Gift biz unwrapped episode 43. I love being out and hearing a little Ching. Hi, this is John Lee Dumas of entrepreneur on fire, and you're listening to the gift of biz unwrapped. And now it's time to light it up. Welcome to gift biz, unwrapped your source for industry specific insights and advice to develop and grow your business. And now here's your host, Sue Monheit. Hi there.
I'm Sue and welcome to the gift biz unwrapped podcast That you own a brick and mortar shop or you sell online or are just getting started. You'll discover new insight to gain traction and to grow your business. And today I have brought to you, Carrie. Carrie is the founder of social selling mom, where she teaches people how to make a significant part-time income selling on eBay. Carrie is an eBay education specialist trained directly by eBay and is a top rated seller.
She's been on E-bay radio and in eBay's YouTube video called we are E-bay. Carrie started her career as a menswear designer for major brands in the fashion industry today known as elegant KB on eBay. She's made enough money selling part-time to pay for her daughter's college education. How about that? Based on this success, Carrie created social selling mom to teach others how to support their families. Her favorite e-commerce site by far is guess what?
E-bay. She believes that there are endless opportunities there for people to make money and help those they care about. She is also the eBay for charity coordinator at Marin school of the arts. Carrie, welcome to the show. Hi, Sue. Thanks for having me. Would you like to add anything to that intro before we get started? No, I think that was a good intro. Thanks so much. Well, it is exciting to hear about eBay and I can not wait to get started.
As our listeners know, we like to align the conversation around the life of a motivational candle. It kind of gives us a little bit of a subtle different kind of view of you. The light shines on you while you share your stories and experiences. So Carrie, are you ready to light it up? I am ready. Wonderful. Well, let's start with a motivational candle.
I'm going to pretend like I'm on eBay and I am looking for some beautiful candles and I happened upon a site because you just happened to have a candle site. You didn't know that now, did you not know if you were to tell me which candle to purchase, what color would it be and what would be the quote? Well, I love the openness of a classic white candle when it's lit and the flame is there. It symbolizes openness and peace and love. And the quote is use what you have.
The full quote goes, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. That is from Arthur Ashe, who was a tennis player. Tell me a little bit about how you would apply that quote. I really believe in using resources to the fullest potential, and I'll talk a little bit more about E-bay resources, but that's how I've been able to be a really busy mom, have a full-time job and have a part-time business where I was able to make enough money to do things for my family.
Being able to be smart about using the resources and really looking at what you have. And sometimes it's not physical things or items sometimes the knowledge that you have inside of you or the desire that you have Got it.
Well, listen, I am not wasting any more time because I know all of us are really interested in hearing what you have to say about eBay, but before we get started, we've talked a little bit about who our audience was pre-interview so you can have a feel for that already, but would you describe who this conversation is for in terms of potentially considering being a user of selling on eBay?
Sure. I really feel like this E-bay site is especially wonderful for people who are creative and do hobbies and crafts. Almost everybody that I talked to who has a creative hobby looks at shops on eBay for supplies, because they know they can get very nice deals on the site. Many of the sellers don't have high overhead, so they're able to pass deals along to their customers and I've sold craft supplies and sewing notions and goodies like that. What's great is it is a community.
And so if you're a crafter and if you want to sell things that you make, if you want to sell customized products that you make, eBay is an excellent place. It pretty much sounds like all of our listeners actually. Okay. So let's back up and I want to talk a little bit just about history of how you landed on eBay as the best e-commerce site. You know, just give us a little bit of your journey of how you discovered eBay and how you got started For me. Again, it goes back to family.
We lost a dear loved one, someone who was a quilter, crafter and collector. And at that point in time, I just felt that all of these wonderful things should go to people that will care for them and give them their second life. You know, I don't want to put anything into a waste bin and send it out. There was a collection of books, crafting and cookbooks. And I said, you know what, let me just see what happens. I posted some of them on eBay and this was a while back.
So books were still a very valuable item. And overnight, one of the books that I had it turned out was a first edition. It was a dessert cookbook and the bids had gone up to over $90. Wow. So, yeah. So that opened your eyes. Yeah. So, and that is one thing that's really about eBay is that there's the potential to sell at auction.
