On this episode of the Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly and Listing Party, Theresa Cox, Trish Glenn, and Doug Smith discuss their very different inventory management systems, what they have in common, and what works for each of them!
The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly is the e-commerce 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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Reseller Tips: Inventory Management
Doug: Welcome to List Perfectly Reseller Tips, Inventory Management.
Theresa: Inventory Management.
Doug: Three very different styles. We were just talking about that. But we’ll get to that. You’ll see that. We’re going to talk about inventory styles and tips. I actually believe it or not ladies and gentlemen, I have three bullet points, inventory things that are important to me.
Trish: Really? What would those be, Mr. Douglas?
Doug: You want to know right off the top?
Trish: I want to know right off the top before we start talking about the real resellers in the room with their
Doug: Oh. Oh. Oh.
Trish: You weren’t ready for that one.
Doug: Trish, thank you for asking. So important to me is an organized and easy-to-use system.
Trish: Okay.
Doug: Something that has portability and compatibility. Something I like to move around because I don’t have a big giant set station or an evil seller warehouse like Theresa Cox does.
Trish: You don’t have a lair.
Theresa: You just need to move. You just need to move like I did.
Doug: At some point, we’re gonna move somewhere. I guess we’re gonna see what the boy does for college in about a year.
Theresa: I’ll not allow you to move to the same state that your child goes to college in .
Trish: I know the poor kid.
Theresa: That’s just wrong.
Doug: I thought you were gonna say you can’t move to Arizona. ’cause that’s where I live. .
Theresa: It’s a big state.
Doug: I’ve said this before, but my inventory system for what it is based on advice from Theresa Cox long ago. And the only component I have is, I have clear bins because I like to be able to see through them.
And I just try to keep them pretty light and minimal, not over-packed, and just so I can picture it in my head. Because I like, know where the dragon skull is, I know where the jacked up X wing is and then there’s a lot of books.
Theresa: Here’s the problem with that system. Cause I know where my stuff is too. Someday you’re going to need somebody else to pull your inventory and they’re not going to have a clue.
Trish: Exactly. That’s exactly the reason why you shouldn’t be using that inventory system there, Mr. Douglas.
Doug: Let me tell you then ladies. If one of you, or my wife, or Phillip, or my assistant, maybe my friend from Texas were to go into my List Perfectly, that person would see, let’s say, Dragon Skull, not a real dragon, it would be in like B n D, and it would be noted in there, bin D, Doug bin D.
Trish: Oh, okay. So that’s better than we thought, Doug. We take back some of our vitriol for you.
Theresa: Yeah.
Doug: Philip’s books would be Philip box blah.
Trish: So we have three videos to show you guys. Theresa has a video. Theresa’s is nine minutes long because out of the three of us, Theresa’s is the most, she explains the most. I think you guys will Think it’s interesting. Mine is about three minutes long. Mine is less interesting.
Doug: I’m definitely baby bear.
Trish: Yeah, exactly.
Theresa: Actually Trish has more inventory than I do.
Trish: I do, but I think mine is less complicated than yours. And Doug’s is, Doug’s is amusing. Doug’s video, I think is 30 seconds and most of it is just
Theresa: In my defense in advance, Trish said, just film it and we can edit it. I did edit it and just smelled it. I know, but you edited like two minutes outta it.
Trish: Listen. I think it’s pretty good. And we can stop it. If it gets boring we can stop it. But Doug can play it. I think it’s good. It’s a good No, it really is a good video. It shows you exactly what you do. It gives you a clear understanding. You talk about why you need lights. Things that I never even thought of discussing, so okay. Theresa’s is a lot more involved than mine is.
Doug: Do you have your stuff low-lit, too? Are there lower lights along the floor, or is that just something from outside or something?
Theresa: No, you can watch the video and understand what we’re talking about. All right. Clearly, you did not watch the video that Trish prepared.
Doug: I watched some, I didn’t listen to it. But let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, if you remember the TV miniseries ’70s, the first I think was Roots, and then another one that I love is Shogun. And so Shogun had a five-night version and then they edited it down to a two-hour version, which is like blah, blah, blah. Theresa’s is still the two-hour version.
Theresa: Mine’s the five, five nights version. Yours is the two, yours is the two-hour version.
Doug: So we are, what are we going to start with Trish?
Trish: Start with T’s.
