This week on The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly and Listing Party, we welcome Brian, AKA Kings of eBay, AKA Estate Kings on eBay. Brian has been selling since 1997 and the age of 14. Brian is known on social media as Kings of eBay, most notably on TikTok. BESIDES all that Brian owns an estate sale company, is a licensed real estate agent, a licensed auctioneer, a certified personal property appraiser, and does clean-outs and business liquidations.
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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Intro
Trish: Is it 10? I don’t have my glasses on.
Doug: 10, 10 wonderful seconds.
Trish: This week on The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly and Listing Party, we welcome Brian, AKA Kings of eBay, AKA Estate Kings on eBay. He’s been selling on eBay since 1997 and we’ll get to his eBay history. Also, he’ll talk about his TikTok, he’s really big on TikTok. We’ll talk about what he does. He lives here in Boston where I live, so we’ll get to see what he has to say.
We will also have seller shoutouts, a Trish tip, and seller news. Listen in on our chat with Brian Kings of eBay.
Kings of eBay
Trish: Today, we welcome Brian from the Kings of eBay on the show. On eBay, Brian is known as Estate Kings, where he’s been selling since 1997. He started at the age of 14. Brian is known on social media as the Kings of eBay, most notably on TikTok. Brian owns an estate sale company and is a licensed real estate agent, a licensed auctioneer, a certified personal property appraiser, and does cleanouts and big business liquidations. He’s also a fellow Massachusettsian, Massachusettsin, I don’t know what our thing is.
Brian: Massachusite.
Trish: Massachusite. Hey, Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming.
Brian: Trish and Doug. Thank you for having me. I appreciate getting to come on.
Trish: Awesome. And so the first obvious question is, how the heck do you do all this?
Brian: I’ve been doing eBay for 26 years now at this point. And through doing that, I’ve done everything from buying, it being one of the largest storage unit buyers in New England for a little while. And then that little show called Storage Wars came out and made it a little difficult to continue. That’s how old I am. By the way, the fact that I was doing it before that show premiered, just to age myself a little, but I found that throughout the time I had a very long sales career of over a decade in sales leadership and I was very successful.
For anyone that knows sales you get fired a lot, so I always did eBay in my spare time. And it would either be full-time eBay when I wasn’t working or, part-time eBay when I was. And I found that from doing estate sales, it just fell in my lap when someone said, Hey, can you do an estate sale for me?
I was like, all right. And the next thing I knew, literally everything that I had been doing my entire life turned out to be what makes a great estate sale company owner. From negotiations to know-how to handling the money, how to price… everything. Just the advertising, the marketing, the sorting, literally every aspect of an estate sale is what I’ve been training for my whole life. And I didn’t know it.
And then along with that, I’ve got my auctioneer license and I do live auctions and online auctions and I got a certificate to be a certified personal property appraiser. This makes sense since I can pretty much go in any house and price probably 90 to 95 percent of anything in a house without looking anything up, which is why I do so well at flea markets and yard sales.
Trish: It’s a good skill to have.
Brian: I figure, you know what if I could fly, or if I could shoot a three-pointer, or I had any other talent whatsoever, I would do that. My only talent, literal only talent, is that I happen to know what the price is in the history of not everything, but a large majority of stuff in someone’s home.
And I know how to resell it for the maximum amount of money possible, either through my private network of buyers and sellers or just through throwing an auction or an estate sale. That’s why I do flea markets and yard sales. I’m so successful at those because I know what everything’s worth and you’re going to sell me something for $5 and it’s worth $150, I’m going to do it.
Trish: Absolutely.
Doug: A walking pricing encyclopedia. So let’s go back to eBay. So you’ve been there a long time. You started at 14. What got you started on eBay and what were you selling back then?
Brian: Back in the day, when people really watched television and nightly news, programs were something that the family gathered around. In 1997 there was a, I think it was like a channel 4, thing talking about this new website that you can sell all of your stuff and everyone’s selling their things and making extra money. And I was like, all right, I could use some money. I was 14 and I ended up watching that and then I signed up on eBay and then I sold every single thing in my room.
So I have zero personal attachment to items. Sentimental value and that stuff means zero to me. I don’t understand, it means nothing to me. It’s an item that has a value and use or it doesn’t. So this business is really good for me. So it’s no, you can’t have this. It means so much to me.
For me the biggest thing that I found was CDs. There was a tariff in the UK and other areas across internationally, in which if you bought it regularly. It would cost them overseas $35, $40 for a CD. But they could buy one of our dollar bin CDs over here, for, you buy it for a dollar or 50 cents, whatever.
They’d buy it for 18 to 25 bucks. So I just started buying every single dollar bin CD I could find, every video game, everything that possibly was an option of things that people were going to have in front of me and next thing you know I was buying out radio stations, I was buying out cd stores. I was buying out everything around me that had media and by the time I was 15, I found out that I was actually doing the math to it I was making more money than my principal.
Trish: That’s always fun. That’s a good flex. I could have your job. So how big is the Estate Kings on eBay now? And what are you selling there?
Brian: So the business at this point is pretty massive. I’ve built it bigger than anything in my, if I could go back to my 14-year-old self and say, Hey, you’re now a 40-year-old and your business is this massive. I’d probably be pretty proud of myself. But, it’s not really just one thing. I have a feeling you talk to a lot of people who may do Poshmark and other things, and they’re just clothes or they’re just shoes and there’s a terminology that someone came up with called niching down. Where instead of just selling clothes, now you just sell sneakers, or you just sell belts, or, I think, personally, outside of the people that have massive social media followings, or massive whatnot followings, or whatever Those people are a different category.
But what I’m about to say is not for those people. For every one of our regular people that don’t have that, niching down is one of the stupidest things that you can possibly do when it comes to trying to make money and make this into a business that you can do full time.
Because what’ll happen is, let’s say now you just sell dresses. Guess what? You just walk by a Bose Wave Radio for $5 that’s worth $85 because you had to get a dress that you’re gonna pay $10 for that’s worth $35. It’s probably going to sit there for the next year where that Bose Wave Radio would have been gone in about an hour. So I tell people all the time you should not be selling the stuff that you’re passionate about and you love to resell. You should be selling the stuff that has a margin.
The only thing that matters in this business is having it actually be a business. There are a lot of people who open up stores and Oh I love video games, open a video game store, and then six months later, grand opening and grand closing. How was that experience? That’s the thing. You go where the money is, and in my area, from being able to buy a massive bulk from businesses that are closing, or from junk guys, or from collections, or from whatever, I have found the niche for myself, which is I sell literally everything.
Trish: So the niche is called everything, Doug. Get it right.
Doug: There you go, yeah, exactly. Tell us a little bit about your sourcing for Estate Kings.
Brian: I really found it crazy when I started doing social media. Only been doing it for about four years, but everybody was thrifting. I go to thrift stores, I’m a, I’m the thrift god. I’m the thrift! I’ve never stepped foot in my life in a thrift store. I’m one of the few resellers, probably maybe the only reseller of my level that you’ll probably ever talk to that’s never been to a thrift store, never done bins, never sourced in any of those places. Now I’m not against it and keep in mind, I don’t hold the same sentiment, but the way I was raised was that thrift stores were for people that were of low means and that was for them.
