7 Hour All Show Promotion Experience- Part 2 - Episode 98

https://linktr.ee/KarriKennedy

I tried a seven-hour $1 start experiment and paid to promote the entire show. The results surprised me. In this episode, I break down every number, every mistake, what I learned, and why I won’t be doing it again—at least not while my account health is sitting at “Good.” If you’re a Whatnot seller trying to grow your business, this is an honest look at what happened behind the scenes.

#Whatnot #WhatnotSeller #Reseller #LiveSelling #OnlineSelling #SmallBusiness #ResellerCommunity #AuctionSelling #SellerTips #Entrepreneur #SideHustle #WhyNotWhatnot

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Hey there guys. I hope everybody is doing really well. I am actually in my hallway slash living room uh entryway and uh I'm looking around at what happened yesterday and I I came to tell ya. So um I went on with kind of a experiment, if you will. Um I decided to do instead of 921, I decided to do one dollar starts. And if you guys listen to any of my past episodes, I've done crazy stuff before $1 starts and free shipping one time. So um I yeah, I've done 921 shipping, I think it was actually. I've done free shows, I've done all kinds of stuff. Um, it's just you just get to a point and you're just willing to take a chance, a risk, whatever. Anyways, I, as I have told you before, I'm in what I call whatnot jail. Um, my my rating has gone from excellent to good, not for anything malicious, not for being mean, not for trying, but because I accidentally forgot to run a giveaway and I was giving away cash. So did they listen to me? Did they talk to me? Did they work it out with me? Did they give me a warning? No, they just moved me from excellent to good. That being said, for three months I'm in this situation, and a lot of us are in this situation because we have good intentions, we didn't mean anything, just human air, but whatever. Um, yes, I was trying to give away cash. I don't know how other people like Mr. Beast and people can give away cash, but I can't. But, anyways, that's beside the point. Um, okay, so uh I'm in here and I'm looking. I have 55 orders to go out. I was on for seven hours. I ended up selling so much stuff, but oh, here's the thing: besides uh what I did with the $1 starts, I wanted to see because I've never done this. Somebody said, promote your entire show. And I thought this is just another scam. This is just another way for whatnot to get money. And I think I thought right. Um, I ended up giving them $35 per hour, which ends up to be like $200 and some odd dollars. Um, when I looked at how much I make back, I made 117% of that back, but that means I made 17%. Okay. 17% plus I have to pay for the boxes and everything. On top of that, I expected if I gave them $35 an hour, you would think that I would have a certain amount of people in the room at all times. I mean, you I mean, it was a good show. I was positive, I was singing, I was there was good music. We were um I was giving away free things. Every once in a while I would do trivia. I might get busted for this too. Oh, good intentions. Uh, but I was giving away things like Bucky's mints that I was just gonna throw in their box if they answered the trivia question first, and only the buyers got to play the game. So maybe that's it. Maybe one of the whatnot, you know, whistleblowers said, You can't have fun, you can't give more stuff away. So we're only gonna keep it with roughly the most I had in the room in the beginning, I think was around 35 or something, but consistently throughout the whole thing, it was around 20, 25, and that is terrible because my shows used to have, you know, easily minimum 35 to before this happened. 35, do not do anything. 35 to um my dogs are smelling all of the items that are down, and I'm like, don't touch anything. They already broke one cup, so I've gotta cancel that cup. But um the thing is when you only have 20 people in there, even if you're giving free stuff away for fun trivia, even if you've got great merchandise, even if you've got great personality and fun and spunk and you're on for seven hours, the algorithm is purposely screwing you over, even if you pay $35 an hour for the whole show. Guys, this was such a mistake, and I should have stopped earlier. I should have stopped after two hours, and I've done this before, I've said this before. I I am not the first one to make mistakes on this app. I won't be the last. We all have our regrets and we all look at things and go, why did I do that? Or I shouldn't have done that. You know, I've had really wonderful, amazing shows, and I've had shows like this where, hey, at the you know, to think of it in the positive way, I cleaned off a lot of my shelves. I haven't figured out how many items this is. Let me go look real quick. Um, I'm taking you into uh into my office and we're gonna pull it up. But yeah, the fact