Ep 274 || Setting and Achieving Business Goals for 2024

[podcast_team]

We start off 2024 with the importance of setting smart business goals with eBay Growth Advisor, Aaron White and eBay sellers Nikki and Jim Visconti. Griff and Brian answer a question about when and if to withhold the original shipping for a return transaction.

Episode Links:
Jim and Nikki’s eBay Store
Recurring Links:
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eBay Seller Spotlight Podcast
eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey
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Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: And I'm Griff. And this is the eBay for Business Podcast. Your source for the information and inspiration to help you start, manage and grow your business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 274 and welcome Brian to the year of 2024.

Brian: Can't believe it. 2024. Exciting.

Griff: It is. And it's the beginning of the sixth year of the podcast.

Brian: Oh, you're right. Come August 6th anniversary.

Griff: That's right.

Brian: How did we miss fifth anniversary? We didn't have like a big celebration.

Griff: No we didn't.

Brian: Well maybe we should have one.

Griff: Okay.

Brian: A five and a half. Let's see. August. So yeah...

Griff: We missed the five and a half too and didn't know. No, It's coming up.

Brian: It's coming up.

Griff: Yeah, it's coming up. Let's just wait for the six. Okay. Six is a nice round number and if we can make it to six will, what an accomplishment.

Brian: I think that's great.

Griff: We got 25 more episodes before we're at 299 and there'll be the big 300. I was looking at other podcasts. There's not a lot of with 300 episodes in the can.

Brian: I bet. And how long did you do eBay Radio?

Griff: 15 years.

Brian: So we got nine and a half more years to go.

Griff: This is dropping on January 2nd, so it's a day after New Year's. But you know what, everyone does New Year's. It's just the regular exercise. And so I wanted to ask you if you make New Year's resolutions.

Brian: So I used to be pretty religious about writing them down, but I haven't been, it's interesting since Covid I'd say that kind of fell off. But I used to do some work ones and then I had personal ones and then I had under personal ones, I had some stuff that was around like financial stuff and working out and eating better. Fail, fail. I'll have to dust off one of the old ones and maybe I'll do it again. And Griff, what about you? Do you make New Year's resolutions?

Griff: I did, but I never wrote 'em down because that's too much of a commitment. So one of my resolutions, one year's to write down my resolutions and of course that failed and I've gone through them all. I'm gonna grow my hair back, I'm gonna lose weight. I'm gonna join a band and go back into the, the music business. None of those happen. But you know, I do try every January to at least in my mind, map out what I want to do with my selling on eBay because you know, I still sell, not as much as a lot of our audience, but I still try to sell regularly. I make sales every week and I think it's important to stay in the game. So that's our topic for the week, by the way, is setting, realistic and attainable business goals. And then joining us in this discussion are going to be eBay Growth Advisor, Aaron White. We're also gonna talk to two interesting sellers. Their names are Nikki and Jim Visconti, they are husband and wife. They have a store called Sneakers Envy. Very interesting couple. And they actually came to us and said, we want to talk on your podcast about setting goals. And I said it's perfect because that's the topic at the beginning of the year.

Brian: Cool. And I see we have some questions to answer about whether to refund or not to refund the original shipping cost in a return. That should be interesting.

Griff: So we'll talk about that. And it's only one question this week before I do this, I just want to double check, is there any news to report?

Brian: No, actually there's no eBay news to report, which is a good thing I suppose.

Griff: Yeah, it's a good thing 'cause it's the beginning of the year who wants to worry about any stuff like that? And so we do have this one question at the end of the episode, so I'll trust you'll be back to help us answer it.

Brian: Definitely Will.

Griff: Okay. I know I can count on you. Well there you go. I saw the housekeeping for the intro to this episode. So let's meet our first guest for this week. And the topic, as I said, is setting business goals.

Griff: If you remember last episode I talked a little bit about why we were gonna talk about goals at the top of the year and not resolutions. 'cause that's what everyone does. The 1st of January is they make resolutions. You may have heard these data points before, but research suggests that only about 9% of Americans that make resolutions actually complete them. And in fact the research, and I love that they research this, it goes on to show that about 23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week. And 43% quit their resolutions by the end of January. Which is great for gyms because gyms get big membership signups in January and then those people never show up and a lot of them don't cancel. So you know who wins in those resolution fails, it's other businesses. You don't want to be in that boat. So what we're gonna do this year is we're not gonna focus on resolutions. We're gonna focus on something that's totally business oriented and that's goals. And what better guest can we have this week to talk about? This is one of our Growth Advisors. We've had Casey Yardley on the show recently as a Growth Advisor. We have another Growth Advisor from that team joining us today. Please welcome Aaron White. Hi Aaron.

