Join Clara and Josh as they chat about why you should be pricing your items higher and why increasing your prices is the right move for 2023. This decision could be game-changing for your business!
The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly is the ecommerce resource for the seller community across all platforms and a hub for information on growing your business. Find out more at thesellercommunitypodcast.com, leave a message or ask a question at anchor.fm/sellercommunitypodcast, or email us at podcast@listperfectly.com.
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Transcript
Clara
Hello, Josh, how are you?
Josh
Hi, I’m amazing. I’m ready to get the ball rolling.
Clara
So today, um, you know, we all know it’s obvious, Josh, you know, we have a recession, we came out of a pandemic, but we’re not here to talk about the obvious.
Josh
I know today we’re talking about, you know, should you be pricing higher? Uh, this isn’t the gospel. I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t price lower or that people don’t do that and they’re, you know, not successful. And I look forward to sharing. I’ve thought about this for two weeks, kind of what, oh, you know, how do I wanna approach this? What level of sellers are we talking about here? So I’m ready to get going.
Clara
Let’s introduce you, Josh. Could you please introduce yourself to our amazing audience?
Josh
Yeah, I’m Josh. I’m the content marketing manager of List Perfectly. If you would’ve asked me in 2015 if I was a reseller, I would tell you no, I have no idea what reselling is, but if you ask me if I knew how to sell things on eBay, I would say yes, cuz I did it all the time. So that’s my background. Long story short, that’s where I come from, and yeah. And that’s, I’m here today, uh, to kind of, to share this information with you.
Clara
What are your favorite items to sell, Josh? What’s your specialty?
Josh
Everyone knows that I’m the card guy. But I also do electronics. I do retail, a lot of retail arbitrage. That’s probably my favorite thing to do. And then of course I go thrifting just like anyone else. That’s just ingrained in me because that’s how I used to shop for my clothes. I used to walk through a Goodwill and see a WWF T-shirt and be like, yeah, I know I can sell that.
Clara
When would you say you started reselling? The earliest flip, please.
Josh
It’s always been natural. Like even as a young kid, uh, I’ve always flipped my Pokemon cards, things like that. Graduating high school, going into college, and trying to pay bills.
I always sold things. I always went to pawn shops, looked at equipment, and got DVDs. Uh, I did all of that stuff. Those were very normal things. I’m 29 now, about to go in on 30, uh, in a few months. Right. So we’re talking like 22, or 23 years old, so I can’t even remember how long ago that was.
Clara
I’m very excited about this topic because pricing, it’s a taboo in our community. So Josh, what is the first thing you would like to share about this topic?
Josh
When we talk about recession, it never happens. It can, like we’ve seen what happens with the banking collapse and stuff like that. Like of course things can happen all at once and come crumbling down. But like it’s never fully realized The way we kind of think about it when we, in terms of feeding into the media news and things like that, right?
Like so many people are waiting for hyperinflation, but they don’t realize that their gas has gone up, their eggs have gone up, and bread’s gone up. And then so whenever I go through the content on YouTube and I’m trying to uh, kind of get my ear to the ground on what’s going on in the reselling community and hear what people are saying. But what I do know is that a very common theme for all sellers, whether it’s part-time, full-time, Mercari, eBay, Poshmark, or whatever, is that the thrift store prices are insane.
Like you can’t thrift anymore and make a decent living as a reseller because Goodwill is getting greedy, right? And some of that could be inflation, some of that could be the market, and some of it is they know that resellers are going there and making lots of money. So why wouldn’t you price it higher, right?
So Goodwill is pricing higher, a lot of thrift stores have already been pricing high, so why wouldn’t you price higher if that’s what the current market is. And then if you’re going to bins and you’re getting your wholesale price by the pound, whatever, right?
Why would you not price it the way Goodwill would price it if they’re pricing it that high? People are buying it. Why wouldn’t you? So that’s kind of how I’m approaching the subject and where my mind’s at right now. But I would love to hear what you think and what everyone else thinks.
