Starter: How I built my business: tips and tricks from successful sellers

[Music] [Applause] hi everyone and thank you for joining us for this panel we know that our seller community loves to learn firsthand from each other from other sellers and this training session today is all about how i built my business and i'll be asking three top sellers how they built and scale their businesses and we'll find out what helped fuel their success the topics we talked we'll talk about today include tips and tricks for sourcing managing inventory marketing customer service best practices will cover everything now i'd like to introduce you to today's panel and we're actually going to play each of their seller spotlight videos as a way for you all to get to know more about them first up we have jim tim calls his specialty a dying art though he says clothing clock repair shops are shrinking in number jim's ebay business keeps growing i always thought there was a mystery about these clock movements and when i started learning about it the mystery disappeared and i got hooked really really hard i'm obsessed with watches and clocks but it is a dying art we're buying stuff because otherwise we'll land in the landfill my name's jim rodman and my ebay store is j.r clocker the one thing i knew i wanted to work for myself in 1992 we opened a clock shop and it just took off and then my wife got a big opportunity to get a huge job promotion but you have to move it was very hard to leave the clock shop it was like my second home but this was a big opportunity for my wife and that's where i discovered ebay it was great i could work at home and i got to spend a bunch of time with my kids there's a picture of jeff and i working at a bench when he was really little i'd come home from an auction and he'd want to see the watches i got all of a sudden that's what he loved to do ebay was really rolling at that point in time but i always kind of kept it in check a little bit because we may have to move and then my wife said i'm getting ready to retire it's your turn i started ramping up the business in the last year and a half we've bought three clock shops and a watch shop 4 500 square feet of inventory we had to find all kinds of places to store this stuff we went from having four or 500 items up on ebay today i think we're at just under 2543 the way you do it you just taught me something my main job right now is to make the business so jeff can take it over spinning around take a look at your work not bad at all to have jeff with me oh my goodness we just have a ball [Laughter] it's absolutely family business i just want to see it continue thanks for joining us today you certainly have no problem running your business from wherever you decide to live when did you just realize that you could turn your interest in clocks into a career well it all started in the beginning with a brick and mortar shop that we had in muncie pennsylvania and then my wife got a big promotion and we had always decided that we were going to go in her direction fortunately we had been selling on ebay for about a year when that happened and we just i felt that we could just change the business from brick and mortar to uh ebay and it worked in 2015 my wife decided to retire so we really ramped up the business at that point and i am sitting right now in a building we just bought and we're going back to the brick and mortar with the emphasis that ebay pays will do everything we never have to worry about it uh but we can have some fun and i can teach my son great thank you so much for being here today thank you next up we have linda linda was an attorney and she left her career to pursue selling designer pieces on ebay that's where her true passion was today linda's stuff has become one of the top sources for fashion and accessories on ebay and there's she has over a hundred thousand a hundred thousand square feet um of inventory in her warehouse let's watch in our warehouse now we have over a hundred thousand items but it started as this one woman show in my house my name is linda lightman and i'm an ebay seller when i was in college traditional success seemed to me to be a lawyer or a doctor so i went to law school but i absolutely hated being an attorney it wasn't the thing that i was passionate about i'm a shopaholic fashionista i love the treasure hunt looking for steals and deals i started selling on ebay my own designer clothing shoes and accessories and i kind of became hooked on this process my kids left for school and boom work mode turned on i wore all the hats created the listings took the photographs answered all the questions did the shipping my husband like a year in said you have a great business i'm going to quit my job i mean what you're going to quit your job and we're going to do this and we took this leap of faith together we moved to a 6 000 square foot office within two years we outgrew that space and moved to a 15 000 square foot space then a 25 000 square foot space and now we are in a hundred thousand square foot warehouse that i say is filled of fun and fashion people listing product people photographing product people shipping product people authenticating products because everything that we sell is authentic when i started the business it was mostly pre-owned that's evolved too we get product from retailers from manufacturers from designers people have said oh linda laitman the queen of ebay i'll take that that's a compliment i've hitched my wagon to ebay and we never looked back when i started my business we were selling hundreds of items now we're shipping thousands of items a day in a world where venture capital money is being thrown at businesses who do what i do i still own a hundred percent of this business i love what i'm doing i'm happy this is my purpose i get to come here every day and enjoy what i do [Music] welcome linda thanks for joining us today thank you so much for having me this is a great opportunity it's clear that you have done an incredible job building your brand how does it feel being dubbed the queen of ebay so you know that old adage like love what you do do what you love and you're never