Episode 1 - Relaunch

Hello all, it has been 3 months since we last spoke.  I am relaunching this podcast because I realized that I missed it!

Funny enough, many new listeners didn't realize that I stopped recording.  I still get emails almost daily from you asking questions and seeking advice.  Keep the questions coming but my new email (well my old-new email) is mike@sparklerdesign.com.

In today's episode, I talk go back and quickly retell my origin story, my business, and my philosophy.  I also talk about how the landscape is changing and what you need to start thinking about to keep going.

In this reformulated podcast I will be talking to experts in the area of reselling, business management, marketing, and even some of our old guests.

It's a new day!

Transcript

Welcome back. It's been three months since we last spoke since I signed off for good. Well, I'll tell you I signed off, and I realized that I enjoyed doing this podcast. And so I decided to come back. Cause I think I have a lot more to say, first of all, why? No intro. Well, it's coming, but it's new. Just like this podcast is new.

Have a little bit of a change of focus. And I think I can help the world has changed. Pandemic is now endemic, you know, people are living with this thing and, you know, I even had COVID a few weeks back and, fortunately, I'm fully vaccinated whether you agree with it or not did help me, I think, to get.

Quick. I still got it, but I came back quickly and decided that I'd start this podcast back up. The economy is sputtering, and consumers are fickle. Things that used to sell on eBay are no longer selling on eBay because people are worried about the economy. Some people are selling more on eBay and other platforms because of the economy; I know that I've had to get a little more creative in my world.

To get people to come back. I've had to run sales. I've had to cut prices to get my sales up. And I will tell you; it has been pretty, pretty difficult out there for you. Well, for me anyway, I don't know about you always. So reselling is fluctuating wildly. What I, I'm trying to say. eBay sales have fallen for the last four consecutive quarters; their sales are falling.

Your sales are most likely falling. The now funny thing is, during those four quarters, they have increased revenue in the way they not income actually profit. And the reason why they've increased profit is that they've been increasing costs. So those costs are on your back, not your customer's back.

So, what are we going to do about it? Well, there's a lot to do about it. I have a lot to say so this podcast will be different from the last one. And I'm going to bring in guests that are not only resellers but also guests that are not resellers but have good insight into the economy.

Good insight into marketing. Good insight into how to run your business and move you away from becoming just resellers to becoming online entrepreneurs. There are other things to increase sales that we want to talk about. And I've talked about them at some point, but I want you to now listen and focus and hyper-focus on trying to move off-platform, get to know your customers, and get into a new type of thinking about your business.

You can't just resell stuff. I don't want to get questions about, Hey, should I resell this? Hey, should I resell that I don't care? And you shouldn't care. The point is when eBay sales fall for the last four quarters, other platforms' sales are going up, meaning that other companies are trying to go after eBay's business.

And they're doing this through the niche. What I mean by that is that Poshmark and Mercari have been focusing on sales for clothing, and they have for a long time, and they're starting to bite into eBay's business companies like hip have been focusing on some collectibles in the market. And so they're starting to take away from those eBay sales and the sports card arena.

Many sites are starting to. Sports cards and shoes and watches away from eBay. My point is that eBay is beginning to lose market share and is showing in the market. And that is dangerous for you. All right. Now, it's dangerous for you since your customers are not really your customers.

Your customers are eBays customers that happen to run into you. That's okay. If you are doing this as a part-time income, but if you want to make this a full-time income, you can't just rely on one source. And I've been saying that for a while. However, I've struggled with this. You work with it too.

I'm sure. So I've done things like, you know, starting my own website and then pushing people to that website so they could buy from me. It's still going through eBay because I used a Wix plugin.  And truth. Be told I'm still doing that, but I'm doing things differently now.

And we're going to talk about that throughout this podcast. And we're going to talk to people who are also doing that, and we're going to talk to people who aren't doing it but want to start, and we're going to coach them through it. But, as I said, we're going to have other people on this podcast that are going to have expertise in areas that are not necessarily reselling-related but are marketing-related that are business-related.

And I think that's going to be important in the future. If you're going to rely on one market, you're going to fail. If you rely on software that's going to post you on multiple markets. It will take you a little bit more time, but you'll still fail because your customers are not your customers, and that is not anybody's fault but yours.

