Ep 223 || Sourcing from Storage Auctions

[podcast_team]

Jessica Oman of Storage Warriors on eBay shares her experience buying and selling the contents of foreclosed storage units. Griff and Brian answer a question about printing labels for eBay Standard Envelope; a seller tip on Time Away; and the Listing Quality Report .

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Episode Links:
2023 FedEx rate changes
Winter Storms Update
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Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff. And this is the eBay For Business Podcast. Your source for the information and the inspiration to help you start, manage and grow your business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 223.

Brian: The first one of the year.

Griff: First one of the year.

Brian: Well, happy New year, Griff.

Griff: Happy new Year. It's a great time of the year to take stock about last year. And figure out how you're gonna use what you learned last year from selling and running a business on eBay to make it even better this year.

Brian: If I think about last year, there were a lot of adjustments that sellers had to make because as we finally started to come out of Covid, things started to change and there was a little bit more variability with sales and people had to think about how do they market their items a little bit more and strategize. And so I think we'll probably see more of that in 2023.

Griff: I think you're right. I think we'll definitely see more of that.

Brian: It's always changing, isn't it?

Griff: It is. We'll be bringing a full roster of up to 52 shows again this year.

Brian: Hooray. You'll have me on once in a while I hope ?. I am kidding.

Griff: You know how I feel about doing the show alone.

Brian: Well, do we have any guests for this very, very first week of January Griff?

Griff: We actually do have a guest for this first show. Our guest this week is a a seller. She sells on eBay. And her name is Jessica Oman. Her user ID is Storage Warriors. And I spoke to Jessica just before the holidays last month and we had a great conversation about how she got started on eBay, going to storage auctions in Vancouver, Canada, which is her home base. She's quite an amazing seller and more tips and ideas about where to find inventory.

Brian: Fantastic. And then any news?

Griff: I'm supposed to ask you that.

Brian: Oh, You are. I'm outta sync.

Griff: Yeah. Brian, don't let what I told you, go to your head. Okay, here we go. Brian, I wonder if there's any news this week, .

Brian: Well we do finally have some news to relay.

Griff: Oh, good.

Brian: Topics are the recently announced FedEx rate changes that went into effect on January 2nd and an update on Winter Storm Elliot. So let's start with Elliot.

Griff: Elliot!

Brian: If your business was impacted by Winter Storm Elliot, eBay will automatically protect your seller performance, including your late shipment rate and valid tracking upload rate, and any item not received cases due to late delivery as long as you uploaded tracking before the case was opened and have a physical scan from the carrier. eBay will also remove any defects resulting from transactions you canceled and will remove any associated negative and neutral feedback. Finally, these cases will not impact your service metrics rating.

Griff: Oh, that's good news.

Brian: It is, yeah. And our second item this week, FedEx has updated their rates for 2023, which went into effect January 2nd. We will be sure to announce USPS and UPS rate changes as soon as they are available. FedEx shipping services rates will increase an average of 5.1% for FedEx ground, 5.9% for FedEx home delivery and 5.5% for FedEx. Two day delivery.

Griff: Inflation

Brian: Inflation. To make things easier for you, the eBay Shipping Calculator will display the new rates on the date they go into effect, which was January 2nd.

Griff: Yesterday. If you're listening on a Tuesday the third. Well Brian, thanks. And uh, as we always do, we'll post links to the announcement and we'll post a link to the shipping calculator in the summary overview for episode 223, which you can find at ebay.com/podcast. Not surprised the rates kind of went down for the holiday season. Now that's over. So FedEx goes, oh put 'em back up now.

Brian: yes. And it's kind of that uh, first of the year, first month or two of the year. This seems to be the time the carriers and others increase their rates.

Griff: Yeah, I'm expecting the other shoe to drop any moment, which is USPS. They always announce in January. So we'll see what happens.

Brian: It's probably also an opportunity for sellers to take a look at their carrier and do some price comparisons cuz they don't always apply to everything equally. Sometimes UPS raises something like say freight more than they do others. And you might find that it's worthwhile to take a look.

Griff: I did that a year or so ago and I discovered, and now I'm using 'em all the time, is I was a USPS guy for years. Almost everything I was USPS and now it's mostly UPS ground.

Brian: Interesting.

Griff: Fast service. Much better on price.

Brian: Will they pick up?

Griff: They will if you have an account. Okay. Yeah, it's not as easy I think as with USPS.

Brian: You just schedule it.

Griff: I think with FedEx you have to have an account but you know, I mean with UPS you have to have an account but the UPS office in San Jose here is just right downtown and I actually kind of look forward to the little trip every day. I get out of the house I drive by San Jose State.