Clara
We have a recession, so inflation is the loss of acquisitive power of the same currency, right? And now the recession is the consequence. That could be a consequence of inflation or not, right? One is a symptom, the other one is a diagnosis. The cost of living has gone up. Salaries haven’t gone up, you know, and maybe the dollar has lost, very tiny because it’s still strong right next to the euro.
Where Silicon Valley Bank, the banks from Etsy and Shopify, they defaulted, they were kaput, okay? Sellers were literally days without their due payments. Those days were not bad. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The supply chain is broken. So, we have thrift stores, and wholesalers, even if you’re doing retail arbitrage, everybody’s pricing items higher just because it’s harder to get it.
Why should I go sourcing out there when I come to buy from other sellers by giving fomo?
Josh
I had a vintage sweater worth $150. I couldn’t get it to sell. Another vintage seller offered me like 20 bucks for it. I got it for 15, so I took 20, but he’s selling it for 80. You can get deals from other sellers. I just wanna remind people first of all, that when we’re talking about raising prices here, We’re not talking about making fake discounts, I’m not talking about looking at the market and then putting it for a hundred dollars over and then making a discount to get it back to the market.
I price higher on Poshmark for a lot of reasons people love to haggle on there. So let’s just say this North Face jacket, right? The MSRP on this is a hundred dollars, but this is a, one-of-a-kind collectible jacket, it’s a limited-release drop, right? If I found this at a Goodwill, I got it for $30. Why would I list it at M S R P?
I wanna list this for more money because it’s a limited edition drop. And some of that comes with knowledge, right? Knowledge of the market, the nuance of what you’re buying, your bread and butter, butter stuff, you know, sort of thing. We talk about raising prices, there are lots of ways to think about it, I would just want to reiterate that we’re not talking about making fake discount prices.
Clara
I really wanted to tag along with what you were saying, because we’re looking at comps in the past. And these are comparables. The recession wasn’t so deep. People were still at home bored and sometimes, just shopping as therapy. How many of us did a little shopping therapy during the pandemic, but once the pandemic left, The tendencies of purchases and pricing changed dramatically.
Josh
It depends on what I’m selling. Most of the time, if you’re really specific, you’re getting a good listing in and you’re really detail oriented and you’re putting the information that should be in there, you’re gonna get the smart pricing.
I don’t turn on smart pricing, but I do look at their sell rates as far as what sells fast, and what takes a long time to sell, but it’ll sell.
Clara
It’s good tools, but at the same time, it’s managing the data that is just in Mercari. For example, Terapeak is a great tool, but it manages the data that is on eBay. I really need a lot of data in order to give my customers the right recommendation.
List Perfectly Video
List Perfectly has just released a new tool and it is called the Pricing Suggestion Tool by List Perfectly powered by Google. And as you can see, this tool allows you to view all of the comps online that are related to your item. This helps guide you to understand what important details you should add to your listing as well as price points related to your item. We have made it very easy for you to access this tool. All you have to do is click on the magnifying glass located in the top right-hand corner of any image located in your List Perfectly catalog. There are no limits to what you can search with the new pricing suggestion tool, List Perfectly powered by Google. You can search for anything from toys, clothes, home decor, electronics, sports, equipment, wow, vinyl, collectibles, appliances, tools, furniture, office supplies, and vehicles. Basically, anything that you can sell online, you can use with the new pricing suggestion tool, by List Perfectly powered by Google.
Clara
So this is a tool again, zero extra right now. I just said that it’s about pricing, Josh, but what do you think? Do you think that this tool is only for pricing?
Josh
Yeah, definitely pricing. I don’t have to go and Google a title when I can use it with my phone. I make my listings on my phone because I’m selling cards. It’s one of the easiest things to list. It takes like five seconds for me to do it. And the most annoying thing is, okay, I need to find the best title for it. Now I just click, I have a really good picture. I just click on the little magnifying glass there, and the title comes up for me.