going to feel like you work a day in your life that's how i feel being a lawyer just didn't do it for me my passion was fashion and i've been selling on ebay for 21 years i kind of feel like i've grown up with ebay because i started 21 years ago when ebay was so new started in my house and now as you said we're in a hundred thousand square foot warehouse and we have over a hundred thousand unique items on ebay every day that's kind of mind-blowing i think amazing and finally we have mike mike has worked at detroit axel a a long time starting in his early teens now as ceo he leads the auto remanufacturing business his father started in 1987. what began as a five-person operation now employs 400 people across three warehouses let's let's watch his video the company was founded by my pops back in 88 and we started remanufacturing cv joints and rag companions we started selling on ebay and opportunities are incredible we immigrated to this country back in 87. my father had six kids and you know he had a dream i would see my father work 12 14 hours a day back then most of the businesses were tailored to the big three and as time went on automotive factories closed and moved out of town vacant buildings were all over and it's almost surreal as if there was an exodus we've had it hard over the years because of what happened with the auto industry but my father he had his philosophy and i thought that we can build on his philosophy by expanding more and when we put our products on ebay for the first week we've seen our sales at one or two a day and then about a week later it went up to like 14 orders a day and then next thing you know you're doing 10 000 or 11 000 orders a day we went from serving metropolitan detroit to serving the whole world through the platform of ebay if we compare between before we start ebay and now we were doing about three percent of what we are doing and everything because of the vision of my son mike my dad came to this country with a dream and now i want to make that come to life and this is the city that started everything and we stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us [Music] thanks for being part of our panel mike thank you for inviting me you've proven to be a serious leader in the parts and automo automotive sector why did you start selling on ebay though uh ebay happened to just fall in our lap really back then when we got on ebay we really didn't understand what it meant to sell online and uh ebay being so uh user-friendly and uh it made it made it a lot easier on us to be able to understand what's possible out there in the e-commerce world and thanks to ebay we're growing our business substantially over the last 12 or 13 years that we've been on ebay thanks again for being here linda um let's start with you because now we're going to talk about how to stand out and differentiate from the competition and you've become one of the top sellers for fashion and accessories on ebay and i'm wondering have you found that standing out from the competition is an important factor for the growth of linda's stuff and if so if that's been a priority how have you achieved this so absolutely when i started 21 years ago there was really no one in the resale market and we've grown purely on sweat equity but what's made us successful is that we are nimble and our customer service right i think that that's so important ebay has a 180 million worldwide buyers out there you want to respond to their questions and i think customer service is what separates us from our competition being able to answer those questions from potential buyers being able to take great pictures and ship our items for free and very quickly and that sets us aside we are going to answer every question whether the item is twenty nine dollars or twenty nine hundred dollars we're here for our community great thank you jim over to you you sell clocks as well as clock parts all shapes and sizes is there anything that's really a priority for you that you're super like particular about when it comes to your listings pictures pictures pictures pictures so many times you find that people don't read the descriptions but they go on pictures so if you have very good pictures they're going to understand what they're going to get customer service is the most important thing um letting our customers know that we have an expertise in what they're purchasing and puts puts us uh stands us way far above uh every all of our competition just being able to let them know they can send a question and find out whether a certain bound staff which is about this small will fit and be able to repair their watch and knowing that and having the resources to do that is all part of what we do here at jr clocker okay thanks and mike how about you you went from serving the detroit area to serving literally the world how do you help detroit axle stand out in such a huge way well in the auto business consistency and reliability is important so nothing's supposed to be easy and everything is everything's a real struggle from day one until right now it doesn't get easier it's not supposed to if it if it was easy you'll be doing something wrong so yeah you got to put in there you got to fight every day that reliability is what you know people would uh would prefer and the consistency is what they're looking for so that our effort over time shows that we're we care about the customer now each of you run unique businesses which means you have unique challenges unique opportunities let's drill down a little bit on on each of your approach and mike speaking with you the auto industry of course has been really heavily affected in detroit um but somehow you were able to grow and market your business any pearls of wind wisdom on um like defeating the odds well i mean there's no substitute to hard work really so you you got to understand that the customers out there he's trying to get it for the best value he could a customer understands his best interest is receiving the product and his best interest is what's in his pocket so you have to be able to serve him in every way possible and if you're committed and you're true to to the customer