Doug: Okay. So we’re going to start with that and then we’ll go through and we’ll stop it along the way. Okay, so I can pause, but this is, I’m going to narrate this. This is Theresa Cox’s Evil Seller Layer.
Theresa: Two things that I want to emphasize today when you’re coming up with an inventory system is consistency and process. And what do I mean by that? Consistency is, if you’re going to list using boxes, do everything in boxes. Right now, my minion is taking things that we had listed in crates, and not everything Got photographed, but what we’re trying to do is now take these and integrate them into this so that we don’t have a stack of crates.
Same thing with books. And Consistency. Everything in a box. Consistency and Process. And that way the people don’t have to touch it more than once. Now how this system works is I have Consistency and Process. Seven rolling racks. These rolling racks are 48, 18 inches deep and 6 shelves high. These boxes are 18 inches by 14 inches across and 12 inches, 12 inches deep.
And we have, I start here at the top. This is the first shelf. And a one, two, three, and then this is rack one. And inside we have then they go down here. This is a box Nicole’s working on right now, but you can see that it all lines up. And for those of you with OCD, For the most part, it’s okay but looks clean and sleek.
These two lights happened to be here when the house when the warehouse was built, which works out perfectly. So that’s important. Good lighting is important. It’s also important that I have enough space between shelves so that when I pull this box out, I have enough room. In the storage unit that wasn’t the case and I have enough room I can also pull out this side.
So they get numbered all the way down one through you can see this is 196, 97 all the way down to 210 And then it wraps around here And then up here is 211 and it goes down there
Doug: All right, so real quick. So for those that don’t know, can you tell us about the facility where you bought this place. You had a second floor added because it had the giant RV garage, correct?
Theresa: Yeah, so I bought a house based on the Two garages. I have a two-car garage And then it came with an RV garage. The RV garage is 15 feet wide, 50, five, zero feet deep, and 20 feet high. So what I did was the day that escrow closed an hour after escrow closed, my contractor friend was over here cutting holes in the walls and putting in that second-level loft.
It’s not quite 32 feet because we didn’t want to cover up a window that was there. So it’s I think it’s 30 feet by 14 because it has to come in for some wall stuff. So let’s just say 30 feet by 14 and a half or something like that. But the second-level space made all the difference in having this warehouse.
We don’t show the first level yet because it’s still in progress. It’s a disaster.
Trish: Yeah, let me just say this. Hers is very organized looking.
Theresa: It’s organized on the outside.
Trish: I don’t want anyone to think that they need to have the same symmetry that Theresa does. Theresa spent money on those boxes, and spent money on those shelving units. If you want to grow into a system, that is perfectly fine. You don’t need to have everything matching. You don’t need to have all of the same things. Just have a plan. Anyone who’s in Mastermind, I’m always like, where are you trying to go? Where are you trying to go? Think about what you want the end result to be, right? So even if that’s not where you are right now if you’re going to invest in a new shelf, if you’re going to invest in a new bucket, a box, whatever, just think of what you want at the end so that you can slowly move into it. I don’t think you need to have it as beautiful as Theresa’s is. I don’t want anyone to get nervous about that.
Theresa: Let me tell you that. Before I moved, when I was living, I called it the big house, but I had inventory all over the house. And it was a disaster. I didn’t like it. Nobody could find anything, including myself. When I moved to the space up in Williams where I had a Quonset hut and I had a 15 by 40-foot room dedicated to eBay. That’s when I started to get shelves, but then things were in banker’s boxes and cutie tangerine boxes and whatever fit on the shelf. But I did have a system. It wasn’t until I moved into the Airbnb where I used the two-car garage, that I had enough dedicated space.
And that’s when I slowly processed out into taking everything. Cause I was selling all my personal stuff. So taking everything out of moving boxes and putting it into inventory boxes. I’m putting the inventory boxes unlabeled on those shelves so that I can get everything out of the house. And and I’ve been doing this for a very long time and that only happened in 2017.
So yeah, it is a process and a journey. I do not bag the items. I bagged some items. You’ll see a little bit of that later in a second. Yeah. I’m in at 123. Yes, I do talk about it. Cutie boxes are great for DVDs. You can fit three DVDs across and about 25 deep.
Doug: They’re easy to peel. There are big ones and small ones. What’s nice is we get in California, Costco delivers to the house and they bring those big sturdy boxes, like the fruit boxes and the blah, blah, blah boxes. They’re great for a lot of stuff and they’re stackable.