Clara
One rule of thumb that I always say is, okay, if you’re just gonna go and increase your prices, just because I don’t think that’s a sustainable business practice, but if you could. Even one word, one keyword, or one image, on your listing. I would say at least a 10% increase. If you’re gonna be reviewing a listing, you must increase at least 10%.
Josh
A lot of people are doing these, whatnot, these live events, right? And they’re basically giving away free inventory for peanuts. And that’s just what it is. And that’s Okay. I don’t know how sustainable that is. It is affecting the market to an extent. But the other thing I wanted to kind of get into with this is that people will buy things just because they love the person who is presenting. So they love the story, the brand, whatever this person is about, they love it. They don’t care that they’re going to buy this shirt for $50 from their store when they can find it for $20. And marketing is just telling a story. People will buy things just because they like you, just because they support you.
Clara
Whatnot is a new marketplace. And literally, sellers buying from sellers. That’s why values are coming down. So sellers, buy from sellers in a marketplace that doesn’t have that many buyers yet. Now, when it comes to live selling in Poshmark, that’s a whole different song.
So I’m gonna share right now a very big concern that happened in Poshmark. Poshmark got in a pickle because you had too many notifications of live shows. In account settings, we go to where it says notifications. Here, and then you can put the Posh shows. So now you can turn off the notifications.
Josh
E-commerce is gonna a hundred x, we’re all gonna be a part of it. If you’re a reseller, you’re passionate about it. You want to do this for a living, you want to do this as a side hustle to get an extra 10 K a month or whatever. Whatever your number is, you know, we all have that number in mind, but this is only going to grow. And so I highly just like whatever the news is coming out about inflation, all of that, like we’re not even at the tipping point. We’re only, we’re at the bottom of what e-commerce sustainability and all of that will be.
Clara
Use the update feature of List Perfectly to increase your prices. Five or 10%. Worst case scenario, you can put a sale and then you win. Everybody wants to buy from a sale.
List Perfectly Video
We’re going to update our prices within our List Perfectly catalog using the Express editor.
Now we are updating our prices to bring them down just a bit so that way we can update our listings that have already been cross-posted to Grailed. So we’re just quickly going through and just updating the prices, reducing each one by $5 so that way we can entice our potential buyers on Grailed. Now that we have updated the 11 listings we would like to update, we’re gonna go ahead, disable inline edit, and now we can go through with updating our listings on Grailed.
Now that we have chosen to update just the price field, a new tab will open up for each of the 11 listings that we have chosen. Now our price will be copied into the listing form on Grailed, so that way we can go ahead and review each listing to ensure that the price reflects what we have changed it to within our List Perfectly catalog.
And once we can confirm that for each listing, then we can go ahead and publish that listing and move on to the next one.
Now it’s really nice because what Grailed does is they retain the original price that you listed an item for, and then if you make any changes to reduce the price, then they show that to any of the potential buyers, and that’s really nice. So now we’ll just publish the last one.
Clara
What do you feel about that feature? Be updating pricing versus de-listing and releasing. Have you tried it, have you compared that in, and how did it work for Solid It Better, please?
Josh
I do use that feature. It’s one of my favorite features. It is essentially delisting and re-listing. I don’t necessarily agree that you have to de-list or re-list solely to get seen or get sales. I don’t agree with that. I think delisting and relisting is great to optimize your listing to see what’s not working. To see does it have watchers, does it have traffic? Has this item sold? What is it selling for? And what are some key differences between this listing, and my listing?
If your prices are low and you look like you’re trying to undercut the market, I can’t even trust that you are a legit seller on my end.
Clara
If you’re using delisting and relisting as your automated solution to grow your business sustainably, no, that’s not gonna work. Automated delist and relist, without logic behind it, is only gonna carry you to have more expenses, to pay more fees.
Josh
I have decreased my prices to kind of just see, I’ve even experimented with undercutting the market, and to me, there wasn’t a super increase in sales. I wouldn’t even have enough volume to enjoy a $2 profit anyway. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that practice, but to me, it didn’t do anything to, I guess, boost my sales. I would actually argue that, kind of just sticking to the 90-day average, and kind of working around that, you can even get more money from that average. So look at the average, and I would say go over the average. If you wanna do the average, that’s fine and a little bit under the average, that’s okay too.
