Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper interview Josh with Vendoo, a software that allows resellers to list to multiple platforms.
Check out Vendoo's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Vendoo
Follow Vendoo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendoo.co/
Appliance Flipping Course: http://applianceflipping.com/
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
Check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
Interview with Vendoo
Rob: What's up, guys?
We got a cool treat. Josh is on here from Vendoo. Very excited to talk to Josh and let him tell us some more stuff about Vendoo.
I'm sure they've had some more stuff roll out in the last couple months, in the last year. So, in just a minute we'll be bringing him on so he can talk to you guys.
Melissa: Share how they, how they can help you grow your reselling business and make more money.
Melissa: Hey Josh.
Josh: Hey. How's it going?
Melissa: All right, we can hear you. So we're happy to have you tell us some more about Vendoo.
Josh: Okay, cool. So first and foremost, I'm always inspired by you guys' energy. You're so high energy and enthusiastic about reselling. So it's really exciting and thanks again for the opportunity to get in front of your, your sellers here.
So, a little bit about Vendoo. We are a software that, makes it easy to manage a reselling business across multiple marketplaces. So a little bit about myself. I was a full-time reseller for almost 15 years. I started off with a brick and mortar sneaker store, in the Maryland area, and I ran that for a few years.
Around 2009, I would say the economy started getting a little bad. There was a recession there and I wanted to start selling items online, just to kind of increase the visibility for my products and to not have to be sitting in a store where the sales were kind of declining. So I started this journey, like all the rest of us, of selling on different marketplaces.
After a few years, I realized that I kind of hit a ceiling that we all hit where there's just not enough hours in the day to do all of the different things that it takes to run a reselling business. You have to source inventory. You have to be a photographer and take your photos. You have to make listings.
You have to be an accountant. You have to stay on top of all your, your numbers. You have to do shipping, customer service, all these different. And, as we started to think about the reseller experience more, we wanted to figure out how we can build a software to condense and solve so many of these pain points in one product.
So that was our goal with Vendoo. We started working on the idea in 2017, me and our three other co-founders. And we basically tried to start building an end to end solution to solve so many of those manual and tedious processes throughout the day, that a reseller has to do.
Melissa: The templates, do you, are they limited, like the number of templates that you have, are they per?
Josh: So you can have up to, you can create up to 100 templates in your Vendoo inventory account. So that's basically unlimited. I'm not sure if there's even a hundred different types of templates you need to create, but if for any reason you would need more than that, we could customize that for you to create more.
Okay. One thing I also, I forgot to mention that's really important is we do have a mobile app. So our original software is a web app, that runs on a Google Chrome extension. So our, a lot of our users in the chat know that they have to download that Chrome extension to their browser to use the Vendoo software.
But we have a mobile app that we launched earlier this year. And on that mobile app we have, the majority of the features that we have on the web app is still in beta. So it's a work in progress, but I believe we have six marketplaces at, at the moment. And you can do just about all of the features that you can do on the web app, and you can download our mobile app directly from your iOS app store or your Android app store.
Rob: When your item sells, do they have to populate it in Vendoo or do they have to show Vendoo which platform sold or does it do it automatically?
Josh: So currently the way that it's set up when an item sells, you would have to come into Vendoo and just click the mark as sold button. So that mark as sold button is gonna allow us to fill in a couple details there. We're gonna ask you for the sale price. We're gonna ask you for the, shipping costs and the marketplace fees.
For a lot of the marketplaces, we calculate the fees automatically, so that might already be filled in, but as soon as you fill in those details, it'll automatically remove that listing from all of the other places that it's currently listed. Just with one. We are building a way in the future to be able to do that in an automated fashion so that once something sells, Vendoo knows automatically.
And we'll take that down for you before you have to come into the software and do anything. But at the moment, you do have to come in, tell us that it's sold and it'll be removed and you can do that on he computer.
Melissa: Can you do that on the app too?