that once they get their cut and once they they get their cut plus the $35 an hour, the amount of money that I lost last night, I mean yesterday for seven hours is it's insane. I I was just looking this morning because it all had to come all the way into my kitchen because I had so much, and it was the entryway, the hallway, the kitchen, the living room. There's stuff everywhere. It's 55 orders, and I'm gonna see if it says, I think somewhere out of here, 55 new live orders. And does it say it's 189 items? So 189 items. One of those items this morning was a I kid you not, brass bell with a brass handle that I got as a gift. I've had it for I don't know, 20 years or something like that. It's probably worth honestly, 45 to 60 bucks. I sold it for 15 bucks. And I think once the the offers and people, I mean, I just thought, oh, it's a brass, somebody's gonna want this. I mean, it's a very nice, I mean, even just resale, and it ended up going for 15 bucks. And I was just like, what? Sometimes things would go for more. Um, in there also on the kitchen island is a one of those vanities, it's a mirror with the brass around the edges. And I had two of those. One of them went for 25 bucks, but the other one I think went for like six. Um, so there's there's wins and losses whenever you're playing the game of whatnot, that is for sure. Unless you're somebody who constantly has, you know, 600 people in your room. And then every night is a winning night. You know, you're never you're never at a loss. Now, how many new people did I have? Uh, quite a few. There's four, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Yeah, I've got at least 25, 30 new people, which is wonderful and great, but it also makes me kind of sad that this kind of sale didn't go to the people that have been coming to my shows. Maybe I need to start considering doing private shows. I've never done a private show where I just invite all the people who have bought from me in the past. Maybe that's what I need to do. I'm wondering if there's some kind of limit on how many people you can invite to that private show. I do not know this information, but oh, I was gonna tell you the money on this. Let me let me pull this up real quick. So the sales, okay, the sales are 1,265.40 in sales. Honestly, the what I sold money-wise, like what it's worth, is easily that. So I don't know what I paid for everything, but I let it go for way less than it was. And then it says estimate earnings 1,045.17. However, that doesn't take seven hours. Oh, almost, it was almost seven hours. Uh, let's just do the math on that real quick. So, um, and I I'm, you know, people said to do this. I'm glad I tried it. You know, $35 an hour. That's what I tried, $35 an hour times we're just to say that's $245. So then what you do is you take 1045.17, subtract, okay, for me, what did I just say? $245, that gets me down to $800. I'm just telling you the the truth, guys. If I look like an idiot or sound like an idiot to you, that is fine to me because we all make mistakes, we all screw up, we all do things we shouldn't do. Um, right this point, I'm just even wondering has any of this been worth it? Because I feel like when you get on whatnot, you you're told, oh, you're gonna build your audience, you're gonna grow, you're gonna grow. And I get that I have not been in the same lane and I have not been consistent. And I just got back from a month uh vacation. I get all those things, but it's the fact that you're you're fighting with an algorithm, you know, you're you're not actually you're not it's not equal. You're you know, you go on vacation, it doesn't like you as much. You don't go on consistently, it doesn't like you as much. You don't stay on a certain amount of hours, it doesn't like you as much. You don't, you know, run whatever. But even with me giving it $35, I still feel like that was ridiculous. Okay, so here's how the money is really gonna go down. I'm not making this up. Everything is exact, exact with 55 orders and 189 items. One of them, including an angel that is um made of concrete that that is like a shelf sitter. Um, it's like a cherubim, seven pounds, and that thing is going to need some serious packing, all the way to crystal and glass, and just you name it, lots and lots of breakables. I am going to have to go to half-priced boxes this morning because I tried to order more boxes from Amazon. They will not get here till too late. This is another one of my mistakes. I didn't think this through. I didn't realize how much stuff I was gonna sell and how few boxes I have. So I'm going to have to go buy boxes. I'm completely out of paper. I'm going to have to get bubble wrap. I'm going to have to get bubbles, uh, the saran wrap ones, everything. So I will probably spend about 250 bucks, 200 to 250 at the postal place where I'm gonna have to get all my stuff because I got to get my stuff out. I go, go, go get it out. Not only