Part II of our conversation with eBay Seller Alec Larson focuses on ideas and tactics for sourcing new and plentiful products in 2021. eBay Vice President of Seller Experience Harry Temkin returns with news about a major upgrade to the backend sales and traffic data platform in Seller Hub for later in 2021 and recent enhancements to Terapeak for sourcing research. Rebecca and Griff answer two questions; Keeping watchers for listings where a best offer results in an unpaid item and what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to dropshipping.
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Episode 128 Links
Seller Events Page and News
Seller Events Page Announcement
Severe Weather Update
eBay Drop Shipping Policy
Alec Larson’s eBay Store
Hosts:
Griff, Rebecca Michals
Guests:
Harry Temkin (eBay VP, Seller Experience), Alec Larsen (eBay seller)
Transcript:
Seller Events Page and News
Seller Events Page Announcement
Severe Weather Update
eBay Drop Shipping Policy
Alec Larson’s eBay Store
Recurring Links:
Hosts:
Griff, Rebecca Michals
Guests:
Harry Temkin (eBay VP, Seller Experience), Alec Larsen (eBay seller)
This week on the eBay For Business Podcast:
Harry Temkin: "One of the new things that we are launching is something called Terapeak Insights. And it's exactly that as you noted, it is a sourcing tool. And what it's designed to do is to show you which categories are in high demand and where there's low supply.”
Alec Larson: "I mean, there's just so much opportunity. And especially this coming year with seemingly a lot of other businesses going online, some businesses liquidating a lot of their inventory. Like I mentioned, hardware stores, you've got office supply stores. Those are filled with huge inventory opportunity, just like automotive parts. You can buy truckloads of inventory from like, I think Lowe's and Walmart. So if you have the means to store some of that stuff, there's just so much opportunity there for other niche items as well.”
Rebecca: I'm Rebecca.
Griff: And I'm Griff and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your weekly source for the information and inspiration to start, run and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 128. Welcome back Rebecca.
Rebecca: Hey Griff. Happy Valentine's day, a couple of days late.
Griff: Better, late than never. How was Valentine's day for you? Were you showered with chocolates and roses?
Rebecca: Well, not exactly, but some friends and I did a, my secret Valentine, where we all send each other little gifts and opened it up together on zoom and it actually ended up being a nice day.
Griff: Well, that's great.
Rebecca: Yeah. How about you?
Griff: I stayed home.
Rebecca: As you should right now, I guess.
Griff: I don't know. I'm not really anyone's Valentine, but that's okay. I'll just sit here in the dark. You never call, you never write.
Rebecca: Oh Griff, will you be my Valentine?
Griff: Oh it is a Deal. Thanks. You know, Valentine's day is a big day on eBay. Big season. People buy a lot of stuff on eBay.
Rebecca: Is it really? Oh wow.
Griff: It's been a go-to for things like cards, vintage Valentine's day cards, you know, old antique cards. They're always popular, but people look for a lot of gifts for their sweeties on eBay.
Rebecca: And what's coming up next. I guess it would be St. Patrick's day and wonder, Oh, I bet. Decorations and costumes and stuff are the thing.
Griff: Yeah. Lots of green food coloring,
Rebecca: Shamrocks and so forth. All right. We're getting a little goofy here Griff. Who are our guests this week?
Griff: Well, first up on today's episode, we're going to meet with eBay Vice President Of Seller Experience. Harry Temkin. Harry has some updates on, it's a big platform overhaul that eBay's doing, and we're also going to do with Harry a deep dive into Terapeak as a really great source for researching, sourcing products. And then we'll hear part two of my interview with Alec Larson of Larson Enterprises. It was only supposed to be a one part interview, but boy, we talked for nearly two hours while we were recording and there was just way too much good stuff to throw away. So I thought I'm not going to stop this. We'll just divide it up into two parts. So we're going to listen to part two today. And again, it also focuses on sourcing. Primarily how he sources for his auto parts business. This month is all about renew. And we thought it would be great to talk about how you can renew your products. Maybe you're selling the wrong products. Maybe you want to add to your product line. So talking about sourcing is a big part of that, but first, before we get to all the good stuff, it's the really good stuff. It's time for the news.
Rebecca: And in the news this week, of course, one of the things that's top of mind is that last week, severe weather conditions disrupted transportation lines across parts of the U S. And we wanted to tell you that as always eBay has been closely monitoring the situation. So if you're involved in an eBay transaction as either a buyer or a seller in the effected areas, please note that the ability to communicate or complete transactions may be delayed due to these severe conditions. We encourage both buyers and sellers to be patient in this matter throughout the transaction. And also definitely when providing feedback after the item arrives. Now, sellers, we want to remind you that you don't need to worry about your seller performance. If your business is impacted, eBay will automatically protect your seller performance. And you can read more at ebay.com/sellernews.
Griff: It's a standard procedure for eBay now. We've been doing this for several years. These things are all automatic and they kick in whenever, whether it's severe.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. This is one of those, what do they call it? A polar vortex. And it's definitely something we have experience with and we will protect automatically.
Griff: Yeah. The result of the polar vortex is, Damn It's cold in some places right now! Not in California, but in other places.