i i think you will in the long term be successful you just gotta give it a 100 jim uh as we alluded to earlier you specialize in what you've called a dying art um what tools do you use to help maintain your business's success in the face of those headwinds we use a software called six bit and and that keeps all of our customers every every time they've bought from us how much they've bought from us when was the last time they bought and how many years they would buy and we keep that in line and we it's very easy to we get an offer or something to make sure that oh yeah well i can give you a little bit more off you've been a customer for 20 years and so we we really specialize in the um personal as as all the panelists here today have talked about their personal customer service it's a huge huge uh benefit it gives us a big advantage all of us here linda one thing i understand your sellers find really important is authenticity they want to know when they're buying items from you that the coach is really a coach or whatever brand really is that how do you approach making sure that your sellers trust in your authenticity of your items so rebecca that's such a great question because early on we realized how important it was to gain the trust of our buyers excuse me buyers want to know that when you list a prada handbag a gucci handbag a coach handbag that it is authentic and while many of us in my office have the core competency to authenticate a handbag we rely on experts so we work with probably a dozen authenticators all across the country different authenticators for so many different brands to make sure that that item is authentic and we send them detailed pictures we're happy to send our buyers a certificate of authenticity i think that really helps repeat buyers have confidence i've so often heard buyers say they love buying from us because they trust that what they're getting is the real deal so now let's talk for a few minutes about sourcing and don't worry i am not going to ask for any of your secrets i know that sourcing is a carefully uh carefully held secret for many people but you know i think we can discuss approaches and strategies without asking where you actually find all your great stuff so keeping things general in light of clock and clockwork repair shops when shrinking in numbers um as we discussed earlier it sounds like you just recently bought a bunch of stuff but where do you manage to source um your huge warehouse of inventory from well currently we have 4 500 square feet of storage space which warehouse space which is absolutely totally packed um we buy clock shops we buy watch shops we go to auctions not so much during covet but now with the clock shop open um people we bought 60 clocks last week uh through the clock shop we bought four or five watches today so it all comes through uh we just the biggest thing that we want is margin we have to have good margin because this this business will eat you up if uh because there's lots of things i buy that i'll be hanging on for for years to to distribute it at all so you have to have good margins in order to do that so uh we have a lane that we've chosen and that's clocks and watches and that's the lane we we we think we can be very competitive in and that's what we're after i think that's so interesting and each of you really has chosen your lane and really made a success out of that particular focus and specialty um mike how about you what are your sourcing tips and can you talk to us a little bit about what products you source internationally which ones are sourced right here in the u.s well we re-manufacture you know transmissions and other car component axles and rack and pinions and we source them from core suppliers and uh used auto parts all over the country uh aftermarket products are from asia europe and some here are sourced here local in the us but when you when somebody's out there trying to source i mean what they're trying to do is get to the actual source you've got to get to the source that's the only way you can cut the middleman out and that's that's what the consumers are doing online they're trying to cut the middleman but the distribution so you're it's imperative that you find who the source is and you go straight to the source margins if you're trying to grow your business you shouldn't be looking for margins that's not important profit's not even important the most important thing is to try to grow your business and if that means that you get a little less than everybody else so be it you got to just keep pounding away trying to retire off every sale is a very very uh not a clever idea you got it you've got to give him that value and when you give him the value you make him want to come buy from you again and having him as a customer for a long time it's what it's all about and that should be your main and only concern sometimes you might have to lose to win whether there be refunds or returns you're paying for the returns it doesn't matter that's not important it's important is that you give get the customer taken care of that should be job number one great thanks mike linda turning to you um tell us a little bit about how you source and manage your inventory and specifically let's focus in on what's your process of onboarding clients and listing their products and how has your approach to that evolved throughout your business so first i'm going to tackle sourcing we don't source inventory in the way mike or jim do because everything that we do is consigned it's people like all of us here sending us those items that they no longer want use or aware but as our business grew and evolved over the years it became not just individuals like us it became manufacturers and designers and small chain stores and huge online retailers i mean you guys would be shocked at who is consigning with us and it's great because when we started it was just pre-owned and as we've grown we've grown to have a tremendous inventory of new product new product from stores and unfortunately when covet hit we were really able to help out those small stores and help them sell those items that they couldn't sell during covid