And that was their place to get cheap clothing or items or whatever and I was middle class. We didn’t go to thrift stores. I now know, obviously, thrift stores are for everybody, anybody who wants to go there and buy and resell, you have at it. But for me, I’ve found their prices are insane, and I know that from seeing the lives of people who go and do them, I would never in my life spend 7. 99 for a shirt that I can maybe get $25 for, that to me sounds insane. I would never do it, so I deal with people who need a house emptied, I own an estate sale company. So I’ll go in, I have a whole house available to me. I’ll have people who also want to stay till companies and guess what?
Now they need their place cleaned out, all that inventory we’re being paid to remove. I can take whatever I want for free. Do you want to talk about margin? I’ll take something for free and I’ll sell it for $80 or $100. Over and over again, building a six-figure business on the backs of being able to get this stuff for practically nothing while also doing flea markets and yard sales.
Cause as I said before, I have that special ability or superpower, whatever you want to call it, where I can look over an entire yard sale table or flea market table and know, Oh, this is crap, this is reproduction, this is where the money is. And then I go into my brutal negotiations, for anyone who’s watched my social media, they’re absolutely brutal! And I get it for the price that I want, or I walk away.
Trish: And you have a team that works with you, right? You’re not alone, you have other people.
Brian: I do. Yeah, I have a pretty good team in place and the size fluctuates depending on the time of year and how many estate sales I’m doing.
Trish: Living here, weather matters. Sometimes, people put off things here in the winter. It’s not like where Dougie lives.
Brian: Doug, no offense, but I hate everyone who can go to yard sales in December and January with a passion.
Trish: It’s annoying. I know it is, it’s annoying. And I was on a thing the other day and they asked me something about whether you’ll be able to go to a yard sale soon. I was like, no. Yard sales start in May if we’re lucky. We’ll get the cold May and it ain’t happening.
Brian: Flea markets are in April. Our flea market season is April until just about the beginning of November. Our yard sales are from May typically till about the beginning of September, and then that kind of dies down once school starts.
Trish: And I think he’s being generous about the flea markets, my personal opinion.
Doug: A real quick aside. So I’m curious. So you’ve got this encyclopedic pricing knowledge. Do you think it’s just years of experience or how much research did you do? Or where do you, where did this come from?
Brian: The best way to be able to gain my knowledge of stuff is to buy storage units, buy out houses, buy out businesses. You want to buy things which you are forced to research because when you buy a storage unit for $700, that’s full of random crap. Guess what? You want to get your $700 back. You’re going to find out that’s a World War II binoculars and that is a toy from Marx from the 1950s.
And this He-Man figure, the figure isn’t worth anything, but the sword’s worth $50. You need to figure these things out. And I’ve sold, God knows, how many items in my life. I couldn’t calculate how many items I’ve sold. It’s gotta be in the hundreds of thousands privately and through eBay through my old accounts on eBay. So I’ve been forced to learn because I have a very good memory. It’s a huge positive and a huge negative. All right, before I go to bed at night I can remember horrible things that were said to me in kindergarten. And I can also you know remember exactly where if you can see here All the stuff that’s in my office, I know where everything’s located. You can pick up any item here. I’ll tell you where it is, how much I paid for it, the whole deal. And that’s just, it’s weird, it’s a weird thing to be able to have that kind of memory, but I do.
Doug: Sorry, Trish, I’m taking over.
Trish: Go ahead.
Doug: So this is a question I love to ask people. I call it the craziest thing question. So I’ll be out and about and do this. What’s the craziest single thing you’ve found in a nook and cranny in a house or in a storage bin? Is there one thing that stands out?
Brian: Yeah there is one. And this is the one that I when people ask me that question, I get that question a lot. So I am an expert in antique medical.
I deal in antique medical. I’m an expert in antique medical. I love it.
Trish: Can I just say something? Did you even know there was a thing, Doug, called antique medical?
Doug: I actually do. It’s very niche. I think it’s a very interesting niche. I’m into like, I don’t, I have little weird things, but oddities, antiquities. A friend of mine is an antique dealer, but I’m aware of the niche, but not an expert.
Trish: Okay. All I meant was that it’s not something the day-to-day folk are coming around to see.
Doug: I would imagine so.
Brian: So I’m, like, I’m the weirdo that was at auctions. There was an auction for a funeral home, and I cleaned up at that place because people didn’t want to touch the stuff. I knew what all the medical tools were, and I bought a doctor’s bag for $40 full of tools, so heavy you couldn’t even lift it. And this thing, I separated all the tools, sold the bag, everything for three or four thousand dollars. I paid $40 at auction. And people gave me the look like I’m a lunatic for that, but, I just, I don’t know, I just gravitated towards it.
The weirdest thing I think I’ve ever sold is a suppository press.
Trish: Oh, lordy lord.
Brian: And that, that was what they would use. It was metal. It weighed a lot. It was a metal press. You open it up, you put everything in there for it. You close it and it I think you would do some sort of process with this mold, and it would then turn whatever you put in there into a suppository.
And my favorite thing about that was, I bought it for I think 20 or 30 bucks and I bought it just because I thought it was funny and then I sold it on eBay for $300. And then I did what you have to do when you sell something like this and I normally don’t do this because my feeling is once it’s sold, you forget about it.
I messaged the buyer. Who’s in New Orleans, I said to them…
Trish: What are you doing with this?
Brian: I said, just out of curiosity. I said, are you going to put this on a shelf and have it as part of a display? Or are you going to actually use this?
Trish: Yeah.
Brian: And I got the worst possible response. Are you ready? No response, which means they saw what I wrote, were taken aback by the fact that I would even question them and then just didn’t respond. So to this day, I will never know if that thing is now back in use and people are having a good old time with something due to what I sold.
Doug: Some New Orleans vampire ball.
Trish: I was gonna say, I have no words for that. Tell us about your social media. What kind of content will we find? How did you start it?
Brian: Sure. I’ve been doing this for 26 years and I’ll tell you right now, if I had started showing the things that I was doing when I was younger on YouTube I would be the you know, hairy tornado type guy where everyone would know who I was. I didn’t start doing this until four years ago as far as social media is concerned. Part of what it was is I went on Instagram and I started seeing people that were calling themselves experts and selling courses who had been doing it for two or three years and like in front of Lambo’s I’m a reseller. I make a quarter of a million dollars a year. This is my Lambo. This is my second Lamborghini. And this is, and if you give me 99.99 a month or whatever, I’ll do this course.
I was so taken aback that it just really put a bad taste in my mouth. So I decided okay. I’m gonna try this, so I did what any new social media person has no idea what they’re doing. I paid an absolute fortune to have an animated intro made of me and my son. And I had that thinking for YouTube and started doing YouTube things I paid an editor more money than I care to mention to do, I mean this guy did an amazing job. I mean my first six videos on YouTube amounts of thousands of dollars that I paid to get those produced and done and I’m thinking this is gonna work. This is gonna be amazing! Nothing.
I mean if it was like, if a tree falls in the middle of the woods, type of thing. No one saw it and I was so proud of those videos. They’re still there. They’re still there. Kings of eBay on YouTube. Anyone can watch them.
And then decided to get, I dabbled into Instagram a little bit. I started to get a little bit of Instagram following. I got about 800 people pretty quickly. And I was like, Oh, this is cool.
And then I met a guy locally who is big on TikTok. I think his account, his accounts are massive. He’s like a local, like Boston kind of guy. And he said to me, ” Hey, I’m doing a podcast. Why don’t you come on the podcast? So I was like, cool. So I did that. We just talked eBay for a little bit and then he said, you should do TikTok. And I thought TikTok was just people dancing and doing silly things. Come to find out from joining it. The reselling community on TikTok is the strongest of any of the channels stronger than YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, any of them, the number one channel.