Clara
I’m going to give a very simple example. Let’s suppose that these are two items that are exactly the same. What do you think about perceived value? And what is that Josh?
Josh
It’s a speculative value, right? What doesn’t have value to someone else will have value to another person. Someone else, right? And Theresa Cox always, you know, that’s actually someone I learned from every single day, right? And she’ll tell you, I’ll buy these fuzzy socks from Walmart for 20 bucks. I’ll go list them for $40. And I don’t care because a year later someone’s gonna be looking for fuzzy socks online and they’re gonna come across five-star rated, clubred97, you know, and buy those socks without thinking about it. I do it all the time. I Google what I want. I don’t care. I’m gonna buy it. Cause I want it.
Clara
Let’s suppose I’m a buyer. All of you are mostly sellers, so I don’t think we have mostly buyers watching here. So sellers, what do you think if you see two of the same listings?
Okay, but one of them may not have such a proper picture and it has a lower value. You’re a buyer, you’re not a seller, what do you think of that item? The first thing you think is that it doesn’t work. It’s defective and somehow doesn’t have the same features that it should have from the other item that has a higher value and maybe even the same background sometimes.
You are hurting yourself by lowering prices. If you are selling internationally. Don’t forget that as the rest of the world, we live to buy from America because you guys always give a sale.
So increase those prices, put a sale, and put it just for a couple of days, just three, four days. Then let that sale die, and then you do another sale. And then before you lower those prices, increase the prices and do the sale.
Different channels and you can do different percentages of sales on different channels instead of going everywhere, you know, 30% off. That would be something that I always highly recommend, to manage prices if you can differ in different platforms and try different titles if you can until you find your rhythm and your jam until you learn how to optimize every max dollar from every item and you get a five star or a perfect review.
That’s the idea.
Josh
I don’t know why people buy certain things at a certain price, and of course, there are always gonna be penny pinchers. I’m not saying that’s negative, I penny-pinch, right? But I’m just saying sometimes I don’t even want to do the research. I just want to Google. I wanna buy it. But I think a lot of it has to do with timing the market, right?
Certain items go in cycles. You know, this is a 2022 blue Ralph Lauren t-shirt. There’s not much different from 2023, right? So you could still sell it, you know, as, you’re not gonna say it’s 2022, but it’s brand new. You’re gonna sell it as a Ralph Lauren t-shirt, and now the prices are $25 at the time you got it from Ross for $15, $20.
I’m gonna give you the ultimate formula, okay? When people tell you, okay, why is it so expensive, please do me a favor and ask them compared to what? Always you wanna know because you could be in the wrong and you’d be surprised how many times people are gonna provide you with a compare button. And how many other times you’re like, thank you so much.
What if you’re going to a garage sale or you’re at a Goodwill bin or wherever, where you’re getting the cheapest of the cheapest products, right? And then you find a vintage Nike shirt from the eighties, whatever it is. But it has a stain on it. Maybe there’s a hole in it, right?
But you buy it anyway. You buy it, you clean it up, you fix it up, you patch that hole, and you make it look new. Are you gonna go and sell this as a used item and try to undercut everything? Or even if you could sell it at the market. Like why wouldn’t you just list it higher because you put in the work for this item that essentially people gave up on?
But it has an amazing value if it was new. And then you put that work in. So price it like it was a new item, a hard-to-find new item, right?
Clara
It’s about how you present the item and one of the things, the biggest advice I’m gonna give you all this, is it, this is a success formula and this is why sellers, this is the difference, the sellers that will make it, okay.
If you are searching on the comparables, on the past comparables to determine your pricing, I don’t think you’re gonna make it on your return of investment because now the market has changed. You gotta see what is available on the market. Not what sold, but what is now available? What other sellers are asking? Are you the only one that has it? Why would you sell it for whatever it was three months ago?