Aaron: Hey, how's it going Griff? I appreciate you guys having me on today. What I do is I do pretty much a lot of the same things that Casey does, but we really focus heavily on the growth side of accounts. But we really like to also hone in on the health side because I think that really goes hand in hand. And so we're really trying to focus on listing optimization and finding other ways to bring more traffic into an accounts site and then just give 'em that education to show that partnership. Of course we really focus on goals and kind of show them how to coach and how to get to these goals and what actions it may take to really show a clear path, what it's gonna take to see how you can achieve these goals.

Griff: What are the three most common goals that you as a growth advisor hear from people who you contacted that are selling on eBay?

Aaron: Yeah, so I think the three most common goals are gonna be is we want to see more traffic to our listings, right? So they're looking, Hey, how can we get more visibility? And then the other one of course I think is probably gonna be the number one is how can we get more money? We want to make more sales, we want more GMV and then the third one's it's really gonna just be, we want to just know a little bit more about the platform and how to utilize maybe some emotional tools and things of that nature and how do we get over those hurdles. Those are some of the three most common ones.

Griff: Yeah. So that last goal is very a popular one that we hear a lot at the podcast 'cause I think people who don't have a background in self-marketing or promotion may find the promotional options a the smorgasbord, if you will, of different options for promoting a listing a little overwhelming. If somebody comes to you with that goal three, what's some common advice that you give?

Aaron: Yeah, so typically what we're really looking at is saying, okay, well before we're gonna put any money into the listings and promoting the listings, what we want to see is are the listings performing at a high level organically? First thing is, are you guys looking at the listing quality report? They may say, oh, what is that? We don't know what that is. Okay, well this is how you can go and look to see how your listings are performing organically before we're gonna start putting money into the listings such as running promotions or doing promoted listings we really wanna make sure that hey, are you utilizing the eight pictures or up to 24 pictures, right? Are you utilizing the 80 character count in the titles? Are you utilizing Terapeak to see if you might be using good keywords? What type of things are you using right now that are free to you resources that we have on the platform that could help you make sure to see that your listings are performing at a high organic level, which ultimately is going to allow you to feel comfortable with spending the funds on promoted listings or promoting the item as coupons and so and so forth.

Griff: Yeah, when you're trying to determine goals, it helps if you're reading any guidebooks or anything the way they talk about goals, it's just set realistic numbers on a schedule. Do you help sellers do that? So I mean I can come to you as a seller and say I want more sales and I want more traffic. But that's great, we all want that as sellers. What's the roadmap look like? How do you build that roadmap based on what you know about that seller?

Aaron: Typically what we really want to try to help the seller focus on is, hey, you know your account better than we do. If you want more sales, tell us what it is that you want more sales in. What is it that you are heavily stocked in that you focus to have most of your sales in? Is it laptops, desktops? 'cause once we can figure that out, then we're able to kind of help them hone in on saying, okay, well if that's what you want most of your focus vertical sales to come from, let's focus there first. Let's focus on those products first. Let's work on those title character counts. Let's work on those pictures, let's work on keywords on those. Because what mostly happens to most of sellers when we start telling them, Hey you gotta work on your title character count, you have to work on your item specifics, you need to work on adding more pictures. They say, well I have 3000 SKUs. That's a lot. They get overwhelmed. Right? So we kind of have to break it down for 'em a little bit and say, all right, well yes you do have 3000 SKUs but you have 200 SKUs that are just in desktops and laptops and you want that to be your main focus. Or you have 200 SKUs that are over a thousand dollars worth in GMV each SKU. So let's focus on your high-end product and work our way down. We kind of try to minimize a little bit of the work to make it more impactful and focused on maybe a category that they want or a GMV number that they're looking to try to reach to help them see, okay, that's something doable. It's a little smaller, it's not 3000 SKUs, it's 200 SKUs. And then we really try to help them see, within the Listing Quality Report we say, Hey, this updates every 31 days. If you go back and we're making these revisions on these listings in the laptop category, it's gonna help show you within the last 31 days how these listings are performing, how many impressions they're receiving, what's the conversion rate. If you've had some sales on those, what's the click through rate? So then that way you can actually monitor and also do this in the traffic session, monitor how the listings that you've just revised or just made those changes on are actually catching traction. So then you can see if your actions that you've taken from our recommendations are actually working, which typically then will, if it's doing well turn on that light bulb for that seller to say, Hey, we did that in laptops and desktops, that's really great. Also have another 300 cameras. Let's go do that there. Then they're able to see setting that small goal, achieving that small goal helps 'em say, Hey, that actually worked. Now I'm willing to go ahead and do a little bit of more of the work because that legwork is really what it's gonna take.

Griff: You know, over time I've discovered that that and many times when I don't achieve success it's because I'm my worst enemy. Do you see commonalities among some of the sellers that come to you when it comes to the obstacles that they face or worse the obstacles they put in front of them, whether it's intentionally or unintentionally that prevents them from seeking the success that they search for?