If you are a reseller and you really want to hear people that know their stuff. Those who are communicative will respond to you that are just friendly, kind, and nice and the community is amazing. Its TikTok and I mean you hear so much crap about TikTok I understand people’s hesitancy. But I’m telling you, like the comments, the stuff, the support how often we go live. I go live almost every night on Kings of eBay and I’ll have a ton of people who are all resellers in the room, talking about our day, talking about the stuff we have going on.
And I don’t charge for courses, I have over a thousand videos for free. I have people who email me all the time asking for help and questions. My email is openly available for anyone who wants to email me. People jump on my lives, I’ve, there are so many people who are now big, well-known people on social media who were no, nobody’s four years ago, no one knew who they were, who their first lives were in my lives because I’m one of those people. I let everybody on.
If you want to come on and you want to talk, I want to meet new people. I want to learn new stuff and that’s really how it just came to be. And my first week on TikTok was nuts in retrospect, I went from zero to 3, 500 followers in three or four days. And then by the end of the week, I had almost 6, 000.
Then within a month, I had almost 10, 000. And now I know that’s like nuts. I didn’t know my videos were going viral. I just thought every video hit 300,000 views in a couple of hours.
I hate to say ill of TikTok, but you can lose your account very easily. They love to ban people. You can have 10 million followers and they will just cancel your account and there’s no recourse. So I built my account up to 26,800 followers, not that anyone’s counting, and I got my account kicked off because a troll reported my account. And I had no way of responding and I lost it! And then I rebuilt it within a little less than a year up to now almost 35,000 followers.
And part of that was I had a video that hit 12 million views before that was eventually removed because somebody reported it. So who knows what that would be like now, but for two whole days on TikTok, it was the most viewed video in all of the United States. And that’s pretty awesome in my eyes. I’ll always get to enjoy having that fact.
DOUG: We’ve heard obviously Tik TOK for creators, Tik TOK shop is growing right now. So super high level. If a seller to you was like, why should I come on TikTok? What do you think the top opportunities for sellers are on TikTok right now?
Brian: So TikTok shop is getting bigger and there are people who are making a fortune off of it. I’ve dipped my toe into it. I haven’t sold anything yet so I can’t give you a positive negative or anything. I found that a whole lot of resellers are still really just all over at Whatnot and they are using TikTok to promote their Whatnots so you can actually jump on someone’s live and it’s just them having an extra camera showing that they’re on Whatnot.
So that’s happening a lot but I found that If you go on and you build enough of a social media presence on TikTok, or really any social media channel and people see that you’re genuine, that you have legitimate stuff, that you’re not gonna just, take their money and they’ll never hear from you ever again you can have a way of being able to sell stuff.
There are a lot of people who showcase things, whether it’s jewelry or clothing or artwork or whatever, and they’re able to say, Hey, I’m selling this, whether it’s on my private channel, D to C, or if it’s through eBay they’re making a fortune by properly utilizing their social media. But even more so people like me are teaching everyone else how to be able to make more money doing simple things with their eBay stores with how they do postings, how they do offers, how they do all this stuff, or even just how you properly take a photo. These little tricks are changing people’s lives. I get messages all the time from people who say things to me like, Hey, Brian, I normally would never have purchased a musical instrument. And I buy, I don’t know, a thousand musical instruments a year, so I’m very well versed in them. And people see me at my flea markets and lives, I go live to the flea market, and they’ll see me buying 20 musical instruments in one morning. And people say, I bought a trumpet for $ 50 at a yard sale and I sold it for $850. Thank you so much and that means more to me than anything.
Trish: So what are the challenges for sellers on TikTok? Are there challenges?
Brian: In order to get on and do lives with video, you need 1,000 followers. So you are going to want to create some content and you are going to want to follow a bunch of people that you admire and try to get into their lives and try to get on their radar. There are people who came into my lives quite often who I, I didn’t know, they’d comment and we’d talk back and forth and I would even say, Hey, so and so is at 500 followers, give them a follow, and let’s get them to a thousand, try to hype them up.
The other thing, though, I think this is with all social media, the amount of drama that goes on in these worlds is just, to me, it’s absurd. It’s like high school again, with a lot of this everyone tries to cancel everybody. And so you have to tip-toe a line and I am very bad at it, I’ve found that I’m very blunt. Like with a hammer. If I am going to hurt your feelings, I know at the end of the day, I am going to help you make more money and change your life positively. I’m okay doing that. And there are certain people who can handle it. And there’s certain people that can’t.
Trish: I do think it’s a New England mean thing, right? New Englanders, we don’t suffer fools easily, and so we’re like, why are you doing that? This is what you should be doing. And we’re not saying it to be mean, we’re saying it because we’re trying to help you. I think New Englanders, are a little rough. We got, sometimes you’re just a little what the hell’s wrong with you, buddy?
Brian: Kindergarten through 12th grade at a public school north of Boston. As a kid I was overweight, a very large guy. I was, I’m six foot one. I’ve always been one of the biggest guys in the room my whole life throughout high school and everything, everyone wanted to be the one to challenge me. I was in over a hundred fights, at the end of the day.
You realize very quickly, words don’t hurt and even most people fighting don’t even hurt. I’m not afraid of anything, or anyone. It’s, I think a thing that’s, people are from this area I think just not even just the north shore of Boston, but like all of New England really, and really Massachusetts.
It’s one of those things where you are absolutely trained throughout your life to be able to handle whatever comes at you. And you’re not someone who’s going to sit in a corner and be shy and afraid. I’m going to tackle a challenge. I’m going to go after something head-on and people, there are people from other parts of the country, or they maybe were raised a little differently without that kind of stuff.
And they take it very personally sometimes with things that I say or do. There have been so many attempts to try to cancel me or have me blocked or whatever. And people say to me all the time, why don’t you block people? I’ll tell you why I don’t. I believe it’s an open-door policy.
That door opens, you want to leave my channel, you don’t want to, goodbye, see ya. You want to come, you want to come back in, welcome back. I’m good. Like I really, people think that my feelings get hurt and what, I’m like, listen, I went through a six-figure divorce. There’s really not much you can do to hurt my feelings at this point in life.
Trish: I’m good, thanks, buddy.
Doug: And Trish has been in over a hundred fights in her lifetime as well.
Trish: I have. You don’t know. I grew up where he grew up, dude.
Brian: Listen, I never lost one. I was legitimately in from fifth grade all the way to twelfth grade. I was in over a hundred fights.
Trish: I’ve never been in a fight in my life. Other than words. But I’m a girl. It’s different. You know what I mean?
Brian: Not where I’m from.
Trish: I’m from the South Shore. We’re a little bit nicer.
Brian: Oh yeah. North Shore. Our girls are a little bit more trained.
Trish: They are a little tough up there, man.
Doug: So any top social media advice for sellers across the board?
Brian: I’d honestly say, You want to listen to people, but you also don’t want to have it that you take every word as gospel. I hear a lot of the times when people say stuff on their social media, and these are people with tons of followers, way more than me. Listen I’m, I have a good amount of followers, but to some of these other people, I’m a nobody where they can crush me with their millions. But I’ll sometimes even still hear some of them say things that I think is absolutely absurd that the niching down and that you should only focus on one thing and only sell stuff that you’re really passionate about or to me, it’s nonsense, absolute nonsense! And I’m listening to the people with massive social media followings, they could just sell soap and make a million dollars.