Josh
We’re here because we love it. And it doesn’t matter if we’re failing today. It doesn’t matter if we fail tomorrow. It doesn’t matter what the recession says or what the market says, right? We do this because this is our passion. This is our life. This is how we make a living, and we’re gonna keep going no matter what. Some people might be affected. They might have to go and find that job, right? Yeah. But are you gonna give up on running your store? I would start over personally, right? So that’s what I love about the community. Like I’m here to lift people up as much as I can. I’m here to find as much information as I can and just give it to you guys straight.
I understand there are resellers out there that don’t want to give away their sources. They don’t want to give away their honey holes. Totally understandable. I totally respect that. But think about all of the great people that you meet in this community that are willing to give that to you.
Clara
You know that when you manage your business, you’re analyzing which categories are working for you. That’s why you wanna have sales analytics. Okay? Whether you’re doing it with eBay tools, or maybe you’re doing it with List Perfectly tools but analyzing what is selling for you. What time of the year is selling best for you? Understanding that’s what is gonna make the difference. And now understand that this year you will need to source something new. You will need to do something new because changes will come. 2023 will be a challenging one. But like we said we got each other in this community and we can certainly pull through this recession and this tough time.
Josh
Right now we’re headed into summertime. When is the time that we should invest? Right now is when we should invest in our winter gear. Now you’re gonna invest in your winter clothing, cuz you can probably get a lot of great deals right now. Now, are you going to list it low because it’s not selling right now in the summertime? No. You’re gonna jack those prices up and we’ll see what happens.
We can always optimize. We can always go back and look at what’s selling. How it’s selling, but don’t undercut your price just because it’s not wintertime yet. Like you’re getting your best deals up right now. Build that store and let’s make some money.
Clara
Josh, what would you say to a new seller that wants to get it, What is it? The egg and the chicken. I’m a new reseller. I have no sales, no credibility. I’m piercing my items lower so I can get that. What would you say to that seller, Josh?
Josh
Okay, so the biggest thing right is you’re starting a new store. You’re a new seller. You need that credibility. Don’t give up. It’s a tough challenge. It’s a tough first hump to get over. Like, I totally understand because I’m going through it right now.
But I hope that he won’t give up because of that. So that would be my first insight. And also, education is free on the internet, and on YouTube. There are so many masterclasses out there. I mean, it’s amazing. I was watching masterclasses for a week straight, just trying to get ready for this, you know, cuz I wanted to give you guys the best of the best.
So I would say, educate yourself and then go out and just do it. And don’t be scared to fail. Like, who cares?
A lot of things I run into when I’m buying, I feel like I did these good deals and they are good deals and I can sell for a profit, but I didn’t take into account the shipping, like going and getting my boxes, my bubble wraps. I didn’t take into account the fees from the marketplaces. So those are all things that you should know to get started, but just like, go find an item that you’re passionate about that you know will sell.
Maybe you like video games and just list it and who cares? Like just list it, see how long it takes to sell, see what other things are selling and then now you have a baseline for what you’re looking for. And at what price you should be buying it? And, start with things that you don’t use, like old clothes.
I sold so many old game systems, laptops, cameras, equipment, and clothes that I didn’t even just care for anymore, but like I knew it was a good brand. Stuff like that. Don’t be afraid of failure.
I’ve lost out on so many sales. I failed so many times, but I don’t care.
Clara
So it happens to all of us. If you are in a situation where maybe you were sourcing and you pay the higher price for that item, that’s when you’re gonna need to put extra time into explaining why your item will be more valuable than other items. If you’re asking for more money, make sure you find some comparable keywords, images, or something that makes it look hip and trendy.
We have settings in the List Perfectly extension if you wanna prevent the smart pricing on Mercari, we have settings for you to adjust, you know, pricing in different ways.
Josh, thank you so much for an incredible session today.
Josh
Thank you so much.
Clara
Josh, thank you for your incredible energy and for being with me today. I can’t wait to be back with you. Thank you. Let’s support each other. Let’s sell more, and may all your dreams come true.