind that's a great question because i think that trips a lot of new new sellers up when we first started out we had 100 of our items were free shipping and that included even the big stuff it this everything was free shipping it made it easier to list easier to price uh because you just look at the solds and and factor in if every somebody else was selling it with shipping you would just factor that into the sales price and then you knew what the total price would be for that item and so you got a a sense of what it sold for um the easiest way for a new per a new seller to navigate they say that the easiest way to not lose money on shipping as a new seller is to do calculated shipping but i would not recommend that but and i'll go i just that's our personal preference um because you know calculated shipping just in case anybody doesn't know uh you will have to weigh and measure weigh and measure the dimensions of the box that you're going to ship that in or at least it's got to be close it can't just be you can't just guess it has to be somewhat uh close uh when you list the item and then the buyer will pay the shipping based on where they are so if they're close they're going to pay less than if somebody is farther away that's what calculated shipping is flat rate flat shipping is obvious what it sounds like you you tell it's gonna be cost ten dollars to ship no matter where you live um and then free shipping obviously no extra so um the prevailing wisdom is to do calculated shipping because then you won't ever lose money however that requires the seller to be extremely diligent on weighing their items and knowing exactly what box they're gonna go and that's the problem with a lot of newer sellers they don't know what box is gonna go in so to go that route in my opinion it's kind of risky so free shipping is definitely what what i would recommend for new new sellers if they weren't comfortable with free shipping you could always do flat either one of those will probably be fine and just take in consideration what you want to sell that item for total and if you want to charge shipping you extract the shipping cost out of it and add it on there there's lots of reasons why you would want to have free shipping versus added on shipping and we we could talk about that for an hour too but we have migrated from 100 free shipping to a mix of flat shipping and free shipping depending on what the item is how big it is we don't do free shipping on any really large heavy fedex items anymore that's one thing we don't do anymore um but other things vary yes for sure and i think too you know well okay i was i was going to get into the topic of you know another question about ebay listings is do i turn on best offer do i turn it off and i think where some people have gotten burned is they have free shipping built into their price but they have best offer turned on they accept an offer they realize crap like with that offer that i accepted minus the shipping that is actually more than i thought it was going to be or something now they've lost money right so um and maybe we'll get to the listing later but that is another thing to kind of keep in mind is if you are going to build shipping into your price you have to remember that you did that so that if you're accepting offers that you're not accepting something too low and now you're looking at you know a negative money earned yeah i think it also also depends on what you want to do with your your reselling business if you're looking to grow and get more volume i would i would advise probably not having that best offer turned on it's a distraction uh and if you price it right it's going to sell so that's we feel confident we don't have best offers on our items unless we really don't have a sales history for it so that's kind of like where we'll say hey there's no sales history we think it's around this so i'll just flip on best offer so you don't want to do that for all your items because it could be a big distraction and not only that people can offer you anything they want without having a best offer on the listing you don't have to have best offer for people to give you an offer and the minute somebody messages you messages you about an item you have the option to send them an offer so that's why we actually when you first started i think you had best offer on everything and we have over the years had different criteria but we would do it on this but not this and now it's like dave said it's kind of only if we're really not sure what the price really is yeah yeah going back to how i started uh selling on ebay i it it's i told laurie the other day it's like learning on ebay first is like taking algebra and then going back and maybe going to another platform it's like a lower level it yeah you're gonna have to put a little bit of time in but it's not that bad yeah i'll be honest if i were to try to learn amazon right now i would probably be just as intimidated it's just going to another platform that you're unfamiliar with and you have to learn something else it's not a big deal um yeah so absolutely it's like if you can do ebay well or if you can do amazon well you can do any of the platforms well because they're definitely up here as far as difficulty level and everything else is so easy and i think that's why for people like me who started on poshmark and there's just a flat shipping rate it's like what do you mean people are going to pay different amounts for shipping like what do you mean there's like boxes i can use and boxes i can't use and you know and so i am really envious of people who started on ebay and kind of going along with that point that you said of like if you price your items correctly and right and you're looking at the comps you don't have to have best offer turned on because people will buy your items at that price i think that's one of those things that's a little bit difficult for poshmark sellers too because poshmark sellers are so used to kind of inflating the price a bit because they're waiting for offers like very rarely do people outright buy any items because they're always going to send an offer you know and so people are kind of taught you inflate the price by about 20 percent of like what you actually want to get for the item that's not really the way to play