If they have a social media following, if they literally just want to sell plastic rings, they could make $10 million a year. That’s what having that following means. It gives you that but for everybody else that doesn’t have those massive followings, ya you have to find the stuff that’s going to sell quickly that you can buy cheap and sell expensive, and just rinse, repeat, over and over again.
Trish: What about eBay Live or Whatnot ? What do you feel about those?
Brian: So I think eBay Live really is just for the Sotheby’s type situations. I don’t think they’ve opened that up to everybody unless I’m wrong on that.
Trish: It’s not just for Sotheby’s, we know a few sellers who have been on. What it seems to me is right now you’re redirecting them to your listings. It’s almost more QVC, you’re showcasing your product. And then you’re, they’re not set up to do the live auction part yet, but we know sellers who have done it.
Brian: eBay should have bought Whatnot and made that, instead of calling it Whatnot, it should have been called eBay Live or whatever, that was a giant mistake, which they can correct. So they have the market cap to be able to do that, but I’m a licensed auctioneer. So for me how do I put this? Watching the overwhelming majority of Whatnots would be like Michael Jordan watching a fifth-grade basketball camp. Where the kids just are learning how to play basketball and like shooting over the basket and things like that.
Trish: So you’re trying to say it’s a little painful.
Brian: Some of these Whatnots that I’ve watched are so painful. And it is, listen, I’m not trying to knock these people trying to make money. I support that 100%, but people come there to buy stuff and there’ll be people that’ll go seven or eight minutes without doing a product and just talking.
It’s like this is supposed to be an auction and then they don’t list things properly. They don’t show things properly. They don’t say the size of the shirt. They don’t like it. They didn’t load everything in so you could preview what the stuff is when it comes up. Listen, it is painful for me to watch Whatnots.
I do, and I buy stuff occasionally from it, and I even did a Whatnot and it went horribly. It’s the same reason I don’t use Poshmark. Cause you have to promote the hell out of your stuff in order to get people there. So would I use Whatnot again? There’s a chance I might honestly, I’m sitting on over 1000 articles of clothing right now that I need to sell.
So there’s a chance I may do some type of a Whatnot. I’ve also thought about consigning it to someone who has a large social media following. That’s definitely an option but honestly, I feel like eBay has an opportunity in this very moment right now where they could change the game in so many different ways.
Unfortunately, there’s no one at the company right now who is willing to talk to someone like me and have that conversation where Listen, I’m a businessman above anything I own over five businesses. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know my stuff and more than anything, I know eBay and reselling.
And I would love more than anything on this planet to sit down with an executive that’s high up at eBay and say, Hey, here are the opportunities for you to not only make a ton of money for this company, for the sellers, resellers, and buyers of eBay to get an experience that they actually want.
And I’ve come up with so many different things that they could be doing that would make them a fortune. The problem is that they just won’t talk to someone like me and it’s aggravating. And I’m an eBay seller chapter leader. I’m like, I’m in there. They sponsored me for stuff. Like I’m with them to that point and I can’t get to that next level. And it’s so aggravating.
Doug: I totally agree with you. I think it’s a big missed opportunity. I still know people at eBay. I think Trish was there for this conversation. It’s like a friend of mine who works there basically says there’s a big internal debate specifically around eBay Live. And this was about a year ago when we were up there, but I agree with you, it’s a missed opportunity. They could definitely get in and dictate that industry at this point.
Brian: I know for a fact, if they were ever actually really looking to change eBay for the better for buyers and sellers, all I would need would be a one-hour meeting with someone who’s high up in eBay that has the opportunity and’s willing to listen.
For that, and then their marketing. I have been very critical of their marketing for 26 years and I’ve been on there for 26 years I’ve come up with marketing campaigns that would literally change the face of eBay. If they would ever actually talk to me and I’ve been with their marketing teams. I’ve done that where it’s the lower level where I even say to them, Hey, I have these marketing ideas and they pretty much throw their hands and they’re like, hey, you know It’s nothing we can do guy. Good luck.
In the case of eBay, you have someone who’s used your platform longer than almost anybody. I know there’s people that have used it since 96, but I’ve been on it since almost its inception. I’m very knowledgeable in business. I know the background of all this stuff. I could single-handedly sit down with them and change the face of that company and I just don’t see it ever happening.
Trish: It’s a tanker, and they can’t stop on a dime. It is a huge organization and I think, anything they’re doing is years out. And I think they did try to get into the live shows and I know I’m a little bit of an eBay cheerleader. I know, Doug, you don’t have to tell me, I already know it’s true. They’ve already started this live, I think they’ll come out with it. May it be too late?
It may be, by then, but I don’t know. I love eBay. So that’s all I have to say. I love them.
Doug: Yeah, definitely an opportunity there, though.
Brian: Hey, I love ’em, too. But at the same time, I think that they’re on eBay 2. 0 and they should be on eBay 7. 0 at this point, and they’ve allowed companies to get bigger. Poshmark should have never gotten to the size that they are. Whatnot should have never gone to the size that it is. We go up and down. Facebook Marketplace shouldn’t have been able to challenge them for a lot of stuff. Even now, TikTok lives and Tiktok’s getting into this. eBay should have squashed every one of these companies like bugs. Look at Amazon, you’re telling me at some point that they couldn’t merge eBay and Amazon. Imagine what that would look like. These are the types of things that I think of.
Trish: eBay and Amazon getting together would be difficult to get through the government. I think it would be too big. It would be a monopoly at that point.
Brian: Maybe not.
Doug: You know what? There are a ton of eBayers over at TikTok now. Specifically on that obviously the e-commerce team and the TickTock shop team.
Trish: So tell us what’s next for you. What’s next for the Kings of eBay?
Brian: So my estate sale business is really growing heavily. I’ve got a, since Massachusetts I have an estate that I just got the contract signed yesterday for Arlington. So that’s right near Boston for those people that don’t know But what I end up doing is because not only do I do the estate sales I’m hired on to do that. I also have a cleanout team to clean everything out once the estate sale ends to get rid of all that, but then i’m also a licensed real estate agent.
So I’m also being signed on to sell the home as well. So my company does what I call white glove service. Basically, you can hand me the keys to your house, sign a bunch of paperwork, and you’ll end up with a giant check. Sell everything in the house, and sell the property itself. We also do cars, boats, and RVs, and I’ve sold those over the last couple months.
I’ve sold RVs, Harley Davidsons, trucks, cars, everything. That’s growing to be pretty big. Now I’m trying to get live auctions back to the North Shore of Boston, actively working on that. That is one of my biggest goals. And one of my biggest goals, my whole life, was to be an auctioneer.
And I am, I’m a licensed auctioneer. I want to hold live auctions again, and they haven’t had any north of Boston in like over a decade and I want to bring it back.
Trish: Pre-pandemic there were three down here on the South Shore. Hingham, Avon, and Brockton. You could go every week, right? Since the pandemic, though, it has not come back and It’s too bad because I used to go quite a bit, more than I should have, but it is a great way to source. If you are in the area, it can be a really good way to source. And I think the pandemic just put a halt, halt on that specific thing here anyway. So I hope you do. I hope you do. If you do, I’m coming up.