Rebecca: No, no, but we have sellers all across the country and around the world. So we keep an eye on the weather pretty much everywhere all the time. Okay. So also in the news is an announcement from Andrea Stares, Chief Marketing Officer, and VP of Seller Community, and my boss about a new seller events platform. Andrea says, "while we miss seeing you in person this year, slate of virtual events will bring us all together wherever we are. To make this a reality. I'm delighted to announce a new site for eBay seller events, a platform specially built to host our virtual events. The site features easy registration and a calendar for all of our 2021 events. It's a one-stop shop for all seller events."
Griff: How cool.
Rebecca: I know we're very excited about this launch and of course, those events for 2021 includes seller check-ins, a new initiative for seller meetings and the big one, the big news, the return of eBay Open in 2021. Which will take place virtually in August. You can see the current events scheduled by logging into sellerevents.ebay.com with your eBay user ID and password.
Griff: Sellers loved eBay Open. And I know you haven't been at eBay when we actually did live events.
Rebecca: I have not. And I've heard so much about it. I'm really excited that we're bringing it back virtually this year,
Griff: Maybe in 2022, we'll actually have, I don't want to make any promises, but who knows, back at the eBay Open,
Rebecca: Hopefully by 2022, things will look a little bit different, but this year, at least we're going to have eBay Open virtual.
Griff: That's. Yeah. That'd be fun. Well, thanks so much, Rebecca, for that news.
Rebecca: Thanks for letting me stop by. And I'll be back later in the episode to help with You've Got Questions.
Griff: That is terrific cause we got two questions. One's about, so a little unusual about unpaid items where the sale was made on a Best Offer and one on drop shipping, but first eBay updates an important backend platform for Seller Hub Data.
Griff: Every month or so we'd like to check in with our friend who actually oversees the entire seller experience team. And that's also all of the seller tools that the different product teams are working on. And he's back with us this month, Vice President Of Seller Experience Harry Temkin. Hi Harry.
Harry Temkin: Hello, Griff. How are you? Great to be here with you again. Hello sellers.
Griff: It's always great to talk to you. We always learn something.
Harry Temkin: You know, I love these podcasts. There's so much fun. It's great to be with you because I learned something too, usually from you, which is great.
Griff: But it is unrelated to anything related to anything with the podcast. (laughter) I've heard through the grapevine there's a lot going on this year. I know your team's very busy and I thought we'd ask you a few questions so we could find out what you can tell us. But first, before we start, what are your favorite tools in our suite of tools known as Terapeak. This is renew month. We're asking sellers to review and renew all of their strategies. And one of them is what they source and how they source it. And I think a lot of our sellers may be aware because we talk about it all the time on the podcast about Terapeak, but maybe they're not quite as aware of how Terapeak can actually help you, not just do research, but actually figure out what you're going to source. So I thought we'd talked a little bit about that and I know that all I have to do is wind you up and let you go and you talk. That's what I love about having one of the podcasts. So Harry, the floor is yours.
Harry Temkin: The microphone is mine. The floor is mine. Well, yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, I do get excited about all the tools we work on. This year we have got a packed roadmap. And one the new things that we're launching is something called Terapeak Insights. We are currently ramped at 75% here in the United States. So three of four sellers store sellers basic and above should have access to the tool. And very shortly, all of our store sellers will have access to the tool. And it's exactly that as you noted, it is a sourcing tool. And what it's designed to do is to show you which categories are in high demand and where there's low supply, right? So if you think about it, the way we do that is we look at all of the search data, all of the impressions data ad we look at the number of search impressions in a particular category relative to the number of listings we have on the platform in that category. And so we create this impressions to listings ratio. And so where we see quite a wide or a large ratio in categories, we identify those as what we call great opportunities. It can do that either on the categories that you sell in, or you can really browse across all of the categories on the platform. You can save categories, the ones that again, you trade in quite often, and it will tell you, in which of those counters, we're seeing this wide ratio again, of impressions to listings. And then once you click into that, what it'll do is it'll show you the top combinations of aspects, right? So these are the items specific. So we're looking at, say, for example, in sneakers, brand and color and department, and we'll identify where we're seeing again, the largest amount of impressions relative to the listings that have those items specifics, right? So in other words, what are buyers particularly looking for in these categories? Where are we seeing lots of search count buyer demand relative to the number of listings. And then that'll take you once you get to that screen, you can click directly into Terapeak the actual pricing data, and it'll show you all of those listings that match that criteria and how they've sold and what the trends are. It's an awesome tool to look for opportunities to go and source very particular items in different categories, know how they're priced on the system right now and go and get some of that inventory and put it up on the platform.
Griff: Yeah. I got a question from a seller this week who said, is there a page that I can go to to find out what the hottest items are in the hottest category? And we really don't have that as a webpage, but what you just explained kind of covers that. So you can go in and find within a specific category, not just what's hot, but what's hot and maybe there's not enough supply of it on the site.
Harry Temkin: Exactly. Right. That's what the tool is designed to do. And as I said, so, you know, it starts there and then it ends up in traditional Terapeak research will then shows you all the combination of listings that have sold say over the last 30 days, 90 days, whatever you might want to look at in terms of historical transactions. And remember, then you can also switch in Terapeak to looking at all the active listings. So it's not just about what's traded, Oh, say the last 30 days or transacted, but then what's on the platform today?