the game some people do that though that that is a strategy that some people that some people do because you know wise because some people won't even make you the offer they'll buy it at that price that's true too yeah yeah there's there's strategies on ebay that would mean about a poshmark once you set up those properties it's it's good and as laurie may have uh you know that she just touched upon a lot of people post to ebay first and let it sit there at a high price for a week or two weeks and then no action then they move it to another platform that they uh know that they can move yeah that's that's a great point too i you know i think a lot of people here in the chat are multi-platform sellers so they sell on you know poshmark ebay mercari whatever um there is a really good feeling that comes from like having something listed on one platform you haven't taken the time to cross-list it yet and it sells you're like yeah you take the time to cross-list it um like you said all of these topics we could spend an entire hour on you know another question that came up very often in my instagram and that we have a question about here was about stores like when is it worth it to start a store what are the benefits of having a store um chloe here has a specific question about um store her particular store but yeah what are your guys's thoughts on all of this again that is a topic that could we we could fill up at least an hour maybe two on um it has been so long since we started i have difficulty in talking about this because we have been so set for so long we had an anchor uh sorry we had a premium store for probably seven years and it was okay it was good we knew at some point we might need to bump it up which we did last year so we have two anchor stores on both of our accounts um and we have very specific reasons for doing that which we could go into detail later i won't bore you with the reasons um but the overall the advantages of having stores is they will give you discounts and or extra tools to help you with your ebay selling the fee with the discounts in terms of fees um insertion fees final value fees all that sort of thing they will give you extra discounts in terms of promotional materials like they give you a shipping supply discount depending on what store you have um it really there's i mean i literally printed it out and it's three pages long it's so in-depth but all this information is right on ebay so all you got to do is go there and if they lay it out really well if you're not familiar with a lot of ebay's help features they really do do a good job of just telling you everything you really need to know if you take the time to look and read it um so most generally speaking i'd say most people do start out without a store and then they quickly realize oh this might be beneficial and believe it or not last year i think it was ebay added for the longest time ebay only had three stores they had the basic premium anchor and then all of a sudden they came out with these two bookends of stores one is a it's called a starter store it is like this only five dollars a month if you commit to it for a year very very small amount and then they also have the opposite end it's called an enterprise store and that is crazy i think it's i don't know 100 000 listing or something i forget it's crazy amount right um so there's a they have uh i guess it's five different versions of the store so whichever one meets your needs in terms of how many listings you have how many listings you want to have um where you want to grow to there's always um a break-even point where it does make sense to go to the next level and if you look on facebook groups there's these people have done calculators and things like that where you can tell and off the top of my head i remember that it was a break point for us to go from premium to anchor was 3 400 listings i believe i i'm sticking in my mind um because then you're not paying extra for the insertion fees you're you're breaking even so but it's really a personal decision um for the seller and they can only make that decision themselves with that knowledge yeah and chloe i don't know if this answers your question but um part of what people don't understand too about um so let's one of the stores has like 250 listings right is that correct or well we can use chloe's example so yeah that's the starter store okay so well okay let's use that example then 250 listings people think that that means they can list 250 items but what they don't understand is that when your item goes through that what is it 30 day period or 28 days or something and it doesn't sell is it 30 it's 30 30. ebay will automatically re-list it and that steals one of your 250 listings well yes and no that is true right um but it's 250 sold and listed if i'm not mistaken so that's why some people get tripped up like they can put 250 on there but that includes the ones that you're selling too yeah so it's not like right so if you had 250 and you sold them all like that's like that's what it is so um in terms of what the question is here if she's got a premium store then she's got a thousand free listings not total um that's not the selling limits that's a totally different thing yeah so um that's probably why she's seeing that i would guess so that's what the store offers in terms of free listings is different than your selling limits for your account that makes sense okay so for this for this question she only has 35 items left because why can you say it one more time because because her selling limit is 1400 items what i would recommend in that case if she has already maxed that out she should call up ebay and say i need my limits raised and most likely they'll raise them if she's maxed out no doubt nice sometimes they automatically do that based on your selling history um in advance but we had to do that so many times over the years uh because we were growing and growing and we would max out our list our limits and they were very usual i don't think they ever declined us a limit increase so as long as you're showing that you are legit you're not trying to scam people you've got a legitimate business going here they're not it's in their best interest to increase your listings they just don't want new sellers coming in and dumping 10 000 