Brian: Absolutely. You’ll have an invite. Front row seat saved for you. Thank you. I just feel like, so now I’m doing a lot of online auctions. I just had one that recently ended up, I’m using a site called Auction Ninja. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Auction Ninja. For anyone who’s looking to source, and is looking for a good place to source. Auction Ninja is a great place to go. I’m doing really well through that site and I am posting online auctions there constantly it’s a mostly local pickup, but I’ll do some shipping. I just did one that was half artwork and half sports collectibles and it went for a lot more than I thought, but even with that being the case, the people who bought stuff still paid way less than what it is.
Because I’m getting consigned, a large part of my business is consignment. So I’m getting consigned stuff for people like, hey, I just want it gone. And so even if I get 40 percent of the value, they’re thrilled. The buyer’s thrilled. Everybody wins.
Doug: Interesting. Before we go, anything to add? I know you’ve got a couple of things coming up you want to talk about. So let’s get those in.
Brian: Okay I am an eBay seller, and chapter leader, for Boston you do not have to be from Boston to join you can i’m most the overwhelming majority of the events are virtual. But we’re trying to build this into a massive group teaching people all sorts of tips and tricks if you want to see what the first meeting was like you can go to my YouTube channel Kings of eBay and the full recorded Meeting is there.
But if you go to eBay the seller events, you can just google that or go to sellerevents.eBay.com. If you click Seller Meetings on the bottom, you click Explore by Region. I’m northeast in the name of my group, which shouldn’t shock anyone is called Boston Kings of eBay. So I know a huge surprise for everybody.
But it also is pretty cool that eBay allows me to call myself Kings of eBay. That’s, you want to talk about clout. That’s some clout right there when they respect your gangster of how long you’ve been on the site and, how much stuff you do to promote them because I promote the hell out of eBay! Everywhere even if, even when I’m critical, even when I am, I still, at the end of the day, it’s only because I want them to be better.
So, one other thing real quick is Brimfield is the week of May 12th, and May 13th. I will be hosting an event, hopefully, sponsored by eBay. Potentially List Perfectly, who knows? And for Brimfield, it’ll be at the MGM Springfield. All resellers all over really, the country are flying in. We’re gonna be doing a meet and greet with a ton of TikTok resellers hanging out.
We’re going to have a big dinner on Tuesday night after we go to Brimfield. It’s going to be amazing. But on Monday night I’m going to be hosting an event for everyone to come and join and be a part of it. Probably even be live-streaming that event on eBay as well. Yeah, I’m really hoping everybody can join. Everybody can be there and it’s going to be good.
Trish: I don’t know, Doug, if you know this, but now that he said it is at the Springfield MGM, I’m going no matter what, because anytime I can go to a casino, Trish is going.
Doug: There you go.
Brian: As a Vegas guy, I graduated from UNLV. I love to gamble. I don’t hide that whatsoever. I played more poker and sat at more poker tables than I care to ever mention.
Trish: I do love Vegas.
Doug: Trish and I have had some fun in Vegas.
Trish: We have, we’ve had a very good time in Vegas a few times. But I’ve been to MGM once and it was great. So I’m looking forward to going in May.
Brian: Absolutely. I hope to see you there.
Trish: Yeah. Oh, I’m going.
Doug: She’ll be there. She’ll be there.
Trish: I go to all the things.
Brian: Awesome. We’re going to be live-streaming Brimfield. So for anybody who wants to know what it’s like it’s going to, it’s…
Trish: Brimfield is crazy.
Brian: From 5:30 in the morning till 2:00 in the afternoon, I’ll be live streaming it.
Trish: And if you’ve never been there, you don’t understand it. But I also think that if you have any dealings with antiques. It is just, you’ll just walk around a, like a kid in a candy shop. It’s awesome. But thank you so much for coming. This was great. We really appreciate it.
Brian: Thank you for having me.
Doug: Yeah. Thanks so much, Brian. Kings of eBay and Estate Kings. It was a cool talk. Fun. Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time. I will probably livestream the event, but I’ll look for Trish. And again, I love that you are pushing TikTok for sellers. I’m a big fan.
Brian: If you’re not on TikTok, you should, it’s free to join, look up resellers. You will find more content and more community than you could ever imagine finding online.
Doug: Awesome. All right. Thank you. I’ll see you on TikTok.
Brian: Absolutely. Thank you guys.
Seller Shout Outs
Doug: All right. Let’s get into seller shoutouts. What seller shoutouts do we have this week? Trish don’t make me cry.
Trish: Okay. I don’t know if I can promise that. So Brian Burke, who is a friend of mine and certainly a friend of yours, has worked for eBay for over 25 years and he’s in community engagement. He really is the community engagement guy. He announced the other day that he’s retiring as of March 1st, and this is going to be a big blow for us, Dougie.
Doug: Yeah. It’s put out a lot of ripples in the seller community. Sellers were crying, men were fainting and policemen were turning in their badges.
Trish: Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s good for him. He had spoken to Doug and I once about wanting to do this. He had some other things he’d like to do, but, it’s really too bad. He’s a great guy. He’s always available. Everybody knew him, so we’re going to miss him. So I’m sad about that, but I’m glad for him.
Doug: Yeah, it’s good for him. And I’ll just say, 25 years with eBay, not always on the seller engagement team or not always in the seller community, but always an advocate for sellers, way back the book, The Perfect Store, the book about eBay they talk about early on how he was going to bat up at the CEO level for sellers. And he’s just always cared about sellers. I don’t know if you know this Trish, but I did work at eBay for four years.
Trish: I’m pretty sure I did know that Doug.
Doug: Brian never liked when I would say he was my boss, we were teammates, and we had a lot of fun, a lot of crazy adventures.
But again, he was always an advocate for sellers, even when sometimes some of the sellers did not like what would come back or like him. He would even advocate for those sellers. And he would also be the guy that would call, you got to call so and tell him to take that YouTube video down.
Trish: Yeah, you may have crossed the line there, buddy. But he tells this great story about the two of you being on a little road trip from, I believe, New York to Boston. And it has to do with a key fob, and I would love it if you would tell this story.
Doug: So we did this we called it the Three City East Coast Tour, and that is, ladies and gentlemen, the monumental trip where I met Trish and Diane Lassonde for the first time.
Yeah, we flew in somewhere and we got a rental car and we drove from the airport to this hotel. The next morning we got up and it’s got this key fob that none of us had ever used. And between fairly smart fellows, we couldn’t figure out how to start up this stupid car for I don’t know how long, and then finally we started and it’s don’t touch anything, just get in and go.
So we drove up, we did I forget where we started, but we drove up.
Trish: I want to say Connecticut.
Doug: Maybe something like that. We went, it was like a Chili’s or something. And then we went to Diane’s house, met you guys, and caravanned over to the Italian restaurant. From there, we went to New York City and Kathy Terrell’s meet-up. And then we went home, but that was the East Coast tour.
Trish: The way Brian tells that story about the two of you, California boys, being in the cold. They don’t know how to do anything. You don’t have the right jackets. You can’t figure out how to turn on the car.
Doug: It’s so cold. It’s so cold. I’ve got ten jackets on Joey.
Trish: You’re like a little match girl, freezing to death outside.
Doug: Please help me.
Trish: Buy some matches, please. Yeah, so I’m really going to miss him, so that’s what I have to say about that.
Doug: I think with Brian, under Brian’s direction, when I worked there I think there was a shift more towards sellers than they had done in a while. Because a lot of sellers told us that specifically, it is like you guys are connecting more as eBay than eBay did for years.
Trish: Yeah.