Griff: And this can help guide a seller. Who's not only looking for what's hot, but may want to either expand their product line or maybe change out their entire product line.
Harry Temkin: No, exactly. Right. There's a lot of different ways to use this tool for sure. Ultimately, this is exactly what we designed it for, was to help you understand where demand is, what are buyers looking for on the platform and in which categories is there opportunity to fill a gap in supply. I mean, I also just think it's a great tool from the standpoint of looking at impressions data in particular categories. I mean, obviously we have the traffic page and we've talked a lot about, you know, the new download capability on the traffic page to look at how many impressions you're getting organically versus promoted. That's very specific to your listings. I just happen to like to see what the impression counts are across these various categories, where are we seeing demand and how is that changing over time?
Griff: A lot of sellers may have been using Terapeak for years and think of it primarily as the pricing tool and we changed that.
Harry Temkin: Oh, exactly.I mean, and we're on a continuing journey to enhance Terapeak. If you recall, we talked about how we've expanded the search capability of Terapeak to include items specifics. So the ability to really filter the data and get the searches to be extremely granular to the exact things you're looking for has been a really powerful enhancement. And it's just, you know, made Terapeak that much more powerful in terms of accurate pricing.
Griff: We use Terapeak and determined six months ago that there seemed to be a high demand and a low number of inventory of the site for green new balance sneakers. So what did I do?
Harry Temkin: Opportunity.
Griff: I've been stocking up as much as I can. I like to hold on to stock of specifically sneakers. And I also do this with fragrance. I like to buy sneakers in that category and then I hold onto them for six months to a year. And then when I put them back on the site, I'm the only person that has them and they sell for a lot more.
Harry Temkin: That's a great strategy. And as you know, we've talked a lot about my son as a seller of sneakers. He does the same thing, you know, so there's some opportunities where they sell instantly in a day just because they dropped on that day. And there's really incredible demand, you know, in the secondary market. And then there's times where he says, you know what, that I'm going to hold on to these for a bunch of months, cause I've seen other sneakers and how their price just dramatically increases. You know, I think these are going to be worth a whole lot more in six months time than on the same day that you know, they dropped.
Griff: And we should say here that there's no guarantees in business. I mean the data may say one thing today, but that doesn't mean that six months or a year from now that those same trends will hold. But this is a way of informing your decision in advance to at least where, you know, where we stand today and in the past about what the trends says for a specific category. And now even on the granular level of item specifics within that category, because there may be a high demand for green sneakers, but maybe not so much for purple and that Terapeak data can help guide you in your purchasing.
Harry Temkin: No, exactly. I mean, I think that's the really cool part is getting down to that granular level. It's not just about in the category of athletic shoes, the impressions to listings ratio is high. It's then what combination of characteristics are the ones that are getting the most impressions and limited supply., As you said, knowing that it's just Nike, isn't going to help you it's then what brand, you know, or what model and then what color potentially, or what size is, what really benefits you. And by the way, you said something before, two words, informed decisions. That is exactly how we think about building the analytics that we're building. And it really is about helping sellers make informed decisions. It's one thing to throw a lot of data in front of you, but it's another about how you interpret the data. So we want to present you with the data, but then we want it to be very easy to understand what is it telling me I should be able to do or what I should do. And that's really what all of these new tools are about. The sourcing insights is exactly that make it super easy to understand which of these categories is in play and then show you in the category what's in play and why.
Griff: We've talked about how this a big year for updating the back end platforms for a lot of different systems, including the systems that help collect and then display data that sellers can use in Seller Hub like traffic metrics and sales reports. Is there something happening in that particular area of our universe that you can talk about?
Harry Temkin: We've been on a long journey actually through the course of last year, culminating in the launch of a new back end data platform, which is going to power the displays on the Performance Tab. This backend being all on next generation technology means the ability to store much, much more data to access it much, much faster, and to be able to do a lot more different types of calculations and expand on the data points that we're actually collecting. Today when we talk about sales and cost data, we really just do it at the store level. You can look at your total sales and total costs, by the way, it's not only going to be the database of record, meaning the data that's in there will incorporate the new rate-based FX conversion for payments 2.0 Sellers. It incorporates the real-time fee netting. All of those things will be in this database. It's going to power the new sales cost page, but it's also going to now allow us to do things like break down the sales within a store by category. So whether by eBay category or by store counter, we know that's been for a long time by our sellers. You know, I just that it's like if you were the CEO of your department store and you asked your manager, how did we do in electronics today? He said, well, I can only tell you how the seventh floor did or the whole store did. Now you'll be able to say here's how electronics was doing or here's how fashion is doing in the store. And I think that's really, really important. And again, that's going to tie back to also seeing the performance of different categories and what you may want a source. So tying back to the inventory sourcing, but some of the other big things, how did things sell? Did they sell because of best offer? Did they sell, using seller initiated offers? Did they sell via volume pricing or order discount or markdown manager, right? So the ability really to interrogate the performance of the store via categories, and then by the method that they sold, if you will, so that you get an understanding of which one of say the marketing engine tools work the best for you in a particular category. Of course, it also shows what's sold via promoted listings. And a big one also is to understand if it was a repeat buyer and be able to attract repeat buyers with some of the additional work we'll be doing with the marketing engine tools. This is the types of things that this new backend database is going to allow us to do. The last thing I would note is the capacity. We're going to go back three years worth of data on the sales and cost of platform. And right now you can only download a quarter at a time of data, but you can go back to a year. Very shortly we will open that aperture and allow you to download a full year's worth of data, which will be a significant enhancement to the sales and cost page. And finally, for those sellers that have thousands and thousands of listings you know, the old database, just to have trouble retrieving all of that data at one time. And sometimes our sellers would get errors. Now with the new database, it'll be able to retrieve thousands of listings of data in very, very periods of time.