Josh: So we just rolled out the ability to do that on the app.
It might not be live yet, it might be live in the next day or so, but on the app, you'll be able to go in on the, go, open your phone and market an item is sold, and remove that from the marketplaces directly from your mobile device.
Rob: Awesome.
Melissa: Yeah, that's a game changer. I like that you guys are always like, trying to add more and listening to people and what they need and trying to, yeah.
Always add more, make it better.
Well, and the cool thing is you are a reseller. You, this is, this is not theory of what you think is good. You know this from being a reseller. This is the best app ever built by somebody who's reselling and doing this stuff. So I think that shows a lot towards your passion for reselling.
Rob: The app definitely follows that, so that's so exciting.
Josh: For sure. And it's not just from our perspective. Our company is built on feedback from the reseller community. So the first two years almost of creating this idea, we went around to every reseller convention. We attended conferences just like this one.
We went to meetups and posh and sips all over the country and just asked questions to sellers to really understand their daily pain points, what their experience is like on a daily basis, where they feel like they spend the most unnecessary time. Just really understanding what those problems are so that we can find ways to creatively incorporate solutions into the software.
Rob: I love it.
Josh: I, I quickly, Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Melissa: No, go ahead and then I'll ask you. Go ahead.
Josh: I wanted to just mention a couple resources that we have as well. So we do, we are a software company and we do provide you, provide resellers with these, features to streamline their business and make things easier.
But we also create a ton of educational content for sellers, just free information that we give out weekly, both high level and entry level. Anything about your reselling business from how to create a strong listing on Depop to how to seo, optimize your titles for better results, just all kinds of instructional content.
So we have a blog on our website. Vendoo.co is our website. On our blog we release new blog articles every week. Those are free for you guys to go check out. We also have a YouTube channel, Vendoo, a seller's best friend YouTube channel where we put up both tutorial, videos about our software, but also just a lot of reseller information every week, and we put out a few videos weekly.
And then we have a strong Facebook group called Vendoo, a seller's best friend where there's a lot of Vendoo users in that group talking about the software. We give product updates in that group. We talk about things happening in the community. We run contests and giveaways. So those are some great resources to tap into.
We're also on Instagram, which is our most, the platform that we're the most active on. So if they go to Instagram, which is Vendoo.co there's a link in our bio where they can access all of these different resources that I just mentioned, but that's the best way to find us is either on our website, Vendoo.co or on Instagram @vendoo.co.
Rob: I love it.
Melissa: If I start listing on Vendoo, can I eliminate the $4.99 from my invoice after everything's all imported?
Josh: So, yeah, a lot of sellers typically do the import for the first month. They'll have that feature for the first month just to help them get all of their existing inventory brought over once all of their items are in of their Vendoo inventory, you can remove that add-on from your plan, like just once you're finished importing everything, remove that, add-on, and then create items in Vendoo moving forward.
We also have some sellers that like to keep that ad on because they do feel more comfortable, for example, listing on eBay. They feel like they've been selling on eBay for so long that they can navigate that form quickly. So they like to start their import and then cross post. So you can do it either way.
Melissa: Okay. Cause yeah, if once you get.
Rob: Real quick question. Oh, just thinking about that. I just listed an item a little while ago on eBay. So the videos, so eBay's allowing you to do with their new listing form videos in there as well. How does that play into your guys' software? Is it, will it pull videos or what does it do?
Josh: That's a feature that we're building now, because Poshmark also allows video and listings and other marketplaces are starting to do that. So we're building that capability so that our sellers can upload their videos directly to Vendoo the same way they do with their photos.
Rob: I love it. Awesome.
Melissa: Awesome.
Is there a way to put items on vacation mode from Vendoo?
Josh: Oh, good question. Unfortunately, vacation mode still has to be done on the marketplace, but that's a great feature suggestion. I think we can look into figuring out how to build that. That'd be really cool to put all of your stores on vacation mode with one button.