Aaron: The biggest portion that I think for them is education. And I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. I think I just mean that across the board is just really helping yourself understand the eBay platform and the platform that you sell on as a seller. Right? So knowing a little bit more of those ins and outs, knowing a little bit more of those nuances about your seller protections as a seller and some of the policies that can help you in your process of, you know, running a return or knowing how important it is for item specifics and filling out the basics when it comes down to a listing and knowing a little bit more about the basics when it comes down to running promotions and when to run promotions. Education is the biggest portion of it because things are always changing on eBay. So it is kind of hard to keep up a lot of the times, but you do want to make sure that you're putting forth the effort to do that. And then the second portion is gonna be the maintenance. The maintenance in your inventory. So a lot of sellers that have been selling on eBay for 15 years, sometimes they have a thousand plus listings and they just leave them up and they've been up forever without revising and things of that nature. And that can hurt a little bit, right? Granted it may get a sale finally down the road, but when we're looking to bring on new inventory and you have something that's been up for six years, honestly you could re-list that and that's new inventory at that point, right? And I don't mean re-list it and just re-list it, I mean recreate it as a brand new listing. So then the algorithm will see it as you're bringing on new inventory. I think those are some of the harder things that a lot of these sellers deal with. And I think that has also to deal with bandwidth, the one man show, the two person show can be a little bit more difficult to maintain that maintenance. I think that's some of the roadblocks that I see the most. But if you learn a little bit more about the eBay platform, eBay is very helpful in that way. We have a lot of tools that are accessible to these sellers that can help them in. So in those particular ways and I think that education will definitely help. I'm glad to be here doing things like this and the other webinars that we have. I think it's great for the community.

Griff: So we got this new year in front of us, 2024, 2023 wasn't bad. We're finally through those weird years of the early 2020’s . Uh, yeah, may they never return. What is a goal that you have top of mind that you'd like to give sellers going into 2024?

Aaron: I really want to say, I think the goal right now going into 2024 for most of these sales I would say is educate yourself one on the eBay platform and learn more about the tools that you can use. And then the second thing I would say is be much more involved in your community. There's so many sellers that I think that sell on the site and their neighbor doesn't know that they sell on the site or you know, the people at their school, the kids' school that they go to don't know that that's sell on the site. Be much more involved in your community. Let people know that you sell on the site. Granted it's an election year coming up in 2024 and I know that's, here or there, but there's gonna be a lot of trends and there's gonna be things that are happening in your community that if you're tapped in, that you are going to have a better chance of thriving and growing and reaching different avenues that you may have not have known that were there to you before. Let's not leave any money on the table. Let's make sure that we immerse ourself in the community because we are eBay and you are part of the eBay community. You should definitely let people know that you're thriving here in this community.

Griff: Oh that's great. Our sellers love to know this when we bring on an employee. Do you sell Aaron on the platform?

Aaron: I used to sell on the platform. What I do now is I'm trying to get back on the platform to sell again. My sister just opened up her new line of hats, Good Day Hat Company. And so I'm gonna help her launch that on eBay as well. And then I have some spices that are coming out 'cause I have a catering company, High Texas Barbecue and I'll be launching my spices on eBay back in spring.

Griff: Oh I can't wait.

Aaron: Yeah, so I'm excited. I'm excited. So I'll definitely give you an update and I'll make sure I'll send you some spices as well. Griff.

Griff: Well I'll buy them on eBay. I think that's the only fair thing to do. I don't want anybody to think there's a payola going on about being on the show? Do you have background in Texas Barbeque?

Aaron: I do. I do. My family we're originally out of Dallas and Austin and so we used to own Hardeman's Barbecue way back when and so that's how I learned how to barbecue is with my grandfather at Hardeman's as well. And I've had a catering company now for four years and we started out in Maui. My sister lived there for 12 years and I moved there and I started a catering company there in Maui I was doing weddings and golf courses and PTA luncheons and stuff like that. That's kind of how I got started. Came back to Austin and trying to put my roots down here and this is where I'm from. If I can get it to be successful here in Texas, it'll be a good thing. It's exciting. So it's called High Texas Barbecue and that's the name of it because I started it in Hawaii, but I'm from Texas. We do a barbecue with a whole lot of aloha.

Griff: That's a good mix. Nothing like Texas barbecue.

Aaron: Nothing like Texas Barbecue.

Griff: It is far and away, in my view, the best barbecue cuisine ever.

Aaron: Hands down.

Griff: So I can't wait to get the spices. Thanks so much and thank you for sharing your business acumen and expertise with our sellers audience. I'm sure they appreciate it and we'll revisit in the future when we talk about goals.

Aaron: Yeah, well thank you Griff I really appreciate you guys having me. Here's to the years,

Griff: Aaron White is a Growth Advisor here on the eBay team for Growth Advisors. And we'll uh, be featuring Growth Advisors throughout the year 2024 to help you grow your business. Remember that's the podcast goal. That's your goal. That's our goals here at the podcast for the years to help you grow your business. It's great hearing from Aaron. He has a specific take of course on how to help sellers achieve their goal and grow their business. After all, he's a Growth Advisor. Well our next guests are also well practiced in the art of making and keeping business goals. That's because they have a business and it's rather a successful business on eBay. Under the user ID SNKRSNV, S-N-K-R-S-N-V. We'll put the link to their eBay store and their Instagram account and their webpage in the show notes for episode 274. Please welcome Nikki and Jim Visconti. Welcome.

