Ep 222 || Our Annual Podcast Best Of 2022

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Brian, Rebecca, and Griff share their favorite guest segments from 2022.

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Episode Links:
Ep 214 Jesse & Austin Smith
Ep 202 Steve Young
Ep 190 Diane Lassonde
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Rebecca: I'm Rebecca.

Brian: And I'm Brian

Griff: And I'm Griff. And this is the eBay For Business Podcast. Your source for the information and inspiration to help you start manage, and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. This is episode 222, our last episode for 2022. So it's an apt number and it's our annual best of addition. In this week, as you heard, all three of us are here in the studio. Yay.

Rebecca: This is so exciting to be all together.

Griff: I Don't think we've done this.

Rebecca: I can't think of when we have,

Brian: Um, very early on. I think we did. Maybe two plus years ago.

Rebecca: Wow. Wow. Well, here we are. And happy holidays to you guys.

Brian: And you too.

Griff: Thank you. Happy. Thank you. Holidays to You

Rebecca: How are things going in the run up to the holiday season for you Griff?

Griff: They're pretty busy because there's a lot to get ready for for 2023, including the recording of our library of ESAs, eBay Service Announcements. Did you guys have a chance to hear last week?

Rebecca: I did. It was hilarious. .

Griff: I haven't had any feedback. I'm really depressed.

Brian: No One? Everyone's out busy shopping.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Griff: Yeah. That's what I'll keep telling myself throughout the year.

Rebecca: Well, listeners, if you heard this interstitial, the E, what are we calling it? The eBay service announcement. Let us know. It's Griffin and Brian talking all about the how to search the help pages. Right?

Griff: That's the first one.

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's hilarious and charming and has fun music in the background.

Brian: It does have good music.

Griff: Thanks. It was my choice. Hey, you're not getting off lightly on this room with Rebecca, cuz we'll be doing ads with you too.

Rebecca: Ooh, I get a turn. I I'm here for that. Yay. Yay. Okay. Bring it on.

Griff: It's a deal. We put the news and the, you got questions segments on special holiday hiatus for this week.

Brian: Well, we've been light on news anyway the last few weeks.

Griff: You Know what's amazing? We really haven't had anything new to report.

Brian: Just wait till 2023 everyone.

Rebecca: Yes. So I guess you could say we hit time away on the news .

Brian: Yes.

Griff: . And we extended it by more than 30 days . Well anyway, each of us, uh, selected our favorite segments from the past year 2022 to feature.

Rebecca: Now this was not easy. There were so much great content, so many amazing sellers that we talked to this year. It was hard to choose our favorites.

Brian: A lot of really good guests. And we had guests in person this year. Again,

Griff: We had a lot of guests in person post Covid, well mm-hmm. , I don't know if that's safe to say, but post eBay Covid. Yeah. They, we can now bring people into the campus. I actually had guesses about what both of you would select. Oh, did you? I wasn't too far off.

Rebecca: I have to admit that some of my favorites, you know, listeners who've been listening this year know that we were in Las Vegas at an event and we did a bunch of rapid fire recordings with sellers and those really stood out for me. So spoiler alert, my choice was one of those sellers that we talked to in Vegas.

Brian: It was hard to select. I mean there were so many good guests and for us in person, we had multiple really good guests here in the studio. So it was a challenge.

Griff: Anyway, let's Get started.

Rebecca: Great. Can I go first?

Griff: Of course you can.

Rebecca: Yay. All right. My choice for best of is an interview we did at the Reseller remix in Las Vegas. And that was this past October. I went with our interview with Jesse and Austin Smith of yesterday's fit,

Griff: Jesse and Austin Smith. Welcome to the podcast.

Jesse: Howdy. Thank You

Griff: And what's your user id?

Jesse: Uh, yesterday's underscore fits, which is the same as our Instagram and um, our store name. We have a brick and mortar store, yesterday's fits and we're about five minutes off the Las Vegas strip.

Griff: And is the store open right now?

Jesse: Yes.

Griff: Well, who's manning it?

Jesse: Our manager. Ah, there you go. The guy. We pay the big bucks. Right. That's what he's there right

Rebecca: Now. How long have you been selling? When did you start your business?

Austin: Well, the store opened up five years ago. We've been selling on eBay though for, I think our account opened up in 2014. But we sold for our parents before that on their account,

Jesse: Well ourselves and our parents.

Austin: But helping list in that was probably 2009, 2010?

