SUSPENDED BANNED KICKED OFF AMAZON OUR STORY STORAGE WARS AUCTION BUSINESS
hey guys welcome to our new studio we're just testing it out see what you guys think so i'm casey this is renee welcome to bargainer's thrift talk show so here's the funny part i don't know what she's talking about i didn't tell you what this i didn't tell her what this video is about so i'm making it up as i go along right isn't that what half of life is about fake it till you make it so you guys know we're going to build our studio but we have absolutely done nothing except move this desk and his chair over a little bit a lot of you guys said that um that you want us to keep these chairs you really like to change yeah these chairs are super nice and really comfortable so we might keep that we're about to tell your story if you saw the headline you know the story would tell you about so we think that just for fun instead of having the whole studio set up let's just show an episode let's just do my my thing was kind of to have a desk kind of like the kona brian jay leno type of thing because if we do show some stuff we have a workspace we'll have casey here as my special guest and if other people come we can have special guests so we're going to tell you that story today but before what we want to do we just want to show you the studio you see we have a big space right here we can do a couple of different things first we were thinking about maybe doing a green screen background but i think we're going to keep it real with a window in our warehouse which you see that's a merchandise in the back oh yeah i think we're gonna decorate the back maybe we'll put up a bunch of bookshelves and show some some of our collectibles that we really like um you know some cool items or just things that are for sale and then just let us know what you guys think how should the studio be and also the most important thing if you want us to see videos like this so like it come and support the channel it's absolutely free guys and one of the things that we wanted to do on the channel i think you know maybe two or three times a week have a little video coming out where we tell stories of some of the things that's happening where we'll talk about news flashes like open something really big lockers that was just another amazing storage find um maybe i'll look it up we'll do that as the next video and then we'll just kind of interact and share maybe we'll do some lives and stuff from that on our q a sundays remember when we used to do that we used to do q a sundays but we barely have time anymore like sunday's like a day that's like almost a family day now he's only saying that because football season's going on right now it's like 12 hours of football on sundays six and that's a really good night team but um yeah i don't know we'll see so you guys support it but anyway so this video what i'm going to talk about how we got kicked off amazon i have people constantly asking me questions like hey renee you said a long time ago you're going to share that story so i guess i should share that story yeah yeah okay sorry so we'll let renee say it because i may say things everywhere like we can't say that on camera no it's different so hey look amazon is a very different company like so when you list stuff on ebay ebay is a platform that you sell on and they just collect their fees and people complain that the fees are high all the time but they even hire on amazon and we just think that ebay is a little bit more user friendly or seller friendly right yeah so it changed but what happened is so the problem with amazon you compete with them so if you sell this product and you do you really good and they see that you have a lot of sales they'll just copy you they'll make the amazon brand or they'll import it like with dvds a few years ago um if you were selling dvds which were selling a lot of and a lot of brand new stuff in order to continue selling they wanted to see all your invoices where you buy them from your wholesalers with all contact information and what ended happening to a lot of guys i know several guys that happened who had really exclusive products amazon contacted these people and bought the thing directly but instead of ordering 200 cds they said hey we'll take 2 000 but we want it at this price and then amazon was selling it for less than these guys were buying them wholesale so that that's a drawback a little dirty well i mean it's one of those corporations that just wants everything you know that's okay i mean you know it's one of them catch 22s but i mean that's even fine that's their prerogative i mean that's a business that's how they want to do it you know they are open about it they're not they're not trying to hide it i mean they flat-out tell you but the problem with amazon is there's no support and ebay used to be that way too but then they changed so this is how we got kicked off so we were filming storage wars and we used to do like every year on amazon like over a hundred thousand dollars we would do a lot of books which is still the best profitable one especially older books we would do a lot of cds cds dvds we used to make we made to make a living on box sets oh yeah so we used to play games board games and then um like star wars anything with the barcode any toy action figure toys were really