Nikki: Thank you.

JIm: Thank you. Very excited to be here.

Griff: Jim, when did you start your business?

JIm: The business actually took off in 2019 Q4 specifically. I had been on eBay I I believe since 1999. Very familiar with the platform, purchasing things, occasionally selling items, but never actually going in and saying Hey, I wanna make this an opportunity for it, something that we could grow. And in 2019 we we looked at what we could do and we tried FBA and that just wasn't for us. It felt like a cog in a machine and eBay was something that we could do together. It was something that we could do from home. It was something that allowed us to travel and it was something that allowed us to hopefully make a profit and build a business together.

Griff: Well I should explain because when we record, of course I can see our guests even though we're recording remotely and I see lots of sneakers. Right behind you, you're framed in sneakers.

Nikki: I am.

Griff: Why sneakers?

Nikki: When we first got started we sold Jim's toys from the eighties, Ninja Turtles, things like that that we had around the house. And we didn't want to invest any of our own capital. We wanted to sell, make the money and reinvest it. Jim and I started listening to podcasts and YouTube videos and we came across a YouTube channel called Hustler Hacks who also sells on eBay. Since then, we became friends, we became friends with Glenn and we absolutely love The Retail Arbitrage and he was going to discount stores and we have those stores around us and we're like, this would be something that's achievable. We can do it while our kids are in school. We've always loved sneakers even though we never thought we would run our business around them. So we decided to give it six months. Fast forward to now, we have thousands of sneakers filling our warehouse at our home and it's grown each year. We don't think we can fit any more sneakers in our house, but somehow we have managed.

Griff: I'm assuming that you, uh, credit some of your success to our friends Ken and Glenn?

Nikki: Yes, 100%. We found Glenn and we've met him at a few sneaker events over the past few years and the Hustle Bee Ken and JC we live about 45 minutes from them and I feel like they mentored us, which was absolutely amazing. And I feel over the past few years we've mutually been able to help each other and help each other to grow and succeed. So it's amazing having local eBay sellers that are there to have your back and to help you succeed. It's amazing.

Griff: This is what I love about eBay. It's always been this way. The seller's helping out other sellers.

JIm: It really is a community and that's what made it so much different from trying to sell on other platforms. And that's what really drew us to it. And I think that's why we succeed in it is because part of our goals is we want to enjoy it and to enjoy it. It means to interact with other people and have fun.

Griff: It's no fun just being alone in your basement even if you're doing well, unless you're that kind of person. I don't like people, I just wanna be in my basement. I'm assuming that you have goals for your business, Jim.

JIm: We do. We set goals every year, but not just every year. You know, um, when unique opportunities come up, we will alter those goals and maybe shorten timeframes.

Griff: How many goals do you have for 2024?

JIm: I would say we have um, three major goals, which would be a little bit more, you know, they'd be kind of broad.

Griff: What is your first goal?

JIm: We really want to like emphasize how we're gonna create new connections and in those connections, hopefully find bulk liquidation. What we learned from going to the stores individually and what we learned from Glenn on his channel and picking up units at discount retailers. It is fun but it's also very time consuming. So this past year we discovered essentially liquidation and we've bought two stores at liquidation this past year.

Griff: You mean a whole store?

JIm: Pretty much The whole store. Almost the entire thing. And it allows us to get so many units at such a cheap price that it's worth the time and it allows us to grow much faster and we're hoping to build those connections this year.

Griff: And Nikki, what's the second goal that your business, you and Jim run have for the 2024 year?

Nikki: Our next goal is we are hoping to expand membership and attendance to our greater Cincinnati eBay chapter networking in a roundabout way. We had two meetings last year that were successful. We met eBay sellers that were within a five mile radius of our home that we never would've crossed paths with. Given 2024. We have all of our dates already scheduled out and we are hoping to grow and meet more members and just be able to network and connect. Something that we've found at the place that we're at now is in certain topics I feel people need mentorship or accountability. So we already have um, a member in a group that we've been able to do biweekly check-ins just through emails with, just to help hold people accountable. And we're by far not perfect and there's so much we can learn from sellers. Sellers of all categories so far. There's one other sneaker seller that we've met, but we have thrifts. We have people that are just selling stuff that they've hoarded and collected over the years and it's amazing the shared experiences and things that everyone faces that you think you're the only one going through it. But since it's eBay, it could be shipping, it could be marketing, it could be networking. There's so many things that you can bounce ideas off of each other with.

Griff: How often does your seller meetup meet?