Brian: You say go Spartans, like I did in Boise as we lost a ballgame.

Griff: I'm sorry to hear that.

Brian: It was a great experience even though we lost.

Griff: Did they lose cuz it was so cold?

Brian: Well they were playing eastern Michigan, but that's not why we lost. Turn over the ball too many times, you don't normally win.

Griff: Yeah. So I hear well there it is. Anyway, so in the meantime we have some questions. Yeah, we'll have questions in a little bit and we'll answer. And uh, before we even start with our interview, I just wanna remind people, hey, we need your questions. So if you're on the fence right now, send them in to podcasts@ebay.com where you can call (888)723-4630. And remember, your question is appropriate. We'll put it on the air and you will win a mug.

Brian: Till we're out,

Griff: Which is coming close.

Brian: And then we have some new items. So you are gonna, maybe we shouldn't tell people.

Griff: Why?

Brian: Because they might hold their questions till the new items come.

Griff: Well we can't get the new item until I think now the beginning of March. Yeah. So you just have to send in another question. I'm sorry. But you start your collection this way of eBay Podcast swag-alia. If there's such a word. Okay, let's roll my interview with Jessica.

Griff: I know I've talked a lot about it in the past few months. We had such a wonderful experience meeting sellers and recording them back at the Reseller Remix event in Las Vegas a few months ago. Last October last year. It was great fun being in the podcast booth with Rebecca. But we didn't get to hear any of the speakers cuz we were in there for one day recording straight. And I remember that our first interview that we recorded, there's a lot of background noise of people cheering and applauding and I thought wow, that must be some speaker. And later I found out. Yep, it was. Just because we missed her at the event doesn't mean we miss her here. I wanna welcome eBay seller, Jessica Oman. She has a store on eBay Storage Warriors but her business is Storage Warrior. Why the difference? Jessica? Well first welcome.

Jessica: Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I couldn't get the uh, singular Storage Warrior username. Turns out Storage Warrior is kind of a popular phrase due to the show and it being similar to the name of the show. So I had to jiggle things around a little bit to get the usernames that I wanted. But our store on eBay is Storage Warrior Canada and our eBay username is storage_warriors. So very close.

Griff: So you're based in Canada?

Jessica: We are in Vancouver.

Griff: Oh, such a lovely city. Great food.

Jessica: We pay for that . Yes.

Griff: But it's worth it, isn't it?

Jessica: Most days.

Griff: Tell us how you got started. When did you get started and how did storage auctions figure into it?

Jessica: Sure. My husband and I used to really like watching the, the storage auction show maybe 10 years ago now. And we were just sitting on the couch one day going, I wonder if they do that here. And it turned out that they did. We found an auction nearby that was coming up and I remember the auction process being really slow. It took, we were there al almost the whole day and we ended up buying the last locker of the day. I think it was $230 we spent on it. And we were like, what did we just get ourselves into. Pulling things out of this huge vault unit and just spreading them all, all over the floor. We were like, we just bought a whole pile of junk but we found a whole collection of Royal Albert China in there in a pretty collectible pattern. And so we ended up making a fair amount of money without knowing at all what we were doing. And that just hooked us. We were like, we can get better at this. We can figure out how to make money and have a great little side hustle here. So we just started buying more and more storage units, loving the process, figuring out how to sell things, learning about collectibles, keeping things out of landfill. Like all of the aspects of what we were doing were so much fun that eventually we both just quit our jobs. did it full-time.

Griff: And what year are we talking? How long ago?

Jessica: Um, my husband left his job I believe in 2015 and I stopped consulting in 2017. I still maintained a moonlight position as a university professor until just last year, but it was very, very part-time.

Griff: How did that go subsequently from that first uh, storage auction where you made some money? Did that continue? Did you find more storage auctions and what happened?

Jessica: The first year, I think we sold maybe $10,000 worth of stuff and we were like, that's pretty good side hustle. And then the next year we doubled it and then the next year we doubled it and the next year we doubled it and we were like, okay, we have a business. I mean we can't get kid ourselves here and this is actually a business and both of us are really interested in doing things efficiently, getting the most out of our time. We're definitely like work hard, play hard kind of people and we just kind of got into it to see how far we could take it. And after a few years the auctions started to go online, which was too bad because the whole experience of going out with all of the other people who were bidding and getting to know them, I mean it was very much like the show. We had these funny banter and silly relationships with the other sort of characters, and then it went online and that was fine. I mean we were still buying units but as we got closer and closer to the pandemic, the prices just got too high and we had to stop doing it for a couple of years. But we're just starting to get back into it now.