great toys i mean toys spring on amazon 20 to 30 percent more than they do on ebay because people just wanna click and ship and don't forget to share with them how you found out about selling on amazon versus ebay i don't know how we originally got amazon okay before we tell you how it got kicked off so the way we originally got on amazon so we used to be in a swap meet we used about like 10 employees two 24 foot truck loads of merchandise you wouldn't believe how big this space was 24 parking spaces people would come and be like oh my god where does this start and where does this end it was so massive how much stuff we had out there yeah i was copying there was about three four other guys who did the same thing i was copying that concept basically and they taught me too so but then you know we're obviously competing but one of the things where you have in the early days remember those t-mobile sidekick phones where the keyboard came up and stuff like this people used to come and bite like one time we bought this really rare dvd collection everything was like weird b rated sci-fi and horror and i had guys literally there from six o'clock in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon just making huge piles and they looked at because they didn't want to take a risk you know a lot of these young guys never want to take a risk so they looked up every single thing if it was profitable they kept it in a stack and people were buying hundreds the funny part net is like okay well i'm taking 200 what kind of deal can you make me i'm like no deal at all because you looked up every one of them i know anyone that you put aside and i'm charging you three bucks for you're going to sell for a minimum for 10 bucks he's like well that doesn't matter i'm like okay well then like i said i always said they're three bucks a piece i never said a discount them they're three bucks a piece buy more dollars like i've been here all day i'm like yes the price has been all day for three bucks so buy them or don't buy them and of course they all bought them because there was dvds in there for 40 50 bucks so i'm like ah man i wish i would be more advanced at the time and do it then the scanners came out so all these guys started coming if you guys been in the business for a while the socket scans we had them too and they would just come scan scan scan scan yeah this story was probably like what 12 to 14 years old probably 14 years old today i was really young so we're just building the company this is pre before our store and a lot of these guys were really cocky and rude they thought you know they would be in their flip-flops in the backpack and they would they would try to treat us like we're like like we were dirty like we're swapping it's coming a lot of other swap meetings said that too and but we're the ones that move tens of thousands of merchandise every week but still they were cocky they were just young they don't know how to treat people so that's why i tell you guys all the time when you do business the most important thing it doesn't matter if it's a one dollar deal or ten thousand dollar deal or if you do it or not treat everybody with respect because it can really really bite your ass and this particular scenario so this guy comes already doesn't like him that much because he's always complaining always arguing but he's you know i know he's making a lot of money stuff but it's fine i'm flipping i'm still making money so we just bought the storage unit it used to be some kind of indian philosophical store like meditation and all that stuff and there was just like boxes and boxes of brand new books and i had them out on the table and uh and whenever you see books that are like meditation or anything really specific like that those are usually like home runs to saw online oh you know actually that that was the second time he came so he was here the week before and he built up a bunch of books and um he wanted to buy the books and he asked me hey how much you want for these books there was some kind of d d books and stuff like this or like also special subject books and i'm like well how much do they scan for he's like that doesn't matter oh he's like i'll pay a buck a book like everywhere else i'll pay a buck a book i'm like okay well i don't want to sell them for buck a book and i'm like what do they scan for and then so then i just tried to look at one behind i'm like well this comes out at 27 on amazon so i'll take 10 bucks you still two and a half times your money but for those guys that wasn't good enough they want to spend a buck and sell for 27 you know but i'm taking all the risk and they wouldn't just say hey how about everything they just want to pick just to win us he's like i pay a buck a book if you want to know what it stands for educate yourself all right he said that to the wrong person yeah because i guarantee you they came home figured out what where to order the scandal we knew what it was i ordered a stupid scanner with 1300 at the time uh we ordered it with the scanner at the time i think it was a seller tool we had later went to needle scan and i bought the whole socket scan of the socket cc i still have it somewhere c7p scanner now your iphone can do everything super fast too and just bam bam next time he came and i really didn't like this guy because