items and not knowing what the history of that seller is that's just to protect the environment right and the integrity of the platform yeah and i think that kind of answers ali's question here am i going to be limited on how many listings i can have at first even if i have a store because i'm new uh to some degree yes um no but it it it's the it's like every month you could call up and say i need my limits uh raised so it's just a matter of establishing that you're a legitimate seller you can you call 30 days later they can bump you up in in your limits right just because you sign up with an anchor store that or say the anchor store is um 10 000 free listings they're not just gonna say oh yeah sure go ahead and list ten thousand listings just because you're new so those two like i said those two things are different and they're separate okay and same uh person asking another question that i think is another question that people have when it comes to stores are you committed to that store for a year or can you change um the size of your store mid-year i feel like there's an answer depending on if you're an upgrade and then if you want to download yes and i think you're right i mean yes the answer is you can uh change it um they have two different prices if you commit to a year it's a lower price per month if you want to go monthly it's a little bit more but if you're uncertain about the way your business is going to go if you really don't want to commit i would not recommend the annual fee because if you do downgrade there will be it's not a good situation i think because yeah i think there's penalty use and things like that if you do it if you just like anything that you commit to for a year if you do it if you cut it out beforehand they'll be not the best um result yeah and chloe and melissa they're both echoing that sentiment of like if you choose your option um there's a penalty if you leave that early um and veronica brought up a really good point too i think a lot of people talk about oh you should get a store because you get a quarterly coupon to get the cool ebay tape and the mailers and the boxes but not if you get the lowest your score um that's correct you don't get the shipping coupon with that so i think you need the basic store the one that they originally had that was the lowest store before before they added the even lower store that's correct we have we have plenty of extra ebay tape if she wants to reach out to us which we use on a daily pieces it goes for a lot i mean a little goes a long way and when i use my like regular scotch tape i'm like god this runs out so much and i think part of it too is like i'm not shipping out huge things on ebay so my tape just sits there unused but even when i do use it i'm like oh my god like this is still going it just there's a lot on there yeah yeah um you guys i am trying my very best to um keep up with the chat and figure out like what all you guys are saying um i think that i have gotten some of your questions if i missed something and it's about something that we've been talking about please go ahead and throw it in the chat again um oh i was going to add something to what we were talking about but of course i forgot so i'm going to ask or i'm going to post another question that has been um asked this is chloe again just asking for some clarification on the selling limit and how it differs from the store subscription listings i think i'm honestly still a little bit confused about that as well right now the selling limit are the limits that ebay will allow you to sell and list in a certain month and they are based on how new you are how much you've sold and that sort of thing the subscription listings are the ones they're giving you for free before you start paying insertion costs for each listing thereafter so um they are completely two different things and have two different purposes okay chloe i hope they answered your question i could not have answered that better so um this is shifting gears a little bit but i know if i don't ask right now um i will forget to and also i know that this is another thing that people just are confused with when it comes to ebay this is my man charles and he asked what do you think about the new banking system on ebay i feel like he's talking about managed payments yes paypal is kind of out of the picture now but um well for me i still get shipping pulled out of paypal but um the idea of them moving to manage payments and working directly with your bank what are your thoughts on that can you share just a summary of what that all even means sure um in the past uh paypal was ebay's payment processor and paypal is a very unique uh financial institution in the way it operates it doesn't operate like exactly like a bank so ebayers got used to getting their funds from a sale literally immediately after somebody bought something it would literally be available to spend right after they somebody bought something for them that is no longer the case with managed payments because now it has to go through a payment processor and there is a little bit of a delay before you actually see that those funds so that's like the biggest difference between the two however i have to say that it is probably the industry standard with all these other platforms and as a matter of fact if i'm not mistaken ebay uses the same exact platform that another one does and i don't remember which one it is um so but there is a little bit of a transition especially if you've been on ebay forever and you're so used to paypal and don't get me wrong paypal was was great and worked for a lot of people they had a lot of great tools and things um we switched over to managed payments last august and uh we did fight it until we absolutely were like you have to do it now um we never like to be in the first level of any sort of new thing i'd like them to work out their kinks first and actually one of the biggest reasons we didn't go in is because initially they didn't allow for any global shipping sales and we knew that 20 of our business was through the global shipping program so we were like well we're going to wait until that is available and then it was available or like okay so uh honestly i have we have had not a lot of issues there is a little bit of difficulty can be in the