Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about one thing that may be keeping you from making more sales on eBay.
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Pro Flipper Show – One Thing That May Keep You From Making More Sales On eBay
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about one thing that could be stopping you from making more sales on eBay.
Rob: Alright guys, so today on the episode we are chatting about something that could be holding you back from making more sales on eBay.
Melissa: And not just eBay, really any platform and really not even just your reselling business. It could be any, anything, but we're gonna talk about specifically your reselling business.
Rob: That's right.
Melissa: Because this is something that we've noticed a lot more. We've been doing a lot more one-on-one, working with people and in their flipping business lately. And so it's something that we keep seeing over and over again.
And it's kind of surprising, kind of not surprising. So like we kind of expect it, but at the same time it is surprising, i, I feel like, so.
Rob: Absolutely. So you guys might be asking us, what is this? I want to know what could be holding me back right now. Analysis paralysis. Are you stuck in this loop of really overanalyzing what's going on and it's making you freeze and stop and not take action?
Melissa: Yeah, we, we do see this a lot. Like, and, and we get into that rut too. It's like you wanna learn a new skill, so you feel like you need to know everything about that new skill, about that whole business. You need to know all the details, every single thing before you can even get started. And that really is not the case.
Like you really, it's better to just dive in, obviously have an understanding of what you're getting into, but at the same time, just go, you learn the best by doing so.
Rob: Absolutely.
And you will learn from your mistakes when you're making mistakes. That is when you do not make the same mistake twice.
Typically, when you make a mistake, you learn from it and you grow. All my past mistakes that I've made, I have absolutely learned from them and I've gotten better each time that I've done it. So, the other cool thing that you have to remember is nothing is reversible, irreversible. Totally, you can, you can walk away from the selling game.
If you make a mistake, I mean, we can throw a couple examples at you. What to do, you, you, you sell something, you don't have enough insurance on it, or you don't you know, have enough charged for insurance, right? And it's gonna cost you money. Cancel the sale and re-list it with what you learned, how much it's gonna cost you to, to ship it somewhere else.
So, I mean, there's, yeah.
Melissa: You meant shipping, not insurance.
Rob: Sorry.
But shipping, yeah. You didn't charge enough for shipping. The shipping for an item. That's one of the options. I mean, there's just so many things that could go wrong. Don't think about those things. Really get in there, get something listed, and take action.
Action. Massive action is, I mean, it's on the board right behind us for our own, for our own development, for our own growth, massive action. Take massive action. And that's what we'll encourage you guys to do as well.
Melissa: Yeah. And sometimes it's messy and sometimes you will make mistakes and we're not encouraging to go out there and make all the mistakes and whatever.
But if you're, if you're here listening or watching, then you're somebody who's trying to learn more anyway. So you're trying to be prepared, but we do find that a lot of people get over prepared and then don't step forward. So we've had people in our community for years and they're constantly watching and constantly learning and constantly, you know, taking all the information in.
But the information is only as good as, as you're gonna move forward with it. So.
Rob: Absolutely it paralyzes people because they're worried about making a mistake. They're stuck in what they're doing. So if that's you right now, we wanna encourage you guys, take that step of faith, step out there. Take action and get something done.
That way you can totally start seeing reaping the benefits of what you're working on.
Melissa: Yeah. Cuz if you think about all the things that could go wrong and you're trying to prepare for all of those, I mean, it is good to be prepared. I'm not gonna say that like it's good to have your items, the descriptions that properly it properly done.
It's good to have, you know, the pictures showing everything in the item so your buyer is not getting something they're not aware of. Like all those things are are great, but if you do make a mistake and something happens, I mean, you're probably not gonna make that same mistake again for one. Like you learn, especially if there's money involved that you lost, you definitely learn the hard way.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: But it's, it definitely you learn a lot more by doing, and a huge piece that comes with that is gaining confidence. So a lot of times, you know, you're just nervous about doing and nervous about making a mistake, but if once you do it, you're like, oh, it wasn't as, it wasn't as hard as I thought.