Griff: So why do you think that happened during the pandemic that prices went so high? Was this sort of boredom buying on the, the part of newbies that said, Hey, we're stuck inside and uh, we have nothing to do. Let's spend half of our life savings on these storage units though we have no idea what's in them?

Jessica: Well I think the process of it going online just allowed a lot more people into the system and convinced more of them to try it out cuz you can bid from home. So it was before the pandemic that things that the prices really started to creep up. When the show was at its peak, you had lots of people interested in it and with the auctions being online, it was very accessible. So the prices were already going up. And then during the pandemic it was so difficult to source in other ways, yard sales and estate sales weren't happening in the same way. You couldn't buy collections as much cuz people didn't want you in their homes. The thrift stores were closed. A lot of the other avenues that people had for sourcing dried up. But the auctions didn't stop.

Griff: You stopped using them during the pandemic because of the prices. What did you do for sourcing inventory as an alternative during that period of time?

Brian: It was challenging because partly because we were selling so fast. I mean I think a lot of other sellers experienced a real uptick in their sales during the pandemic. And so we were actually trying hard to keep up with that. And so we did manage to, you know, as things would sort of loosen up a little bit and people would get a little more comfortable, we would kind of work some leads and sort of meeting people outside their houses or going to outdoor estate sales when they would happen. You know, people still move, people still downsize the pandemic didn't stop any of those things from happening. So there were still opportunities there but they were few and far between. So when we managed to get a collection, we would just try to buy as much as we possibly could cuz we didn't know when the next collection would come in. It was very piecemeal and it kind of still is. I would say that yard sales and estate sales here in Vancouver have not picked up to their pre pandemic levels. So some of our sourcing avenues are still pretty thin, but it is starting to get a little bit better and we ha have managed to buy a couple of storage units in the last few weeks.

Griff: So you are back at it.

Jessica: We're back at it. Wetting the whistle.

Griff: One of the fun appeals about storage unit auctions has always been that you're bidding on something that you either don't get to see or you only get to look in and peer through the door. How do they lay out the inventory or do they lay out the inventory for a storage unit on an online auction?

Jessica: It's pretty bad. Some, some of the facilities will only take one or two pictures. Sometimes they're blurry. It's pretty challenging to bid and you can't smell it, which is really important. You do wanna be able to smell it. Cause I mean cigarettes, cats, I mean those kinds of odors, if they come off of a unit, you're just not gonna pay as much for it. So for us, we're trying to be smart buyers and we withdrew a little bit because you couldn't get in there with the flashlight and see as many things. Whereas I guess other people are just willing to gamble. The thing is, in all the hundreds of storage units that we bought over the years, I think we only lost money maybe three times. And there's always some way in there to recoup your investment. So even when the prices go up, you're still likely to make money. It just won't be quite as profitable. And I think that those bidders who are still willing to take those big gambles and pay a lot are probably for the most part, not losing every time, but it's definitely harder and harder to make a profit. We were just bidding on a unit last week that had all this vintage furniture in it, boxes you could see had been taped up for 20 years. I mean it was old stuff and we were like, we'll bid this to $1,100 and it was pretty small unit and it went to $3,000. We were like, never mind.

Griff: Geez. And after does the winner show off what they got? I mean, I know in a real auction you might, if you're there face-to-face in the pH physical world but online you don't get to see it.

Jessica: No. I really miss that actually showing up with the other bidders who bought units at the same facility and you show up at the same time and compare notes. , I wish that would still happen.

Griff: The relationships that you've you developed with other bidders over the course of your time going to these live auctions of storage units sometimes on the show. I remember watching it and thinking this may, it may be staged with these sort of disputes, but there were people that did not seem to get along.

Jessica: There were disputes. Oh okay. Don't get me wrong. But there was also lots of collaboration. There's some of the facilities would do silent auctions, you know, where you'd just write your bid on a piece of paper and hand that in. And at a couple of times we would just collude if only a few people showed up, we would be like, okay, you're getting this unit, you're getting this unit, you're getting this unit. We're all bidding a dollar. And then the facilities were like, ah, we see what you did there.

Griff: And there's nothing they can really do about it right.

Jessica: Nah. You know, but they, what they need is their space back. That's the value. I mean that's why they have to get those units empty cuz there's so much money in space.

Griff: Yeah, I I guess whatever it takes. Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah, yeah. And I, I do, I miss that kind of back and forth and the banter and sometimes we'd get a little upset with each other, thought somebody overpaid for something or someone would try to bully somebody else out of a unit. But it was, I mean in the end it was just all fun and games and we all knew each other and and played those games together. But now that it's all online, that's, that's all gone and I kind of miss it. ,

Griff: What was the most remarkable thing that you can recall finding in a unit that you won?