do I have to get it out just because I always try to get it either that day or the next day, always my shipping's always been amazing. I live really close to a postal place, it goes out quickly. If you look at my reviews, everybody's like, wow, I got here so fast. I purposely do that because I I want it out. Um, but then today it's like a total necessity because it's everywhere. If I had a warehouse and and all of this stuff could be nicely up on shelves or something and organized, that'd be great. Unfortunately, it's all over my floors, my countertops, my tables, my couches, my chairs, everywhere. Stuff everywhere. And um, I have definitely sold this many items before. I think in my 13-hour show, I sold something like 353 items, and that took us forever to ship. So that gets me to the next point. So let's just let's just say $200. That's being very nice, but okay, so it goes from $817, takeaway $200. Now I'm at $600 and 17 cents. Okay. Sarah, my helper, is going to come over here today, and she's gonna be here for about two and a half to three hours. We're gonna say three. So we're gonna subtract another $60. I am now down to $540 for basically giving my stuff away. I was on for seven hours. I sell nice stuff: brass, glass, crystal, brand new things in their boxes. I mean, let me walk around and just show you some of the stuff. I sold it all, 55 items. So, and then let's not forget, once this is all said and done, my time. Okay, so let's just say I'm only making $20 an hour, just for fun. This is for, you know, just for fun. Okay, right now I'm at $540. If I made $20 an hour for my time and my energy, okay, let's subtract that. That's $140. Oh shoot. What did I just say it was at $740? I think I did. I think it was at $7. No, $540. It was at $540 subtract uh $170, right? Is that what I'm doing? Let me clear that out. Sorry, guys. Okay, so $540 subtract $140. Now I'm at $400. Okay, $400. That's for my time during the show. Just trying to make $20 an hour because my kid, I mean, kids can make $20 an hour. I mean, babysitters make that much. So I'm just saying that's a bare minimum what you should be paid, right? Now, today, my time, I've already put in about 30 minutes of my time getting candy together because we put freeze-dry skittles in as many as I have that I can put in the orders. And then I'm going to have to put my time in today, drive to the post office, do all that. I think this is at least probably five hours worth of work. So let's do five times 20. That is another subtract. So I was at 400, subtract another hundred. I'm at $300, guys. $300 is what I have made at the end of a seven-hour show, and basically giving really good stuff away. Let me walk through here and show you some of the stuff I'm just gonna say. There's silver, there's crystal, there's a candle, there's a fitz and floyd gigantic um what is it? A gigantic pewter bowl, there's cloches. This is a mallard, there's pewter um candlesticks, there is a thrift through. You bought a bunch of great stuff. Uh, there was $99 coveralls that I had bought for myself somewhere. And I thought, oh, eventually I'll resell them. I'll put them on eBay or something. But then I got off eBay and all that. I think I sold the overalls that were $100 to her for like eight bucks, maybe seven or eight bucks. Those are there. Oh, yeah, there's a brand new Yankee candle. Um, brand new. Those cost what 15, 20 bucks. I sold it for six. I get that whatnot is cheaper. I get it. But when I'm looking around and I'm my I'm mathing this and I'm looking at the time it took me to buy this stuff, to get this stuff, to sell the stuff, to show this stuff. And after seven hours plus five, 12 hours, 12 hours of labor plus like untold amounts of labor in buying it, showing, I mean, uh putting it up, like displaying it so it was nice and keeping up with all of that. So seven plus five, that's 12 hours. We'll just tack in another, I don't it'd be at least four to five hours for this. So five, 10, 7, we're gonna say 17 hours of labor, really, truly, for moving things around, probably around 17 hours of labor to buy these things, to stand in the lines, to get the items. And I'm looking at that. So let's just say this is me doing all of it just right here on the spur, guys. $300 profit right now after paying for the for the help, for paying for the supplies, for paying for my time, right? Like we took the time out already, so I can't I can't take the time out again. But three hundred dollars, guys. That's I'll I'll go back and I'll just say for the time I actually am going to spend today, which is selling yesterday and today, five plus seven is twelve. So I'm gonna take that three hundred dollars and I'm gonna divide it by twelve and that's twenty-five dollars an hour plus I made twenty. So I I basically that, yeah, you could say I made $45 an hour, but I lost the cost of the product. That doesn't take in the fact that I just basically