Like it actually, the world didn't explode, or you know, like I didn't lose like all this money that I thought I could, whatever. And I did it and everything was good. So, yeah, because more of the time you're gonna have a positive experience. Like of course in any business there's gonna be a negative side where like we get returns every once in a while or, you know, something happens, but it's, it's a lot lower percent than like if you're trying to prepare for every bad thing that could happen in your business.
So, yeah, if that makes sense.
Rob: Absolutely. And let me give you some advice. If you're listening to this right now and you have really, you have that desire to start your eBay business, start your reselling business. What can you do to minimize the mistakes? Minimize that stuff? Guys, start low. We ship, we sell, we ship, high value items. We're dealing with thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in some of our single sales that we're doing. Don't try to start with that. Start low. Start with this process for an item that is $15 an item, that's $20. When you make a mistake on one of those items, it doesn't hurt as bad as when you make that same mistake on a $10,000 item, a $15,000 item. You do not wanna make those mistakes that you can make on the lower priced item. So really get the hang of how eBay works, how the system works, creating your label, shipping these items out. Really get the hang of that at low cost items. It's, you're not gonna make a ton of profit, but you are gonna learn the system, you're gonna learn the process, so you're ready to go up to that next level of selling a $100 item, a $300 item, a $500 item, until you can get to the point where you're selling the items, the high profit items like we are doing.
Melissa: Yeah. So it definitely hurts a lot less to make the mistakes on a smaller item than on that bigger item. So, so yeah, we, it, the biggest thing really is to get kind of outta your own head.
Yeah. And it's hard to do. Like you get into where I just wanna know everything about what could possibly happen. But if you find yourself getting into a space where you're just constantly, and we love learning, but if you're constantly learning and constantly taking in information without action, you're not doing anything with it because you're like, okay, well I still need to learn more about how this works before I can do it.
I would challenge you to go and do it. Go. If you have been not starting your eBay business or not, whatever platform you wanna sell on or whatever it is, go and do it. Go and list a couple items this week. Go do it today. Go find some items and go do it. And then you get past the scary stuff and you might not know everything about listing, but you know what you run into.
You'll know what you don't know. Once you run into that problem, then you'll go find the solution.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: So you can move forward that way. Yeah.
Rob: And another piece of advice for you, this is really, really cool as well. So, if you are doing this and you're doing it by yourself, try to find an accountability partner.
Find a friend, a family member that might want to do the same thing, and bounce ideas and work through stuff together. When you have somebody who can keep you accountable, you wanna start, but you're procrastinating because of analysis paralysis, try to find somebody that you can partner up with that. We have an amazing group when people actually come into Flipper University.
We have a, a group of only people who've gone through Flipper University, but it's a, a community of like-minded people who can bounce ideas off of each other. Now, if you haven't done that with our community, there are other communities out there, but there's also people out there that you can, you can bounce ideas off of and you can grow together and really do that.
So I'll encourage you, find that accountability, accountability partner that you can really grow in this business. Like I said, start out low and then you can start to get better and better in higher profit items.
Melissa: Yeah. So go get started. Bust past that analysis paralysis.
Rob: You can do it.
Melissa: And it is, I, it does surprise me sometimes when I, how many people I see and even people that I know are seasoned, like we have people in our community who sell and do really well, and then all of a sudden they get back into that analysis paralysis and get in their own way again.
And, and it's just a constant learning thing. I mean, we do the same thing. I. We do it all the time too. So it's just keeping moving forward and having that, and I think like since we have the community, we have you guys like we can talk to and it just helps us to bust through it. So even absolutely even starting this podcast last year, it's like, okay, we don't know.
We don't know. We just gotta dive in and do it. We're gonna make mistakes and that's okay, but we're just gonna keep going forward. So, yeah, I think that's the only way you can really move forward is to bust through that analysis paralysis. So.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: So let us know too, if you make the decision that you're going to get started, whatever it is.
If you have started on eBay and you really know you wanna list more or you haven't started or whatever it is in your flipping business, shoot us a DM on Instagram. Let us know what is it that you're working on, and yeah, we'd love to encourage you. So thank you guys.
You guys rock. Have a great day and we'll see you on the next episode.