Jessica: Most remarkable thing? It's always such a difficult question to answer and I've probably answered it 150 times.

Griff: You found that many remarkable things?

Jessica: Well we really have. I mean some of these units were just incredible. Our units, they would get nicknames, we'd have like the Awesome Locker, the Russian Locker, the Silver Locker, and we would just refer to them when we'd sell things from them. But the Silver Locker was probably one of the most remarkable ones. That was a unit that had been sitting for probably a couple of decades or more. Had a lot of old turn of the century stuff in it. Uh, one of the items in there was a photo album from the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds. The family had been missionaries and they would go on these missions to different Asian countries and get photographs taken or they would get copies of photographs and they had them in these albums, I think they're called album M photos. We get this album that's full of them. They're really interesting. There's like pictures of geishas and there's Japanese landmarks and things like that. But then you turn, there's all these beautiful landscapes and pictures and then you-turn the page and there's a whole page of decapitations.

Griff: Oj geez.

Jessica: That was something that's remarkable.

Jessica: Uh, did you sell it?

Jessica: We still have it.

Griff: Oh, I wonder if you can list that on eBay. I'm not so sure you can.

Jessica: You know, I don't know what we're going to do with it, but it sure is interesting. , we like to show it for a guests at parties.

Griff: Great. Great conversation piece. You just leave it on the table and see what people's, their reactions are when they turn the pages. Besides being remarkable, can you recall the most profitable item that you ever found in a storage unit?

Jessica: Probably that same, that same locker. We call it the Silver Locker because when we weighed out all of the silver bars and coins that we found in there, it came out to 120 pounds of silver.

Griff: And how much did you pay for this unit? If I may be so bold?

Jessica: I believe we paid under 1400 Canadian. And we split it with somebody. So yeah, $700. It was a very good profit. And we bought a truck because of that locker. We didn't have a truck and we knew we needed one to help the business so we could pick up more inventory and take bigger loads and things like that. But we were kind of reluctant to pull the trigger. But once we got that Silver Locker, we were like, well worst case.

Griff: You can't really go wrong.

Jessica: No

Griff: We seem to be entering post covid years. Maybe these live auctions of storage units are starting to come back. Where where does your business stand right now?

Jessica: I think, like I mentioned already, myself and many other sellers had a couple of pretty good years during the pandemic when online shopping was really strong. We're definitely experiencing withdrawal and that spending is, people are now able to spend their money in a lot of different places. So we're focused on quality inventory that is going to be highly collectible. That's high quality, high value. Because even though we may be entering a relatively slow economic period, the people who already have money and have a lot of disposable income are not likely to lose very much of it. It, and they may be looking to buy really high end collectibles at good prices because prices will probably fall. So we're looking at sourcing the more expensive stuff right now. It may sound a little bit counterintuitive, but that's what our next year is going to look like. We're planning to source a lot more in the US. That's another thing that we had started to do prior to the pandemic that we had to stop doing for two years because the borders were closed.

Griff: That's right. Yeah.

Jessica: So, um, we're gonna make a point of coming down to the US to buy inventory more frequently. We always make tons of money off the stuff that we source in the us We find it much easier to get good inventory there. That's what we're looking to do next year I would love to say that we will double our revenue again.

Griff: Of course everyone wants that. Right.

Jessica: But that may be a bit too audacious of a goal.

Griff: Do you find that you specialize over time? Are there, I know that you never know what you're gonna find in a storage unit, even if you get to peek in. But overall, do you, do you tend to gravitate towards items for specific categories?

Jessica: Yeah. The categories that we know really well are the ones that we tend to look for. With storage units. It's the fun of finding something new, getting to know a new category. You end up being these, one of these anything and everything sellers. But people love the story of how you got the stuff. If you're not buying storage units, then categories, specialization is really the key to doing well. Bringing buyers of particular kinds of collectibles back to your store over and over and over again. We have four or five categories that we know really well. We know how to source them. So comic books, die cast cars, model cars, vinyl records. Those are the categories that we really try to focus on. So if we're going out and helping somebody downsize or we're buying out a collection, we're looking for those types of items. Cause we know how to make offers on them and we know we can sell 'em quickly.

Griff: And they're easy to pack and ship too. Of course. And store.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. Nice flat things. I love that. Boxes and boxes of flat things. It's wonderful.