beginning if you don't have everything set up exactly so because everything has to match okay so your account name estimate your bank account has to match and especially if you're a business seller and you have an ein and an llc and all these things it could get a little com confusing and complicated uh but i don't think a lot of people have had a lot of issues with it all uh all said yeah i i actually feel like i was one of the earlier ones to move to manage payments i i didn't see what the fuss was about i personally just like i i thought it was so weird that my money went to paypal and then i had to get my money from paypal and so it made sense to me that it would go directly from ebay to my bank but you know people who have been on ebay for a very long time they were very used to the system it worked for them or they made a you know they figured out a way to make it work and people are very resistant to change usually so yeah i i don't know very much about it the pros and cons i just know that for me it's not it's not that bad well at the end of the day we're not gonna have a choice because that's everybody's gonna be moved over and so if you wanna sell an ebay you just have to you have to make it work for you yeah for sure um i always have to highlight this person because this is one of my students and he's always just hanging out whenever i go live matthew i don't know if you're still here but if you are hello friend i'm happy with you i love it he always he doesn't resell or anything but he just likes to hang out so i appreciate thanking you um okay there was a question i'm looking for here it is adventures in polish land asked about promoted listings i know you know again another question that people had not even just with the stores but kind of attached to that topic of stores is like fees there are so many different fees again coming from a poshmark seller's perspective it's so easy you sell the item poshmark keeps 20 you keep the other 80 there's no ifs ands or buts about it like there's no sitting down with a calculator or looking up online on ebay like where is the line item for my you know it's just so simple um so there's like promoted listing fees there's insertion fees there's uh the final whatever but let's talk about promoted listings first and then if you don't mind talking us through your knowledge of just the fees in general i have no knowledge i just know this is how much i typically make on an item but um what are your thoughts on promoted listings do you guys use that well yeah we do um and we it goes back to initially you know what you want as your final profit margin it's okay to pay a fee if the platform is going to be marketing it for you which ebay does we we don't have to promote our listings we don't have to share our store those type of you know time stocks or energy or you know for some people financial i mean they pay people to share their store so promoted listings helps us uh it it has its benefits we have seen we we do them on all of our listings at a very small flat same fee for everything and it's very small it's like one or one two point one point two percent that's it yeah so yeah we've had success with it we we don't go crazy we the consensus is as laurie says it's you know and it's two percent or under that's what the main number is nice yeah i i promote all of mine at one percent um i see someone saying in the chat that they feel like oh no it's the question on the screen right now they feel like their views actually go down when the feature is on what's really interesting i don't know you know i honestly couldn't speak to that because we never ever ever look at views yeah i couldn't even tell you what our views are on our items um we track our sales we track how many sales were sales we're doing a day how much in sales we're doing a day and i tracked that all month long so yeah those are my only that that's what we go by i don't really worry about views or all that other stuff i know ebay has a lot of traffic reports and for some people it really depends on what you sell i mean we're not in a category that's super super competitive like fashion is so if you sell fashion you might have to look at those things so i don't want to say don't look at them i'm not saying that um i say use the tools ebay gives you to that help you further your inventory and promote his listings is just one of those honestly i would i would i would love to do an experiment and take them all off and see if our sales change but i'm very we're like don't want to do that because what if they do yeah so yeah exactly but it's not a huge impact to our bottom line so i don't worry about it yeah and you know i i think too like something to remember is you can get all the views you want on something that doesn't mean it's gonna sell it only takes one person to actually buy the item you know i know a lot of people on poshmark will talk about well this item didn't get any likes or anything um and sometimes i have items that don't get any likes and someone still buys it because that one person liked and that's all it needed was that one person yeah and to that point it's interesting with ebay and the algorithm which everybody would love to know exactly what it is but that i've heard that items with a lot of views and no sales actually is not a good thing so yeah ebay looks at that and says well a lot of people are looking at this but they're not buying so this must not be a really good listing so um i need to point out my good friend veronica gave a five dollar super chat you are too sweet and that was so unnecessary she said it was for the fast food fry fund if you guys watch my channel you know that um we eat way too many mcdonald's french fries in this house like i'm waiting for them to uh ask me to do a little marketing campaign for them because at this point i have given them too much free advertisement um but yeah i think that's a really good point the um idea of like you know a lot of people feel that way too on poshmark about like my item was a host pick five times well that's a problem if your item has been picked five times as a host pick and it's still being you know it hasn't sold yet like what's wrong with the item um and i think the same goes for like you know your ebay item has 300 views on it but no