he was really rude to everybody he thought it was very there's another guy in flip flop back but he always wasn't hurry never wanted to talk to you it's just like like he felt like we were here to supply him with merchandise you know and i tell you guys all the time if you're in a business and you make most of your money selling to other dealers you probably won't be successful in the long run right because it's not enough merchandise and there's some deals that are really reasonable so i had dealers before that say hey renee i mean we had one guy that come to our store he had a huge corporation he goes like we'll scan it we'll put it all in we'll pay you seventy percent of retail we'll take everything like the scottish guy or irish guy it was really nice so he was actually pretty good about it we did a lot of business with him when we had the store because at that point our business got so big i wasn't worried about cds and stuff like this and i got boxes somewhere where every cds 10 20 bucks at the time so but what happened with this guy so next week he came and then we bought the indian store and we had all these books brand new stuff and i haven't even had a chance to look at it my guys put him in a table in front of me and of course he scans and he comes how much of these books and he's really cocky i'm like one second i pull out my scanner oh these are 20 bucks i'll take 15 bucks each she's like i pay a dollar i'm like that's okay hey emmanuel take all these books put them in our amazon pile just to piss them off we didn't have an amazon account at the time you know and then um and i told like so they think they all have us playing against each other but all the storage buyers even though that we compete we are still a community and we kind of a click so this other guy steve which taught me a lot in the business he would at the time get like um black magic books which are usually really really good books though it's a weirdest subject and i mean when i say really good books every book is 10 15 20 bucks and he already told me so the guy goes over there looks at the books and steve goes like hey renee can i support that scanner now i'm like yeah so i go over there i'm like all you have to do scan it tells you the price and the guy got so mad and i'm like wait we don't have to write the lookup prices what do you think and he just got an attitude and then you know he came out a few more weeks but eventually i made sure just because the guy was a dick i made sure that i told everybody about the scanner like every within two months everybody i was buying storage units and it was on kobe swapping the time knew about scanners they all bought scanners uh mark converse which is another good friend that taught me a lot about the business his sister lisa that kind of almost for a long time became a full-time job everybody was scanning and like i showed mark two the way i convinced mark i bought a book so american seashells oh no it was russian seashells i think it was russian seashells that's what it was oh how sweet no seashells like the ocean seashells yeah it was a really big hardcover book he didn't believe in the scanner and i scanned it i'm like hey just you know that scans out at 50 bucks and it has a slow sales rank but it's still scanned out of 50 bucks well usually amazon anything i'm on books a million and it's good and he's like well if it's 50 bucks give me five bucks i'm like okay yeah no problem yeah here's five bucks i gave him five bucks and then we put it so when i got back to the house like the 50 listing was gone and the next listing was like 600 what yeah remember that so just for fun i put like 299.99 and like four weeks later it sold and i got the thing i told mark and i showed him on my phone and i prompted printers and read a book he saw me for five bucks bam sold for 300 bucks he's like oh damn you know and he's like you know what i'm gonna buy a scanner so he went out about the same scanner deal i had steve bought the same scanner deal and you know who else he shared this story with too dave hester you taught dave hester about amazon yeah that's when dave hester still had a store yeah i told him to scan everything and then also my good friend that was the beginnings when um storage wars first started yeah my good friend rommel sakanda i showed him you know so we all started like rommel even took it to whole another level he made a deal with another company where he buys like anything he buys to pay him 80 so he doesn't have to sell on amazon so but that that that's so this story is kind of going different from what we wanted to do right now but that's oh we're just giving you you know the behind the scenes stories yeah so but that teaches you if you treat people crappy be really careful they revolt and then that guy couldn't buy nothing or swap me anymore because we checked all toys books cds like i had an employee or casey would come out and i'm just making corner table i'm like hey this stuff is not for cell until she scans everything and we scan everything we used to take every weekend like on a bad week and two to three hundred dollars worth of cds dvds and books on a good weekend if we find the right lock of three four thousand dollars and we would ship every day so all right how did we get kicked off amazon okay here we go this is the