Griff: You're hoping to of course double your business for the year and I wish you luck with that. I sincerely do. I, I'd love to see sellers succeed, but for a long-term goal. Will you continue doing this? Have you, you said you, you both have quit your full-time job, so you're kind of vested into this. Is this something you hope to be doing for the indefinite future?

Jessica: My husband says he can't imagine his existence without picking. He's his favorite thing to do in the entire world. Even if we were to retire or if we were to sell the business, which is an option that we float from time to time. Sure. You know, we would still probably be doing this in, in some way. There's so many benefits to it besides it being, you know, profitable and, and paying for a good life that we have. It's keeping things out of landfill. It's an environmentally conscious type of business. You know, we, we scavenge and reuse shipping supplies as much as we can. We try to intercept junk or even recycling. If it's a product that still works, why recycle it when somebody else can actually use the thing. Yeah. Those are some of the things that I'm really passionate about. I do see like a bit of an evolution in the business. I'm an educator. I've got my podcast, The Business Of Reselling, where I talk all about, you know, how to scale up your business and grow it. I could see myself going into educational products, online courses, things like that to kind of help other sellers get to the scale that we're at. I could definitely see that. As well as getting more involved with sort of community environmental initiatives and circular economy stuff and just showing how resellers can be a really important part of a sustainable economy. And I think that what we do as resellers is not being talked about enough. So that's kind of where I want to start moving.

Griff: And Your podcast again is called The Business of Reselling. And we'll put a link to that in our episode summary overview where we have all the links on Community so that you can find it. But of course if you search your podcast app for The Business Of Reselling, it'll show up as well. How much time do you take a week during your podcast?

Jessica: I launch a podcast every week. So I do put a little bit of time into, especially the longer episodes cuz I like to incorporate some research, statistics and fats. I really like to base the things that I say in real research and real experiences instead of just sort of talking off the top of my head. I'm an academic so I have to, it's like I can't function otherwise. So I, I like to put the time into it to really put out content that is going to help people understand the business side of what they're doing. Because I think a lot of us, including myself, even though I have a business background, I didn't get into this business intentionally. It wasn't something that we set sat down and made a business plan for and said, yes, we're gonna do this. It was an accident. And I think a lot of resellers get into it in that way or they get into it just because they're trying to look at making just a little bit of extra cash on the side. And for those who decided they wanna take their business beyond that, where do they go? What are the resources? How do you actually apply the concepts of a business to what we're doing? Because it's a bit unusual what we do.

Griff: It is. And also a lot of people like yourself who fall into this and have some initial success, which you know, makes a person who falls into it want to keep doing it. Of course. It's not surprising they don't have business backgrounds and that's always a little risky because that initial success may have been just a chance or you know, it was a luck or good fortune. But you, you really do have to know how to run your business as a business. And it sounds like that's what you have brought to your business and why it's still running and doing well today.

Jessica: Exactly. I love the, it's for me, I've almost gamified the whole experience of growing this business. I'm like, what can I do with marketing today? Like I, I love to experiment with things, experiment with different types of advertising or different types of messaging and just kind of see what happens and then pass along the experience of that to people who may be a little bit shy about pulling the trigger on some of those marketing activities or spending money on this or that business activity. So if I can make that a little more accessible and easier for people by just sharing what has worked well for me, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's replicatable because we all all sell different stuff. We all have access to different inventory and we all have different business objectives. But, you know, I think it can be helpful for people to at least get sort of that raw understanding of like, what I did and when I screwed up, I'm happy to share why I think I screwed up

Griff: Does it happen that often? I hope not.

Jessica: Failure is wonderful.

Griff: Yes. so I hear

Jessica: It honestly, you learn, I think you learn more from, from messing something up and failing at something. I'm lucky to be in a position where we can take business risks and just being able to do that it's fine. It's fun, it's exciting. It keeps things, keeps us on top of everything and keeps our energy going. And hopefully it helps other people who listen to the podcast as well.

Griff: We have mostly experienced sellers or sellers with some experience who I believe tune in or download the podcast, but we occasionally get the new seller. What first piece of advice do you give to a new seller who maybe asks you, hey what, what do you do and is it possible I could do it and I'm thinking about doing it and what do you tell these people?