So we're going to teach you how to, how to make them, your customers. And then what happens is they come back to you. They don't come back to eBay. They may be buying through E. But they're coming back to you, and that's the important thing. So I'm going to do a little bit of a recap over me, an overview of my business, and my philosophy on how to run the type of business we all run.

So if you're new to this podcast that you could start here, you don't have to go back to listen to the old ones. You can if you want, but you don't have. Because if you listen to this one, this will be a good recap. Over the last 60 episodes. Who am I? And why did I get into reselling?

I was an executive for an events company in Europe, and I was traveling a lot for work and, you know, obviously with a pretty much. A high-pressure job, a lot of travel, and not taking good care of myself. Unfortunately, I had a medical problem while I was in the air on my way back to Dallas from Dubai.

And, as you can imagine, you know, when you. You hear about those stories, about people who must be taken off the plane when they reach their destination. That wasn't exactly me, but let's just say I went right from the airplane to the hospital, and that was a little bit of an eye-opener.

I realized working for somebody else was something I didn't want to do. And I didn't want to have those medical problems again. I need more control over, over my life. And so I decided to become a reseller now, you know, there's a lot of reasons why I went to reselling, I think partially because the barrier of entry was low, considerably lower than traditional businesses.

But you know, ultimately, I did it because it was a really good business. Or established marketplaces where I could sell goods. And now the only real problem was, you know, what do I sell? And where do I sell it? So obviously eBay, which I was doing business with for years as a buyer, occasionally selling stuff that I needed to get rid of, but, you know, mainly a buyer.

And so, I naturally went to eBay. And look to see if there's a business there. And of course, I did all the YouTube searches and, you know, listened to some podcasts and thought, you know what? There is, there is something to be said about this business. And like I said, low cost of entry and, you know, plenty of people out there.

To teach you the business. So I did what a lot of people do is I watched these videos, and then maybe I, I not, perhaps I did buy a few courses online from people who were YouTubers and decided that, okay, let's, let's go forward. And, and I will tell you that those YouTubers did help even their courses did help me in my business.

Are they necessary? No, they're not necessary. You can learn everything you want by listening to podcasts and watching free YouTube videos. And I., suggest you by any of them, frankly, listen to old PO if you want to go back and listen to the old podcast, that would be a reason why to do it because I divulge not any proprietary information that they've given because none of it's really proprietary.

I will tell you, though, that those courses shorten your learning curve. So if you want to do that, buy a cheap one, because they're all going to be the same. I'll recap it right here. You buy things low; you mark them up. Rinse and repeat. Okay. They may have lists of hot items, and I'm going to tell you, you need to learn how to fish, not know how to copy what they're doing because they're feeding you fish, and you need to be able to find your fish.

And there are plenty of research tools out there you can use to do that. Whether it's the eBay tools that they provide, you. Or worth point, or other tools, there's plenty of them. So in my business, in particular, I focused on repeatable small items that I could store because, as we talked about in many episodes, there are levers in the business that you need to be able to pull, to be able to increase sales, increase, inventory, and pricing, ultimately, and we're going to talk about that in future episodes.

So we'll come back. My philosophy has always been to do something, you know, find out what works and then rinse and repeat and do it repeatedly. So I, like many resellers, started in clothing because the clothing was easy to find if you had any thrift stores in your area.

And that's what I did. But I found that selling clothing was time-consuming. It was space-consuming. And when I, what I mean by time-consuming, it's anything from just—prepping it and getting it ready for sale to the enormous amount of questions you get from people. And that's, that's a real problem because then you're never going to get out of the, I mean, you're a rat race, you exchange one rat race for another.

My point is you don't want to do that, and we will teach you not to do that. So our goal here is turning customers. That comes to once every once in a while, or maybe never after their initial purchase; we're turning those customers into fanatics. And there are many ways to do that. I think one is trying to get to them and understand who they are.

I don't mean who they are as a person. I mean, what's their email address, what's their name? What's their contact information. And eBay is getting tougher and more demanding and more challenging and tougher, and other platforms are not at all, not even possible. And that's because they don't want them to be your customer.

They want them to be their customer. They don't care if they are repeat buyers or not. Now some tools are out there to kind of assist. Obviously, with couponing, things like that. So they're not entirely against you, but the reality is that they feel that if you have their contact information, they're, you're going to pull them off-platform.