Doug: I hope it doesn’t swing back. eBay seems to me more corporate now. There’s more corporatey.
Trish: Okay. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s interesting. We’ll have to see, right? In time.
Doug: Yeah, we’ll have to see, but Trish and Doug will be here, ladies and gentlemen.
Trish: Exactly! Whatever you need, Trish and Dougie are here. We’re both gonna miss him, and he did a great job, and he’ll be really missed. Congratulations, Brian, and we look forward to seeing what you do soon. Maybe he’s gonna become a seller! He should be a seller!
Doug: He sells a little bit. Oh, dude, on that trip, he was all riled up. He sold some cuckoo clock or something. He was like, oh, I forgot that I’m not gonna be able to ship it. I’m on a trip. He wasn’t expecting to be on a whirlwind East Coast tour with me.
Trish: And the other seller shout-out that I would like to talk about Doug and I both had spoken about this after we talked to Brian on the podcast as we both went in and looked at the TikTok seller community over there, the reseller community over there. And it’s pretty big.
Doug: It’s interesting because they’ve got TikTok Shop now. And just cause we say the seller community over there is big. It is big, but a lot of sellers are doing content over there.
Trish: Yeah. That’s what I mean by content.
Doug: Not necessarily selling there. I think they’re still working that out. I think TikTok still has a bit to go before they convince sellers like we know to really start selling there.
Trish: Agreed. But the seller community over there, the reseller community over there is very strong. And if you’re somebody who is just starting out, is looking for niche advice, or is looking to see what else you can do within this industry. TikTok is a good place to play around with, do some searches, and see what pops up. It has a huge community and we know a few American Arbitrage, Cary, he’s got a huge following over there.
Doug: That’s where I first discovered Cary over there. On TikTok, I followed, and I, and it’s funny because I got so excited on one of his lives once where he’s Oh, Snoop Dougie has a question. I was like, that’s me. Hello. I have a question.
Trish: I’m so debonair. Hello. I didn’t just almost get excited.
And Sonny Las Vegas, who’s a friend of ours. He’s on there. He does some content. And he’s adorable. I’m sure all the girls love him.
Doug: Yeah.
Trish: But there’s a lot more, there’s a ton of them. So go in and look.
Doug: Yeah, go in and take a look. And we talked about it earlier with Brian Kings of eBay, but you can post on there. It’s very much a video platform. Once you get up to a thousand followers, you can go live, which is a very interesting experience. And that’s the thing. What I really like though, about TikTok from a content perspective. Its algorithm is really crazy. It’s based on what you look at.
Trish: Yeah, the algorithm is nuts. And so if you look at something, I’m going to tell the story of during the pandemic, when I first started watching out TikToks. Okay. I got on lesbian bread TikTok for a good Eight weeks. I don’t even know why there’s such a thing, but there was.
And this girl would come out and pound this dough and show you how to make things. And every day I was like, Oh, I wonder what she’s making today. It’s so niched down. If you look at something very specific, you’ll find it. It’s crazy. The algorithm is awesome.
Doug: And so the TikTok algorithm is based literally on what you look at, not what they think you should see or what they think you want to see, and it can shift super quickly oh, you’re into lesbian bread now, so I’m going to show you more bread, more lesbian bread. More similar content. I might’ve gone with a different example, maybe music or selling.
Trish: I guess that was the example because it was so niche down that who would have thought that would have been a, that would have been a topic is what I’m saying.
Doug: There you go. Trish just niching down on TikTok and you could too. And your algorithm will shift.
Trish: It will. I haven’t seen bread in a couple of years.
Doug: Check out the TikTok reseller community. And again, best of luck and all our love to Brian Burke. We’ve had a lot of fun. We’re going to get together for a drink or something when he’s down this way in Southern California. So I’m looking forward to that.
Trish: Yeah, he’s a great guy and we’ll miss him.
Doug: Yes. And so will the seller community.
Trish: Oh, absolutely.
Trish Tip
Doug: All right, Trish. Surely you have a seller tip for us this week.
Trish: My tip this week is for newbies. I suppose it’s not just for newbies. If you’ve been selling for awhile, maybe you don’t know this.
This is a flat-rate legal-size envelope. This goes for the flat rate, regular size envelopes too, which are maybe this much shorter. You can order these from usps.com, and have them delivered right to your house. I want to make sure everybody knows is two things. If you can fit it in here, And close it with anything else, it does not matter if it’s a round circle. Okay?
Doug: Stop the show, Trish. Stop the show.
Trish: Stopping.
Doug: What’s the craziest thing you’ve fitted in one of those envelopes or boxes?
Trish: This one right here, not the boxes, but this envelope, I got a pair of men’s pants that were a 52 waist.
Doug: Wow.
Trish: Yeah.
Doug: Impressive.
Trish: That is impressive because they were heavy and they were very big. And because of that, I saved myself a ton in shipping, right? So that’s the thing about these. And what I would like to say to you guys is make the bottom do that to the corners and make the bottom flat.
Doug: You’re making it like a box. So you square off the corners.
Trish: Square off the corners down the bottom. So you have a flat, part it in. Now I always put the things inside. I use a food bag from a, I’ll put this link in. I buy food bags from a restaurant supply and they send them to me on rolls I think a thousand each roll is like, let’s say 10 by 14. Put it in there. And then because it’s, it’s slippery, right?
Cause it’s, it will slide right in. Then lean on it and roll the top closed.
Doug: There you go.
Trish: Okay. And the last thing I want to say is. You don’t need to get it all the way over. You just need it to hit. So even if it just hits, then you can’t pull the tab because it will be on the jeans. Put a piece of tape over it.
The only thing that USPS does not let you do is change the shape or the integrity of this. So as long as you do not cut into this, anything, you can tape it. You can do whatever you want to. You just can’t change the original shape.
Doug: I’d love to know, like a USPS person, what’s the craziest thing you’ve seen come through?
Trish: Sure it’s going to be nuts. But a while ago, people would say, no, you can’t do that. It’s not flat. They think that the flat means flat. Flat means it’s one price, right?
Doug: Oh, there you go. So let me ask you a couple of questions. Correct me if I’m wrong. So USPS. com, you can order these. They will literally bring them for free to your house and drop them on your step.
And they’ve got all kinds of different stuff, all the USPS shipping supplies that they have available.
Trish: Correct.
Doug: So first of all, what’s the cutoff guideline? Is it one pound or two pounds or where do you start?
Trish: So it used to be up before we got Ground Advantage, which is relatively new, right? We just got Ground Advantage. Before Ground Advantage, if anything was a pound. Pound point one, right? Going into one of these, it was the most economical way to send anything over a pound 98 percent of the time, it was the most economical way to send anything over a pound was to put it in a flat rate envelope and you would want to put it in. That’s a legal size. You’d want to put it in the regular one for the cheapest.
But since ground advantage has happened, sometimes over a pound, it’s still cheaper to send it ground advantage, which is like first class rather than one of those. So just check the prices. Once you know what it weighs, Put it in and check the price and it will tell you whether ground advantage is cheaper or a flat rate envelope.
Doug: They have charts at USPS.com, weight charts, and stuff. And then if you’re a Pirate Ship user, they will also help you select what’s the most economical for the item you’re shipping.
Trish: If you’re selling on Poshmark, you get a USPS priority shipping label up to five pounds. You can use one of these, you can use a box, it doesn’t matter. But it can’t be over five pounds.