Nikki: The greater Cincinnati chapter right now we are meeting bimonthly and we are meeting in person. So we are hoping as we grow this year to switch to monthly meetings. What we do is we have a form that I created that we have everyone fill out and it gives us their store name, their location. So every month we cater to a different location by a different member's house. So we're kind of exploring all the smaller cities within the greater Cincinnati area. We will meet in Kentucky, sometimes we'll meet in Ohio, we will meet in Indiana. We are right in the middle of the Tri-State.

Griff: Perfect location. Yeah. And we'll put a link up to your page where people can go if they're interested in attending an event that you're holding for your chapter. If you're in that Tri-State area with Kentucky and Ohio and what was the third state, I forget?

JIm: Indiana.

Griff: Indiana. Indiana, exactly right. That's the corner there. We'll put a link up so that you can contact Jim and Nikki and start going to their meetups. So Jim, you said three goals. What's the third goal?

JIm: The third goal is pretty simple. it's just to have fun. We don't want this to seem like a a nine to five everyday job. It is a business. So there are times where it does feel like a grind and you have to get through that in order to achieve things. But we don't want to get up every day and ask ourselves why are we doing this still out.

Griff: Of all the goals that you've mentioned, I think that's the easiest one to set or to achieve. Yeah, I'm gonna wake up and have fun. Oh yeah, that's easy.

JIm: Hopefully. Hopefully. And I think along with that you also have to think of considering knowing why you're doing it and keep reassessing that it's fine for people to come on eBay and this is just a hobby. It doesn't have to be a business. If you enjoy it and you can interact in the community and and meet new people, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you want to have a a larger business and grow it, that's fine too. You have the opportunity to do any of those things on this platform.

Griff: So, okay. That's your goals. Those are three, I would think, very good goals. One of them, like I said, sounds like it's easy to reach. What are five things that you tell these sellers about goal setting and goal and a goal achieving? And Nikki, I thought we'd start with you. What's your first one?

Nikki: That's perfect. I think this is a very simple one, but our first tip would be brainstorming. A question that we always ask our ourself each year is, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? And that could be very broad. Some people might think of things that are easily attainable, but think of even the unachievable and scale it down. A good way to think of is like what is holding you back? Is it finances? Is it your time? I feel like you can learn a lot by thinking what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail and scale that to meet your business or your personal needs after that. The next thing, this is so simple and I feel you'll hear this all the time, but actually physically making a list and writing it down, putting pen to paper. Research shows. I know we saw the statistic years back that your goals are 42% more likely to be achieved if you have them written down in front of you and you are seeing those goals every day. It is so easy to be like, by the end of this year, I'm gonna achieve this, this, and this. And then the end of the year comes and you're like, what goals did I set? And it was not in your face. You're not seeing it every day. But when you put the pen to paper and you have it posted at your work station or a reminder on your phone that pops up. It's just inspiration. And it just, at least for us, uh, once we set a goal, like we wanna see it achieved and we wanna see it achieved like at its highest standard in the shortest amount of time possible.

Griff: Absolutely. That's a very good point. Yes.

Nikki: One more thing along the lines of brainstorming, I think Jim would agree with this, is bouncing your ideas off of others. Once you put the pen to paper, sometimes you need someone to bring you back down to earth if your goals are very unachievable or just to brainstorm and see, you can do that with other resellers, like we said, joining an eBay meetup group. That would be a great way to bounce your ideas off of someone, a trusted friend. Go to YouTube. There's so many live channels and shows and podcasts that you can join if you don't have a group nearby or someone just bouncing your ideas and your brainstorming ideas off of others is key. And I know that's helped with our success and growth over the past four years.

Griff: That's important. Definitely. Okay, so the first one, brainstorming. I love that. I'm writing these down by the way. So Jim, what is the second?

JIm: Our second tip is kind of something that we touched on already and that's, it's knowing your why. So that's asking the question, why would I want to do this and what do I want to accomplish with it? As we said earlier, you know, we did it. Our why was we were looking for something that we could do together. Mm-Hmm. We were looking for something that we could do and travel. So we were able to go to different sneaker con shows. We're able to source all over the country. If there's a great opportunity in California and it's 1600 miles from us, then we get to take a business trip. And it's great. It's an opportunity.

Griff: You can write it off.

JIm: That's right. Yeah. And there was something that we wanted to be done from home and something they wanted to be flexible. And we also wanted it to have pretty much unlimited upside as as much effort and time as you want to put into it. You can grow it as much as you want. And I think knowing that why is very important because not everybody is gonna want a giant business. Not everybody's gonna want to travel. Yeah. If you can really be honest with yourself and say, why would I want to sell on eBay? What do I wanna accomplish? Then you've got a good chance of succeeding there.

Griff: Yeah. It keeps you focused.

JIm: Exactly. And it's a good thing to revisit too.

Griff: Absolutely. I get up every morning and ask myself why I am doing this. But I have the answer. And it goes back to what you said about your goal number three mostly 'cause it's fun. Doing a podcast is fun. So that's my, that's right. I met that goal. So Nikki, what's the third tip?