gave the products away. These products actually cost me money. So I'm pretty sure I ended up negative on this. I don't think I will ever promote a show again unless I'm in the excellent category. When you look at your account health, guys, you can go in and you can just check that on your um whatnot. I'm gonna walk you through it just real quick. If you guys are listening to this and you're like, well, dang, I might need to think about this. You go um down to your seller hub on your phone and it's in the middle, and it will um give you, hold on, let me click on it. I'm like, it is there, isn't it? Uh okay. You scroll down to where it says performance, and then you click on account health. Right now I'm at 99.3 for on-time scan rate, which is shocking to me because, well, that's because one day my stuff was ready and my kid didn't get it to the post office. That was that he did not take it when he was supposed to. So that's 99.3, and then I have a defect free order rate at 99.2, which is also both of those are horrible for me. I don't know which y'all's are, but I have always tried to stay at 100. So the fact that I have a 99.3 and a 99.2, it might only sound like points to you, um, but it means a lot to me. And it says your account is violated more, um violated one or more whatnot policies. Review your policy standing. My policy in standing, I'm good, is good. It'll say it in small writing, right of the policy standing. It'll say good or excellent. And so um, it says you received a warning. This this is not a warning, this is a total slap on the wrist, and it is is terrible. So at the end of the day, right now, it says, Oh, okay, here's the exact payment: $228. I don't know what I said earlier. $228 for the time, the almost seven hours. I wish that I could have during the show when I realized how few people were in there. I wish I could have hit the button and said, I don't want this promotion anymore. I think if I had the option to do that, I probably would have. And I'm I'm kicking myself in the butt, guys. I really am at this point. I don't know where you live. So some of you might be shaking your heads and going, Well, cheapers, why'd she do that? What if number one, I'm in a tight place for three whole freaking months because of whatnot. They don't give a shit about me. They they don't care that I'm struggling to get money right now. So I'm like, well, what do I do? Do I have a garage sell? Do I put get back on Facebook? I got off Facebook. Do I get back on Facebook and start selling on Facebook? Do I go to other sites? You know, I don't want to have to do that. I want things to be better. And so I what I'm thinking is what I tell you guys feed the algorithm, feed the algorithm, give it what it wants, just like the, you know, the whatnot monster. I describe it as Sully from Monsters Inc., and that's how I think of him. You know, this big, cute, cuddly guy, which sometimes is very um, very, very snappy with me. Uh, and he wants everything. He wants his money, he wants his time, he wants his benefits, he wants you to talk nicely about him, he wants you to stay on a certain amount of of time, etc. etc. If I don't feed the whatnot monster/slash algorithm for the next three months, then my standing might not go to excellent, which I I don't even know how because they're not they're not looking at your ratings. Like I told my assistant this, she's like, You have a 5.0, and I said, Yeah, and I always will because I bust my ass for customer support. They're not taking customer support and your reviews into account when they give you these ratings. So um it's because, you know, I mean, the standing, it's because you did something wrong. And in my case, I tried to give money away and I forgot to run a giveaway. So yeah, how horrible, how awful. I really deserve this. Not. I know I'm being sarcastic and snotty, but um, you guys are really getting the truth on how I feel. That being said, I'm going to switch the thoughts here. I'm having a ton of people right now come into my shows. I mean, not come into my shows, come uh onto my, you know, send me messages, send me texts, and they're like, Carrie, what can I do? How can I get more people in my room? I really do not know what's going on. Honestly, if I I don't know if this is gonna mess things up. If I go into whatnot right now, will it keep me recording? Um, I'm just gonna, yeah, I'm in whatnot. I'm gonna just show you. Um, there's people that I see on right now. Um, one of the people who's on every single morning, she busts her ass. She is a great seller. Her name is Vintage Circus. She's got six people in her room. It's 8 09 a.m. on Monday. Um now, Shop the Butts is doing really good. They've got one dollar vintage quilts, quilt blocks, linens. They've got 90 people in their room. Let me go look at some other things. Some girl spot hers is sponsored. She has 18 in her room. Hers is Kindle Light, something she's