Jessica: One of the most common pieces of advice you hear is start with what you know, which I think is generally good advice. But if what you know is something that's not in demand, you're not gonna do very well. I think it's start with what you know, but also like research the heck outta that category and understand if like, if it's actually gonna sell or not. So like, you know, a lot of people get into selling like old clothes from their closet and stuff like that and then they're like, well how come my, you know, these brand names aren't flying off the shelves. It's great clothing. And it's like, well cuz there's, you know, there's 50,000 other ones just like it already out there. So start with what you know, but research what you know. So I think that is good advice, but I also think the willingness to take small risks and you just need to learn to be comfortable with that. That means don't be afraid to spend $30 or $50 on an item to see if you can flip it, make a bulk buy even if you don't know everything that's in there, buy a storage unit, do it. Like, just, just have that experience and learn from it. Those kinds of things will not sink you as a business owner. They're small risks, but what you learn and what you gain from that is so important if you're thinking about doing this full-time.

Griff: Yeah and I think a lot of people who start off and have those questions and take a long time to get started are somewhat risk adverse and they suffer from that. I know it's cliche analysis paralysis.

Jessica: Analysis Paralysis.

Griff: I wanna be perfect.

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, and that's absolutely understandable, right? It's, we, we all have uh, a hard time, you know, dealing with failure. But I guess maybe that is one of the keys to our success. I'm totally comfortable with making mistakes.

Griff: I think I better get comfortable with it since I seem to make so many of them.

Jessica: We all do. And I think maybe it's, maybe that's part of it is just understanding that like, not just in resellers but in any entrepreneurial venture, like we're all bound to make errors and nobody is going to just roll out this perfect business where everything is incredible and the investors just throw their dollars at it and it's just, it's just not how it works.

Griff: Someone once said to me that to error is human. And I always reply, well I must be superhuman cause I really know how to err. But it's a learning experience. I remember back when I first started in the antiques business, there was a very distinguished and quite dashing x Shakespearean actor who was an antique dealer in uh, New Hampshire. And we would pick and bring things to him. One bit of advice that he said to me, and I think he had been with the way he said it, it was like a rehearsed line and he must have been saying it all his life. I think we brought something to him and he explained to us why he wasn't gonna buy it. And he said, don't be discouraged. You will sell it. You may have to take a loss. But the thing is that you'll, you've learned more from this than you would've learned if I just bought it from you. And you're gonna learn in life that it's not your successes that teach you, failures are how you learn. And that really stuck with me. It is a good way to think, especially if you're gonna be a business person. Jessica, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Jessica: We could talk all day!

Griff: . I know and I'd love to call back on you sometime in the next year and check in to see how storage auctions are going.

Jessica: Yeah, let's do it.

Griff: Okay. It's a, it's a deal. I'll put it on the calendar. Thanks again Jessica.

Jessica: Thank you for having me. It was super fun.

Griff: Jessica Oman sells on eBay under the user ID Storage Warriors will put a link to her store and we'll also put a link to her podcast. I love to promote seller podcasts and I encourage and urge you to subscribe to her podcast so that you have something constructive and fun and entertaining to listen to about selling and hopefully it'll help your business.

Brian: It's 2023. You got questions?

Griff: We got answers. Boy do we got answers Brian. Our first email this week is from an eBay podcast, regular listener, he seller Carl Swain and he sent these questions to podcasts@ebay.com. There's two of them. His first question is, I listened to your discussion about vacation settings last week. Somebody commented about putting your store on vacation when you still have items that are unpaid. Carl says, I had that happen to me. So I packaged the item up and I took it with me. Once the buyer's paid, I purchased labels from eBay with the QR code and then I took the item to the post office and I had them print the label first time doing that and it worked.

Brian: Oh that's a great solution Carl. And great customer service for your buyers.

Griff: Absolutely. There's a seller who's thinking, of course I assume it's an excellent solution as long as you're able to bring one or two packages with you while you're on vacation. This could be really difficult to do if your vaca involves spending time in the middle of nowhere without access to a PO.

Brian: That is true.

Griff: Carl, we assume you weren't out in the middle of nowhere

Brian: Or with a massively large item to bring.

Griff: Yeah. Carl also had a good second question or a good comment. Why don't you read it Brian?

Brian: Certainly. Carl says you encourage the purchase of a thermal printer. I don't believe that thermal printers will print labels for eBay standard envelopes. Would you check on that for me? 95% of my orders go out using the eBay standard envelope label. eBay starting the eBay standard envelope label has enabled me to regain my top rated seller status. Great. Congrats. That's great. My current numbers are in tracking, uploaded on time and validated. 99 I'm and around 99.8% of the time. Oh that's great. That is, it's great. Yeah. Congratulations Carl. Absolutely. Well thanks for those questions Carl and Griff, can a seller use a thermal label printer to print standard envelope?