Jesse: Even I think earlier. Even earlier than that cuz I started taking photos for my mom as like a like kind of like chores. Um, instead of helping clean the house and stuff like that, we would do that.

Austin: We still had to clean the house , but you know, but we didn't get chore money or anything like that. We got, we wanted money we would list on eBay for them so that they could get money out of it and we could.

Rebecca: No profit sharing .

Jesse: Yeah Exactly. But uh, I was like five when I was doing that.

Griff: Excuse me.

Jesse: When the little point and shoot Cameron. Yeah, when we moved out to Vegas, my dad was promised a job. We moved from Illinois. We been kind of bouncing between different places, but we get here and it got pushed back like six months and so we end up moving in with my cousins. But my mom grew up in this like little college town, was making a ton of money working at bars and she would go out and buy all these brand new clothes every single night when she would go to work. So when she moved out here, it's 120 degrees out here. She doesn't need all these sweaters and jackets and everything. So we started selling everything on eBay. I was born in 96 and I think this was in 2002. 2001. I was literally five or six years old. Helping my mom take photos. And then Austin was six or seven and he started taking photos and I was working on, you know, learning how to do titles and drafting all the rest of it off the way.

Rebecca: So you've really kind of grown up with eBay in some ways. I've never heard a story like that before. And I actually really love the origin story here of like helping your family like get by and I mean she essentially made it a hobby for you guys.

Jesse: . Well and that's what it really, it did turn into that like we, you know,

Austin: After school we'd go on thrift and yard sales, yard sales every weekend and every moment we could, we were trying to find our own pieces so we could list them and try to make a little extra money.

Griff: And so when did that branching off start from when you were doing this for your mom and now you're doing it for yourself?

Jesse: We took a little bit of like a break. We went to really, really hard high school out here and it was a magnet program that was super, super like pushing. So we took a like a break and I was focused on that a lot and you know, we had big dreams of doing stuff in sports marketing and management and all this stuff. But my junior year of high school I found this Pistol Pete jersey at the thrift store and I bought it for myself. It was $7.99. Just was curious cuz it was this bright green jersey. I was like, I'm really not gonna wear this to school. So I was like, let me see how much this sells for on eBay. Cuz I was still dabbling in eBay a little bit with like sports cards and stuff like that. Nothing serious but just to kind of clean out. And I threw it up on eBay for 60 bucks and it sold overnight. That was kinda like the spark in me again. I was either 16 or 17 and that's when it really like picked up like crazy for me. And I ended up going really, really heavy into it for three years. Like my junior senior, then my freshman year of college. And it was to the point where like all my friends thought I was selling drugs and I was just like, no. Like I'm just making good money selling on eBay.

Rebecca: I mean you can get addicted to selling on eBay. Right, exactly.

Austin: I was for sure. We still are. It was a kid bringing two or three extra shirts in my backpack cause I knew kids would want 'em or extra pair of shoes or Yeah. It got to that point where kids at school wanted to sell some stuff and I was like, oh I know I can get money for that. Ooh, I'll give you, I'll give you 20 bucks for your shoes that you don't want. Oops, my bad .

Jesse: But yeah, we were, we were selling at school, we were selling on eBay, we were doing all that. And then I think like the pivotal moment was I moved to Reno for a year to go to school up there and I got a job working at Savers so I could use my 50% off discount to buy things to sell on eBay. And then my other job, I was working part-time at a sports card shop and I said don't pay me in cash, pay me in store credit. And he ended up doubling what he was paying me and then I would just sell everything on eBay. And so I ended up making, you know, four to five times the amount that I normally would in a weekly basis just because I was selling it all on eBay instead.

Griff: So this is while you're in Reno? Correct. And then when you leave Reno, you come back to Las Vegas.

Jesse: I come back to Vegas and I'm here for maybe two months and this is Austin's senior year of high school. And I see that he's like really, really picked up on shoes.

Austin: Yeah. I started a degenerate sneaker collection. Right.

Griff: Degenerate sneaker . Got no, explain please.

Austin: It got to the point cause I was, anytime I could get a cheap pair of shoes in my size, I'd grab em.

Jesse: Not even just his size. He's lying too about that. Every, every possible.

Austin: I keep it from my, I intended for myself though.

Griff: You're Gonna grow into those. Yeah, right.

Jesse: He was a senior in high school. So not a ton of growing left going on,

Griff: Well I do hear that your feet continue to grow as you get older. I can testify that.

Jesse: Alright There you go. Maybe I'm the liar then. ,

Austin: I'm a size nine and a half 10 buying 11 twelves.