Griff: This is amazing. I can't wait. And in fact, can you give us a realistic roadmap ahead of what we can expect? Is this going to take a year?
Harry Temkin: No, no, no, no, no. Over the course of this year. Yeah. And so you'll see a lot of these enhancements over the course of this year. This is really the foundation that allows us to build all of these new features in the performance database. Many sellers have asked for these features for a long time. Now that the foundation is complete, we'll be able to start to building these additional capabilities on top of it.
Griff: Well, congratulations to you and your team. I know this is a large effort. It's not easy to do when you're running a site as big and as busy as ours to actually make these kinds of upgrades. If we were starting from scratch. Yeah. It's easy. You just launch a new site, but it's always difficult when you're working on a car while it's moving.
Harry Temkin: Absolutely. I kind of refer to it as you're always kind of upgrading the airplane while you're flying, actually.
Griff: That is even worse. Harry, It's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. I appreciate every time that you take time out from your busy day to talk to us and we always learn something. So thanks again.
Harry Temkin: Oh my pleasure. Happy to be here.
Griff: Harry Temkin is the Vice President Of Seller Experience on eBay. As new features do roll out this year we'll have Harry back on to go into more detail on what they can do and how they can benefit you in managing and running your business. I.
Griff: In our last episode, we featured part one of our conversation with eBay seller, Alec Larson of Larson Enterprises. This week, we continue with part two of that conversation by focusing on how Alec sources for his auto parts business. Remind us again, the different ways that you source product for your business, which again is primarily auto parts.
Alec Larson: Back when I got into e-commerce, the main challenge was finding hot selling products. How do you find a hot selling product? You know, I have to get on a trend. You have to find a trend. And what's cool about the model that I'm using is that it primarily runs on slow moving inventory. Inventory that I could take sometimes a year or two to sell one part. But the X factor there is that you have much less competition. You have a lower cost in inventory. You have a bigger access to a larger supply of inventory. I think you have a more consistent cashflow and you can predict things a little bit more consistently. So the challenge is though, is that it's a little more time consuming because you're going to have to be refreshing inventory. You're always going to have new inventory coming in. You're not going to have the same SKU. Once I have a product, it's likely that once it sells, I probably won't ever have that same part number again.
Griff: You won't have a restock for that one item. Even if you do have multiple quantities of it, once you're out, you're out and you're probably never going to have it again.
Alec Larson: Exactly, it's gone. Whereas if you had your basic model that works where you're buying from a supplier, you're buying this product, you know, it's going to sell, it's going to turn this many times a year. And that's great. That works. With this model, what's cool about this one is anybody can get into this with a small investment. You can start very small grow without a huge investment. There was one really cool example where I paid about $154 for a pallet of GM parts. It ended up being worth around 1,800 in total value. And I made that initial investment back with maybe selling two parts. You take that to any sort of niche industry, . It could be printer ink from Office Depot closing up shop in your local town or industrial parts, hydraulic parts, washer, and dryer parts. The model is you're investing in not just one single SKU. You're spreading that out and having an assorted selection of inventory. So that way you can recoup that initial investment continue snowballing it, growing your inventory amount, growing the cash flow. And that gets you started. And it's a great way to get started because you learn all the initial mistakes with shipping and all this. I really liked that model. So with sourcing to get on the actual question, I'm, I'm running off on a tangent, but the sourcing is great because I have several different methods of looking for inventory. I initially started off with the basic auction sites that I'm sure everybody knows. You know, you've got, I think Bstockliquidation.com. You've got a lot of the government surplus websites and then your local auctioneers, you'd be surprised at how many there are out there. And just calling them and getting on their email lists. I'm in auto parts and that's its own niche, but there's so many different niches out there that are probably even better than what I'm in now. That's where I started and I still use auction sites today. The other supply route I use is in automotive parts. So a lot of my inventory is OEM. It's primarily, like I mentioned before Ford, GM.
Griff: We should mentioned that people who were restoring cars or fixing cars are always going to give preference to an OEM original equipment manufacturer. For example, I've had Chryslers in the past and you want to buy what are called MOPAR parts because you know, they're going to fit, you know, they're high quality, you know what you're getting as opposed to something which may be a compatible part and cheaper, but wasn't made by the original manufacturer.
Alec Larson: Absolutely. And the cool thing about the market is a lot of times I can compete with the aftermarket version of a part with the OEM version, because your cost in it is much lower than if you were to say, if you're paying 80% of cost for a part, you really can't afford to take your original OEM alternator and price it below the cheap knockoff brand. But a lot of the times, because I have such a low cost in it, I can do that and not even worry about competing and for buyers it's great because they just saved hundreds of dollars on a part that they would have to go to a dealership to buy, or they would have to go to a manufacturer. You can go on eBay and find it for much cheaper and quickly and quickly. Exactly. And so think about that with the different areas of different industries like washer and dryer, electronics parts, the same concept can apply. If you can pay for a lot, like as in a bulk load of some of these products, you're going to have a lot of time invested in listing them and getting sorting through them, making sure they're not broken, but your return is going to be much higher. It's going to be much more worth the work and you're going to provide value to the market because you're giving buyers a great deal on parts. You're usually cheaper than the list prices.