Nikki: Is to make a plan or time management. Setting up a daily routine, being intentional with your time. It is so hard to do. It has been a struggle for us personally. The last year and a half I feel like as we've really focused on being intentional with our time. So every day, Monday through Friday we have two daughters. I drop them off at school at seven 30 and from eight o'clock to 12:30 every single day is devoted to eBay. We also brought in help back in April. So we have a friend who works for us three days a week as well. He works with me on Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. And we are every day. First things first we are packaging everything and we are listing items, we are updating our store. We might use some of that time promoting our social media as well. But just prioritizing what needs to be done in our store and treating it just like a job. So every day when I get up, I take the kids to school, come home, I make my coffee, I'm down here and I know from eight to 12:30, the only thing I am focusing on is our work.

Griff: When you're setting up something like this for time management, you also want to be realistic about what you expect to accomplish during that time. Do you set up quotas and goals? Like X number of listings, X number of shipments?

Nikki: We do. Top priority every day is shipping. We try to get things shipped out within 24 hours. During holiday time we were shipping twice a day and dropping off. The next thing that we do, we prioritize our listings. If we have a lot of products to list, I would say ideally we would love to list like 20 to 25 items a day. Sometimes we'll have a day that we'll devote all four and a half hours to just working on creating listings. We utilize scheduling out listings as well. During the holiday season. We knew things were gonna be crazy so we worked very hard in November to create all of our listings to schedule 10 to 15 listings to post every single day. I think that is key. So for us, like listing is priority, shipping is a priority. Weekly, we at least reassess our store. We run sales, we try to connect with our buyers. All of those are very important. And depending what your goals are, like if your main goal is to list, I would say you're prioritizing your time. You're gonna spend the first three hours of your day listing and you might spend the last hour reassessing, checking the market prices, running sales, going through old inventory. It's really whatever the needs of your store are.

Griff: And setting a schedule and sticking to it. That's important.

Nikki: A hundred percent. With the time management. We also talked about setting up goal timelines. We discussed that briefly earlier. This is another thing we do. We're reassessing the goals during our eBay time as well. And we're trying to have measurable time constraint to force production and also be able to reassess as we go. Part of the time, if we're not meeting our listing goals that we have for that month, we might need to reassess and reprioritize our time because it's so easy to be distracted or get sidetracked. But after months of repetition it just becomes so natural and easy for us. And the last year and a half we've noticed like growth in our store. I feel just growth overall in the business with just being intentional with our time.

Griff: That really does work.

Aaron: And we also for setting the goal timelines to look at it as slightly seasonal, since we are essentially an online retailer that we look at Q4 and that's where we're gonna do the most business. I love to look at eBay's metrics and see how many impressions we have, how many views we have, how many clickthroughs we are are at, what our click-through rate is. And set actual goals on how to achieve, how much gross merchandise that we wanna move during a particular time. And then figure out how we need to run maybe a particular sale or a particular set of products that we have at a particular price during a particular time during the year. And eBay has all those tools there available for you if you know where to look and you can figure out how to use them or you can find somebody who can help you.

Griff: Maybe it's your seller chapter events that you owe bimonthly now. See I told you I am gonna promote it. I'm promoting it already.

Nikki: We love it. That's the plan. Like we said, if we can help anyone, we would absolutely love to. And there's so much like we said to learn from other people that things we don't even think of.

Griff: Okay, Jim, let's move to number four, your fourth tip.

JIm: Our fourth tip here is actually going back and just kind of reflecting on what your eBay store looks like. We have already gone through, made a plan, we've implemented that plan. We need to go back and see did we execute that. So we will actually go back through. We do it pretty much annually. Um, you can do it at whatever interval you think is is good for your store, but you need to go back. And I think one, because we have the goal of having fun, you need to go back and look at did you enjoy it? And if you didn't enjoy it, was it because of the processes you had set up or is it because of the products that you're selling? Maybe it's just a category. Maybe you enjoy searching for something else, shopping a particular way, but you really have to go back and decide, did I have fun there? And then do you need to diversify into another category because things are always changing. You're always gonna wanna look at what you believe the trends are gonna be and what you might have to pivot to. And then I, we always do, do we want to grow? So far we've been in a growth phase for basically the four years that we've been on eBay, but at some point I think we're probably not gonna be in a growth phase. We're gonna be at a point where we're happy and we're just gonna be in a maintenance phase.

Griff: A steady state, so to speak.

JIm: Yes. You know, not everybody has to continually grow, especially to meet our goals where we wanna do things together and we want to have fun. We have time constraints on that. There might be a point where we say, enough is enough and we're happy at where we're at. So that's something that we reassess every year. And then we also look at where did we fail and what can we learn from that if we didn't meet our goals? Trying to figure out why. And also when you have a little bit more retrospective, you can say why maybe why didn't I have this particular goal? And when you can look back on it at the end of the year and that's something that you can put into hopefully next year.