Griff: Well you'll, there'll be a day. Right?

Austin: Right. It got to the point where my collection started getting up way too much.

Jesse: It was taking over my old room at the house and when I,

Austin: So I had my room and then started filling up his room and then he came back and we were just like, okay, we gotta do something with this. I was still selling on eBay here and there throughout high school. I, we had some pretty good flips. I actually found a pair, pair of shoes out of flea market for 40 bucks and sold them for $2,400 in less than a week on eBay. Sold.

Griff: Ok. That's it. I quit .

Jesse: And it was funny cuz we're sitting there at the flea market and I'm, I look at these shoes and I'm like, I don't know anything about shoes at this time. Right. And I'm like, Austin, aren't these like, like really cool shoes? No. And they were priced at 60 and he goes, those are crazy. Like we have to get those bottle.

Austin: It was one of those like, I don't know if they're real, I don't know if they're fake. I, because I don't know enough about 'em but I know what the shoe is.

Jesse: Yeah. So I looked at the guy and I said, we take 40 bucks from him. And he goes, yeah sure. And I like paid them and handed 'em to him. I was like, here you go. I dunno anything about these,

Griff: What were they?

Austin: Yeezy Platinum two s. But we had spent 40 bucks on them and I sold 'em for 2,400 on eBay within less than a week.

Rebecca: Do you still sell sneakers? Is that one of your, one of the categories you're sell in?

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah.

Griff: You must use the authentication program. I mean,

Jesse: yes.

Rebecca: How's that experience been?

Jesse: Great. I think we had one kickback the whole time. Mm-hmm And.

Griff: Why, why was the kickback?

Jesse: The shoes were real.. I listed, I listed them as brand new and they were brand new when we bought them. But because we have a brick and mortar store, I'm assuming someone tried them on in our store. And so when they got to eBay I didn't check it. They weren't new anymore. So they got kicked back. But I like that though, you know what I'm saying? Cause as a buyer if I got that shoe I probably would've been upset. It's been good though. It makes it a lot easier for us cuz we do buy on eBay also all the time. And so it is,

Austin: So if you know your markets, you can buy shoes on eBay pretty easily. Yeah. Cause you know you're buying authentic shoes and if, you know, if you purchase it and they come out to be unauthentic, you get your money back.

Griff: Has that happen to you by the way?

Austin: I mean we bought a few things and I've turned out to be unauthentic and then no issue. We get our money back and we go on to the next purchase.

Rebecca: It sounds like you have a lot going on. You've got your store on eBay, you've got your brick and mortar store and you have social media as well, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So on Instagram, YouTube.

Jesse: So mainly Instagram. Yeah, we have YouTube. We're not very active on it at this moment. Mm-hmm. Um, working on it. Working on it. Yeah. But Instagram's our number one.

Rebecca: How do you balance, um, all of those priorities?

Austin: We started, uh, realizing that we can't do it all by ourselves. It's more based off a team. Mm-hmm. . So we have like, we hired a content creator for us and a videographer, which is actually the dude who's uh, doing the videography for this event right now.

Rebecca: So that leaves you focusing on sourcing and business strategy.

Jesse: We kind of have it broken down between about five of us. Austin and I do a lot of the content production I like to say, where it's like, Hey, this is what needs to happen on our Instagram, this is what needs to happen on our YouTube or whatever. And I mainly do like a lot of the backend work with, you know, with eBay, making sure the website is taken care of. Cause we have a website with over 2,500 items also.

Rebecca: What's That url?

Jesse: Yesterday's fits.com. Yeah. pretty easy to remember but you know, Austin does a great job at making sure that the shop is running and promoted very well because we do have a store where we do buy, sell trade. People are bringing us stuff all day, every day. The sourcing aspect of it, which I would say 99% of the people behind us have an issue with when it comes to sourcing. A lot of people aren't, you know, full-time resellers. Probably do. Luckily we don't have that issue.

Austin: I mean yeah, we, we'll never have a problem trying to find something to put on eBay.

Rebecca: Is it because it comes to you or is Vegas particularly good

Austin: Because we're such a transient city? Mm-hmm so much comes in, so much comes out that you're always able to find new things. But it is getting a lot more crammed here now. It is getting a little harder to find stuff, which is where our brick and mortar comes in handy. Cuz a lot of other resellers out here don't have a place to go sell their stuff. Right. And it's a lot of these people who are thrifting things now can bring it to us instead of having to try to go around and do their own things.