Griff: For auto parts, you actually contact dealers directly in your area. Have you established relationships with specific dealers that you can go back to over and over again?
Alec Larson: Oh yeah. That was always part of the growth plan was adding more and more dealers to the not rolodex, but in my contact list. And what's interesting is I had no idea how it worked when I started, I was, I never worked at a dealership. I don't know who to even talk to. So I just said, all right, I'm just going to start calling. So I called, I think I probably called 10 and got some confusing no’s just because I really didn't know what I was talking about. I'm calling there. Hey, I, um, I sell stuff online and I was wondering if you have junk parts to sell or something like, uh, old parts to sell. I don't know?. And then I finally, I think contacted one dealership and I ended up leaving a voicemail and he called me back and he's like, I've got a list I can send you of stuff. And then that sparked, the other challenge was figuring out what's a fair price to pay and figuring out what value you're providing to the dealership as well. So you have your customer that you're selling to, but you also have to make another customer happy and that's the supplier you're buying from. And so if you're buying out, say a hardware store or something, you're liquidating their inventory for them, instead of them throwing it out, you're taking that off their hands or clearing out the shelves for more inventory or giving them capital to reinvest. You keep those two in mind that essentially that your supplier in my case, my supplier is a customer as well.
Griff: You mentioned that your first couple of calls didn't go so well, have you developed now a kind of, I don't want to call it a spiel, but almost a script of how you would approach a dealer who you've never spoken to on the phone before to help make yourself sound more serious and professional?
Alec Larson: I think sounding not too professional, not sounding too much like a big service or something because a lot of these businesses get calls every day. So I just kind of approach it as normal as I can, as authentic as I can, as transparent and as honest as I can, I usually say " I do online sales. I do e-commerce and I help dealerships liquidate inventory. Um, if you have anything that you'd be interested in selling, give me a call back, or if you want to send me a list of things." And so I usually do that and usually I don't hear back and I used to go sort of above and beyond. I would go in and I would just appear inside the dealership. I'd walk in and meet people, bring donuts or something. And so usually that works. So then I've developed some relationships where I get calls on a quarterly basis or someone will send a list over. And that was the one thing that I was looking for. I wanted something consistent as far as supply, and that gives you confidence moving forward, because you know that there's inventory out there. You learn so much. I mean, I learned everything I know from just talking to parts managers. That right there is enough of a benefit to the cold calling.
Griff: Just getting that knowledge, that institutional knowledge.
Alec Larson: I mean, there's just so much opportunity. And especially this coming year with seemingly a lot of other businesses going online, some businesses liquidating a lot of their inventory. Like I mentioned, hardware stores, you've got office supply stores. Those are filled with huge inventory opportunity, just like automotive parts. You can buy truckloads of inventory from like, I think Lowe's and Walmart, if you have the means to store some of that stuff, there's just so much opportunity there for other niche items as well.
Griff: You have by nature, long tail merchandise, that's merchandise that once it's sourced and in your inventory, it's probably gonna take a while to sell. Is there some point though, when inventory that you have and hasn't sold, do you actually do your own liquidation occasionally of inventory that just isn't moving?
Alec Larson: I have a system for each part. I try to assign each part, a lifespan or a plan for that item. And so I like to list something at a competitive price for a month. Then I want to maybe run a special on that part. Maybe a 15% discount or best offer. I wish I could get the number of how many of my sales actually go because of best offer. But I would imagine it's more than half. And with having less invested in it, you can afford to do that. I like to try to revisit old parts as often as I can. And I usually don't let a part go, i'm probably wrong on this, but I like to go back every six months on a part, because a lot of people use software to do this to competitively price things automatically make the price lower and that's awesome. I've used that before and it works, but I found that even going back and finding that I spelled something wrong in the title or I didn't space something out. I like to first do that. Especially if the part's been sitting for a year, I'll take it down, end the listing, revisit it, edit the picture, maybe change the picture, maybe add data, change the title. Maybe there's something that title that I had in the beginning that should have been towards the end. And I will relist it as a completely new item ID. And that usually puts it in sort of a new flow or algorithm. Maybe it puts it in a higher priority on the email list. Maybe a new buyer runs across it. That's one method. I really try to dedicate time and re listing and re editing older listings. There's parts that we'll just have no hope of selling. And what's funny is I'll have trim panels that are, it's a big box. It has no chance of selling, and I'll just throw it away.
Griff: Just throw it away?
Alec Larson: And just get rid of it. And then all of a sudden, not a day later, or even the same day, someone will buy it. And I hadn't taken it down and I'll have to take a ding on that for getting rid of it. But I'm like, thinking, should I never throw away parts because you just don't know, it's so random.
Griff: But you have limited space. You have finite space in your warehouse.