Griff: Yeah, of course. I'm not quite sure why Carl thought otherwise. So you can use a thermal printer to print out anything including the labels for eBay envelopes. What he may have been thinking is every and everyone makes the assumption that thermal printers only print out four by six labels and if he's using a, you know, a real envelope right and it's a small size, then that label might not fit easily. But most of the printers that print four by six labels, you can actually adjust them and they'll make labels that are of a different size, like that thin one that you'll sometimes see.

Brian: Like a two by eight or whatever they two by two by six maybe.

Griff: Yeah, I can't remember the exact measurements. If you set your printer up and it will print one of those, your thermal printer, like for example a Brother thermal printer, which you're not my favorite anymore cuz they, they're really messy to work with or hard to get to be compatible with a like a Mac, which is what I use at home. You have that size option and it'll print everything on the thin long label. And then when you go to print the label, there's an area where you can select the the format and you just change it from uh, the six by four to this, the other format.

Brian: So then you just need to buy a roll of those thermal labels.

Griff: Yeah. And for someone like Carl, it sounds like the vast majority of what he brings...

Brian: Could be his default.

Griff: Yeah. I know that sellers who have sales that are kind of half and half or a mixture, they'll get two thermal printers and one will be set up for printing the smaller label and then the other one will be set up for the standard four by six.

Brian: Are you sure you don't get a commission from the thermal label companies?

Griff: I'm absolutely sure I sit waiting by the, my mailbox hoping that a check will arrive. It never does. I suppose I actually have to call them and make this arrangement, but then I wonder if I put my job in jeopardy. I think I might.

Brian: You might.

Griff: Is it worth it?

Brian: No.

Griff: Are you sure?

Brian: This is a lot of fun. Yeah, it's

Griff: A lot of fun. I wouldn't wanna stop doing this. So Carl, I hope that answered your question. Go out there and get a printer. Just do a little research and make sure that it's the thermal printer you buy is gonna be able to create smaller label if that's what you need. And if you have any questions about that, just send them to podcast@ebay.com. I'm happy to help you research if you need it. Brian, our next email to podcast@ebay.com is from seller John known on eBay as StetBooks. And John has a comment about the Time Away discussion in our previous episode and he writes in episode 212, a user was asking if there was any way to reduce or remove dings to her account from late shipping while her store is set to time away. I'd like to share a similar experience I had on that topic. So John says I had a question for eBay For Business and Facebook before I went on Time Away and I changed the handling time for all my listings and my shipping business rules from whatever they were originally to five days, which is not recommended. You don't have to do that. When I returned I had to go back to each rule and change them back to their original settings. This was ungainly because I had so many business rules. I had asked if there was a quicker, easier way to do a temporary change to the rules. And the answer I got back was that I can save a lot of time by doing nothing! Which is exactly what we talked about when we we did. When the Time Away feature is activated says John eBay automatically adds the extension to your handling time. So that for example, if you had a handling time of three days and went on Time Away for 10 days, you'd have a 13 day window for an item selling on day one, 12 days on item on day two and so on and so forth. It was good info and it will save me a lot of time the next time I need to use Time Away feature. And he signs off John Myers with his user ID as Stet Books. PS I don't think I used the phrase Time Away enough times in the above message says John. So here's one more Time Away.

Brian: I’m glad we helped you with Time Away. It was a time saver and that was actually one of the complaints that Sellers had with the old feature and product. Fix that and it saves time.

Griff: Yeah, I'm glad you you got that information from Customer Support. Yay. You know from the Facebook page we also gave the same information I wanna point out on the podcast, but that's okay. You never call, you never write, you never listen. We'll just sit here in the doc. It's okay. , our next question isn't actually a question, it's a comment called Into our voice line at 8 8 8 7 2 3 4 6 3. My friend of the podcast, Kathy Terrell.

Kathy: Hey podcast team. It's Kathy Terrell, how are you? Listen, not a question, just a shout out, well done you guys. Episode 221, Optimizing Your Listings for Google Shopping. Absolutely brilliant. You guys knocked it out of the park. Anyway, happy holidays. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Brian: Well thank you Kathy, it's great to hear your voice in 2023 as well.

Griff: Yeah, that was a fun episode.

Brian: It was. And I learned some stuff on that one with the Google stuff too.

Griff: I learned a lot and then afterwards I learned even more, you know why?

Brian: Why? You got some comments or suggestions?

Griff: I did. I got a comment on the community post. You know on each of the episodes you can actually leave comments and questions for that episode. And while we're on this topic at Google Shopping, I think I should mention that a seller posted a message to that community blog for episode 221 about listing quality report. You know about those? Well I'd forgotten about 'em. So seller, My Cottage Books And Antiques wrote: kind of surprised you didn't mention the eBay listings quality report, which includes information about which of your listings, if any were rejected by Google Shopping and the reason for the rejection.