It really can drive the price to a point where sometimes you can't believe it, A very heartwarming story actually, to be able to take something that was so precious within your family and make sure you can place it in the hands of somebody who's really going to care about it. Exactly. All right. And so then you started learning the ins and outs. Let's keep walking this path. What happened from there? That's true.
True. And then because of my background in the fashion industry, and my knowledge is selling started selling clothing and accessories and things that people would give me or things that I had. And even as my children grew out of a certain kind of toy, they wanted to sell their toys on eBay so that they could get a new toy. You know, it was time to get rid of the Polly pockets and move on to the video games or whatever.
So it was something that I was able to do part-time and then it evolved into more of a consignment selling business. So I've tried a little bit of that. And in doing that, I've sold everything from motorcycle parts to stoves, to larger pieces of furniture, chairs. And, you know, once I got this E-bay bag, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to try that. I'm going to try that. And then I, at one point I said, well, I have all this knowledge.
I really think that other people would see the opportunity of eBay if I could show them. And that's how I got into the EBA education specialists program. Got it. Okay. That's great. Because that gives us a little background and understanding of how you started on eBay and then lays the groundwork for what you're going to share with us. So let's talk about it. Why would you be choosing eBay over other platforms or what do you see as the value of eBay?
If other people haven't considered there before? What I find with E-bay is that there is a huge community of shoppers. So when I put something on there, if it's something unique or something that somebody needs, there's 157 million active buyers on that site. Wow. That's a few you have stuff to use. So what I feel is when I go on eBay, I actively look for something. I know, you know, how much money I want to spend today because I'm looking for an item or I see something, Oh, that's a great deal.
So I think there's people on there in the mindset of shopping, some of the other shopping sites, I feel like there are a lot of lookers and there's also some larger fees. So the simplicity of E-bay, it's easy to list. You can do it from your mobile and they've gotten rid of any fees that you have to pay upfront to list as a new person on eBay, you can list up to 50 auctions per month for free, and then you pay a little fee on the end, a final value selling fee.
So there's really very little overhead in getting started except for your time. But now that you can take the pictures, the mobile and list from your mobile, you know, you don't have to be tied down to a desk. So, okay. So just to make sure I understand this, cause I have never sold anything on eBay, but you can set up an account and sell up to 50 items at no cost each month, right? At no initial cost, right. But no initial cost.
And then you don't pay anything upfront, but once that month is over anything you've actually sold. There's some type of amount that they pull out. Yeah. I can't get into the fee structure because it's very different based on which categories you sell in. But there is a small commission on that side and on the PayPal side.
But overall, really your overhead, your startup costs are very small and you can test all kinds of things because if you put something up as an auction and it doesn't sell, you didn't pay anything. It was just a little bit of time invested. But if you put up something for auction or even a fixed price listing, which doesn't go into the bidding process and you get sales, you now know that there's a market for that item. And then you can run with that and try all different kinds of variations.
So it's a really nice place to try things where you can get cash flow relatively quickly eat. It also has a seller protection policy, basically, as long as you describe the items accurately and ship within the amount of time that you've promised you're covered the person on the other end could claim they didn't receive it, but you're still going to get paid. Got it.
So you talk about how you've been so successful that you just doing this part time, you've been able to pay for your daughter's college, Right. Which is exciting. It's so exciting. And we don't need to use specifically your example, but if someone were to do this, let's say nighttime weekends, cause they have a job during the day already.
So there, they may even just be testing out their product just to see if people would be interested in it before they went full force into opening a shop or, you know, something like that, meaning, meaning a retail shop, but let's say they were selling just part-time at night. And maybe on the weekends, can you equate some type of our input to dollars out like what's possible on eBay? What you need to do is kind of figure out the sweet spot.
What I do is I start with research and I like to sell things for at least 25 to $35 based on how much I paid for them and how much I'm going to put my time into it. So what you would have to do to make $2,000 a month on eBay is to find the inventory that adds up to that amount and then spend time listing it. It's not that hard to do if you have items that are going to sell.
And the main part that I wanted to stress was really the research, because there's so much activity on that on eBay, you can easily do searches and look at what has sold in the past. I actually have a step-by-step guide and some pictures that I'd like to offer as a free gift for your listeners, where they can see in detail how to do that because it's really, if you can research it and you have similar items, those are the types of things that you want to try.