Alec Larson: Right, exactly. But just getting creative, like I had three pallets of snow chains from one of the auctions. And I'm thinking that there's no way I'm going to get rid of these. I can't even scrap them for metal, but it took them like three or four months before I started selling snow chains. I was selling the snow chains. You really don't know what's going to sell. And if you have the space, it almost makes sense to hang onto it. Especially if you've already recouped your initial investment, why not hold onto it? There are things that I like to do where I will throw some things out and just get rid of them. Mostly the big things, but I really like to hold on to older stuff, just because I've been surprised at what has sold.
Griff: When we were talking earlier you mentioned about online auctions. What are some of the things that you would advise a seller who's interested in exploring these that they need to look out for? They need to plan for, you know, for example, do all of them require you setting up an account? How do you pay them? What's the shipping situation? Is there a sales tax issue? Some I know are cash only how should a seller set up so that they can get started quicker.
Alec Larson: So it's really simple. A lot of the auction sites up and coming make it really safe to buy. They handle the payments. Some of them even handle the shipping, where they have software in there that can give you a quote and they set you up with a freight company. And I would say the only thing to really look out for is do your due diligence obviously. A lot of the sites have a manifest of what you're buying and I can't stress it enough to try to find an auction lot or site that has a manifest of what you're buying. Especially if you're using a significant amount of money to invest in that thing.
Griff: You don't want to mystery box.
Alec Larson: Yeah. Sometimes it works out. I mean, it's worked out for me before, but it's not wise to do that. That's the one thing I would say is as far as to be careful, I mean, I spend hours sometimes just looking over a manifest sheet. And when you're on the auction side and you're going through a manifest, you have the ultimate tool on eBay. In the sales history, you have a manifest of parts on an auction. You can copy and paste the part number or the SKU or UPC code. And then you could see what that product is sold for. It can't be more easy than that. That's one thing is I will go through an entire manifest, even if it takes me days, it gives me an accurate value of what that lot is worth. I can say, okay, this is my max bid. My freight cost is going to be this. And I think that's absolutely necessary to do for a seller. For the most part, you're able to use credit cards on those auctions when they get to higher dollar amounts, some of the auction sites require you to send wire transfers. I mostly do that now, but I remember the first one I did, it was $11,000. And I wired it to like a sanitation department somewhere in New York. And I remember being scared to death because it was the biggest investment I ever made. I just sent it off. The banker was looking at me like, are you sure? I said, yeah. And at the same time I had to book, a freight shipment, and I'd never done that before. There's a semi-truck that's going to show up? Do they need a forklift? Do they need a lift gate? You have to keep all these things in mind. Is the inventory you're buying, Is it close to home? If so, that's great. Is it out of state? Okay, that's fine. As long as it's on a pallet, are you able to afford the freight cost to get it back to your location? So those are the main factors. And once you navigate your first couple things, start to get less scary. I'm much less nervous buying a big, a lot of inventory now and getting that initial couple ones out of the way.
Griff: You gain the confidence that you know how to do the research. You know what your top bid is? You can easily say I'm going to get it for this, or I'm not going to get it. Exactly. And I would say there's one obvious one that we really haven't touched on too much. If you're going to be buying stuff like this, make sure you have a place to put it.
Alec Larson: Exactly. Yeah. I sacrifice my living room to make it a warehouse to bootstrap and it worked. So don't be afraid to sort of get creative with shipping containers if you've got land and you can put a shipping container on the land. Storage unit storage units are pretty cheap, but an enclosed trailer, a seven by 16 enclosed trailer that you can have in your driveway, maybe that's storage.
Griff: The one caveat is to make sure you're not in violation of HOA if you're under one or your local zoning ordinances, who may look not kindly on you using a residential property to run an obvious business. Now like when it comes to researching, do you ever use Terapeak?
Alec Larson: Absolutely. I was just going to mention Terapeak as well, because you can go back a year on the sales history on Terapeak. I like Terapeak and I would say for tips on using Terapeak in that search bar, look a year back. If your part numbers or your UPC codes have hyphens in them, take the hyphens out. Experiment and really take the time because it'll pay off in the end. But yeah, Terapeak, they just sort of added thatI think on the eBay research tab, I love it.
Griff: Alec, It's been a really interesting conversation. I have some ideas for myself in case I need to retire from eBay and start looking for stuff. I promise I'm not probably going to go into auto parts. It's not of an interest to me but there are other things that are. But you don't seem to be scared of competition. You believe the market just in a, in a niche like auto parts is so big that there's room for other sellers.
Alec Larson: Yeah. And obviously I'm small in comparison to my competitors. I mean, there's so many bigger companies out there and I mean, I think it's a $200 to $300 billion industry anyway. So I am just a very small drop in the bucket, but there is so much opportunity as far as acquiring a lot of inventory in all different sectors right now, especially in this sort of transition time, it feels like where everything is going to be moving online. And if you acquire those assets, now, it could be a really cool five years, 10 years of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ride that wave of e-commerce.
Griff: That's the important word there. Opportunity. Alec. I want to thank you again. This has been a great conversation. If you don't mind, we'd love to check in on you again in maybe six months and see how business is going. Hopefully we'll be out of the pandemic by then.
Alec Larson: Hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. And then I'm not selling any sort of course, or I don't have a community or anything or a website, but if you guys have questions for me or want to reach out to me, you can obviously find my eBay handle. I guess the best way to get in touch with me would be through Instagram. Just my name, Alec Larson, shoot me a message or something.