one's bought it like that's probably not a very good thing um i don't know how you guys feel about this i'm trying to get better about getting in the habit of ending my listings before that 30-day period runs out and selling similar so that it ends the listing and then it creates a new listing i know some people are talking about like using vendo or list perfectly to do that what are your thoughts on that we don't devote another hour oh yeah but i'll try to i'll try to make it brief okay uh in was it 2019 ebay changed their listings made every fixed price listing to good until cancelled you used to have a choice of even having 30 days in 10 days i forget what it was a lot of choices and they changed that and um the prevailing wisdom at that time was if you sell one-offs if you don't have multi-quantity listings uh you should have 30-day listings because what you just said was exactly correct right but all of a sudden it was like oh no you need to have a long url for google shopping and you want it to never end and all this stuff well we tried it that way and since we track our numbers we know exactly what everything is we found very soon that that wasn't working for us at all so uh we we have to to meet our goals to end our listings every 30 days and that's 4 000 listings that is a lot of ending and losing but we have people we pay people to do that and that's one that's our main person she does that every morning and but it's a good thing because you take that opportunity to evaluate your listings and make changes to the titles to the price you can tell oh my gosh this is that we've had this listed for two years i'm gonna do something about this or whatever the case may be so it's a good excuse or a time to do inventory active inventory management in terms of your listings and that helps too so um so yeah you'll never nobody will ever convince me that we are better off with all good like first list it and forget it that's what they call it no not us however if you have a whole bunch of multi-quantity listings and uh you sell a lot of the same thing the opposite is true so because ebay will say oh that's a good listing lots of people are buying that one and they push it up and search so wow yes those are great yeah and it's similar again i'm always kind of bringing it back to poshmark because i feel like there are a lot of poshmark sellers here but you know that's the same reason why people say you should reload some poshmark you know and that's why poshmark has even made it that much easier to relist an item if it's been listed for 60 days or more um because they know too your chances of that item selling um if it if it's been over 60 days has gone down exponentially versus if it's a new fresh listing um and same thing when i do that when i go in and re-list an item i use an app called seller insight to do it which makes it much faster but when i do that i re-evaluate the listing i look at it and i ask myself is this price too high like could i use better keywords in my title and it's it's a good excuse to do that so i think that's extremely wise okay i'm going to bring it back a little bit to kind of continuing to talk about fees and i think this is exactly what i was talking about meg said i'm so used to poshmark and makari telling me exactly how much they take in fees when i make a sale but i can't find anywhere on ebay that tells me this info clearly up front do you know of the magic place on ebay where they tell you exactly how much they've taken in fees and how much you've made on that item i thought there used to be a fee calculator that they had but honestly we don't pay attention to that either until after the fact i track that information at the end of the month um because we know that ebay's fees will are a range there's a range of i think it's seven to ten percent or something like that depending on the category so i can see why some people might be confused like oh i sell this and i'm getting charged that but i sell something else i'm getting charged a different amount we look at everything from a very high level global uh macro that thank you a macro view right of our business we are not we're not transactional we we couldn't we have too many transactions to worry about what every single transaction is yielding us right so it's an overall number at the end of the month yeah so that's how we that's how we go through it but to answer the question i thought there was a calculator on there somewhere but i wish i could say i know exactly where but we don't use it so i don't know yeah meg i i if you poke around in ebay online not on your phone um i know that i have found it's like a report that you can pull up or something and it'll give you line by line like each item that you've sold and it'll tell you like this is how much you paid for this fee and this is how much you paid for that fee i don't remember exactly where to find it and i don't know if there's anyone who's in um here you know in the chat right now that could um answer that question it does exist they don't it and i feel like ebay as a website especially from like that seller portal aspect is not super intuitive so it does take some digging to find it it it does exist though right and the other thing you have to remember about fees as well is it depending on what seller level you are that will determine what your fees are if you're below standard level they will add on i used to be four percent i don't know if it still is on top of the regular fees that they charge and then you can start being that could be kind of expensive on certain things so that's definitely something you want to remember but if you use a third in my mind this is what we do 13 if you just incorporate 13 if you just think that's probably the maximum as long as you're not below standard that you're going to pay in ebay fees for that item you're going to cut you're going to be okay and that includes the payment processing fee as well it's not separate like it used to be with paypal if you're on managed payments yes yeah yeah and you know that brings up another point that you alluded to which is depending on what your seller status is because there's like top rated i don't remember what they're all called but stop rated above standard and below standard yeah yeah and that's why again you