Jesse: And it makes more sense for us. Instead of me driving around all day trying to find stuff at the thrift stores and paying, you know, two to $10 a piece for these items. I would rather us pay five to $20 an item and have it all brought to us.

Rebecca: Right Your inventory just walks in the door.

Jesse: Exactly. And then I do a lot of resourcing on eBay through whatnot and through just like, we go out to the Rose Bowl flea market at least every other month in Pasadena. And I love that place. I love it. Oh yeah. I literally like imagine that's what heaven's like for me, you know what I'm saying? like, like the smell of it. In the morning you craved the feeling of being there. When I lived in Reno, there was one tiny flea market that was at this drive-in movie theater every single Sunday. Mind you, this was seven years ago, six years ago before everybody was a reseller at one point. But every time I went my car was full leaving. And it wasn't just fashion stuff, it wasn't just clothing. Like I, I remember this one time I walked out with these original Muhammad Ali fight posters, 1970s original fight posters. I paid 25 bucks a piece for em and I did, I ended up selling 'em for almost two grand each.

Griff: Yikes. Thank you Reno.

Jesse: Right. Exciting. But and then it's just like, how did that end up there? Like that's, that's a good question. That that's always a thing for me with these flea markets. Cause you have all this abundance of stuff. It's like there has to be one thing that someone's gonna make a million on.

Austin: Flea markets are the place to be. If you have an hour or two, you can find something, something will pop out.

Rebecca: It does sound like, I mean, you have to be willing to take a risk. Not necessarily know exactly what you're buying or exactly what it's gonna sell for, but just have that eye.

Jesse: Yeah.

Griff: Well I wanna thank both of you for stopping by. Appreciate you guys.

Jesse: Thank you for having us.

Rebecca: Thank You.

Brian: I can see why you went with the Smith Brothers. They were really, really good.

Rebecca: Really inspiring story. I love the idea of these young brothers, being so motivated and learning so much together and how far they've come.

Brian: Yep. I'm so glad that like their parents allowed 'em to use, their account pre 18.

Rebecca: Yeah Exactly.

Griff: We don't discourage that. If you're using a, an you know, an over 18 year old family account, you know, mazel tov.

Brian: Right.

Rebecca: Please. That's ok. Absolutely. Kids can work with their parents to sell on eBay. For sure. And you know, some of our favorite sellers and ones that we see really achieve a lot, they start super young with their parents' help. Yeah,

Griff: Yeah. The family that sells together excels together.

Rebecca: Oh, Griff, I love it. Genius.

Griff: On eBay. I have to always add that tagline. Hey, can I go next?

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait to hear what you chose.

Griff: So this was difficult for me too because I do a lot of these interviews, but my favorite segment from 2022 when I gave it a lot of thought was one that it was quite surprising cuz it was clearly a most unusual topic.

Brian: German packaging act,

Rebecca: . No, no. . I refuse.

Griff: No, I don't wanna go back there. Not that episode though. I thought it was a good one. Anyway, my selection for this year as best interview was Steve Young, the industrial musical collector... Our guest this week is a former writer for late show with David Letterman. Steve Young's passion for the industrial musical is the focus of a book co-authored with colleague Sport Murphy. And it's titled Everything's Coming Up, prophets The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Steve is also the focus of a Netflix documentary titled Bathtubs Over Broadway, which follows him as he searches for recordings and artifacts, many of which he has found on eBay. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Hey Griff. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Griff: Now, Steve, normally we start off on the podcast asking our guests how they get started on eBay. But I have to start with another question. What is an industrial musical?

Steve: Industrial musicals are Broadway type musical shows, often extremely elaborate, full casts, orchestra props, costumes, a story. But they were created for company conventions and sales meetings. There might be a marquee at Radio City Music Hall that's a little bit cryptic. It just says, welcome Ford Tractor Dealers. And if you went up to the ticket office and said, oh, what can I see this? No, if you're not a Ford Tractor dealer, you can't go in. But inside there are thousands of Ford tractor personnel and they sit down and there's a mind bendingly slick and professional and Tuneful musical about the triumphs and tragedies of being a Ford tractor dealer. . And just maybe if things went really well, the company would be excited enough to press a souvenir record album. Private pressing never in stores, just given out within the company. And so if you multiply this by thousands of companies over several decades, you have an enormous yet almost completely off the grid hidden secret form of show business, which I discovered quite accidentally.

Griff: What do you mean accidentally?