Griff: Well, that's very generous of you. We'll put both links to your store and to your Instagram in our transcript for episode 128, but there's also the same information in 127 as well.
Griff: Alec, Thanks again.
Alec Larson: Thanks again, Griff.
Griff: We've been speaking with Alec Larson. His user ID on eBay is larsonenterprises. And we'll put that link as I said, in our episode transcript.
Rebecca: You’ve got questions.
Griff: We’ve got answers. Oh boy, do we got the answers.
Rebecca: Oh, it's my favorite part of the week.
Griff: Every two weeks you mean .
Rebecca: Well, you know, technicalities.
Griff: What's a calendar? Useless really.
Rebecca: I love this. I love hearing from the sellers, finding out what their questions are and getting them the answers they need.
Griff: Right. And we like to remind our sellers that if you want to send your questions in, you can either use (888) 723-4630.. To leave a message or you can email us at podcast@ebay.com. Our first question was called into that hotline at (999)723-4630, let's listen,
Guest caller: Guys. This is Patrick with speckinc. Love the show. Love what you guys provide, which is tons of information. And it gets me motivated to list more and more and more, and really get my eBay business moving forward for success. My question, when accepting a best offer and then having a buyer not pay for the item, I have to relist the item and I lose all the Watchers. Is there anything that eBay can maybe set up for us where when we accept the best offer, we don't lose all the Watchers this way. We still have a chance to sell it to another buyer who may be interested in the item. Thank you.
Griff: Thank you, Patrick. Rebecca?
Rebecca: It's a fair question. And something that we know is, you know, top of mind for many sellers. How can they make the reality of unpaid items more successful? I think it's a really interesting question to figure out how can we help these sellers retain all their Watchers?
Griff: I mean, ultimately, without making any promises, eBay's seriously looking at all of these sort of legacy situations from the old days of eBay. But in the meantime, there is, I discovered in research, something that Patrick can do when it comes to Watchers in this situation.
Rebecca: Really? What does that look like?
Griff: It's interesting cause it's something we talked about last week. It involves the stockout option. If you listened to our show last week, our last episode, 127, Brian and I talked about as part of a question that came in and we talked in depth about stockout. And what stockout is, is this a setting that you can set as a seller in your site preferences in My eBay account, where you can for your fixed price listings, Oh, you can opt into this. And what will happen is when the item has sold out and so if it's a quantity of 10 and you sell all 10, or if it's a quantity of one and you sell that one, instead of the listing actually ending, it goes into a status called out of stock. And for an out of stock item, there's no purchases. It can be made once it's out of stock until you then put quantity back in. The way it was meant to be used was primarily for sellers who have lots of multiple quantity, fixed price listings, and maybe the item goes out of stock. They don't want the listing to end because they don't want to lose what we talked about last week, the sales and impression data for that item. One other thing also sticks to that item. And that's the Watchers who have it in their watch list, or even in their cart where they're thinking about buying it. So in those cases, you could utilize that option if this happens enough to you so that it's a concern. And there's an item that has a lot of Watchers. If you have a situation where the offer results in an unpaid item for that listing, the buyer doesn't pay, you can go back, change the quantity to one that will relist it. If it's a single quantity item and you won't lose any of the previous Watchers.
Rebecca: I like it. That's amazing.
Griff: And it surprised me because I had no idea. Harry actually was the one who told me this happens. Now a lot of sellers don't like the stockout option because they get confused with the stockout option. If you opt in, not your auctions, but all your fixed price listings, when they reach a quantity of zero, they don't show up in your ended view. They show up still in the active view, but with a quantity of zero and some sellers found this confusing and we're concerned, what if the buyer tries to buy the item? And I don't have any stock it's out. it's zero. Rest assured that when a listing, a fixed price listing that is under that status of stockout, it can't be found in search. And even if they could find it, they're not going to be able to buy anything from it because it shows a quantity of zero. So you can't accidentally sell. The only thing where this may be an issue is if you have somehow automation set up, especially maybe with a third party app, for example, that relist your items automatically and puts in the original quantity. That could be an issue. So make sure if you're going to use this option with this in mind, you know, protecting your Watchers for each of the listings where you might have an unpaid item, that your listings aren't subject to automation that could list them with your original quantity. That could be an issue. And the other issue that we talked about in this, and this will be a seller concern is, well, what do I pay for that out of stock option? When a listing is in the out of stock status and it's considered above your allotment for whatever your store subscription is for, you know, your insertion fees, you may get charged insertion fee for that, but if you don't change the stock from zero to some amount, you get a credit in your next invoice, you don't end up paying for using the stockout option for listings where you don't go in and relist them right away. The nice thing about this, it's also a way for people with fixed price listings that go in and out of season, for example, or they don't know when they're going to get their next quantity available, you can keep it in the stockout status until you get the quantity back in to sell, and then you can increase the quantity to whatever. And it goes back live and any Watchers, any sales and impression data stays right with the listing. So that's it.
Rebecca: All right. That's great news. Thanks Griff.
Griff: Okay. Our next question was sent to podcast@ebay.com and Rebecca, give me a break. Why don't you read it?