know kind of going back to what meg said it is so complicated because it can shift as you grow and as you improve or if you kind of have a few dings on your account the you know the fees will grow so it is hard and i would i would poke around and see if you can find that report if it is really um important to you to know exactly what the fees are on every single item if you are top rated what do you like how much do you guys assume you're making off of each sale excuse me top right there there's an extra discount there's a top rated plus yeah yeah we don't yeah top rated plus is only if you're top rated you can also get top rated plus but that's on a per listing basis and that's only and yeah and i don't have the information in front of me to tell you exactly but you have to offer i believe you have to offer free you have to offer returns and a one-day handling time um i can't remember his free return somebody can correct me if i'm wrong there but you can't you have to offer at least two of these extra things uh we are none of our items actually qualify for top rated plus because of the return the return option i believe okay so that the personal choice that and if you do get that plus you get 10 discount off your final value fee so that could be the maximum a dollar thirty yeah and there's always two like ebay's running those promotions where like if you sell sneakers over a certain amount like there's no final value it's just it's almost impossible to say to a penny like how much did you actually earn on ebay um yeah but there's a report somewhere that you can find i do know that much i have seen it with my own eyes but so becky i have a question for you real quick when you started going to ebay did you see an increase in your sales or how did you how did you experience uh that transition and uh how did your sales go so you mean overall yeah just overall and what yeah like what what percentage of your sales are done through ebay currently yeah so um when i started on ebay i i still remember i was um in a hotel room because i was like in i was on a trip with students we were at like some sort of festival or something and i had some time to kill i was like i should just really try this ebay thing i think i listed like 10 things and then they're like you can't list anymore and i was like why and i think i tried calling them and they're like no you even sold anything and i got the usual like scam you know things where people were like i'll pay you 60 for these shoes that you listed for 50 and i'm like great you know like i mean i made every mistake in the role uh you know that everyone possibly could and it really turned me off and so i think i took like close to like a six-month hiatus or something but when i started getting back into it very seriously and listing it was really slow at first just like you know if you remember when you started selling on poshmark it's really slow it's hard to get that first sale it's hard to get the ball rolling um but now that i've been on ebay for i don't even remember how long it's been maybe a little over a year i would say like depending on the week but like last year maybe like 30 40 of my sales were coming from ebay but ebay is catching up to poshmark by a lot like there are weeks actually when ebay performs better than uh poshmark which is shocking to me but also not because of the fact that one like you guys said there's so many more people on ebay two i'm getting better at ebay because i'm practicing it and i'm understanding a little bit more of like how to price for ebay versus poshmark i know that's a question a lot of people have too is like do you adjust your pricing when you move from poshmark to ebay um again there's not like a straight shot answer because it depends on like are you offering free shipping on ebay are you you know did it at all like what is the item exactly how did you have it priced on poshmark so not like a clear-cut answer necessarily but as i'm figuring out my systems better as i cross list more and more items um i am finding much more success and i have over i think i have like around 830 listings on ebay now so it's you know i also have a lot for people to choose from um so yeah i mean it's definitely grown and the trajectory of growth for ebay i think right now is bigger and faster than poshmark so it is it's exciting i mean uh yeah yeah we've heard the same thing a lot of posh postures that move to ebay notice uh the balance is 50 50 for most of the time um so yeah that's excellent yeah um someone asked i'm i lost it and some people are kind of sharing their own opinions about ebay um some people are like it sucks i listen i would come on my channel on a weekly basis and talk about how much uh ebay sucked and here i am now like you know a little after a year um sharing that for me i mean it really it's really changed and i think it changes the more you kind of um learn about it um someone had a question oh it was about um global shipping program i'm gonna try to oh here it is so envy asks could you talk a little about global shipping i understand how it goes to a us location to get shipped which is that town in kentucky but when is that option to use global shipping except accessible to a seller and are there extra fees involved for the seller any other issues your thoughts on global shipping you guys said 20 percent of your sales come from it uh that's what we were told by ebay at ebay open in 2019 uh we use global shipping exclusively for all our items that that can go uh overseas that can be sold overseas um it does go to a con the place in kentucky uh there's i think the only requirement if i'm not mistaken told me to do this that you have to have at least sold one thing i think you have to be a seller on ebay and yeah so because i had this situation uh with somebody i know recently i think that's what they said now there are no extra fees to do it as the seller and your shipping costs are just to kentucky and that's it now on the other side um the buyer is paying extra fees to get it to their final destination so a lot of people will say that global shipping is more expensive for the buyer and it may be uh but we like it because uh that's the way dave started doing it and to do it directly you have to really learn the international shipping you have