Theresa: One thing that I’m going to mention while we’re breaking here is that you may notice on the block, you will notice on the boxes in the lower left corner. There will be a green dot, a red dot, and, or a purple dot. Those are inventory markers. I just bought a box of bingo dabbers. And when I was doing it, I would dab them with red and you could see which ones I had done and which ones I hadn’t. This is when I was moving them from the storage unit to the house to take inventory. Nicole’s favorite color is purple. So she did purple and they all have purple dots on them because she has inventoried every single box. And so that’s what those are for.
Trish: I have a tag on the front that says XX or WX and I write in the corner when the last time inventory was done. So basically the same, I can look at a bucket and look and see when the last time inventory was taken. Theresa and I both do believe that inventory, taking inventory every once in a while is important. I know some people don’t, but Theresa and I do. Doug, do you think inventory-taking is important?
Doug: I do. I will go through the five bins and look and be like, okay, everything looks like it’s there.
Theresa: We all know that eBay does, the eBay blacklist is real. Yes. So not only do you have to do inventory, physical inventory, you need to make sure your stuff stays on eBay, which is easy with the List Perfectly Because it’ll show you when you, it’ll show you if it’s on the site or not.
Trish: Right.
Doug: But yeah, back in the day before List Perfectly, when I had my spreadsheet, I would be like, sold.
Trish: How did this disappear? Exactly. Or why isn’t it here and it’s not on eBay? Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: And then I wouldn’t believe that I’d sold it and I’d go dig through the bins and I’d be like I can’t find it.
Trish: I guess I sold it.
Doug: Alright. Are we ready to return?
Theresa: I mentioned the light before because this is an item on my contractor’s to-do list. He is going to put one or two lights in here so that we can see down there better. We will have enough room to maybe put another shelf here and one or two shelves over there.
And so here’s another key part of my inventory system. I can pull out any box and there’s everything in this box. There are patterns. There are clothes. There are ornaments, cards, whatever, and DVDs. This is how Nicole does the glass. She wraps it in paper. She labels what it is. I’m sorry, wraps it in bubble wrap, label what it is, and that’s in there.
And I can pull this shelf, this one, And there’s shoes and there’s Christmas and there’s Halloween and we really try to I call it the Marie Kondo where you put everything vertical so that if I’m like this I can easily find items. We also started putting in, this would be in a bag because there’s a lot of different things.
But anything that’s little that can get dropped down in between here, we put in a bag so that it doesn’t get lost. Sometimes she puts the beanie babies in bags, but most of the time not. But then we try to throw some of these little things just on top. But you can see, just like a filing system, I can easily find what I’m looking for.
And then another thing that I really like to do is store shoes this way so that you can vertically, this happens to be, I think it’s a size 15 shoe, which doesn’t fit vertically. So we put those this way, but I try not to put,
Doug: What is Shaq buying from you?
Theresa: So let me just tell you, I only buy a shoe that’s over a size 12 if it is under $5 because they are very slow sellers. So yes, that is a shoe that probably wouldn’t even fit Shaq. I actually think it’s a size 16.
Doug: Wow.
Trish: And I’d like to say, Theresa, so when you sell these things, does everything go in a bag or do you just put it in a poly?
Theresa: Like those shoes, I will put them in a 12x6x6 box if they fit. Those 16s won’t fit in that. But yeah, most things like the little Fisher Price play thing that’ll go on a, six by four by eight box or something.
Trish: The clothing. Do you bag it and then put it in a poly or just in a poly?
Theresa: Like if it, yeah, I just put it in a poly. I don’t do anything. If there’s no poly, those are used shirts. My new stuff is usually poly before we inventory it, before we put it in there, but not always.
Trish: Okay. Just wondering.
Doug: All right.
Theresa: I really like the idea of having every item and a number. It just doesn’t work with my stuff because I can’t fit 25 items in every box. So it just would make it too difficult. I think that the key to this is you get some ideas, you get some a light bulb in your head about how it could work because inventory, when you start off is a hurdle for many resellers. And so you just have an idea of how it’s done and then you tweak it. Like I didn’t invent this. I saw other people’s and I tweaked it to where it worked for me.