I would love to. I would love to have that just for myself.
Something that I thought was kind of cool well, really cool is once you have all this stuff organized, like you really don't need another bookkeeping software because you have it all there. So like I know GoDaddy went out for resellers this past year, so they were kind of, so there really wouldn't be another one that you would need.
Right. Like that, like?
Right.
A lot of sellers start off by using either pen and paper or some type of spreadsheet that they update manually, right? So the cool thing about Vendoo is as you're listing, you're actually creating a spreadsheet at the same time. So there's some fields that we have in our listing form, like we have your cost of goods.
We know the date that you, input that item into our system. And there's some different things there. So, any item in our Vendoo inventory, you can easily click. We have a CSV download button that downloads your entire Vendoo inventory into a little file that goes to your desktop, and you can drag that into Excel.
You can drag that into Google Sheets, and it creates the spreadsheet for you based on all the information that you've already created in your Vendoo listing.
Rob: I love it.
Josh: So that kind of, bypasses the separate bookkeeping system that you would need and some of that behind the scenes,, inventory organization.
Melissa: Yeah. Because that's not sometimes the hardest thing for people. I think it's hard for us too. Like you get, you're excited about the find, you're excited about the sale. Yeah. And then all the other stuff's just not as exciting for most people unless you're, you know, an analytics person. Yeah. But the numbers are what help you grow your business.
Absolutely. And you can know your numbers.
Awesome. Can you print out the sold page that has all the details of the sales?
Josh: You can. So, all the details you on the CSV download that I just mentioned, you can, choose the columns that you wanna appear in that spreadsheet.
So let's say you only wanna filter by sold items. You can definitely download the sold items to a CSV file, put that into Excel or Google Sheets, and then make a printout of that, which is gonna give you a whole printout of all of your sales. You can run that by month. You can run that for the year, which would be easy to just give to your accountant or whoever's helping you with your taxes because your co your cost of goods will be in there.
Your marketplace fees will be in there. Everything will already be included in that printout, and that's an easy way to kind of stay on top of your numbers.
Melissa: Awesome.
Rob: I love it.
Melissa: Are you able to create a temporary, like across the board sale for inventory, like a Christmas sale?
Josh: So we don't have that ability at the moment?
No. We do, however, if you're a seller that's like enterprise level, you'll say you're working with 10,000 items per month or something like that. There's ways that we can do that for you, where we can do bulk actions for large number of items, but you would have to contact us in order for us to set that up for you.
Melissa: Okay.
Sorry, there's lots of, I'm just trying to make sure we get 'em all. Did you say that you can list on three markets without having the multiple marketplace fee? Or what is the limit?
Josh: Yes. So, if you're creating, if you don't have the all marketplaces addon, you can list your item to any three marketplaces of your choice.
Melissa: Okay.
Josh: And then if you have the all marketplaces add on, you can list to up to all 10. Okay. Some people say that, Oh, I only list on three platforms, so I don't need that add on. Some people list on on more than that, so it's helpful for some people.
Melissa: Okay.
Do you support multi quantity listings?
Josh: Multi quantity is the newest feature that we're currently in the process of launching.
You guys are kind of getting a sneak peek. We haven't put that out yet, but when I was sharing my screen, I think you could see that we do have a quantity field now, so we do support multi quantity on all the list, on all the marketplaces that support It should be seeing that in their account within the next few days.
Melissa: Sweet.
That's awesome that I know. That was a big one. A lot of people who sell, yeah, that's a big one. Who sell smaller, high volume and stuff. Yeah. What are the 10 platforms you support?
Josh: So we have eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Mercari, Grailed, Depop, Tradesy, Kidizen, Facebook Marketplace and Shopify.
Melissa: I was intrigued by the Shopify because like I've thought we've toyed around back and forth.
The idea of listing some stuff on Shopify just to see like if we get it out there and promote it other than using like eBay, and doing all the fees. So we were, we were toying around with it. That would be kind of cool to play around.