Steve: I spent, uh, many years as a writer on the Letterman Show and uh, early on in my tenure there, the head writer said, well, we do a bit called Dave's Record collection. It's Dave Letterman holding up Real, but really strange and unintentionally funny record albums. And we hear a sample and then Dave's got a funny remark and then, and we do eight or 10 of them. And it's a desk piece. It's a comedy bit, but it's real. Yeah. And uh, maybe you can be the guy who will go out and find the records cuz we need somebody to go find records. So I started looking through used record stores in New York City thrift shops, finding whatever we could get. Uh, it early on had been a lot of the celebrities who should not have been singing, who were singing like William Shatner. Uh, that was a good one. Leonard Nemoy, for some reason, the Star Trek guys thought they were gonna be singers. So we ran through this bad celebrity singers. And then it was a lot of teach your parakeet to talk and learn to touch type and take dictation. But I started finding the first few outlier examples of something that I, I had no idea what I was finding. And I'll show you a couple here. Diesel dazzle. Yes an entire musical about selling and servicing diesel engines put on by, the Detroit Diesel engine Division of General Motors in 1966.

Griff: Can you hold that up again? I

Steve: Oh, you don't need to ask me twice. Yeah. diesel dazzle. It's on the face of it, obviously, it's off the charts absurd. Like for a comedy writer looking for grist for the comedy mill, oh my God, we're three quarters of the way there before we even put the needle on the record. Just because conceptually a musical about selling and servicing diesel engines. Oh my God. This is a gift from the Comedy Gods . This is, American Standard commissioned a musical called The Bathrooms Are Coming, oh geez. About the new line of plumbing fixtures. 1969, 2 shows Vegas and Atlanta for plumbing fixture distributors. Again, not the public. You could not go see the bathrooms are coming unless you were a high up in the plumbing industry. So this, this is just melting my head. I kept finding them though, my insurance man, continental Insurance, a musical about how to be a better insurance salesman. I thought, oh my God, this is fantastic. But what blew my mind was not all of them were great, but like those three that I just held up, I could not get the songs out of my head. Oh dear. We'd make a joke on the show and it'd be weeks later. And I'm still, why am I singing that diesel lynching song? Why am I excited about insurance sales? There's some magnetic quality to this. I thought there is some genius at work here. Who were these people who made this stuff that seems way better than it should have been? How can I find more? First of all, and that's where eBay started to come in, of course, but also who were the people who wrote these things and performed in them? And that's kind of the arc of bathtubs over Broadway. The documentary.

Griff: Some of these shows were written by people who would go on to actually become famous as Broadway writers.

Steve: That is absolutely true. It was a terrific training ground for people who were on their way up in the musical theater world. You could wait tables, you could drive a cab according to Hal Linden, or if you hit the jackpot, you might do the new Buick Show or the Kodak Show or whatever. And you made big money and were treated very well. First class accommodations at whatever resort they flew you to. And it was hard work. You had to learn this stuff and you had to learn it fast and get it right and pivot if they changed the specifications of the two-door to the different V8 at the last minute, or you had to be ready to, to go with the punches. But it could be a terrific world. People made more money doing industrials than they did at a mid-range actual Broadway position. And I grew up knowing really nothing about Broadway. So when I started finding these records and some of them had credits on the back and I just didn't know what I was looking at. It turned out John Candor and Fred Ebb, they did a general electric show. It only came to my attention much later that they had written Cabaret and Chicago. I had a Ford tractor record, Sheldon Harnek and Jerry Bach did not ring any bells for me. And a friend of mine went, oh my God, do do, do, do you know who those guys are? No. They wrote Fiddler on the Roof. So this was a huge training ground for people, not all of whom vaulted to the A-list, but many of whom did. And performers also, uh, in the movie I interviewed Cheetah Rivera, Martin Short people who came out of their early, like, all right, I'm in college and I'm graduating and I want to go into being a musical theater performer or a dancer or a singer or whatever. If you're, if you're smart, you could get in the side door with industrials and you networked and you proved that you had the stuff and you sharpened your craft and you were ready to go when the big leagues called.