In the inventory process. What I do is we will pull it. Let’s just say we pull box 55 off the shelf. We go to List Perfectly, we sort by SKU 55, and we filter out the solds because the solds should not be in the box, and that’s how we do the inventory. Anything that is in the box that isn’t in List Perfectly under 55, we pull it out, we call those orphans.
We try to find them by typing in a description in the title and see if it’s supposed to be in another box. And if it is, we just change the number and List Perfectly. And if it’s not listed or we can’t find it, then it goes into what we call the orphan box and we have no orphans in the orphan box right now.
Trish: So what I do is I have a check system. So I put the SKU number in the SKU line. I take a photograph of my inventory number on top of the item. If I have an item and then I pull it up and it’s wrong, I can usually figure it out by either looking at the photographs or searching to see when I listed that to see what other tags were used that day, because what happens for me is I’ll just put the wrong photo in some time or something like that, but what I like about my system specifically is I almost never lose something completely. I can usually, 99. 9 percent of the time I can find it and I can find it that day so it can still be shipped that day. I have never lost something and found it months later. Where before I started doing individual SKUs and having the backup photograph that did happen and now I don’t have that problem anymore.
Theresa: So anyway, as a buyer, I don’t like the I get it for kids’ clothes but as an adult, if I’m looking for a red t-shirt I don’t want to have to buy a purple and green one when I only need a red one and More often than I think you’ll find people if you do bundles can I just buy the white one? So what I would rather do is take and list it one at a time and then Trish said, offer a sale buy two, get the third one at 50 percent off, or whatever you might want to do. I’m a seller. I sell one-off items more than anything else.
Doug: So I call that the and next time you go, ladies and gentlemen, please note this and think back, hear my voice in your head, and think of me fondly. I call this the Costco effect. Costco packages things in threes, whether it’s shirts, pants, food items, or snacks. Two are cool and one is ugh.
Theresa: What? You have to buy it.
Doug: Then. Olive Green. It’s alright.
Theresa: Yes. And if you’re a reseller, you buy a package. Three. You wear the two cool ones and you sell the eh. Exactly.
Doug: Alright. Are we ready to return to the video?
Theresa: Happen to be here when the house when they see this is 196 90s this is how I because there’s a lot of different things but anything that’s little that can get dropped down in between here we put in a bag so that it doesn’t get lost
sometimes she puts the beanie babies in bags most of the time not but then we tried to throw some of these little things just on top But you can see, just like the filing system, I can easily find what I’m looking for. And then another thing that I really like to do is put store shoes this way so that you can vertically, this happens to be like, I think it’s a size 15 shoe, which doesn’t fit vertically.
So we put those this way, but I try not to put them, this is easily identified because of the orange and this is black and white. These are two different shoes. I try not to put two different styles of shoes that are white in the same. You, oh, look at how pretty this box is with these golf shoes. So these are all the same style and the same size or they would not be in this box.
And then there’s black and white. So I can easily pull this one. I won’t miss it, I won’t mistake this shoe for this shoe. And that’s what we look at when we put similar items. We try not to put similar items in a box. But. Okay, so back to the colors. This one was on the top shelf so we try to keep these lighter and then these can be heavier because we’re not having to pull them out and pull them down.
So the yellow for the Sun is on the top one and then blue is the sky, green is the moon, and grass on the bottom. And then we just do these in order, orange and pink. And it also makes it easy when you’re trying to put these back on a shelf. You can see that this, the middle row is always going to be orange. The top row is always going to be yellow.
Added in so that if she’s inventorying a bunch of books she doesn’t put them all, put a bunch of books in a box that’s going to be on the top shelf. And then we do have some slight overhead storage here because these racks Go almost up to the ceiling.
So we have that as overstock or bigger items. And then we have this down here as well. These are just some items that would just take up too much room in a box, so we just have them on the open shelf. These are some book boxes, just because books, we do have some books integrated, but these are numbered 600, so I know that they’re books.
When an inventory box has some free space in it, we take these 4-inch paper clips and put them on the box. And then this lets us know that there’s room in here for more inventory. And with the workstation up here, we take care of that.
Trish: Good job, Theresa.
Doug: That was a great video.
Trish: It was, it’s a good video. And you’re going to see the difference now between my inventory and Theresa’s inventory. My inventory, I have more inventory than Theresa but Theresa’s is much better looking than mine. And I would like to say, I’m going to show you the main part and a few littles, but I do have another whole section upstairs in my house that I didn’t go up and photograph because I didn’t think of it.