to hold if you thought right domestic shipping was hard on ebay try doing it i mean i wouldn't even try to learn how to ship i mean i'm sure it's possible yeah but i like it because there's a lot of items you can't sell uh to certain countries and if you do it directly i think you have to know those you have to know like all these rules i can't be bothered with that i'd rather just ebay do it for us so that's what we've done and the other good thing too is we're only responsible for getting the item to kentucky intact if that item gets to the final location damaged ebay will pay the buyer back for it so not always not the case with item not as described but with the case with damaged items so there's a little bit of a protection other sellers choose to uh send their items directly and insure them that's how they get around that yeah so so generally we've loved it we we like it that's good i know i had i sold a plush once to someone in canada and i didn't know at the time that she was trying to buy it um as an international seller and she's like why is shipping so expensive and she was really upset with me she's like can't you just ship it to canada and i was like no i don't want to figure it out i was like worried like i can give you a little bit lower of a price but like i'm sure there's a way i jus i'm not in the mind frame right now the real one thing i did forget there are some small extra fees that they will tack on to your invoice when you sell through the global shipping i don't know what they are they're not a lot um and that's only with managed payments we never saw that on uh interesting okay so because of the manage payments shift there are a few more fees associated with global shipping that's good to know yeah but yeah and all the i mean the fees aren't that much like you said but they do all add up is what it is like part of doing business yeah it is yeah it is um you know i had asked the question earlier to you guys if you know how to find this report you know from ebay with all your fees and stuff and you guys delivered amber from amber results said i just saved the report on my computer because otherwise it's hard to find it but you guys were saying things like it's under the payments tab um kathy said go to my ebay then selling then payments and all transactions i need to like okay let me let me take a picture of that because i'm gonna forget you guys i always look for this and i'm like where is it okay so you guys are helping me so much um a lot of people were sharing how to find that um information so thank you guys so much lucky charm wendy also said that it's in the account section of the seller hub so you guys are very helpful thank you so much um we are running out of time so i want to ask you just two more questions and one i think your answer will kind of echo this person's sentiment if i can find it so dapper kitty store said i really like their support and to be able to talk with the real person so my second and last question for you guys for tonight would be why do you like to sell on ebay why is that your platform of choice and you answered a little bit about that but if you want to expand on that why ebay yeah i i think it goes back to just how i started when sourcing i was i was not going by my gut whether to buy something i was i was looking up comps i was looking at the sales history and that really stood really stood out with ebay being able to find that uh the 90 day look back history for anything similar that has sold so while i was in the field if i did a quick look you know based on a model number something or style of a code and i saw it met the pricing the average selling price and if there were multiple items that sold within that 90 day period it met our criteria so it made sourcing very easy right and i mean i guess it's it's worked well for us um we have a very healthy uh inventory turnover rate we sell not too much stuff every month that we have to then uh struggle to replenish it to maintain our business and it works for us so yeah we uh we ship out 10 000 items a year that's that's the activity that we have it sounds crazy but it's very consistent when you get to a certain level it's just your sales are very predictable yeah anywhere from 25 to 30 a day that's what we're saying yeah all right so my last question for you is you guys love ebay so much and um just kind of reselling so much that you have really identified one of most resellers biggest pain points which is the inventory and shipping aspect and you've built a business around that of trying to find a solution for resellers who um they're spending a lot of time on shipping and inventorying and um they need some of their time back right so can you talk to us really quickly about what your business is and how you're helping resellers in that way yes uh eblis reseller solutions is a brand new service we launched a couple months ago to help resellers with those storage shipping and organizational uh challenges that most of them have uh we have found in our in doing our business that that those were our challenges but we did it a traditional way by investing in employees and a warehouse and uh that's one way to do it for sure however we discovered well what if we offered that same service to other resellers because we know we've done it for ourselves for so long and they could benefit from our knowledge our experience and so we have offering for resellers be like thrifters people who sell one-off items it's considered third-party logistics that's what it is it's like amazon fba for thrifters but way better and and so this is uh i think something that is pretty much of a game changer for a lot of resellers especially those who have storage or space issues if you have a small house or an apartment um you just i mean you need inventory where are you going to put it so you can give you can send it into us we will store it for you and when it sells we will ship it for you and that's what a third-party logistics fulfillment service does but we are specifically geared for the the resellers who can't use traditional 3pls yeah um so full disclosure guys i am actually trying out eblis reseller solutions in kind of a limited capacity i'm not sending them everything because just like with amazon fba there is a fee associated with storing