Rob: For sure. That's awesome.
Josh: I think a lot of sellers are interested in Shopify and creating their own, personal online store, but there's just like that barrier of entry there, just because it's a lot more, it's a lot different than a lot of the other marketplaces.
So because of that Vendoo has a partnership with Shopify. That's, an active partnership. If you go to shopify.com/vendoo, I'm sure one of my team members will put that in the chat and enter your email address. Someone from the Shopify team will reach out to you. They'll take you under their wing in about a six week program and help you build your store, help you get all of your inventory populated, and they'll walk you through all of those steps to creating an online store for the first time.
And with that program, I believe, Shopify users typically get about 14 days free. With our program, you get 60 days free. And there's also some other benefits that come along with that. So if anybody is interested in setting up a Shopify store, using that Vendoo program would be a great way to do it.
Rob: Absolutely. That's awesome.
Melissa: And Shopify charge, I looked at it a while ago, it charge it like you pay monthly, but it's depending on how many listings you have, right? Like,
that's not?
Josh: Right, depending on how many listings you have. I think the different tiers allow you to third number of photos per listing.
There's different, there's three different tiers I believe that they have.
Melissa: Okay. Cool. That's really cool. Yeah, we definitely wanna check, check that out. Absolutely. If you don't list or at least draft every item immediately after purchase does, then does Vendoo do have an incomplete inventory?
Rob: Yeah, he showed that. Oh, draft.
Melissa: Okay.
Josh: When you're in a plan, let's say you're in the 25 item plan. You have that whole month to create 25 items in Vendoo. They don't have to be listed, You don't have to have them on the marketplaces yet, but even if you've created drafts for those items, for those 25 items, you're still getting your full use after that month, like after an item has been created, we never count it against you again. So you can effectively store unlimited inventory in Vendoo. There's no limitations to how much inventory we can hold for you, but you're just allowed to upload a certain amount per month.
Rob: Okay, cool. Well, just to clarify, so like the drafts, if somebody, like, if I go buy something, I get a picture of it and I stick it into a draft, that doesn't count towards your monthly thing until you go live with it, correct?
Josh: No, it, so the draft counts because you've created a new item in your Vendoo inventory, and that counts. You can list it whenever you want. And then once an it's been created, you can list it, re-list it, you can put it on as many platforms as you want. It'll never be counted against you again.
Once it's been created.
Melissa: So I create the draft, I list it, or I list it the next month. It's not counted for two items and it's not counted for 10 items, listing on all 10 platforms.
Josh: Once it's in there, it's in there.
Rob: It's counted as, but that's appealing because some people don't get stuff listed right away. Like you said, you get a picture of it, get it in there.
You can put the price you paid for it, the date that you got it for your bookkeeping, which is awesome. And then you're charged for it right then, and then you, whenever you get it listed, it's in there one time and that's it. So I love that.
Josh: We have a lot of sellers that just on the mobile app will create their drafts right in the thrift store or wherever they're sourcing.
They know the items that they're buying. They might have six or seven drafts created before they even get home. And that way, you know, the items that need to be photographed. You kind of can start your workflow a lot earlier, with the mobile app.
Rob: That would help me a ton. It would motivate you, . It would help me a ton to know what I have and it's in the draft so I can get back and get it.
Melissa: But the biggest thing is the date that you bought it, how much you paid for it inside the draft.
A lot of times, half our stuff, most of our stuff is cash pay based. Yeah. So you're like, Oh, well how much did I spend on that? Did you write it down?
Rob: Can you do that in the draft too? Can you take a?
Josh: You can put the cost of goods in, right in the draft. I even. The thing, the thing that's cool about the mobile app as well is I take all my photos on my phone, so I know a lot of times because the photos are already on your phone, it's difficult to send them over to your computer or send them somewhere else to upload them to the software.
