Show up every day: Dave Ng on growing a full-time business

[podcast_team]

eBay seller Dave Ng of Autolatch began casually selling on eBay in 2006, then gradually grew his auto parts business into a full-time career. Join us on today’s episode to hear how he gives new life to used car parts, how being a child of immigrants shapes his business practices, and the importance of self-teaching for sellers trying to grow on eBay.

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Georgea: Every seller has a story. I'm Georgea Mpampanis and welcome to our newest episode of the eBay Seller Spotlight podcast, where each month we spotlight sellers with a story to share with us. Our guest this episode started selling casually on eBay in 2006. It was when he attended an eBay event in Philadelphia in 2012 that he realized people were making a full-time career out of it, and it inspired him to dive in full-time. Welcome, Dave Ng.

Dave: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Georgea: Tell us about yourself. What do you sell?

Dave: I am originally from New York. I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania with my wife. I'll refer to her as we a lot my wife Liz. We've been married 23 years, and I have a little terrier named Willow that follows me around all day. And I sell car parts. So mostly things that go on the trunk of your car. Things like latches switches, handles small taillights, things like actuators, which are the little motors that, you have your key fob and it locks and unlocks your door or opens your trunk. And, yeah, that's it.

Georgea: When did you start selling?

Dave: I started selling in 2006. Just like how a lot of people start, they sell things that you don't need any longer from around your house. I dabbled in some store returns that I would get at liquidation. Like at the time it was GPSs and digital cameras and now our phones just have amazing technology in them and you don't really need those as much anymore. And I learned about thrifting from that conference that I went to was, I think it was called eBay On Location. And they did it in different cities and there was a presentation on thrifting. So I started going to thrift stores. I read a lot on Facebook in those groups. And my favorite things to sell were men's shirts, whichI learned from Griff a lot about that as well as women's shoes, believe it or not. So there's a time as I was transitioning over to car parts where there would be women's shoes lined up right against my car parts which a little funny, but it is kind of a laugh. My friends kind of laughed at that. So one of the challenges that I had with thrifting was that I couldn't scale it the way I would want and it was very challenging for me because it takes me a long time to write my listings. I would blame it on maybe ADHD or just being too, I don't know, anal retentive about my listings. But when you sell car parts, you can a lot of times go and get the same parts over and over again because people need them and they break. So I'm able to hold quantity on my listings and get the pictures the way I want them. And I have one listing where I have over 800 sold on that. And that has been very exciting. Yeah. So it's something that's hard to do is to hold quantity on items in the used market.

Georgea: So you discovered eBay in 2012 in that event you were talking about. What were you doing before then? What made you realize, I don't wanna do this anymore, I want to be an eBay seller?

Dave: Yeah, yeah. I was in finance and financial planning. I worked for a financial planner and then I worked for a larger company that was an investment management firm. And I'm very thankful to them because they paid for my master's degree. So in my projects with my professors, they all were okay with me doing projects on eBay and reselling and just selling online in general and small business. And I learned a lot. So I use all of those skills that I learned from that master's degree now so I can do my own accounting and my tax filings and things like that. And it's been really useful and helpful.

Georgea: You started off thrifting and then you eventually switched to P and A, you had your women's shoes next to Car Parts. What was the coolest thing you've sold on eBay?