Behind the curtain is where eBay starts. This used to be what my mother would have called a parlor. It was, I guess you guys would say a formal living room. And I have about 11, 000 items in this area in the house. It was a small parlor and then went into the dining room.
We didn’t use it. So my husband and I just decided to make them into eBay storage. We have multiple shelving units and then we didn’t use this bathroom. It was just the two of us in the house and we always use the new bathroom. So we decided to just make all of the space that used to be the tub. This was the sink area and everything was on wheels.
You can get anything behind it. There is a closet behind it that we always have things in. And the same with the things on the floor. These are all on some dollies that are made for appliances. So these things move very easily just with one hand. So 11,000 items. in this one area. We just looked at Theresa’s very stylized, very neat inventory system.
Mine is a little bit more mismatched. I do try to have two letters per Box. So each box will have two letters, M X M X. That will give me enough to have about 60 items, one through 60, in those two tubs.
I wanted a way for anybody to be able to do the shipping. So this way, there’s a chart, you can absolutely find anything in the entire house. This way, my husband, here he is, pulling the shipping. He can pull the shipping, and find something he knows exactly what shelf it’s on and where it should be and then there are two tubs that he would have to look through to find it.
I do things by color and because they are see-through a lot of times I can just reach my hand in and get something out, pull it right out, and have it. I do think that this works very well for us. We very rarely misplace anything.
So now let’s talk about how we keep the buckets full. So when I do the inventory, each item gets an inventory number like this, and we take a photo of it so we know where it is.
I do put it in my listing. It’s usually the last picture and that’s what it looks like in the listing. But then we have things called smalls. Smalls are things like underwear or bras, scarves, easy things that are easily misplaced. So we put them in their own special banker boxes. We mark them with an S on the inventory tag.
Once an item is sold, the inventory gets tag, gets thrown back into this bucket. And then anytime someone is listing a new item, you just grab one out of there. and use it to list the new item. Therefore, none of the boxes become empty. And there is inventory in a couple of other places in the house. Those are marked also.
This way we’re always maximizing our space.
Do I have like A, or B? Yes, I do. For those of you who are going to drive crazy, they are not in order. My husband Whose name is Thayer, he’s a real person. Some of you have met him. He used to put away the inventory and pull the inventory, and when it was aa, A B, A C, he used to put ’em in the wrong places.
And because he was the one who did it, he said to me, I don’t want them in order. And I said you’re doing it. I don’t care if they’re in order. For him, it’s easier for them not to be in order, and now they’ve been out of order for years, so I’m just used to it. For me, to put them in order now would be very difficult, because I know where A C is.
Most of my inventory was just where you saw right there. I do have one room upstairs It used to be a bedroom that’s full of inventory then I have a little bit of inventory in my living room Which is the picture you saw of me and then a little bit of inventory in my daughter’s office You Which again is not that much.
All of it could be over here. I think it’s just easier for her to be able to work out of buckets over there. So we do use mostly buckets. I have not been able to find them cheap enough to buy cause I hate spending a ton of money on them. So I have been using some Ikea bags. We have an Ikea maybe 20 minutes from here. They’re cheap. I will eventually replace them when I find the clear buckets that work for me. So that’s my inventory in a nutshell.
Theresa: I have seen people’s entire inventories with these shelves like we have.
Trish: Yeah.
Theresa: Just Ikea bags. Entire, the whole room. So it works. And they’re the right price.
Trish: Exactly. The Ikea bags are cheap. They’re good. The only thing that’s wrong with them is if you don’t have enough inventory in each shelf, they can spill over. So if you’re interested in the Ikea bags, keep them tight. And then that way they just stand up.
Theresa: I always thought that if you did the Ikea bags, it would be great to have a hook on the shelf above it. So you can put things to, because it is, they spread out and you want to keep them, limb and trim.
Trish: Exactly. So for me, I use mostly the regular-size buckets, 55-gallon buckets that you saw. But then when I went into that bathroom, I went to banker boxes because I could fit so many across in the tub. I put a piece of plywood on the top of the tub.
Actually, that’s a lie. It’s an old door. Because it was thicker and it wouldn’t bow. So it’s an old door, one on top of the tub, that’s completely up to the ceiling now. That was an older video. I do, after looking at that, I probably should at least have matching signs on the front, nobody sees it other than us.