So I can just create the drafts with the photos directly from my phone, camera roll, and get all of my drafts created really quickly.
Rob: That's awesome.
Melissa: Yeah. I don't think last year you had the app rolled out yet. I think it was.
Josh: We didn't. Yeah. We rolled that out earlier this year, I believe like March or April is when we first started playing around with it.
Melissa: Yeah. That's awesome. That's a game changer is because we do a lot of stuff from with our phone. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, because we covered so much stuff and there's still a lot of features that I didn't really get into the details for. We do have, tutorial calls every week. We have one on, Wednesday nights at nine Eastern, and one on Thursday mornings at 11:00 AM Eastern.
In those calls, someone from our team, probably either Aaron or Ben will walk you guys through all of the features on the website, show you how to use different things in a lot more detail than I showed today. You also have a chance to ask questions there as well. And then, like I said, we have that Facebook group that's just a constant conversation.
Rob: That's really cool.
Yeah, I love it.
Melissa: And that's, so is that the, for customer service, is that the best way to reach out, is your Facebook group or?
Josh: Well, for customer service on the actual software, there's a little help button in the corner.
They'll see that in the bottom right. We have, live chat customer service, daytime hours from about 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM Eastern. Someone will be there to, answer your question in a chat really quickly. And that's always seven days a week we have that. And, they'll answer both, like if you have a, if you run into an error or something or you don't understand something, they'll walk you through that and they'll also answer those general questions for you as well.
And if you, are just on social media, you can, you can send us a message on our direct message or something like that and we'll get back to you really quickly there also.
Melissa: Awesome. Awesome.
So you said the Facebook group is a great source of info. Awesome. Customer service is always so helpful with you too with you guys.
Rob: I love all the stuff that you guys are doing over there. You really, really have the sellers in mind.
You guys are listening to your customers.
Melissa: It's super cool that you like, how much you've added just since last year, that you're constantly adding that stuff and listening to people, because I think that is super important. It is to listen to your users and.
Rob: It is, they're not just sitting back.
They're seeing what people want. They know what people want and they're constantly, just like you heard through Josh's presentation, he's telling you other stuff that's in the back right now that's getting ready to. They're constantly making this software better, and I absolutely love that about Vendoo for sure.
So.
Melissa: So definitely check them out.
Rob: Josh even said the Shopify, we're thinking about going into Shopify right now. We've been contemplating it for a while now, but he's got a deal because they're partnering with Shopify that you can get, what was it, 60 days, Josh?
Josh: 60 days free.
And during that time period, they'll help you get your account set up so you don't have to go through that whole process yourself. And they'll teach you a lot about the Shopify platform because as a reseller that's on most of these marketplaces, you can kind of just upload your items and go about your business for the most part, for Shopify, because that's your own dedicated site.
You're responsible for driving traffic there, for branding it in the way that you wanna brand it. And those things are sometimes a little bit, There are barriers of entry for sellers who aren't used to thinking about that many different things. So this program is also gonna educate you in into how to best run that type of store and also get you set up at the same time without having to pay anything for that first 60 days.
Rob: So don't overlook that. That's a, that's an awesome thing that Josh is offering to for his partnership.
Melissa: So now we're gonna try that, right?
Rob: Absolutely. We need to do it for sure. We've been, we've been talking about it a while now.
Melissa: We're like, okay, well we, we know we're on eBay and they do well, but when things change, you might need to check out new platforms.
Rob: Absolutely. So we wanna respect your time. Josh, thank you so much for jumping on here, informing us of all the stuff that's going on, even behind the scenes. You've been very, very generous with letting us know what's rolling out and that kind of stuff. So thank you again for doing this. You guys, yeah, you know how to get in touch with Josh. He's got so much, great, places that you guys can see them on social media.
Melissa: And they're really quick to get back with you.
Rob: Yeah. So you guys know that that's the case, so.
Thanks again, Josh.
Josh: All right. Take care.
Melissa: See ya. Bye.