Dave: Yeah. I really miss sometimes finding just rare interesting things. A local charity was doing a, a rummage sale. They did it semi-annually, this is pre pandemic. And my wife and I found a couple of lithographs, which are prints and they looked really interesting. One of them was hand signed in pencil. We paid $5 for one of them and I think $7 for the other one. And they just seemed really neat to us. We just bought them. And then when you get them home, that's when we started researching. And I realized that the one of them was a lithograph by Salvador Dali and it was numbered in pencil and it was an etching of Van Gogh. And so it was from a limited collection and I didn't exactly know what to do with it. Because what do you do with, it's a little scary to have something that you think has value on it. And so I started doing research and I used Worth Point at the time, that website Worth Point, they would buy databases from eBay and they had sales data going back years and years. So I was able to find this print or versions of it on Worth Point. And kind of what they sold for back years ago was kind of rare, but they were out there and I found someone in New York to give an authentication for it. I contacted him and he had me send him pictures and he knew right away that it was the real deal. So I got it listed and it's a little scary and daunting to, to list something, uh, of a higher value. And then it was up for a couple months and I sold it for $3,000. And so that was exciting. You send it off, you pack it as best you can and you send it off. And I ended up donating some money back to that charity as part of this. And it's kind of the wheel of giving and receiving that I like to keep that moving. And the director of the charity contacted me. She didn't know what was happening, but here's this check from a guy and she found out that I sell on eBay and I ended up doing a presentation for her staff on eBay and how to sell on eBay. And it was just kind of a neat experience to do that.

Georgea: Okay. Wow. That's one of the biggest purchases I've ever heard so far.

Dave: Yeah, it's out there. .

Georgea: How do you source your inventory? Do you do this on your own?

Dave: I do. Mainly on my own. In Pennsylvania, we have really good self-service salvage yards. So these are big, giant, pretty much parking lots of cars that are eventually headed to the crusher. So they don't mind, us we bring our tools, you pay them $2 and you march in with your tool bags and you can just handpick the items that you want. And then you, you go and pay and then you come home and clean them up and test them and list them on eBay. And this is the first year though too that I've actually had help. He's a college student and he's strong and he's a lacrosse player. So he's been helping me tell him all about the job and he's studying business. So we talk a lot about business in the meantime as we're driving around and going to the different yards.

Georgea: So you learn from one another. That's awesome.

Dave: Yeah, thanks.

Georgea: So little Birdie told me you are a Top Seller of a certain part. Is this something you wanna share? What it is and why you have so much?

Dave: Yeah, it is. I've realized this in the Listing Quality Report that you get right from eBay. And the part is actually, it's from the rear of a car. It's roof antennas. So these are like little rubber antennas or sharkfin antennas.

Georgea: Do they still have them in today's cars?

Dave: They do. And I'll tell you what's going on with them. It's because of the GPS and satellite radio that are in cars. So they need kind of like a receiver right on the roof of the car for that. And that's what's in the antennas nowadays. And some of them more simple than that, but it's because there's so much technology in the cars. I am a number one seller for that category. And they can get quite expensive from coming from the manufacturers to replace. So I'm sure people are always on eBay looking for a deal, looking for a better price than what the dealer just quoted them for that. And sometimes they're painted. And so you're looking for a color that matches your car.

Georgea: Are those sourced the same way?

Dave: Yeah, sourced the same way. You go in and you have to get in under the headliner of the car and the back and get them unbolted and unhooked. It's a little tricky to figure out how to do it.

Georgea: That's interesting. A part that I didn't even know still exsists on cars. It's one of the top selling on your story. I love that. So Dave, your father was a Chinese immigrant. What are some values that were instilled in you? I personally have a father who was an immigrant and he always taught me to work two jobs. I literally worked two jobs all my life and I got that from him. So I'm curious what you got.

Dave: Yes. I wanted to ask you about that. We could probably do a whole podcast just on that, being children of immigrants and the things that you learned from them. So there, there's a couple of things that come to mind when I think of my father. There's that quote, 80% of success is just showing up. He had this consistency to his work. He worked as a cook for 45 years for the same company and day in and day out. He was just up early in the morning and he would just go to work. And that's something that because I've kind of had more jobs than he did that I'm bringing now to eBay, that I'm finally able to have that consistency in my work. You know, it's very important on eBay to be consistent. Things like listing every day, making sure you get your shipping out on time, answering customer questions, offering assistance. Sometimes I send, if I know I might have a potential problem with certain parts tend to give you issues because they have trouble installing it. Like I send proactive messages to let them know, to contact me that I can help them with that. And also things like using the site site the way eBay wants you to use it, keeping your metrics good and issuing refunds promptly. The other thing that I think of for him, he gave me my first camera when I was 12 or 13. It was an SLR, so it had lenses that you take on and off. So I went through all of his camera manuals and books to teach myself photography. He loved photography. And that's something I can still use today.