But for me, the biggest thing about mine. I believe that they’re individual numbers. Everything’s in a bread bag before it gets put away. So everything has a number. And the other thing that I really like about my system is that every single thing is numbered.
Each shelving unit is numbered, or it will say bathtub. It will say sink area. It will say bathroom. It will say bathroom closet. So that if Doug flew here. And I got hit by the bus, I’m always talking about. So if you’re in Mastermind, I talk about what happens if you get hit by a bus. Someone else needs to be able to continue.
Not necessarily a list, but you at least need to ship. If you do not ship, that will ruin your business. Shipping is paramount, right? Listing is paramount for keeping your business going. Shipping is paramount for having a business. So if you don’t meet those deadlines, they’ll take away your eBay store. One of the things that was very important to me is I wanted anybody to be able to do my shipping.
So I have made, for me, the easiest foolproof way you can do the shipping. And, I really try to make it so that anybody can come over here and do it.
Doug: So do each of you do a daily pick list or how do you do that?
Theresa: I do the pick list. I use List Perfectly’s pick list. And I love it because it does pull it in alpha-numeric order by your SKU. And since my SKUs are, I’ll start with my box number. And here’s another tip. If you’re gonna go with a numbered box system and you think you’re gonna have 999 boxes, you need to start with 001 and not one. Because if you do one. It’ll be next to 11, which will be next to 111. And that will mess all your stuff up.
Trish: So you should do 001 anyway, it will make it easier in the long run for the other reasons Theresa just said. So if you’re going to do a numbered box or even numbered items, I agree with you. Start with 00. I don’t use List Perfectly’s pick list. I use each platform and I’ll tell you why.
Sometimes on a Monday, let’s say I have 125 things to ship out. When I print them from eBay, they’re in like order, right? So when I pick them, I start at the top and go and put it in an Ikea bag. I walk around, and push them all into the Ikea bag. And then when I’m doing the shipping, I can start at the bottom and go up.
I do bulk shipping. I can start at the bottom and go up and then I can line them up like little soldiers in order so that I don’t have to then be like, which one, which label, blah, blah, blah. So for me, being able to print them out in the way they’re going to be printed with the mailing labels helps me a lot because I’m a volume seller.
Theresa: Yep, for sure. When I have, 25, or 30 items to ship, I do the same thing because I’ll put weight and, package them and weigh them. And then I line them up like little soldiers.
Trish: So let’s talk about that for one second. This isn’t really inventory-related, but it is. So you get your pick list, you pull, you’re going to do your shipping, you wrap them up. Do you just put them in order and hope for the best?
Theresa: No, because I don’t close them until I put the shipping label on it. Okay.
Trish: So what I do is I write the weight. The zip code and the item number on it, are my inventory number, not the item number. And so that way, when they’re printed out, cause every once in a while, something will screw up, right? It will be out of order. We screwed up, eBay screwed up. So then I can just look at it. It says 14 ounces, 0, 2, 3, 4, 1, 14 ounces, 1, slap, put it in the bag, and keep going. So
Theresa: I am opposed to spending any time writing anything. Which is why I don’t write on my inventory boxes. I don’t write anything because to me You got to pick up the pen. You got to write on you got to put the pen down You got like it’s just it just to me writing anything Takes so much time. So I take my pictures when we put the When we take the pictures, we take the picture of the item on a scale, so I don’t have to write the weight.
We take a picture of the item in front of the box number, so I don’t have to write the box number. And then when they create the listing, then that gets all…
Trish: I do all that too. I take the item on the scale already bagged up, so you have the weight. And I also take the item In with the inventory number, so you have the inventory number.
But, I just do it for, I shipped once, I’ve told this story before, and I don’t know if you’ve all heard it, but somebody in the military in Virginia, on a military base, ordered a pair of wool socks for me, and a very nice, big-bosomed woman in the middle of the country somewhere ordered a very large bra.
The poor boy in Virginia on the army base got the bra and the lovely woman in the middle of the country got the wool socks. And the message that I got from the boy was so funny. He was mortified beyond belief. The kid was mortified. I’m just thinking he must have been young because, man, he was mortified.