And sometimes you want to try really unique things. For example, there are personalized items, there are customized items and you could even bundle things like having a craft kit of some type, with a booklet that you've written and really make it something special. Okay. So we're going to talk about your freebie more at the end. That's very generous of you. Thank you so much. So we'll, we'll get all the details on that before we're done here.
Let's talk just a little bit more about the types of products you think do work on eBay. And if there's anything that you think doesn't really work from your experience, From my experience, if you want to get a little significant income going, what I think doesn't work is having a garage sale. What I call garage sale mentality. We're not selling things for a buck or five bucks. You want to get products that are unique, that are desirable and you want to set a nice asking price for those.
So of course, all kinds of brand items, fashion items, banana Republic, Uggs, Vera Bradley. There's a lot of higher end designer brands that sell really well. Levi's casual wear. So those, you know, I'm going into the clothing area because I've sold a lot of clothing and shoes on eBay. So that's a great way to get cashflow, but then there's more specialized items, things that you create yourself.
Or in my case, I had a lot of vintage sewing notions and people are collecting that there are trends right now where lace is popular and you can go in and sell bundles of lace. You can also do things with putting together lots. So I have a lot of higher end, nicer vintage jewelry pieces that I can sell individually. But then I also have a bunch of jewelry pieces that I could have put into a lot, put it on auction and people can use that for crafting.
So that's what I mean about being really unique and creative. Those things are just sitting here. It's a nice collection. I'm not going to have the time to use those things in my crafts. So I'll put those on eBay and get a little cash flow. And somebody has a beautiful batch of buttons or rhinestone pins that they can craft with. That's a great idea.
It's also brought to mind to me, something that I hadn't really even thought of until you started talking and that is give busy listeners, if you have a retail shop or a craft room, let's start with retail shop and it's end of the season and you have stuff that just didn't sell through the season and you have one of this and two of this, you know, and just random things. What a great place to go ahead and get rid of that inventory. Just post it right on eBay.
So it kind of compliments what you're already doing in shop and moving it out so that you have space for the new collections that you're bringing in. So that could be a great option. I'm also thinking of someone like a knitting shop or quilters. You know, if you, again, just have some random bolts leftover or you've cut them into squares for quilting or just, you know, you'd use them for a yarn class and you have semi portions of yarn like Harry saying, put them into a lot and get rid of them.
I mean, what a great option and crafters always need a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So perfect way for you guys to clean up shop a little bit and make money at the same time. Wow. Sue, that's great. There's really lots of ideas. Do some research.
And if you are a brick and mortar and you do sell some clearance or lots, or even some regular merchandise, you can brand yourself in that package, even though they purchased on eBay, you can put a note card in that package that you ship out and tell them to call you, look on your online store and give offers for them to keep coming back to you, either on your eBay store, maybe exclusive monthly or weekly auctions, where they can get great deals or bring them over into your brick and mortar,
The website, they like what they're seeing and they want more. That's an excellent idea. And that's really good. Cause I was thinking just eBay as being one off, one off sale here, one off sale there, but I could see where you could build loyal customers depending on whether they continually need your product. It's true. And as you know, you can keep eBay open 24 seven. So you can go to a conference or go off to a scrapbooking retreat and leave your shop open.
And I love being out on the weekend and hearing on my cell phone, the little Ching, Oh my gosh, I didn't even know this, what fun then it's like, Oh, that's fine. Cause I'll just ship on Monday. Or you can also have people that you can train to ship or, you know, if you're going to be away for extended time, but it's just another channel for you to build customers and to test products, to test things like the lots to test bundled items and definitely custom items and personalized products.
They are on eBay. I see people ordering invitations. There's a lot of printables that can be sold as well. Interesting. So it is, that's where the whole research comes into play. We have a lot of products you're not even thinking would fly on eBay, but there's a whole testing ground to see if it's true or not. That's right. Wait, that's the beauty of it. It's that you can do it for very low cost and then, you know, just make sure you study your shipping methods.
Initially you want to ship things that are easy to ship. I wouldn't recommend starting off with really fragile glass champagne, flutes, things that I've done with no problem, but it's so much, you know, I'm just kind of like on edge until I hear that the package arrives. Yeah. You know, you want to start with things that are regular size unbreakable and not over a couple of pounds. I use USBs free packaging.