they maybe didn't have an online footprint and we were there to help them and so i'm really proud of that how we've grown and evolved and then in terms of managing our inventory we use salesforce and we use channel advisor so i think that our process of onboarding clients has really become so easy i love our portal we have proprietary software so a client can come on just sign up online and automatically those labels get emailed and it's just wonderful you know to see that our consignor base all over the united states and international as well so last question we know that there's a lot of sellers tuning in today that are maybe just starting off as sellers maybe some have been selling for a while now but all of them are looking to grow their business and i would love to wrap up by having each of you share one key piece of advice that you would give to sellers who are looking to accelerate linda let's start with you so i think jim and mike have both alluded to this and i think it's all about passion find that thing that you are passionate about and for me it was fashion and i always say coming to our office is like 100 000 square feet of fun and fashion because it really is but it's that thing that you are passionate about i started my career as an attorney and it didn't really make me happy and fashion just always like lit me up so for me that's what it was all about and you know one thing i didn't say rebecca that i think is important to note when i started the business it was just me wearing all of the hats and over 21 years we've evolved and we've grown but we took baby steps so while i would advise everyone to find that thing that you're passionate about don't just jump all in take baby steps so for us we started in our house my husband said you have a great business i'm gonna quit my job he's also a lawyer and let's take it to the next level and we've never looked back 21 years later and i think we did take those baby steps we moved from our house to a 5 000 square foot warehouse to 25 000 to 58 000 and now to a hundred thousand and we did it over a time so passion and baby steps oh great that's great advice jim how about you what's your one tip or advice for someone who is looking to grow their business right now one you got to learn what really what you're selling inside out upside down you know you have to know you have to be an expert anybody and i try to get now you look at linda i mean she's there's a a million people selling fashion on ebay but there's only a few that are selling it like linda the same thing with mike there's only a few people selling what he does you know and there's others there's fine examples who i know are going to be on the panels that are the same way learn pick your pick your pick the brains of people that are doing it successfully you know send a seller that's doing well questions they'll answer you if they're good sellers i'll answer you great thank you and mike close this out what's your what's your big piece of advice for someone who is just starting out maybe experience but really wants to go to that next level well first things i mean you shouldn't be fearful of anything right you just got to be brave and you go at it i can tell the sellers that they shouldn't never go cheap on your shipping so good luck to you and don't be afraid i know you can do it okay lightning round what is your favorite ebay tool and linda we'll start with you my favorite ebay tool hands down is best offers it gives buyers that ability to feel that they're negotiating with us so if we list something for a hundred dollars and they offer us 75 dollars we are going to accept that offer every day every time and i love it then recently ebay came up with seller initiated offer and that has shown us conversion the likes of which we haven't seen since best offer began many many years ago and that gives us the ability to send offers to buyers who are simply watching our item you're watching our item and we'll give you an offer of sometimes 25 off and it's shown great conversion so i recommend it to anyone who's watching on this panel it's great i don't know uh i really don't have a favorite tool i guess ebay in itself is is a great tool if you want to if you want to be successful in e-commerce really and the best thing about ebay is they they show their sellers respect and uh and we appreciate that and they take care of their sellers and so that's you know who knows that's a totally fair answer we'll take it and jim how about you what's your favorite tool well there's a recently added tool which i really love and that's send watchers offers or send offers and i use it in a little unique way i'll put my store on sale 10 off and then when i get likes uh i'll collect about i usually get a couple hundred likes a day and i'll send them a little uh offer hey i can offer you an extra 10 off but it's time based it's only worth good for 48 hours and i'm sending it to three other people and it really just tries to drive sales because they are they're getting a little extra for their effort to watch something that i do and the other reason i use it too is i i watch the flow of how many people are going through my store by how many likes i'm getting because everybody i'm sorry any watchers that i'm getting um because yoni can send offers to people that are watching and only recently watching and so i get once i clear them i can see how fast they repopulate and it really helps me judge what i'm doing now some things i put five percent 15 percent but i get that little extra it's a push push them over the line and get them to purchase um it's really been a great tool and i think some of the other panelists will agree it's a great tool great well we'll leave it there thanks mike thanks linda thanks jim so much for joining this panel um that does conclude our panel on how i built my business um i know that all of the sellers watching appreciate your time appreciate your insight i sure do thank you so much for being here today really appreciate it and thank you audience and guests for attending this ebay open session you

2021-08-07 16:45

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