Doug: And so that’s a great point. So you can ship USPS flat rate in other boxes and packages, but they don’t want you to take flat rate packaging and use it for something else.
Trish: Correct. You are never allowed to use this for anything other than USPS flat rate.
Doug: On Pirate Ship, I could ship something USPS in my own box, though.
Trish: And you even can do USPS by weight. Priority by weight. You just can’t use a flat rate and use your own box. If you use a flat rate, you have to use the flat rate that’s designated by what container you’re using. So whether it’s a flat rate envelope, a medium box, a small box, or a large box, they have eight things you can choose from.
Doug: And I don’t want to get controversial, Trish.
Trish: Okay, go ahead though, Doug.
Doug: What’s my favorite way to ship?
Trish: Pirate ship.
Doug: No, what specific?
Trish: I don’t know.
Doug: Media mail, I love media mail.
Trish: Oh, media mail.
Doug: There are some limits, but for most of the stuff I sell, I can ship media mail.
Trish: Really? That’s interesting.
Doug: Obviously books.
Trish: Books. DVDs. Movies. You can’t ship anything that has advertising in it.
Doug: So technically you’re not supposed to ship magazines.
Trish: Right.
Doug: Technically, you’re not supposed to ship comic books, but books are good to go. And because the books get heavy.
Trish: Yeah, very heavy. And the one thing I’d like to say is my favorite flat-rate envelope. It’s the traditional size flat rate envelope, but it has a very large clear piece of plastic on it.
Doug: Yeah, you put the…
Trish: Correct. It’s so that you could put a label if you wrote something, you could put it in it and it would see through it, right? Yeah. In my opinion, that is the best envelope because plastic pushes out unlike cardboard does.
There is a lot of give in that plastic so you can fit things in that envelope that you cannot fit in the other envelopes. And then a four-by-six sticker almost covers the whole thing. You may see a little around it, but that’s my favorite envelope.
Doug: It’s like a double tip.
Trish: It is a double tip.
I will make sure that the ones that I like, I will put links to them directly on USPS that you can follow in the show notes.
Doug: All right, cool. That is another excellent tip from Trish ladies and gentlemen.
Trish: Thank you.
Seller News
Doug: And now over to the news desk. What do you have for us this week, Trish?
Tish: I feel like we should have a typewriter.
Doug: I just like you to do it. That’s why I haven’t found it yet. I like you to do it with your mouth.
Trish: Okay, I just did it. In List Perfectly News, the Simple and Business Plan now has access to the enhanced catalog view. So that means they have grid view, they have list view, and it’s a whole new catalog. It’s a whole new experience. You can move things. You can see just what you want. You don’t have to use everything. And it’s now been released to the Simple and Business plans.
Doug: I really like it. It’s very Poshmarky. So if you’re a Poshmark seller, you’re going to like it. And you know what, it’s like these things, eBay does it all the time. Any update, it’s not going to be for everybody, but right now you can switch back and forth, but this is based on actually years of feedback that we’ve been saving up.
It’s really cool. You can adjust your columns. You can hide stuff. You can navigate better. There’s a selection in the upper right corner where you can go back and forth between the original view and the new grid view.
And then you’ve got, again, adjustable column width, similar to eBay’s, that has been suggested forever and a day. Choose the fields you want to see. I don’t need to see the cost of goods, Trish.
Trish: Exactly, that’s how Trish feels.
Doug: But you can choose the fields you want to see. You can rearrange the order of your columns, drag them around. Edit your listings in bulk directly from the catalog.
Trish: That’s only for Business, Pro, and Pro Plus the bulk. I just want to throw that out there.
Doug: So there’s now a great navigation bar on the left that you can open or collapse. It contains your notifications and is like a bell type of thing where you see you have notifications.
Those are important to look at. Those are like, we call them your banner notifications. That’s where you’re going to get all your news. You can add a listing from there. You can go straight into help documentation. Again, you can go back and forth to the old catalog there. Your templates are there. Your analytics are there.
Help and news is there, which is basically your guide to List Perfectly, like our help documentation, FAQs, and things like that. Community links, your link directly to Listing Party, which you can have in a new tab Referral, which you should be taking part in.
Trish: Absolutely.
Doug: And then community, a lot of the stuff that Trish and I do. And then account info as well. So that left-hand nav bar is compact and easier to navigate. I dig this new view.
Trish: And what I was going to say is, that change is hard. Do you remember a few years ago when eBay put out the item specifics and everybody lost their minds?
Doug: Yes.
Trish: I would really ask you guys to give the new thing a chance. There have been two years of work put into this. And everything that developers do is based on what sellers have said they want. What sellers have said would help them be a better seller or go faster, etc.
Doug and I know quite a few people who are in the original beta group, right? Because we always test stuff before it goes out. So it has a small beta group to get out bugs and stuff.
Doug: And it’s faster too.
Trish: Yeah, way faster. I think it’s really really fast.
Doug: The other thing we do know is we’re constantly taking feedback, so we’re already taking feedback for this, making some adjustments. Yes. There are some things like maybe the listings are going to be a little bigger than they were before, but there are things you can do with that. Adjust your sort, and adjust the number of things that are showing on the screen, that’s going to help with that.
Trish: If you can get yourself used to it, get yourself into the rhythm of this, you’ll be faster because it’s faster. So you want to try to adapt to it.
Doug: We do these things for a reason. And again, it’s based on feedback. It’s based on improving your List Perfectly experience. The same thing we used to say at eBay is we do these things for a reason.
Trish: And that’s the thing. I think we need everyone to understand that. Anything we do or anything eBay does, I honestly believe this, also anything they do, they believe is going to help us in the end and the same with List Perfectly. So please give it a shot. We’d love to hear what you think. I think once you give it a couple of weeks, you’re going to be thrilled.
Doug: And I will say this, Trish.
Trish: Yes.
Doug: This goes back to looking at your notifications, looking at your banner messages in List Perfectly. This was announced there. Some people saw it as a surprise. If you’ve looked at your banner messages or notifications.
Trish: You would have known.
Doug: So check those. I think this is a great new thing. It’s going down to all plans. Originally that wasn’t the idea, but as we did say with Pro Plus last week, more things will filter down to some of the other plans.
Trish: Yeah, exactly.
Doug: All right. What else, Trish?
Trish: In eBay news, eBay’s new video series on LinkedIn, the Accidental Entrepreneur Lessons in Success features eBay CEO Jamie Iannone chatting with eBay small business owners and other business leaders, many of whom started their journeys right on eBay. The first episode features Nick Molnar, the co-founder of fintech giant Afterpay. So that’s really interesting. I thought. Did you like it, Doug?
Doug: It is interesting to sit down, deep dive into eBay, starting businesses and growing on eBay. I really like that it’s coming out on LinkedIn. I’m a fan of LinkedIn.
Trish: You are a fan of LinkedIn. So I never had a LinkedIn page before last week and I have one now. Cause Doug kept saying to me, where’s your LinkedIn? Where’s your LinkedIn?
Doug: So I can tag you on there and I check LinkedIn daily.
Trish: Do you?
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. Of course, it’s always been considered like your online resume or your online portfolio.
Trish: But when I went in, it didn’t seem like that at all. There was so much information and so much like, business information and figuring out and seeing different things. I was really surprised, really, because I had it in my head that it was, just for resumes.