each item and some of my items it's like you know i'm gonna sell it for like four dollars or something so i'm not gonna pay you know for uh a storage fee on top of that um so i'm excited to see how it goes and i will definitely be sharing with you guys how it is if you're interested in learning more about it and um you know there's so much to it i had to sit down with laurie and like ask her 8 billion questions and um you know because i was like clearly there's got to be a crack in here where like this is not going to work but i mean she hadn't for everything um and so if you wanted to set up a time with them to just kind of pick their brain about how this would work and if it is feasible for your business model um it's not just for ebay although that's like the majority of the people that they work with but i was asking her i said well what if you know one of those items sells on poshmark or makari and she said we could do it and so if you guys want to set up a time to talk with them you um can find their information in the uh description of this video and also there is their instagram and their website you can just let them know that i sent you and just ask them whatever questions you have um i you know i struggle with keeping a really organized inventory system it's gotten a lot better over the years but um i struggle with it still and shipping is just one of those things that it has to get done and it takes up a lot of time and so i'm at a stage of my reselling journey right now where i am very much wanting to outsource as much as i can and when i found out that there was a way to actually outsource the inventory and shipping aspect i was like oh wow so um i wanted to make sure that they were able to plug that and that you guys know about that because um you know they were so good at ebay and so good at shipping and whatnot that they were able to even grow into this other business which i think is so cool and ali thank you so much for this she said thank you so much for your time and knowledge i appreciate more than you know thank you for the super chat you are too kind that was very unnecessary but thank you thank you um you guys any last thoughts or just advice for people who were like me selling on poshmark you know platforms that are easier than ebay um any last words of wisdom for those who are wanting to take the plunge well taking the plunge okay i don't know what that definition is but i'll i'll take a stab at that everyone plateaus all resellers plateau and that could either be that they don't have enough sourcing inventory that could mean that they just don't have the space or they just don't have the free time anymore um as a as a reseller the term solopreneur always pops up where you're doing everything your free labor your margins are beautiful it's great but eventually when you you want to get to that next level as you may know becky it's you hit seven 800 items listed and you're like i'm swamped this is crazy the necessity of having to ship every day it's a great problem to have but to be anchored and tethered to that every day is a burden it really is and um we we've been working on eblis for two and a half years we've really beat it up and we had a lot of um beta testers really run with it so our my suggestion is don't let the mundane tests of reselling get in the way have the confidence and to reinvest in your business and outsource the time sucking uh just activities that are going to prohibit prohibit you from going to the next level i love that yeah i love that so much and you know on the topic of outsourcing that really is kind of one of the only ways to grow is to start letting go of some of the parts of your business that really anyone could do you know so sharing my poshmark closet i don't do it anymore someone else does it for me um you know cross listening manually no thank you like you know there are there are so many things out there that are going to help you get to that next level and it's going to be by getting rid of the things that literally anyone could do and so i appreciate you guys so much of um you know for creating something so cool um i guess my biggest tip for you guys when it comes to like you know do you do ebay or not go do it and know full well that you're gonna make a ton of mistakes and it's through that that you're gonna learn how to do it i mean there's just no way you could take all the courses you could read all the books watch all the videos you're still going to make mistakes but mistakes are the best teacher so um don't let that be the reason you know why you um don't start but just go in with that knowledge and give yourself grace when you do make those mistakes it's gonna be okay um everyone has gone through that same process as you of just getting scammed and getting you know making shipping errors and all that stuff but it is worth it in the end i believe and i you guys probably would echo that sentiment yeah we agree yeah um well lori and dave thank you so much for being here all of you guys who are here with us live right now thank you so much for being here and for asking your questions i know we did not get to all of them i apologize i was trying to keep them as organized as possible if you have any other questions that you want to ask you can shoot me a dm or if it's something that you feel like dave and laura would be able to answer better which most likely like most ebay questions they would answer better than me um but there's their instagram i'm sure they'd love to help you out but again thank you guys so much for being here you guys are awesome and i will see you guys in the next one all right awesome thank you so much all right bye everyone

Channel: Becky Park

Views: 5,655

Keywords: ebay, ebay tips, how to sell on ebay, ebay 101, ebay for beginners, ebay for dummies, ebay seller, ebay reseller, selling on ebay, reselling on ebay, ebay vs poshmark, ebay compared to poshmark, ebay shipping, ebay business, resell online, how to sell things on ebay, how to start selling on ebay, sell on ebay, ebay tutorial, reselling, ebay selling, how to make money online, becky park on poshmark, beckyparkonposhmark, becky park ebay, ebliss, poshmark, reselling business

Id: GhjcKaMv14k

Length: 67min 6sec (4026 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021