And maybe you will; perhaps you won't; I'm going to talk about methods to get that information. Sometimes they provide it for you. But most of the time, they don't. I went through my sales for the past year, and eBay provided me with maybe three or four email addresses out of the thousands of things I sold.

So my goal and your goal should be to turn customers into fanatics and have them return. And there are ways to do that. And we're going to talk about how to do that, but I'm going to give you the long and short of it. First, if you're in clothing right now, get out of clothing. You don't; you don't want to be clothing.

I will tell you if you have specialty clothing, like old concert t-shirts. Very very high-end, women's or men's clothing as well. That's different. All right. I'm talking about the run-of-the-mill. I go to the thrift store. I find polos and jeans and things like that and then resell them unless you have the systems, people, and space to back up that type of business.

You're not going to make very much money. And I'm going to give you a little preview of future episodes. Those people aren't coming back to you. The riches are in the niches. And that means you need to focus on a specific area and get good at it. And clothing's too broad to do that.

Now I'm going to stay focused on areas conducive to repeat business because it's 70%. And this is just a regular statistic from business, but it's probably. More. So in, in the reselling world, is that 70%, it costs 70% less to bring in somebody to re to buy from you than it would be to get a new customer.

Of course, it's not costing you more on eBay or other platforms. So I will say it's 70% more effort to get repeat customers. How do you get repeat customers? That's through automation, and we're going to talk about that. Some of it's easy. Some of it's not so easy, but at the end of the day, it's going to turn your business around, and turning my business around, I could tell you now I sell less than I sold when I sold clothing, but my profitability is so much higher.

My stress level is so much lower. My customer service is so much lower. My returns are practically nothing. I will tell you. I've had one or two returns in my vintage photograph and postcard business. That's it. Two and I sold thousands in clothing. I used to get four, five a month.

Suppose I was lucky sometimes even more because people don't like stuff. , people decide that it's not exactly what they were looking for. Maybe the measure, they don't read the measurements. I mean, there are a million reasons why they return this stuff. And I will tell you; I still have some old clothing items in my inventory because it's taken me a while to get rid of them.

But I will tell you that it's my business's most significant source of headaches. And it's probably the biggest source of headaches in your business. People I've seen on YouTube who talk about clothing hate it. They, you know, like the fact that they can get a bunch of it, and there's a market for it.

And there are a lot of statistics on eBay and other platforms to tell you how it sells when it sells, and so on. And they don't have, as let's say, advanced statistics in other areas. Of, or other products on, on eBay. And so it becomes a bit more problematic, but I will tell you, your buy costs are lower.

Your storage and handling are lower in other areas other than clothing. So I'm just going to tell you, get out of it unless you're a niche player or you have the systems and people in space to run a clothing business, then you need to get out of it. Now doesn't mean you need to try to deplete your old inventory.

If you have it, sell through it; it might take some time unless you get somebody who's going to come in and buy it all from you for what you bought it for or more than, honestly, you don't want to take that loss. Find a niche and focus on that. If you take anything away from today's conversation, that's what I want you to take away.

Right? So just a little recap, turning your customers into fanatics and automating your business will be your sources of success. Now, how can I help? Well, this podcast, I hope, will help. We're going to talk to people who have expertise in that. I have expertise in that. I run a software company that does that mainly for the restaurant business and resellers.

If you want to talk to me, shoot me an email. So, don't shoot an email to mike@oldfashionedmike.com that I shut that off. Old Fashioned Mike is dead. Wanna you get hold of me? Please send me an email at mike@sparklerdesign.com. You can contact me there. If you want to listen to the podcast episodes, I'm going to repost them on a new website.

So oldfashionedmike.com is still functional. I still own the URL. I'm going to forward it to the new website I'm going to put together. And, but, it will be on, my central platform for my, my main business, but, you'll be able to get it there. So, you can still go to old-fashioned Mike, but, you know, essentially, End of lifeing that persona.

My name's Mike Clapperton. I run a company called Sparkler and, based out f  Florida; we mainly service the restaurant industry, but we also service resellers. And, for the short run, send me an email if you want to talk to me, so hopefully next episode, I'll have an intro and outro music, but today I'm just going to sign off.

So I am glad to be back. I missed everybody and keep those emails. Talk to you soon. Bye.