Griff: Okay. That's for brainstorming. What is your why? Make a plan and manage that time. The one we just did, which is reflect on your eBay store and why you're selling and what you're selling. And could it be different? And Nikki, what's goal number five?

Nikki: All right, so this is gonna bring us back basically to our tip number one, brainstorming, but adjusting your goals when needed. Once again, this is very simple, but as the time goes by, as the quarters go by, sometimes you need to adjust those goals because they're just unrealistic or you've set your goals too low. This also has to do, we said with predicting trends and being able to adapt, sometimes the market changes and you need to totally start back over and cycle back to step one and brainstorming. If I may a quick example, back during the beginning of the pandemic, we were selling sneakers and we were using Terapeak to look and see what sales were, what items were selling. And we realized when Covid, everything was shutting down, they were shutting all the gyms down. We saw on eBay that gym equipment and weights were up over 400%. We spent two weeks scouring the greater Cincinnati and Indianapolis area, buying dumbbells and weights and carrying them from our car down the basement steps, boxing them back up the basement steps.

JIm: It was a workout. Justin. Yeah, I was gonna say you killed two birds with one stone.

Nikki: It was a workout. The postal service absolutely hated us. There was a lot of donuts, pizza, we were having to just take stuff to our poor postal workers, I feel like on the weekly. But it gave us a lot of money to reinvest in the sneakers because once the pandemic started to, I'll say slow down and the stores opened up, they had all this merchandise. We drove to Michigan one day because we knew some discount retailers were opening with 50% off their entire store. So we were able to invest the money from the weights that we had sold and dump that all back into sneakers. And we were able at that point to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of products that had we not went on Terapeak and seeing the trending items, we would've totally missed that opportunity.

Griff: That is a very good point.

Nikki: Just being able to adjust your goals when needed and then re brainstorming and moving forward is so important.

Griff: You have to be nimble in this marketplace if you want to stay on top of it. Yes, hopefully this will be a very successful year for you. As I said earlier, we'll put links to your eBay store and your chapter for seller meetups in the greater Cincinnati area and your Instagram and your webpage. All in the links in the show notes for episode 274. I want to thank you both. Thanks Jim and Nikki Visconti for joining us this week.

Nikki: Thank you.

JIm: Thank you. I appreciated it.

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: We've got answers. We're full of answers as you probably know by now. And by the way, this week's question, because we only have the one, it seemed simple at first, but after I started reading it and trying to put together an answer, I realized it is not easy. And so as always, would you do the honors and read it, Brian?

Brian: I'd love to do the honors, especially for this first question of the new year.

Griff: Happy New Year, 2024.

Brian: Yes. And of course you didn't throw in a softball at us, it sounds like.

Griff: Not a softball. We'll see why.

Brian: Well, this week's question comes from Chris who writes, after years away from regular selling, I've been back on eBay selling pretty seriously for about one year. As a Top Rated seller, I offer a free 30 day return policy. I've had a couple of refund requests for items with a value too low to justify return shipment. So I just refunded the buyer considering the loss as the cost of doing business.

Griff: We love Chris. We love him.

Brian: Yes. Great. Best practice. Recently a buyer returned a pair of boots because they didn't fit. I okayed a label and the boots were returned with no trouble. When I was refunding her payment, I was surprised to see that I had the option of refunding or keeping the original shipping costs. I refunded that fee since that's the way I would've interpreted free returns if I was a buyer. But was I required to? Closest answer I found comes from the Help article Return Shipping For Sellers. And it states if they simply changed their mind or ordered the wrong item, who pays for return? Shipping is determined by your return policy. If you stated you offer free returns, you have to pay, otherwise you can ask the buyer to cover the cost. But this doesn't mention the original shipping cost. Thanks for any insight, Chris. My eBay store is HotLunch. All one word.

Griff: HotLunch. Remember that in Catholic school?

Brian: Hot lunch. Yes. Hot lunch.

Griff: Well, you see where this is deceptively difficult.

Brian: Yeah. You would hope that there'd be a really simple answer.

Griff: And there isn't. I realized that I couldn't craft an answer to this because I have the same experience that Chris has had or some of my returns, but it wasn't consistent. So I went to our Community Team, the team that reports to you, Brian.

Brian: Yes. It's a great team.

Griff: And I sent out a, I sent the message, I says, anyone on this team have any idea how I can answer this question? Kyle got back to me and said, well, there is in our, in our health database that we use for responding to sellers who have questions like this. There's some information, I'll send it to you. And he did. Thank you Kyle. However, I still had a hard time parsing it 'cause it's complicated. What I determined was that, Chris, it depends on your status, whether you're Top Rated or above standard.

Brian: Which Chris was.

Griff: He's Top Rated. It depends on if you're offering free returns. It depends on if you're offering free shipping. And it depends on the return reason. And it's simply too complicated for me to sit here and talk about isn't that awful?

