Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper discuss whether you need to use social media to have a successful reselling business.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast – Rob & Melissa On Social Media Selling
Rob: What's up, guys? On today's episode, we are talking about social media. And do you need social media to be a successful reseller?
Melissa: We're going to dive into that question in just a minute.
Melissa: So we've gotten this question before saying that I don't have, I'm not active on Instagram or social media. And so I don't, I can't be successful with my reselling business and they really have not much to do with each other. They can, or they can't. So, but do you need it? Just the blanket statement, do you need it to be a successful reseller? No, you don't need to be active on social media to be a successful reseller.
Rob: Yeah. Guys, we've built our business for the last six years. We do have social, but we do not sell on social. So we are not selling any stuff. Anything that we have, we do not sell it by our social presence.
More of we're sharing our journey and our social presence, which is pretty cool, but we sell probably 90%, 95% of our items on eBay.
Melissa: Yeah. And the other reselling platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Mercari, eBay, those are the places that are the best to sell. Now, can you use social media to sell?
You can. And like, Instagram is a pretty good place and they're trying to get even more into shopping on Instagram. And they even have, you know, you could get a shop, you can make your own shop, you can grow that and sell it. It would probably be better and make more sense if you have a niche like furniture, like, and you're trying to sell your furniture.
If you have a niche, like a collectible, antiques, like that makes a little more sense cause you can have really cool pictures of it and grow a following. And people would like your stuff. Collectors might start following you or people who just love, you know, handmade furniture or painted or whatever will start following you.
And then you can sell it that way. But, it is not needed. And it's not something like, if you don't want to do social media, you don't have to, like, you don't have to do it to be successful in the reselling business.
Rob: Absolutely not. So let's back up for a second. Why do we use eBay? Why Mercari? Why all these other platforms do we use?
Guys, these companies are fairly big and they pay a lot of money to get your items into Google searches. So somebody is looking for an item. They're typing it into Google. They're trying to find that item. Guess what? eBay's coming up. Amazon's coming up. Mercari is coming up. You're trying to compete with your own socials against these behemoths, these huge Goliaths of the time. So it's so much easier just to get them onto these platforms, get them listed on these platforms and then they will take care of getting them sold. So, like I said, it's not a necessity. Melissa just went over to the details of, you know, it will help in some aspects, but still, even if you are building social, you still want to get them on some of these larger reselling platforms because they are going to do so much better at getting in front of the right people, that you want to sell those items to.
Melissa: And we've even thought about putting the items on our own website, because you could do that too. And then, but it's so much more work than just listing them on eBay or other platforms because now I have to drive traffic to my website and that it takes a lot of work to drive traffic to a website. Let me tell you, after six years of trying to work on our blog and website, it's a lot of work to drive traffic. So, it's just a lot easier to not to use the apps that are out there.
Rob: That's it utilize these companies that are around us. These companies who are paying the money to get it seen, to get these items seen, to bring in their audience. Now, eBay, last time we checked, I think it was the end of last year, their totals are 159 million registered users, active users.
So these are people, I mean, eBay's reaching so many people. Now, even for people who are only selling locally, I mean, you're limited to whatever your let's say, Facebook Marketplace, you're limited to your local market, which might reach anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 people, depending on how big your town your town is or your local area.
When you're getting it onto eBay, you have such a better chance of getting more money for that item and finding the right person who's willing to pay more of what that item is actually worth, than in the local market.
Melissa: Now you can do shipping on those platforms now, too. So you will reach more people on Facebook and OfferUp, but they have not perfected their customer service yet, like to where if you have a problem that you could actually talk to somebody or chat with somebody and get it taken care of. So until they figure that out, that we don't feel comfortable recommending people to ship on there just because it's not like, you can't talk to anybody.
Rob: Yeah, they are babies in the industry when it comes to the transactions and shipping eBay has been doing it 20 what, 25, 26 years? So they have really perfected the whole process through the sales, through the shipping and all that kind of stuff. So, that's one of those things, like we said, we don't use them right now. We'll do sometimes local stuff.
But for the shipping aspect of it, we really stick with eBay.
Melissa: So why, like we talked a little bit about it, but why would you want to maybe build your social media for your reselling business? Like you could, if you are in a niche, like we talked about like furniture or some really cool niche that, you know, people would find you and you could use that.
Or also if you just want to share your journey, like you mentioned, like, if you want to document your reselling journey and maybe make a community of people that are, would follow you. So, and enjoy, you know, kind of the same thing. Maybe they're just starting just like you, and they could really relate to you.
So if you want to share that, that is another way that you could use social media, but as far as actually reselling the items, it's not a make or break deal for sure.
Rob: Absolutely not. And like we said, we've been doing it for six years. We've been actually doing our blog, doing social media posts and really showing people kind of what we're doing.
And we still have not ever tried to sell anything on social media. That's never been.
Melissa: Just sharing our journey and helping other people. So if that's what you want, like, that's totally great for that. But for actually selling your items, then I do think that furniture people could do pretty well with that, but they would have to ship it too, because then you're going to get people from all over from that.
Rob: Well, it's a mix. So if you're getting your local market covered with Facebook Marketplace for your furniture flips, and then you're also posting them on eBay, like I said, typically you're not seeing any Facebook stuff come up when you're searching in Google. I mean, test, go and see, hey, look for this brand name and see if anything comes up on Facebook.
Typically it does not, it's going to be something like eBay or Mercari or one of those big, big companies.
Melissa: Ebay always comes up in the search.
Rob: They do.
Melissa: If it's something specific.
Rob: Ebay and Amazon are the two that come up there and Amazon does not do a lot of used stuff. So you're going to find more stuff on eBay. And that's one of those things.
So when somebody's looking for a specific item, whether it's a brand name piece of furniture, a type of desk, you know, any type of dress or anything like that, if they type it into Google, eBay is going to come up with it. So you're going to get it there. You just have to learn how to ship it. That is the next key is learning how to ship those items.
Melissa: Yeah.
And so if you are using social media to sell your items, we would love to hear from you so DM us on Instagram and let us know so we can follow you to see like what you're doing, because that's really cool. And if you just want to share your story, that's cool too. So DM us and let us know, from your handle, and so we can follow you back.
Rob: Awesome, you guys rock! Have a great day.