Rebecca: Okay. I will. So our next question says, "hi, Griff and Rebecca and Brian. I was researching some sourcing ideas and came across a conversation on social media, about drop shipping. From the comments It seems that a lot of eBay sellers use drop shipping to find products to sell, but some of the people commenting also said that drop shipping was prohibited on eBay. Of course I was confused. But then I thought to ask you folks on the podcast. What is considered drop shipping and is it really not allowed on eBay? Thanks from Brenda. "
Rebecca: Thanks, Brenda. Let's start with a definition. Drop shipping is listing and selling products that are not in your possession. For example, merchandise that you purchase from a manufacturer or a second party on a just-in-time basis, JIT just in time, the seller lists the products. And then when one of themselves that seller contacts the manufacturer with a payment and a shipping address, the manufacturer then sends the product directly to the buyer.
Griff: Wow, Rebecca, I had no idea. You knew so much about this.
Rebecca: I picked up a few things in my time here at Griff.
Griff: The obvious advantage we're ended to using drop shipping is that the seller doesn't have to hold inventory on her end. Most sellers who utilize the drop shipping component to their businesses have done a lot of research. They've really, really researched heavily to find reliable sources of product. And then they establish a business relationship with that drop shipper.
Rebecca: And look, the thing here is that it's all about reliability, right? If a drop shipper messes up, it's eBay seller that ends up taking the hit and another downside or risk to think about is returns. A seller has to establish an agreement with a drop-shipper on how returns will work, how the drop shipper will assist if at all with facilitating returns or like it could get complicated.
Griff: It could. So you want to get that out of the way beforehand, before you make any commitment to a contract or agreement with a drop shipper.Brenda, what some of the comments you're reading about eBay, not allowing drop shipping were probably with regards to eBay's prohibiting some types of drop shipping, not all drop shipping specifically. The one that's prohibited is using another retail site or marketplace as a source for products. Although eBay doesn't prohibit drop shipping from a manufacturer, any company that provides the service exclusively to the wholesale trade. What eBay doesn't allow is sellers to drop ship from like online retail sites or other marketplaces where buyers can also purchase the same products directly. The distinction is, of course, if it's not that you can't sell items that you purchased on those marketplaces or those retailers, but you have to have possession of the items. The key is that you are shipping them directly to the buyer's location. You're not having the online site or the marketplace ship. Like it's a gift to the buyer. That's, what's prohibited.
Rebecca: Exactly say that there's a product that you know, is for sale on walmart.com, cup and saucer or something like that. And you have the cup and saucer for sale in your eBay store. And then as soon as someone buys it, you go to walmart.com, you buy the thing, but you put in your buyer's address and ship it directly to that buyer. That's just, what's not allowed.
Griff: Now I know this may sound a little confusing, but think of it again like this. If you have an established relationship with a source of products who doesn't sell directly to consumers and who will ship directly to your buyers on your behalf, that's allowed. But if you're sourcing products on a just-in-time basis from an online retail site or marketplace, that is you don't have prior possession of the products, but instead you purchase the product from an online retail site or a marketplace immediately after a buyer makes the purchase. And then you have that site or marketplace ship the item to the buyer that is definitely not allowed. It's a really bad experience. And it happens to me sometimes on eBay. And I hate it. I just hate it.
Rebecca: Yeah. And I mean, basically you just can't insert yourself in between a transaction that in theory could happen between a buyer and the marketplace. A buyer could go right to Walmart, buy the same thing. You can't get in the middle of that. And then there's another consideration that comes to mind. Most companies that provide a legitimate drop shipping options are usually servicing other eBay sellers as well. So unless you're establishing some kind of new niche market, or you have a pledge, a vow from your drop shipper, that they're not supplying the same product to other sellers, you might find that the resulting competition might cut your margins pretty steeply to make it worth your while. Search carefully, always ask a lot of questions before you establish a contact or arrangement with a drop shipper. So drop shipping is allowed. There are some guard rails and, you know, do your research.
Griff: Do your research. Exactly. Rebecca, I couldn't have said that any better.
Rebecca: Thanks, Griff. All right. So if you have a question about selling on eBay, why not call us at (888) 723-4630.
Griff: (888) 723-4630. Oh. And you know what? I wanted to bring up something here. We're exploring the idea of having live calls, which they will be live when we call, but we'll, you know, they'll be part of the podcast where we'll have some of our people who submit questions, call us, and record with us. Instead of having us just read their parts. So that's coming up and all you have to do is just call us at at (888) 723-4630 with your question, we'll call you back and we'll set up a time when we can record you.
Rebecca: Absolutely. And that's only if you really want to, and if you're not a call on the phone person, you can always email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.
Griff: Okay. I think we've covered everything. So it's time for your daily podcast to do list.
Rebecca: First of all, check the announcement board for up to date seller news,
Griff: Thermal printer.
Rebecca: Griff, you just won't stop will you?
Griff: Thermal printer.
Rebecca: And then of course, check out the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to see the links that we referenced during the episode.
Griff: Join us next week, when Liz Austin will be here to share news of the 50 Up And Running Grant Winners,
Rebecca: Such an exciting program. And then finally, we'd like to, again, thank our guests this week. Vice President Of Seller Experience Harry Temkin and eBay seller Alec Larson.
Griff: The eBay For Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.
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The eBay for Business podcast is published every Tuesday morning and is presented by eBay, Libsyn and Podcast411.