And he, they were both very nice. I sent them labels. They did it for me, which they didn’t even have to. They could have sent it back to me. But since then I’m very cognizant of, I don’t want to send somebody the wrong item. So for the one or two seconds, it takes me to write it down. And now it’s just part of my process. So it’s not any big deal. Yeah.
Doug: So…
Trish: how do you do yours?
Doug: When I do ship, I do, I pull my stuff, I package it. And I weigh it and measure it. And then I write on a little post-it note and I stick it on there. Like last week I wrote Trish and then the weight and the thing. And a couple of weeks ago, Theresa and the weight and the thing.
Trish: He did. He said, he sent both Theresa and I presents.
Doug: And then I come over to the desk and then I go over to Pirate Ship.
Trish: All right, so play yours, Dougie. I think it’s all of 25 seconds.
Theresa: Don’t blink, everyone. This is really important.
Doug: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re finally here. The moment you’ve been waiting for. Thank you, Theresa and Trish, for opening up for me the grand event. I said that I learned from Theresa. Actually, you guys are going to see how Theresa and Trish learned it all from me.
Trish: Yeah, that’s what happened.
Doug: Short, sweet, and to the point, ladies and gentlemen. I followed the directions.
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. If you have any questions, just And ladies, if you need me to stop, just let me know.
Theresa: Because it’s going to have to be real quick. Ready? Stop!
Doug: There we go.
Theresa: They’re out of order. I already can’t handle it.
There are no boxes.
Stop!
Trish: I
Love that he just keeps showing the same six boxes. Doug, we’re so proud of you, my friend.
Doug: Thank you, so much.
Trish: So proud.
Theresa: Everybody has to start somewhere.
Trish: It’s true.
Doug: So I had them in here in the office, but they got in the way. I had them stacked because I have a table over here to the side of my desk. And I had them stacked under there, but then I’d been looking for a CD player.
So I pulled that out and set it up. And now I had to put those back out in the garage because I had to bring all my CD books in here. So I could listen to CDs during the day.
Theresa: So Doug’s, what Doug’s shows us is that even if you only have a handful of items listed, it’s still important to have an inventory system.
Trish: We’re making fun of Doug because Doug has been working. Doug, how long have you been in the reseller arena?
Doug: Like in the arena as like…
Trish: yeah, in the arena.
Doug: I think I started at eBay in like 2017. Something like that.
Theresa: You have a few years under your belt.
Trish: So that’s why we make fun of you. If you are a brand new seller and you have six buckets, God bless you. And I’m not being funny. Some people never get to six buckets, right?
Theresa: I sold for over 20 years before I had the system that I come up with now.
Trish: And I, this system has been morphing since I started. I started in a retail area. I did a consignment store. And so I had to have, everybody needed their own thing. So I started with Theresa Cox had her own tubs and Doug Smith had his own tub. So I didn’t ruin anybody’s consignment.
And then anything that the store owned was like a free-for-all all. And it used to, it would be awful trying to find stuff. And once you get over, you think, Oh, I know where everything is. One too many listed items and you don’t know where everything is and you don’t want to get in that place.
Having an inventory system from the get-go, it will morph and it will change, but have some kind of system because you don’t want to think, Oh, I know where that is. Cause trust me, you will misplace it.
Doug: And then do what works for you.
Theresa: I was a hobby reseller for years and I, did it, I made 800, $1,000 a month and that was my play money. And I thought that was fabulous. And it was for a full-time worker and a part-time seller. But when I moved to Arizona and I had, I started to expand and really focus and dedicate more to this reselling hobby. I had a garage cabinet one, bedroom five closet playroom, game closet, all over everywhere.
And I hated it. I hated having every extra closet, space, rack, whatever, filled with inventory. And so when I moved to Williams and I finally had a space that was dedicated, I was like, this is that fairy tale thing that, it’s it’s not everybody has it. It is a luxury. I like what Trish has done with making her space work.
And that’s what I was doing. I had a playroom, but I had I think I did. I think I put shelves in the playroom because my nieces and nephews came four to six weeks out of the summer.
Trish: When we moved from over there, which is like the in-law apartment to the big house, we call it. And when I moved into the big house, I was paying like, $700 a month for storage and it’s only he and I. I didn’t want to do that. I did not need a dining room. I did not need a parlor. I just don’t. And my mother, God bless her heart, was mortified that I was going to, take up part of the house with this stuff. And I said to her, I just can’t. I’m not spending the money so other people think my house looks a certain way.