whole point of the video at the beginning yeah we were doing um like a hundred thousand a year probably on amazon sometimes 60 sometimes 100 we're doing really good money with very little effort at the end we had like a couple thousand items listed but then you know a lot of slower moving items stuff that we're waiting and we weren't refreshing listings anymore because we were doing storage was full time so they started doing those i don't even remember what it is i think dsr sellers defect rate for sdr something like that and they said if your rate is over one percent of unsatisfied you get your account suspended now we've done hundreds of thousands of business on amazon this guy um this kid buys a pc computer game i still remember what it was silent service 2 and pc the reason i knew what that was casey bought it for me for christmas but then i never ended up playing it and i just listed on amazon um a long time ago just because we're sitting i'm like oh listen i think we listed it early we bought that directly from best buy or i had a second copy or something like that you know so but it was brand new sealed we bought it ourselves directly from best buy this was not from a storage or anything this is something that we bought this kid buys it he gets it he keeps it for like a week then he sends a message hey this is a counterfeit game it's fake i want my money back we're like it's not counterfeit it's brian who's here but you know like whatever go ahead return the game we'll give you a full refund so of course he got the refund right away from amazon never returned the game so now we got a defect for that like okay wow this guy just totally got the game for free and i'm fine with that i don't mind losing people will steal it happens every now and then if it's bigger items you know there's stuff that we can do right cost of doing business yeah it was like a 20 or 30 game i'm not going to be worried about it you know but what i was really upset about that amazon dink down confident because we have done nothing wrong this guy is full of crap and wants a free game that's why the video game category is a really tough category online you deal with a lot of people especially that's just trying to steal games from you was it an expensive game like 30 bucks you're like 30 bucks there what's up dang you can buy a sandwich with that money and you can buy a lot of sandwiches but still it's like it was just um it was just a principle you know now ebay is a lot better because everybody those guys get their account strike they get awaited with two or three times and then back then it was a lot easier for them now then so the problem was because we really weren't refilling we weren't adding nothing like even with ebay right now we've been so busy i just did the first listing since last year november and we still sell every day but nothing huge you know not crazy amounts when we go full time we sometimes do 50 packages a day now we might do two or three a day so same thing with amazon but we're doing like one or two packages a day and still shipping everything fast we usually upgrade shipping we did everything at somebody unhappy just send it back we'll give you money back um if if it was a true mistake where we felt we really made a mistake we just let them keep the item but we don't really do that anymore because people try to take advantage um which is try not to make a mistake and um so at the time we weren't really selling anything so when you worry about that oh odr that's what it was odr ratings so when you worry about that one percent that that thing really hurts you dennis at a girl and she was actually really nice she didn't make a complaint she just sent me an email she bought a japanese anime doll and it was a rare one like a special issue one made in japan as an american version of stuff like this too she paid 75 bucks for it the common version is like 40 50 bucks this was 75 bucks she gets in the mail now also the pictures is exactly what we sent her she gets in the mail she's like i can't buy this for my boyfriend for his birthday the printing looks a little bit less and the hair color's a little bit off also is this a counterfeit thing never never complain nothing just an email message but she mentioned the word counterfeit um i sent a message back definitely not a counterfeit this is actually a japanese version it's a special collector's version that's it's not a mass-produced version you know which actually makes it better right yeah and i showed a bunch of links on ebay tools like hey you can see them here that's why you actually paid the extra 25 bucks because you got the rare version you didn't get the version at every store gun you know but if you're not happy with it if that's what you don't worry about it send it back i'll give you money back and you know i want you to be happy and she's like no no it's cool i did some more research i'm good but because she sent us that email asking if it's a counterfeit not even finally complained just asking to clarify because she didn't know what she bought amazon think they account for that because for potential conflict which is so stupid so now we're not barely doing any sales and our odr rate went to like one point eight seven percent and one percent is the trouble amazon shut down our account with like 2000 listings