And with that, it's super easy because you buy your shipping label right through the eBay site and the tracking number gets uploaded right there. So your customer knows exactly when it was shipped. They can click on the tracking number and see that the package is on the way. Perfect. What a nice smooth system that is. It's pretty smooth.
Give biz listeners one other idea for you guys that I used to use in the past when I was shipping pretty delicate pieces that I needed to make sure arrived on the other end properly to test my shipping methods. I would ship to myself or ship to a relative across country and have them take a picture when they opened the box. So a couple ideas for you, if you're not exactly sure how to ship.
Okay. So now Carrie, I think we've wet the palette of everybody about potential opportunities here with eBay. How would someone get started? Are there three steps that you suggest for someone who's never done anything? You know, they might've purchased before, but they would just be getting started for their business. What would the steps be that they should take? So if you really, really back up to the baby baby steps,
okay. So make sure you have a PayPal account that is the safest way to pay almost everybody on eBay. It accepts PayPal. When you go to do your research, you must set up your eBay account because there are going to be people listening that have any bank account, but they're not set up as a seller.
So what you need to do is change your account to a seller account and link it to the PayPal account and what that will give you the ability to when you search, you can see completed and sold items because you're not interested so much in what's for sale on eBay, people, Mark, their things really high. They Mark the things really low. Everybody has a different scenario, but you want to see what the marketplace rate is for something you need to look at sold items.
So just to clarify, if I already had an eBay account and I wanted to go on, I would reclaim my account as a seller. Do you create another account or a separate account? I know people that do have multiple accounts, but to keep things simple, I would say, just make your account a seller account. It's not going to be really visible to anybody, but you and then you could purchase or sell off of that account then.
Exactly. And you know, my very next thing would be now, as you said, shipping to yourself to see how it comes. My very next thing that I tell everybody that I train is, okay, now you're set up, let's do some research next, let's go shopping because you want to know what the process is like. Yeah. You want to experience it from the buyer's standpoint. And there's almost always something you can get on there.
There's water filters or printer cartridges or whatever, or you could buy something nice for yourself. Once you get shopping, you'll get a couple of feedback. People will leave feedback for you and you'll start seeing how it is being a member of eBay. And then once you have your research done, rarely you can go ahead and get the listing written. Once you're in the double digits on your feedback, you are really ready to do some of the things we talked about.
Test some new products and price selling some clearance items. Okay. All right. We're not going to go into all of this on this call because I know I like to keep it within a certain amount of time. And I know your time is short today, Carrie, but do you then would the next step after all of this, after you're established on the platform, you're going, you're confident.
Do you then by any chance, promote your site over through social media networks like Facebook or anywhere else to drive people over to E-bay. I absolutely do. And I will tell you some of the sites that I find huge success with are my own personal blog. Oh, good. Okay. Well, I look at the traffic reports on eBay. If you have a blog and you just put up listed today and you know, I was doing vintage sewing patterns and there's collectors out there for those.
And then I would just put basically a picture that I, the same picture I used on eBay. And I would say, here's what I have listed today. I really liked this one because dah, dah, dah, and find it on eBay that was working for me. You know, they would actually search for vintage apron pattern. They'd come to my blog and then click over to eBay and see that I had more vintage patterns. So if you have a blog, be sure to include a section of your blog for your eBay postings.
And then Pinterest is excellent. You know, they make it easy. And I also think that people on Pinterest are open to shopping and Twitter. I don't just do an RSS feed on Twitter of my listings. You'll see some people doing that on eBay. I actually like to put a couple of product photos and say, this is a really nice product. Or, you know, just give it a little bit more of a pleat basically. So that way I get people back to eBay and I also use Instagram is a great way to showcase products.
So you do what you can. That goes back to my quote. I'm just, you know, doing what you can, but those are the top things that I do to promote. I'm not trying to overwhelm our listeners either. I'm just closing the loop that just when you're up and selling, there are more opportunities to increase your sales to through free media platforms, such as all the ones Carrie just listed. Excellent. All right, Carrie, we're going to move on into our reflection section.
If you can think back, what is a natural trait that you possess that you think has helped you to get to the place that you are now? I've always been big on learning new things. So once I get started, I'm like, Oh, I got to learn that I've got to learn this. So like I said, I started selling one type of item on eBay. And then I'm like, Oh, maybe I should learn how to sell on eBay auto. For some reason I'm selling motorcycle parts.