Georgea: Your listings must look really great.

Dave: Yeah, I have this light tent that Griff, it's similar to what Griff recommended where there's LED lights inside of it and you don't have to do much editing. When you have a soft box like that with lights in it, your light is consistent from picture to picture. And I even have my camera tethered to my computer. So when I take pictures, they just show up on my computer ready to list. It's not, it's a little overkill I think, but it's how I like to do it and it makes things flow very easily to do listing.

Georgea: What was the biggest thing you were able to purchase with your eBay funds?

Dave: Yes. So my wife and I, we made this pact. We realized how much we spent on cars over the years, tens of thousands of dollars. And so we made this pact to drive our old cars while we were paying down the mortgage. And that's kind of what got me into the junk yards is to get parts from my old cars. But that segued into, I was like, oh, there's parts here that I can sell. You don't know what sells. But I started getting some things to sell and then over time we paid off the mortgage on our townhouse completely. And it was nice to have a paid off house going into the pandemic. We have a different house now because the business then expanded and we ended up, moving in into a bigger house. But we still have the old cars and I'm proud to keep them running and to help others do that as well.

Georgea: So you got a car out of selling car parts.

Dave: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Okay.

Georgea: Awesome. So P and A obviously is a huge category and there's a lot to learn. Was this all self-taught and if so, how'd you do it?

Dave: Yes. For me there was a big element of self-teaching, especially in the testing of the parts when I get them home. It helped that I had a background in selling other items on the site. Then you leverage that into Parts and Accessories because then there's things you have to add like fitment, which is big as well as part numbers that you have to and the manufacturers have a part number for each part and that's how they find it in their system. And it's handy to put that up on the site when you're selling parts. And I give a lot of the credit though to the people that I've met. I have a small, I call them my car part masterminds. These are a couple of people, there's two Chris's in Ohio and Andrew in Georgia and I've met them all at eBay Open, which is the big in-person event that we had a few years ago. One of them, Chris, he happened to just get into an Uber with me. We were in an Uber ride share and whenever we figured out, we were both at the eBay conference and the next question every eBay seller asks another person, so what do you sell? And he said, car parts, oh, we're gonna have to have a talk. Because I was, I just started getting into car parts 'cause I was thrifting still. So we ended up paling around together all night that night. And I've learned a lot from him over the years too. He teaches me something like, you gotta ask so much until you get a no. And even taught me how to do some research because there's a lot of data right on eBay. So you go into completed, you look at the cars that you're looking at and the parts that sell off of those cars, as well as there's some data from TerraPeak now, which has been really good that we have access to that and that that's helped as well.

Georgea: So aside from teaching yourself, you go directly to eBay and the eBay community, which is awesome. Dave, where can we find you in your store online?

Dave: Okay, so my eBay user id, the store is called AutoLatch. You can find me on YouTube as well with that same name. AutoLatch

Georgea: YouTube?

Dave: Yes.

Georgea: I did not creep your YouTube. Okay.

Dave: No. It is okay. I've just started doing it and just this year and it's been really fun. I'm starting to put up little tutorial videos about how to take off the parts, because I've learned little tricks over time with how these parts get removed from the car. And so I wanted to make sure I have a link to that in the eBay listing. So there's a linking and back linking, but I'm gonna try to get more into that and have ideally it's a big task, but ideally to have a video for every part that I'm selling and I'll start with the ones that sell the best.

Georgea: Amazing. So it's all manual for sellers. I love that. Well Dave, thanks so much for joining us today. This is so awesome.

Dave: Thank you for having me.

Georgea: Dave Ng sells on eBay under the store name, AutoLatch. Shop his store for your car maintenance needs. We hope you'll join us on our next episode where we'll shine the spotlight on another seller with an amazing story to share. I'm your host Georgea Mpampanis. Jim Griffith is our Editor in Chief. The eBay Seller Spotlight podcast is produced by Libsyn and podCast411.