gone and just shut it down every time you send them a message you just get an automated reply there's it's somebody in pakistan or india and you know i send them a whole letter explain both scenarios what happened explain to them i'm like also please look at our track record we have thousands of feedbacks we've sold hundreds of thousands of thousands of stuff we're not listed in a private name we're listed as a corporation our business i said hey this is our corporation this is our store location i also used hey where on storage was i mean we're not like selling counterfeit stuff you know yeah that was the year we filmed 48 um 48 weeks out of the year yeah in a row it was really exhausting i was seeing yeah so season four this is almost 10 years ago now and um i send them a letter and no reply oh like they addressed nothing is saying letter oh you need to tell us your new business plan so like okay so then i play the games i'm like okay we try to verify their merchandise more and show direct and stuff like this again automated and everything's out of me said oh you tried three times to spend it there's no phone number you can call us nobody can talk to you're not gonna get an email replying that's other than automated so you're just part of an automation at this point and then i'm like okay well i can make another account and another name but do i really want to do that i mean this is a company you're going to spend a lot we spent hours and hours listing on amazon inventory we still got a whole office where the whole office everything is inventories in amazon it's listed on amazon you good all the time yeah okay we're almost done with this video thank you so we still got an office where everything is listed inventories with amazon stuff we have tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise and i'm like do i want to spend with a corporation that's just gonna kick me off that's the scary part so i meet people all the time oh we just do amazon i'm like well you better be careful because if they shut you down your whole business is shut down you want to be diversified yeah always have a backup plan or have several modes of um selling your item the funny part on our cell account lately we get stuff listings oh your listing is listed but it's not updated it needs to be updated it's going to get kicked off and i'm like dude you guys suspended my account like eight years ago are you getting emails like that right so funny from amazon like this and then so then one time i tried to email i'm like hey this is what happened is that somebody can actually talk to you now and still just an automated reply it doesn't make sense i know what to do you know why you're getting those emails is because jeff bezos said oh my gosh we accidentally made that mistake it was actually him just privately emailing you i don't think so i don't think amazon can ebay for a while for you all time sellers ebay kind of was like that but when they were trying to become amazon and they had a company out there called buy.com and they were really pushing them and they started doing all these ratings and kicking off all kinds of sellers that work good so i mean that's bad sellers you should get rid of bad sellers it's funny though you go on amazon there's people selling stuff from china it's originally counterfeit and they have ten thousand transaction they don't say anything so we have everything payout taxes business licenses everything and then it's just but you can't talk to anybody a company is so big it's all automated they don't care they kicked us off never said anything i tried sending emails everywhere and i got to the point i'm like you know what i got the store i got ebay i got other outlets and um we just never did it now amazon is still a really good tool to use i think if you can but you just really have to be prepared that they shut it down any time and when you do this there's nothing you can do and you don't even have to be wrong so you if you get unlucky and you don't have enough sales for this month because you haven't listed enough and you happen to have three guys that happen to buy something from you that scam you you screw it that's it if the odr goes over the thing so like if i ever were to open up another amazon account i would not sell toys which they don't let you sell toys anymore if you have brand new sealed toils you got to list it in collectible now you cannot sell it as brand new anymore um even though it's brand new and the collectible listings are really surprised so toys unfortunately on most toy stores cannot sell toys anymore um i would probably still sell cds because that's popular that you don't really have much scamming with cds and i would mainly just sell books but even with books that i'd have more people buy really high-end research books use them for 60 days don't want to return them that happens on art books but again most of the books if you don't sell them they don't have that much value but if i list them online i get 50 60 100 bucks part of cost of doing business and when these people abuse it they lose their accounts but i would sell books i definitely would not sell video games on amazon i definitely would not sell baseball cards on amazon even though there's um really good that's you get really good money form but i have some friends that's