Brian: But not surprising actually.

Griff: So what I thought we would say to you, Chris, is this number one, I have to again acknowledge the fact that you're on the right track. When the value of an item is so low that having it shipped back doesn't make sense. Just refunding the buyer and then considering it as a lost and as a cost of doing business is a smart business move for many reasons. One, it's less stress. And number two, you can actually deduct these expenses of returns and refunds on a specific line built just for that reason. And your schedule C for profit and loss. When you file taxes, it's what every business does. It is a standard business practice. So it is smart to engage.

Brian: Definitely. What do you say gr, did he do the right thing?

Griff: If somebody like Chris is a seller who offers free returns and that's what I do, you're going to be presented with that option. You have to do it. You have to provide the shipping label, whether it's one you provide and then upload or you one you get from eBay, which is what I do. You have to provide that label for them to ship it back 'cause you promised free returns. But once you have the item back, like Chris, depending on your status, depending on the transaction, depending on the return reason, depending on whether you offered free shipping or not, you'll have that option that says, and this is different than taking a percentage of the refund and deducting it. Right? This is one that is a separate option that says withhold shipping costs. The original shipping costs that was paid to ship the item to the buyer. You may see that as Chris did, and as again, I know it sounds like we're coughing out, there's too much criteria here to explain. That's gonna make sense. If you do see that option, just rest assured you met the criteria. But our advice, or at least my advice, is to ignore it. It's not really an industry standard.

Brian: Then it becomes ultimately a business decision.

Griff: It's a business decision

Brian: At that moment. We're giving you the choice. And to your point Griff, you're saying best practice would be ignore it. And to Chris's point, that's how he kind of interpreted it.

Griff: And you know there's a big difference when you're looking at it on a case by case, transaction by transaction basis. If the boots are returned to me and they're still in brand new condition, I'm gonna just give them a full refund. And I said free returns so I'd pay for everything. But if I got the boots back and they're definitely been used, maybe they went out and mucked out the barn for the for the weekend and then return them. Well, they were new and now they're used and I'm not gonna be able to sell them for the same amount, then I think I'd have a justification for saying I'm taking 25% off your refund for the fact that you rented them and used them. And it's perfectly okay for you to do that.

Brian: Yeah, agree.

Griff: I guess we provided that option to placate sellers who felt they were losing money on certain transactions and they may be transactions that are for a lot more money, whether it was for expensive shipping for a heavy, big item, or it was just a really expensive item to begin with. So there's a difference between a pair of boots and a luxury watch or hand bag.

Brian: I think that's a really good call out. That might be the one use case where a seller may say, you know what? This was buyer remorse. I shouldn't have to eat that. Even if they feel like it's the right thing to do. If it was a really expensive shipping charge out, then maybe they would say, I want to recoup my shipping charge.

Griff: So Chris, you asked us for any insight. If eBay provides you an option for withholding shipping costs or withholding up up to 50% of the refund amount, you are allowed to use one or both of those options. We wouldn't have presented them to you. Now whether we've given you any insights, Chris, I don't think we have just some advice.

Brian: I don't know. I think it's clear now. He's only gonna see the option when he's eligible to charge the buyer for that original shipping charge.

Griff: It meets all the criteria.

Brian: It meets all the criteria. But then I think to your point earlier, best practice is probably not to charge 'em for it. Because my assumption is you're just going to get into a back and forth with the buyer.

Griff: But if eBay provides those to you, we're gonna back 'em up. You're not suddenly gonna find that, oh, we shouldn't have done that, that you did that and you shouldn't have. No, that's not gonna happen.

Brian: Ultimately, it's a business choice than how you want to run the business.

Griff: And we support you a hundred percent because we know that nobody knows your business like you do. We don't. We can give you advice, but ultimately that is your choice.

Brian: That was a great first question.

Griff: I think we muddied the waters for 2024.

Brian: Possibly we might get some follow up questions to the question.

Griff: Yeah, like you guys, that was the worst answer I've ever heard. Try again.

Brian: Well, if you have a question like Chris about selling on eBay, then why not call us on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: That is (888) 723-4630. And you can call us anytime of the day. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your question. Please call us (888) 723-4630.

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

Griff: And now as we do every week, including the first week of 2024, it's time for your three point podcast check list.

Brian: Check the announcement board at ebay.com/announcements for UpToDate Seller News every day.

Griff: Check your Goals. Just like the road trip must have a destination, your business must have goals. So if you haven't already, today is the first day that you should sit down and start planning out your business goals for 2024.

Brian: Check the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and define the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: And speaking of next episode, we'll be joined by seller Jude Lugo as we explore effective ways to implement volume pricing in your listings.

Brian: We'd like to again, thank our guests this week, our growth advisor, Aaron White and eBay Sellers, Nikki and Jim Visconti.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411. Happy New Year, Brian.

Brian: Happy New Year, Griff and all of our listeners.

Griff: Happy New Year to everyone.