Griff: So you started looking for these records when you discovered them. Were, are we talking in the 80's

Steve: Uh, no, mid nineties I think is when it dawned on me after I had like a half a dozen of them. Gee, how many of these are there? Could there be 10? Could there be, what if there were 12? And then there started to be record shows and record fairs. I thought, okay, well I'm still kind of doing this for the Letterman show, but now it had tipped over more like, I don't care if the fluorescent light fixture musical doesn't get on the Letterman show. I want it for myself. Exactly. But it was right about at that time when I was starting to take it a little more seriously that I started hearing about this new thing called eBay. I first joined eBay in late 97, so it had been around two years for what, two, two years. I heard about this thing and I started looking at it and I'm sure it had taken enormous leaps already by late 97. Of course, it's laughable now to think how crude and undifferentiated so much of it was. So I'm looking for an unbelievably arcane kind of record that was pressed in minuscule quantities never for sale in stores. Most people have never heard of any of the titles or the genre. So it is the ultimate needle in a haystack to go on eBay in 1997. I don't know if they were searching by keywords yet even I just remembered scrolling through thousands of records just listed and it was like the electronic version of being in a thrift shop and you're at a bin and you're just trying to get through stuff and

Griff: Hours and hours and hours

Steve: Yes. But it paid off even early on. I have some of the first ones that I ever found, 1966 Coca-Cola Route Salesman's convention. I thought, this is perfect. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And I think I had to stay up till 3:00 AM to watch the end of the auction. And I don't know how many people were bidding on it. I probably, I may have paid over a hundred dollars for it, but I was very excited.

Griff: Thanks again, Steve.

Steve: My pleasure. And thank you so much for allowing me to tell my twisted yet beautiful collecting story that eBay is such a central part of.

Rebecca: So that was such an interesting interview Griff.

Griff: Yeah. And I wonder if there anyone who listened to that interview has found any of these and they're thrifting or, state sales.

Rebecca: I know. I'm gonna look for them the next time I'm out there.

Brian: And it's so interesting, like some of the musicians who participate in in those Yeah,

Griff: Yeah. Famous composers.

Brian: Yeah. And then you think about it and it's like, yeah, they they have to make money before they're famous.

Rebecca: Exactly. like us . Yes. They wanna be as famous as us. Brian .

Griff: Brian, you're next. You're you've got the last

Brian: Spot. I'm always last. Just Kidding

Griff: . Well I'm gonna be honest with you. I put you last because I have a sneaking suspicion who you chose and it was such a great interview. Did you choose who I think you chose?

Brian: I selected a longtime seller meetup organizer who was in California with her husband Diane Lassonde. And she stopped by the city studio and we had a great interview

Griff: And joining us for little conversation about her experience on eBay and how much the community means to her is eBay seller Diana Lassonde. Welcome Diane.

Diane: Thank you.

Griff: Welcome. Tell everyone your username.

Diane: My username is Shop Creations Unlimited.

Griff: And you are based in

Diane: Boston, Massachusetts.

Griff: And so Diane, what brings you to California?

Diane: Well, we came here for a wedding in LA and so we decided to make it a coast trip. We went up the Pacific Coast Highway and we're here now and then we're gonna end in San Francisco.

Griff: A lot of us are gonna end in San Francisco. . Who's running the business while you're gone?

Diane: Right now I have it on vacation

Griff: Time Away?

Diane: Yes - Time away, which I like that new setting. I think that's really convenient because you're handling time changes as the days get less. I like that.

Griff: Are you making sales?

Diane: Not as many, I have to say. Probably not as many as, and I know myself, I've done the same thing. I've looked and if a seller's away, I might need it sooner than that time when they're gonna ship. But I'm still getting sales. So I have bought over 4,000 items in my store. We list every day.

Griff: Are they all one of a kind?

Diane: Pretty much, yes.

Griff: How did you get them all listed? I'm trying to keep over 100.

Diane: Well that's funny that you say that because when I was first building this up, because I had a brick and mortar store and then I came back to doing eBay. I was on one of the groups and I, someone had 750 feedback and I was like, how did they do that? And then someone else had 900 items or something in whatever group I was in and I thought I have to message them to see how they did that. And the person just said one listing at a time. And that's really all it is. If you are not listing it, it's not there to sell.

Griff: It sits in a death pile. Mm-hmm.

Diane: . Well I have that too. A pile. Everyone, I think everyone has a pile and sometimes I think you need to go through that and say, well I'm never gonna do this and just give it away or give it to some another seller. My thing is always to try to get my items for free.

Griff: And how do you find stuff for free?

Diane: Oh, very easy. So there's garage sale apps that you can pinpoint from your zip code and it tells you where all the Yard sales are. Well, all of those people spent like two weeks getting their stuff ready to get rid of it. They want it gone. So you go on the last day and you say to them, I will get this gone for you. And they can sometimes say, oh well how much? And I say, oh no, no, I was just gonna like get rid of it for you. And then they'll either say yes or how about 50 bucks or whatever, some low low price. So Right. Yeah. Or then you can renegotiate. Like you can have all that for free, but I wanna sell this. Okay. But when you come back to pick it up, they may have said, uh, I don't really just take it. And that's the just take it is the more often than not. And then the the other thing that you do if you're afraid to talk to them,

Griff: I don't think you are though.