all they do is sell brand new pokemon cards and baseball cards they tell me all the time people will open up go through and resell them send back and there's nothing you can do that's terrible yeah so it's basically you you up to you up to hoping that you don't get bought by scammers that just try to take advantage but you know for books and stuff it's still really great probably what we're gonna do because we do have thousands of books that are really good books we're probably going to go on eight books or um there's several other sites that are really good and some stuff on ebay too but yeah that's the story how we got kicked off amazon there's a lot of you guys been asking in the comments what are you going to tell us a section that's one particular user that asks me every time i go live so leave us some comments on this video like and subscribe if you have any tips let us know how you like amazon if you from amazon directly send me an email if amazon ever sees this and sends an email i'll share it with you guys but it's funny because i really did like the amazon marketplace for a long time but i think it's been like 10 years since we sold america but when it was good it was good we used to sell a lot like this i wouldn't list any toys on ebay anymore back then boxes i remember one time we were in palump and we still lived in vegas at the time and we would go um do all the pawn shops and buy the box sets and usually the deal we had with them they said any box set back there was five bucks dvd box sets and we went to the store and perramp and we only go there once again he's like oh yeah right we got like 800 box sets in the back yeah it's like it's like okay can i go through he's like yeah five bucks straight across i'm like cool so we ended up buying like 500 bucks that's 2500 bucks and tatiana was just born it was a lot of money for us at the time and i remember we drove home we got home at like i don't know probably like six o'clock at night or so because it's an hour drive i listed every single box set on amazon we also bought the auto repair machine for five thousand dollars so every box is the cd cleaner cd cleaner cd repair but the highest one so every box set that we sent out the cds were in main condition um i listed all that stuff on amazon until about three four o'clock in the morning because back then that was a lot of our money i wanted to start getting money back in and this was like 15 years ago probably 15 16 years ago right so i listed everything until 2 30 in the morning i was like falling apart because i probably got up at six in the morning and back then i used to get up earlier because you know it was different life back then and um i went to sleep the next morning when i woke up which was probably i slept in that day so i probably slept till 12 or so we had like four thousand dollars in order so i got all 2500 back plus 1500 and i only sold about 30 of the box sets and we shipped it so then obviously we woke up and casey was up already and we started shipping everything we started repairing any cds that we thought needed repair and we always used to sell them as like new or very good depending on the cds and stuff like this and yeah we spent the next few hours packaging shipping everything and we always would upgrade the shipping too so the customer had a better experience like we're expected to send media mail but we should first class or priority mail back then automatically to give them a better experience and yeah that was really good that was great we made our money back plus profit which making a thousand bucks back that was a nice chunk of change right yeah it's a good way to wake up in the morning yeah and then we sold every day we sold more and more box sets so amazon you know i'm not ranking them it was definitely good i just wish they would have the customer service a little bit more not customer service but they really care about the customers but it doesn't seem like they care about the sellers and i don't know if that is because they sell so much themselves so they don't care about third-party sellers as much as or if um if they're just too big but and i haven't tried in 10 years and there's guys that came along and said hey you know give me three thousand dollars we have these companies we get your account reopen and i'm like you know what i don't want it like that i don't want to do anything shady i don't want to do anything i need to do i know i can just start a new corporation put it in her name or i don't know if this wasn't her through her my name i got to check i think it was through my name and just doing that.com but i really don't want to do that and i don't want to build up to 10 000 items or 50 000 items and then bam they shut you down again you know so it's just not worth it and honestly i don't need it now if if all of a sudden ever get an email from them saying hey you know we review account we've seen past there was mistakes we want to open you up i would list again on amazon so let's while you can because it is good but do not like i see so many people that built the whole empire the whole business just on amazon that can really really really really really really really really really backfire so make sure you're diversified anyway story time in a new studio hope you liked it love you guys
2021-11-08 20:08