Brian: My Cottage makes a good point. Why didn't we mention the listing quality report?

Griff: It was an oversight on my part. I'm not perfect.

Brian: You're not?

Griff: No.

Brian: I thought we fixed that in 2022.

Griff: You've already set me up for failure in 2023. No, the report does show which listings, if any were ejected by Google Shopping along with the reason for the rejection. And you concurrently see this report if you go to the performance tab, right, you click it and it there's a link and a little discussion right on the top. And so I went there and I found two things. One, I found two, I downloaded my recent report. I found two items of mine that had been rejected to for Google Shopping. And the reason was they were two pairs of athletic shoes sneakers and there were no U P C code. The learning here was UPC for brand new not used. These are brand new sneakers with the box. You gotta put the UPC code if you want 'em to show up. And what's interesting is that on the eBay end, both of these UPC codes when I put them in, when I type them in, it said no match.

Brian: Oh interesting.

Griff: They're not in our catalog, but Google still wants those UPCs so I fix them and tomorrow I will double check them and see if they're now in Google shopping. But then I found something that's not so good news.

Brian: You mean bad news?

Griff: Okay. Bad news about this fantastic listing quality report. It's being sunset and at the end of February. I don't know why, do you?

Brian: My understanding of why it was is being retired is it was a beta so it didn't go out to everyone. We learned a lot from it and they're gonna evaluate what pieces of it to include down the road or in the future. But for now the listing quality report will be retired.

Griff: Oh dear.

Brian: So what was good that you left it out as a suggestion?

Griff: Yeah, because if somebody listens to that episode and months from now, if I had mentioned it, they would go look for it. And and I didn't mention because like I said, it was a mistake on my part. It was an oversight. I completely skipped my mind cuz I hadn't used it for a long time. I also didn't know that it was a beta. So a lot of our audience out there may have gone searching for it and didn't find it.

Brian: Yeah, see you, you didn't know what, you didn't know or you didn't know what you knew. You didn't know what you knew.

Griff: I didn't know what I knew. I knew I didn't know everything and now I know I didn't know what I knew, I knew and didn't know. This is really confusing. Anyway, that's the story on that. But I still want to thank My Cottage Books And Antiques for making that point. Well I hate to end on a downer like that.

Brian: I'll end before we go to something else. I'll just say it was fun over like the, the holiday break reading some of the stuff that was in the eBay community. There was a gentleman, Mr. Lincoln and you could go out to community and type in Mr. Lincoln. He posts a lot and he helps a lot of our sellers as well who have questions. And he did a poem about eBay with kind of the night before Christmas as kind of the foundation. And that was a fun little read and there was some other good fun stuff that to see people sharing over a quiet time of the year.

Griff: Quiet.

Brian: Yes.

Griff: I'm assuming that people are taking a little break before the rush starts cuz it starts right? Or historically today. Yeah, it's now at the beginning of the month the holidays are over and people are getting serious about shopping. Even if it's just shopping for themselves.

Brian: Or listing the items that you got that you don't really want.

Griff: That's why it's good to not get presents because then you're never disappointed.

Brian: Well it's good to get the presents cuz then you can come list them on eBay.

Griff: Oh, okay. Well see you're always looking at the glass half full. I'm always looking at it and say, who drank half this glass? I wanna throttle them.

Brian: Well, if you wanna drink something out of this glass or have some other fun here on eBay for Business, call us on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: That is (888) 723-4630. You can call that hotline any time of the day, any day of the week. Leave your question or comment and who knows, you just might hear it on the air.

Brian: And if you're not a call the phone person, you can always email us@podcastebay.com. That's podcast ebay.com.

Griff: And now it's time for your brand new for 2023 three point podcast checklist, Brian.

Brian: Time to start off the new year afresh. This week is the week to put your new business practices in place, starting with setting up a schedule for downloading transaction reports on a regular basis.

Griff: If you did nothing else, that's gonna make your life a lot easier.

Brian: Good idea.

Griff: Number two, it's also a good time to take inventory. Make sure that everything you have listed is available and easy to find.

Brian: And finally, make a list of the important things you learned from last year's selling. And use it to hone your selling strategies for this year to maximize your profit and increase your operational efficiency.

Griff: You'll be cooking with gas if you follow these three tips. Now on our next episode, I know it's a little early, but we're gonna bring back Mark Yeager from Tax Act again. He's gonna talk about how to account for selling personal property.

Brian: We'd like to again thank our guests this week. Jessica Oman of Storage Warriors.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.