I have this hunger inside of me to learn more about things and to constantly be trying new things, eBay really stuck with me because I was able to be successful in the things that I tried. And I really feel like, like I said earlier, once I get that inside of me, I get really excited about it. I want to share what I've learned. Got it. And what tool do you use regularly?
Let's say besides E-bay now to keep you and let's focus on just the business aspect, I think, cause this will be helpful to keep you productive and moving forward, Say a tool for productivity is staying organized and I use Google drive. I set up folders in there to keep myself organized with the photos that I've of products that I have listed the photos with products that I've sold. I keep records of the product descriptions in case I come across another similar item.
I can just boom, put that in there. So I really like Google drive and the fact that I can access it from my computer or from my phone, because I'm doing things like taking the description minute and putting that into a blog post, I can just kind of copy and paste that as I need to no Need to do the work twice. That's for sure. Exactly. So I really, really appreciate like a cloud-based storage system.
Yeah. That was a great one, especially for what we've been talking about here, how it applies to eBay, what book have you read lately that you think our listeners could find value in? I really liked Brenae Brown's work. It's a longer title, but it's daring greatly is basically about doing things like you said in your podcast, pushing yourself beyond what you think, driving yourself to a higher place and doing so with confidence. That's been a great book.
I wish it wasn't a short, I want to read it again so Well you always can Harman rating. I would recommend that though. We'll give Biz listeners as you know, and as you're listening to the podcast today, you can also listen to audio books with ease. I've teamed up with audible and you can get a free audio book. Just like the one that carries recommending all you need to do is go to gift biz, book.com and make a selection.
Or you might even be able to go on eBay and find a book that you're looking at, but a free one's over at gift biz, book.com. All right, let's talk a little bit about how our listeners could get in touch with you and specifically advantage of that free product that you are offering everybody. So let's go through that and then we will end with our dare to dream quiz. Sounds good.
So my website is social selling mom.com and you can email me there and please take advantage of the guide that I put together. That's giving you tips for successful eBay selling. You can grab Carrie's guide over at Bitly forward slash E Bay five, And you'll see some screenshots and some really good suggestions and ideas for selling online. Wonderful and give his listeners. As you know, you'll be able to jump over to the show notes page. We'll have all of that information ready for you.
Don't stop, pull by the side of the road, try and copy that down while you're driving any bad or walking the dog. You may run into another dog. I don't know, but we'll have that all over on the show notes page for you. All right, Carrie, at this point, I would like to present you with a virtual gift. This is your magical box containing unlimited possibilities for what you'd like for the future. This is your dream or your goal of almost unreachable Heights that you would wish to obtain.
Please accept this gift and open it in our presence. What is inside? Thank you for the gift inside. I would like the opportunity to continue learning to the end of my days. I feel like when I learn, I get motivated, inspired, and it leads to all kinds of opportunities. Some of which I can put into practice and make some money, do things that I like to do, but it all is based on getting ideas and getting inspiration and having time to keep on learning.
And with the learnings that I pick up, I want to turn around and motivate, inspire, and share with others. I love your gift and you know why it's totally in your grasp because it's in your control. This is one that you can absolutely do. You don't need anybody else to have this come alive for you. So that's awesome, Carrie, thank you so much. I really appreciate this deep dive into eBay.
I think it's opened my eyes in terms of what the opportunities are there that I'd never really thought of before. And you know, you've given us some concrete steps on what we could do to get started and just a whole bunch of valuable information, including your free guide. Thank you on behalf of all of our listeners and may your candle always burn bright Well, you're welcome. Thanks for having me Learn how to work smarter while developing and growing your business.
Download our guide called 25 free tools to enhance your business and life. It's our gift to you and available at gift biz, unwrap.com/tools. Thanks, listening, and be sure To join us for the next episode. After you listened to the show, if you like what you're hearing, make sure to jump over and subscribe to the show on iTunes. That way you'll automatically get the newest episode when they go live.
And thank you to those who have already left a rating and review by subscribing rating and reviewing help to increase the visibility of gift biz unwrap. It's a great way to pay it forward, to help others with their entrepreneurial journey as well. Today's show is sponsored by the ribbon print company, looking for a new income source for your gift business. Customization is more popular now than ever grind your product from your logo or print a happy birthday, Jessica Griffin, to add to a gift,
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