Diane: I'm not. But I know people don't wanna go up and say they're a reseller. I'm not quite sure why. I think that's the first thing you should do because I ran in the state business and I would've loved it if you said, I will take all your clothes at the end of this. I will take all your hard goods at the end of this. So if you make these arrangements with people, you can get tons of stuff for free. And then that's why I say if you're in your death pile or your money pile or your profit pile or whatever you call it, you can choose, then I got it free. I know Brian sells sports blankets or whatever, sporting goods Or do you? I don't know.

Brian: Nancy would more than me. She's the Golden State Warriors fan.

Diane: Yeah. So I would would just say, Hey, you want this bag of stuff and let pass on the wealth. So if you're sitting at home right now with profit piles that you are never gonna sell, join one of the Facebook groups and see if other people want it. Maybe you could trade inventory and then again you're not paying for it.

Griff: Before we started the recorder earlier on, we were talking about community and you had some thoughts and I thought it'd be good to share them specifically about how Diane in the last two years, a lot of people who relied on meeting with other sellers face-to-face haven't been able to do that.

Diane: Right. Well, I'm immune compromised and I was not able to go out at all during the pandemic. I think you get institutionalized by staying in your house that long. Going out is daunting. My daughter and I team up and we meet every week to go over, you know, the things that we accomplished every week we do it on Friday and this one week she's like, mom, I gotta pick a word for the year. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean? She goes, you just think about something that you want to like if it's smile more like so smile or happy or one of those things could be your words. And so I thought about it and I said, I think it's fearless. And so that was my word and I didn't mean I was gonna skydive and jump out of a plane or any of that kinda bungee cord. Yeah, no, not that kind. But fear less all of us. We used to go to our meetup and it was wonderful and we'd have dinner and we'd have Brian come and speak and it was great. And now we're back in our basement again and not going out and fearing still to go out. And I think there's a lot of people that are like that. All the meetup groups, not all, but most have not had meetings yet. So I think there's a couple that have, but I, it's all about rebuilding and how do you face that fear of getting out of your home and to go and meet other people again. And I think we really need to do that because the most successful people are the people who meet with each other and talk about what they did or what changes were made or how they understood something or how they didn't understand it. And then they get to feel better.

Griff: Is your group gonna start meeting again do you think?

Diane: Well, I hope so. I think all the groups need to rebuild now and this is the time when we all have to trust that we can go out and see each other.

Griff: Diane, is there anything else you want to add? Maybe something that you feel our sellers need to hear from you?

Diane: Just do it.

Griff: Well I think it's trademark, but it's good advice.

Diane: . It's right, but it’s trademarked for a reason, right? Because if you don't list your item, it's not gonna sell. If you don't have an item to list, it's not gonna sell.

Griff: Oh Brother. Is that true?

Diane: People wait to be perfect. Why? You don't need to be perfect. Just be fun and real and do stuff and go live your life and be happy. You know?

Griff: And you'll never know what you discover in those death piles. There's things in there you forgot.

Diane: Exactly.

Griff: You'll be pleasantly surprised in a lot of them. Some of them you'll be pleasantly disgusted but,

Diane: Or get an employee to go through that death pile for you and you'd be really happy

Griff: . Right. Do do the research. Well as Diane said, just do it. Just do it fearlessly. Right.

Brian: I am just so delighted that you and Rick, chose to stop by. You're here in California and there's lots to see and I'm really glad that you decided to spend a little bit of time here

Griff: Of all the things she could have done. She decided to waste two hours here with the likes of us.

Diane: Well, and I have to tell you, people that know me don't think this, but I don't like to speak in public either. I'm not the person who's gonna get up on stage by myself and but yet I started a meetup. Right?

Griff: There you go. You were fearless.

Diane: I can do this with you when we're at the restaurant. So I think you find, even though this is not my top 10 thing that I like to do, when you come out of your comfort zone a little bit, you grow and you keep growing and keep blooming and then you become a much better person. And that's all we really need. eBay gives you the opportunity to have a platform where you can sell anywhere in the world. All as you need to do is do it. Don't be perfect. Just go do it.