I hope you guys got something out of this. I’m going to put those videos together, all three of them, and we’ll put them on YouTube as a little series if anybody wants to go back and look at anything.
If we can answer any questions specific later, let us know. You can get us at community@ listperfectly. com.
Doug: Yeah, community@listperfectly. com. You can shoot an email there. And then, yeah, thanks so much for watching and listening.
Theresa: It is, let me just tell you. If there is one topic that resellers are passionate about, it is inventory and shipping stations. And so if you guys do something and whatever, we can do another one of these and have somebody else I think it’s great. I, when I got my shipping station set up because my contractor was supposed to be here. Last week. He was supposed to be here today. Again, he’s not.
Trish: They’re friends It isn’t like she hired this guy and he’s blowing her off.
Theresa: I do pay him.
Trish: It’s not what I meant. What I mean is that you know him personally. It’s not like he just didn’t show up.
Theresa: He’s a, he’s the husband of a good friend. He’s a good friend too.
But anyway when we do that whole thing, I’m planning on videotaping it and showing how we figure out what we’re going to do and all that stuff, give me 20 years.
Trish: Yeah, but you know what? She is right. Anybody who would like to film their thing, please, get in touch with me, Trish@ListPerfectly. com. I’d love, I could make a video, you could just send me the raw stuff, and I could make you a video, it’d be great. I think showing other people The way we do it is very helpful because you just see one thing, one little thing that can change your whole day and change the way you work and make things easier for you.
Theresa: Do you know why I started taking a picture of my item on a scale?
Trish: No.
Theresa: Because I saw a TeenThrifts, Julia at 15 years old, do it on her Instagram. Like her third or fourth year of college. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And that’s when I got rid of my pen and pencil for everything. Like once I figured out how not to have to write down the weight. I was done with that pen and pencil.
Doug: That’s a great point since we are doing reseller tips. Maybe we can try and get our topic out earlier. We can be like, Hey, send us a quick video of you doing it and get some cool little tips like that.
Theresa: We can also do inventory again.
Trish: We’ll come up with some tips and we’ll get them out on the Facebook group. If you’re not on our Facebook group, please join List Perfectly on Facebook. You do not have to be using List Perfectly. It’s just a reseller-focused Facebook group. So please come in and we’ll put something in there and you guys can give us some ideas.
I enjoy. I know you’ll all be shocked by this, but I enjoy her very much. Crystal and I amuse each other, especially in Las Vegas. Yep. There’s a group, please. If you need me, we’d love to have you.
Doug: How about a quick Listing Party plug?
Theresa: Listing Party is, for those of you who are not familiar, is a platform and it’s a community that List Perfectly users have built. It is for the community. We have. Listing parties where you just list and chat. We have educational things. We have Mastermind every morning at six. You can check it out at listingparty. com 6 am on the West Coast. You do have to be a List Perfectly subscriber to join, but there’s a lot of great stuff.
You can be listing while you chat, sometimes, what we do is a very solitary thing, business. And sometimes it’s just nice to have somebody to chat with or a lot of times we’re just sitting in a room and it’s silent and that’s okay too.
This is a new series that I’m doing in Listing Party eBay Beyond the Basics. Cause people wanted to know more stuff. And the goal here is to have eBay employees and product managers come and be guests. And then on the alternate weeks, we will go a deep dive, whether it’s me, or somebody from eBay, and then we will take that information, use it, and come back the following week and talk about it and, try to figure out if we have any obstacles or can’t figure something out, figure it out as a group.
Trish: I really love that idea. I love the idea of We’re going to talk about it on Thursday. And then the next Thursday we’re going to come back and discuss it because if you do it for a week, you may be like, I missed that whole part. Like what the heck am I supposed to do now? Or how did she find that? I think that’s a great idea too.
Theresa: Yeah. So we’re going to do that. And then Again, the goal is to have a guest and if not a guest, then I will do some research and do a deep dive on a topic. And then come back and figure it out and we’ll figure it out together. Cause what might work for me, won’t work for somebody else and vice versa.
Trish: Just like inventory.
Theresa: Yeah, exactly. For sure.
Trish: Thank you, everybody. It was fun.
Doug: We’ll see you on the next one. And if you have any topics, be sure to let us know.
Theresa: community@listperfectly.com
Doug: All right. Thanks, everybody.
Outro
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