Doug: Yeah, exactly. But it’s a great content portal. Obviously, for a business like ours or what eBay’s doing, they’re putting out seller resources and e-commerce resources and e-commerce information. That’s what List Perfectly does there. I share a lot of stuff. There are a lot of brands that post on there, but it’s a very great content portal, a great content resource.
Trish: Yeah, it’s really interesting and I look forward to seeing the rest. It was really good. I liked it.
Doug: So speaking of eBay, Trish, hopefully, you find this interesting. I wanted to talk about eBay auctions for a bit.
Trish: Sure.
Doug: The majority of eBay stuff for sale and bought on eBay now is buy it now.
Trish: Correct.
Doug: So auctions are a bit of a dated concept.
Trish: Yep.
Doug: But that’s how eBay started.
Trish: Yep.
Doug: But, and Trish, surely I have, I guess I’ve probably bid on auctions over the years, but most of the time I do buy it now, but the last couple weeks I was very excited. I was like a giddy schoolgirl. A couple of weeks ago, there was a Star Trek book that I got. Because I was getting nostalgic, and I was searching for stuff.
And it’s oh, these poorly written episode adaptations are available. Brings you back to high school. So they had a collection of the best by this guy, James Blish. And it was like, it was a good deal because some of them were listed at a hundred bucks a pop. It was a good deal.
It was an auction. And I think I got it for like less than 20 bucks. And it was cool. It was a collection of 20 in a hardback, hardback leather bound edition.
Trish: Ooh. It’s funny that you say that because Anyone who knows me is not going to be surprised when I say this, but I have a pocketbook problem, right?
I love a bag. I love a good pocketbook and I want designer bags as cheap as I can. So I bid weekly on bags out of Japan. Japan has a huge luxury market and the Japanese are fastidious in these bags. They are beautiful and they do not want to use them once they’re a little worn.
And so they turn them in and they bring them to these places and those places sell them to the U S markets. You, they have all these auctions every week and I go in and I bid and every once in a while you’ll get lucky and get something relatively inexpensive. And they’re always DHL, brought right to your house. And it’s fast. You’ll have them in a week. It’s crazy. So I love a good auction.
Doug: So I was putting a blog post up on the site written by Power Selling Mom, Danna Crawford. It was something about eBay and I was like, you know what? Let me take some screenshots from her eBay store. I went there, and I was like, oh, she has concert t-shirts.
Trish: Oh!
Doug: And I was looking at that, and Trish, you know I love music, you know I love David Bowie.
Trish: I do.
Doug: I’m not gonna spend two or three hundred dollars for a vintage t-shirt because my wife would kill me.
Trish: Yep, because you’d be divorced.
Doug: Exactly, I’d be divorced. But I’m perusing and I see this David Bowie, 1990 Sound and Vision crew tour shirt in Danna’s store for auction. And I was like cool. That’s the one time I saw Bowie on that tour at Dodger Stadium.
Trish: Okay.
Doug: This is cool. David Bowie, Sound and Vision tour staff t-shirt. And I bid on it. I didn’t get it. But it was fun. And what I loved about the Star Trek book too is I watched the countdown.
Trish: Yeah. So people have these sniping apps that will go in.
Doug: Those still work?
Trish: Yeah. T Money (Theresa Cox), I think I still uses one. We’ll have to ask her.
Doug: eBay doesn’t like those though.
Trish: I know.
Doug: But it’s interesting too because you know the conventional wisdom is and the stats are out there that more than 80 percent of sales on eBay are buy it now.
Trish: I think it’s way more than 80.
Doug: Probably more now. Yeah, this is back when I was at eBay.
Trish: I think it’s over 90-something.
Doug: There you go. There you go. Trish, I don’t want to date this episode, so it lasts forever, but. Yesterday was the Super Bowl. Some people watch the game. Some people watch for Taylor Swift. Some people watch the commercials. The crossover. We talked about the commercials earlier before we recorded. There were some good commercials, but it was interesting to me that Temu had multiple commercials.
Trish: Multiple.
Doug: At least three or four.
Trish: At least. At least four, I think. And wait! Temu isn’t how they said it.
Doug: I know that’s what it was. It’s Temu, right? Or is it something different?
Trish: Say it again. Say what you think it is.
Doug: Temu or Temu? It’s one or the other.
Trish: Temu, I think. And we all say Temu.
Doug: You’re all like, oh, that’s how you say it.
Trish: I know. One of the first things on TikTok I saw when I went in, they were like, This is how you say Temu? Over and over again. But we’ve spoken about Temu or Temu recently, and we know sellers who get inventory from there. So it was an interesting thing. Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. And you can get stuff notoriously affordable there, we’ll say, and I haven’t bought anything there. I’ve been very tempted. We talked about, I think it was last week that they’re going to invite the U.S. And European sellers to sell there. I think that’s going to be super interesting. I think it’s going to change their marketplace. I think that U S sellers are going to have a hard time competing with sellers that are on there right now.
Trish: Absolutely.
Doug: I’m sure they’ve thought about that, but it’s huge in Asia. And I think, frankly, they’re going to have some challenges with perception and things like that. U. S. Sellers are sensitive to Chinese sellers and the Chinese market because of counterfeit knockoffs and cheaper pricing. And some of that’s happening with Tiktok and Tiktok shop right now. But it’s still, that they’re putting so much into this. That’s $20 million investment in Super Bowl ads. And I guarantee that’ll be the first time a lot of people have heard about it and learned how to pronounce it.
Trish: Yeah. I went to Merry’s, my stepmom’s for the Superbowl. So I’ve gone to my dad’s house to see the Super Bowl, I figured it out yesterday for 30 years, every year I’ve gone to my dad’s house. This year when he died a couple of years ago, he died in January and in February we went and had a little thing because.
And then last year we did and this year we weren’t going to and I called Merry and I was like, I gotta come to your house for the Super Bowl. I’ll bring pizza and salads. She’s okay. My daughter and I went over, my husband came and she was there and we watched the Super Bowl.
And Immediately she says to me, what’s Temu or Temu, whatever the hell you say. And my father was a Wish fanatic. When he started to get sick, he loved to shop. So he downloaded Wish and would buy, you can’t even believe the stuff you, we after he died. There were 22 pairs of shoes he bought that weren’t open yet.
And if he liked something, he’d end up buying it twice cause he’s Oh, I like that. And he’d buy it again and you’d get another one. So he was a really big Wish fanatic. So all I kept thinking the whole time was, Oh, my dad would love this. My dad would love this, she had never heard of it and she’s a shopper. So I think they’ll reach a whole new audience.
Doug: Yeah. And Etsy had an ad.
Trish: Which I didn’t really get. I gotta be honest. The Etsy ad didn’t do it for me.
Doug: I don’t know if I remember it, Trish.
Trish: It was an odd ad. The Etsy ad did not do it for me.
Doug: Was Taylor Swift in it?
Trish: No. And neither was Jeff Goldblum.
Doug: Jeff Goldblum was not. Or Tom Brady.
Trish: Or Tom Brady. Jeff Goldblum had a glow up last night. He was in like four commercials. He’s gonna be in a new movie. He was like there. And how the hell old is he? He looked great.
Doug: There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Super Bowl ads. Temu had three or four.
Trish: Exactly.
Doug: All right. Trish, anything else?
Trish: Nothing else that is fit to talk about, Dougie.
Doug: There you go. That’s all the news that fits, ladies and gentlemen.
Trish: I hope you have a good week, Doug.
Doug: Thanks, Trish. You too.
Trish: Hope everyone has a good week. See you next week.
Outro
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