Griff: I couldn't have put it better myself, even though I often try. Diane, I want to thank you for stopping by and we hope to see you again. I know Brian will be making trips out to Massachusetts.

Brian: I hope so. Yeah, I hope so too. Yeah, we're as soon as we're allowed to travel, which seems like is starting to open up for us,

Diane: That would be a pleasure.

Griff: what I really appreciated, but was her Massachusetts sense of humor

Rebecca: So true.

Brian: Definitely. Yeah. It comes out all the time

Rebecca: And you know, she has done a great job of retaining that sense of humor in spite of everything that she has going on in her life right now.

Brian: Yeah. And she's got a great support system back in Massachusetts as well and I'm glad that she was able to come out and I think she might have been our first seller back in person since Covid.

Griff: Yeah, she was.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah, it was. Which was great to have. And hopefully we'll have many more in 2023

Rebecca: . Yes. Yes. Well, we would love to hear what your favorite podcast moment was from 2022. Send us your selection to podcast@ebay.com and we'll read it out on our next episode. Probably include links in the show notes as well. Oh, actually I just said next episode, it's almost the end of the year. We're doing this best of Griff. When is the next episode?

Griff: We're off next week for the holidays. So there'll be no episode that week between Christmas and New Year's, but we'll be back the first Tuesday in January with our first episode of 2023, which will be aptly named episode 223.

Rebecca: I love it. Very cool.

Griff: We're gonna feature a conversation with eBay seller, Jessica Oman of Storage Warriors and I think she's got a great story. You know, she's part of eBay Open and she was actually at Sellar remix. She gave the opening speech, which we could hear all the cheering and applause we could. That's great. We couldn't hear the speech cuz we were recording.

Rebecca: Well, I can't wait to listen to episode 223.

Griff: Not only will, we have an interview, but certain aspects of the podcast, we'll come back from holiday hiatus.

Brian: Yes. So we'll answer your emails and called in questions. So send them in.

Rebecca: And what is that email address and phone number again? I can't possibly remember it.

Griff: Let me see. I had to write it down. It's somewhere over here. Let me see. Uh, it's podcast@ebay.com and the phone number is 888-723-4630. You can email us, you can call us. And if you send your question and we use it in an episode, we'll send you an eBay for Business podcast mug

Brian: Or something new in 2023.

Griff: Ooh, you're gonna give it away.

Rebecca: Are we gonna surprise our friends out there or are we gonna tell them what the new gift is?

Griff: I dunno. What do you think?

Rebecca: I think we could tease it because then that will inspire people to call in over the next couple of weeks.

Brian: But have we made the final decision?

Griff: Oh Yeah. I, there's too many choices in the catalog. So yeah, I told, Sheila, go ahead this week. Pull the trigger anyway. The hint will be, now you can drink your coffee and listen to the podcast at the same time.

Rebecca: , what could it be?

Brian: Or you could have a cold beverage in it too.

Griff: You could have a cold Beverage.

Brian: Guess you could have had a cold beverage in a mug.

Griff: Um, yeah, so anyway, you'll find out. We'll talk about it when we're back next year.

Brian: That's it everyone. Wow. That's a wrap for 2022.

Griff: Another year in the can, so to speak.

Rebecca: And by can you mean digital archives? Yeah,

Griff: Of course. Hey, before we sign off for 2022, do either of you have any parting thoughts for our dear listeners? Say, Brian,

Brian: I just like to really say thank you to all our loyal listeners this year. I really enjoy the comments and questions you send in. And I also hope all of you have an enjoyable holiday season with family and friends and of course a happy New Year.

Griff: And Rebecca,

Rebecca: You know, I like you Brian Echo. I wanna say thank you to all of our listeners who've spent the year with us or maybe just discovered us. I hope that the podcast is informative, maybe even sometimes fun . But we appreciate every question, every comment that we get in. So please keep them coming in 2023. And with that, I'm hoping that everyone has a warm and wonderful holiday season.

Griff: Well, I echo both of your sentiments and I, I want to thank you all for tuning in, downloading, we're always heartened every week when we see those download numbers increase, it means that what we're doing means something. And I have to tell you without listeners, we could be having all the fun we want and giving all the information we could hear, but we just wouldn't be a podcast. No one would listen. We'd have to end it, lock the doors, turn the lights out on the studio, sell the equipment, and walk away. But we're on the up and the up and to the right every week. And I wanna thank you for being royal listeners. And so for the last time, but not the last time forever, just the last time for 2022. The eBay For Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411. Happy holiday, happy holidays. Happy everyone.