Rob and Melissa Stephenson, from Flea Market Flipper, talk about what to do for your reselling business if you're getting gated on Amazon.
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What To Do If You’re Getting Gated On Amazon
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about getting gated on Amazon and what you need to do if it's happening to you.
Rob: Alright, so today we're talking about Amazon and are you getting gated on Amazon? Are you having some issues selling the items that are selling good and that you want to be selling on Amazon? Are they causing you some problems?
Well, we're gonna be diving into that today.
Melissa: And this all actually came about from a conversation you had with, somebody last, a couple, like a week ago or so. Somebody that is one of our members and was diving into our accelerator program and was tired of getting gated on a couple different categories.
And so we wanted to talk about that on the podcast today because it is something that Amazon does to protect their buyers and sellers. Like they are wanting to make sure that they're legit sellers. So that's why they do it. But there's a lot of red tape to getting to sell on Amazon and it's, that's a huge reason why we don't sell on Amazon.
And so our answer to are you tired of selling, getting gated on Amazon, would be, try eBay. Try eBay out. So that's kind of the, the punchline of today's episode, but we wanted to dive into it a little bit. Yeah.
Rob: And one of our members, like we said, I was talking to him and he was more specifically selling books, selling books on Amazon.
The problem was the expensive books, the books that were pretty much like textbooks that he was unable to sell the ones that were making the most amount of money. He was unable to sell them on Amazon, so he had to actually open up an account on eBay and start selling them on eBay.
Melissa: And he was able to sell them on eBay, right?
Rob: And he was able to sell them on eBay and make the money. But, that's where I kind of dove into him and started talking to him more about the, the difference between the gated stuff on Amazon, versus what you're allowed to do on eBay. And typically a lot of the stuff that is gated on Amazon. You can bring it over and sell it on eBay.
Which is really, really cool because you have another resource to be able to make some serious money on these items, that might not be able to be sold on Amazon because they're gated.
Melissa: So basically when you start, when you sign up to, as a seller on Amazon, you have to get un gated from all these different categories.
So the most common ones that you have to get the process so you can sell these items. I wrote them down from here are like collectibles, art, jewelry, holiday items, toys and games. This was interesting. Made in Italy was one of them. Like, that's interesting. It's crazy. You have to get approved to sell that. Watches, sports, collectibles, music and DVDs. And so that, and that's a lot of stuff. Right, right there just a, you know, a short list of a lot of different categories that you could sell all of that on eBay.
Rob: Absolutely. So that's the cool thing is. Any of these categories right here or any of these items right here, you can go over and open an account on eBay and start selling them immediately.
You don't have to get approval from them. And when we say gated, all it is is the approval you have to get approved. You have to be approved by Amazon to be able to sell these items. Which I don't know the process, Melissa and I don't sell on Amazon, but we've heard that some of these things can be a bear to get them un gated or approved for Amazon to allow you to do that.
So.
Melissa: One thing I wrote down that was really interesting is no two Amazon restricted categories have the same method. So like you do it one way for one category and then you have to go figure out a different way to get, and some of them are faster, some of them take weeks, some of them take probably months, to, for them to approve that you can sell in that category.
But no two processes are the same. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't they make it the same? But anyway, so that's it. eBay just has a lot lower barrier to entry. So that's one reason we love it and why we recommend it 'cause we use it. And we're not, you know, paid by eBay or anything or whatever there, but that is just the platform we've chosen to use because of the ease of it.
Basically, you can go in, set up an account , hook up a bank account so you can accept payments and pay also, and then you're good to go and you can start selling. And they, now there is restrictions though, so we can talk through some of the restrictions on eBay when you first get started.
Rob: So when you first get started, eBay does have restrictions just to protect you and protect the, the buyers that are buying from you. But the restrictions are, you can list up to 10 items or a thousand dollars. Once you hit that threshold, what, whatever it is, comes first.
Either the 10 items or the a thousand dollars, they cap you right there. And the only reason they do that is they do that to, find out, or to, make sure that you're a legit seller, that you're providing the service, that you're listing the items that you're listing. You're actually providing the service, you're, you're delivering on legit what you're listing.
Exactly. So. Once they start to see the activity in your account, they start to see the sales go through, they start to see the feedback coming in of items that you're selling. That's when you can get those restrictions lifted very easily. So.
Melissa: We've never had a problem of lifting restrictions. No.
Like we've had when you had your cap at like a hundred thousand I think you had at one point, and then you just basically called them and they raised it. So it was not a big deal at all.
Rob: Yeah. For us. We've sold for a long time. And when we got to that point where we were selling more expensive items, they had us capped at a hundred thousand dollars in inventory.
All I had to do is make a phone call to them. They raised it to $250,000 very, very quickly. Once we hit that cap on it, I had to call them again, and then they raised it to like $750,000 or a million dollars , that they allow us to list an inventory on that. So.
Melissa: We don't have that much listed though.
Rob: No, we don't. Very, very easy to get to that point though. When you're doing, when you're actually , listing the items and they start to see the activity inside your account, it's not that hard for you to give them a call and let them know, hey, I'm listing some more expensive items, or I'm trying to get into higher profit items.
I needed my, my restrictions lifted. And they, they are very, very apt. As long as you're doing what you're saying you're doing, you're getting good feedback, and they can see that you're selling, the items that you're promising and you're buyers are happy. They are very, very apt to change it. So you can actually list more items because it makes more money for them.
They're making more money. The more items that you get listed and the more items that you sell. So yeah.
Melissa: And when you're just getting started and you know, making sure you're doing like, you know, crossing your T's and dotting your i's like making sure if you say you're gonna ship out an item in a day, shipping that the next day, you're shipping it out.
Sure. Those kind of things, they're gonna look at a lot more closely so that they can raise it, raise your limit. And also, so yeah, so you can sell more on eBay. And one little hack that also can help you to get those lifted faster , just to like, we're just trying to create a relationship with eBay is to get your feedback up.
And you can do that by selling, but you can also do that by buying, so you can buy, change some of your buying habits from maybe Amazon to eBay, which might be even cheaper, but maybe a little slower in shipping. So depending on where you live. But that can help also with your getting your feedback up.
So yeah.
Rob: I just actually bought a battery off of eBay this week. So a lot of our buying habits we do on Amazon, Amazon's typically quicker , for receivables when you buy something, you get it delivered quicker. eBay usually takes 3, 4, 5 days, sometimes longer than that. But the prices sometimes a lot cheaper sometimes.
Yeah, that's it. If you can wait a couple more days on it , eBay will be cheaper on those. So, the next thing that we'll actually talk about in this episode as well is , so what is restricted on eBay. And from experience, we're just gonna give you some of the items that we found out from experience that you cannot list on eBay, which makes a little bit more sense than, kind of Amazon gating you on some of these, these crazy categories. But for eBay it's stuff that in medical, specifically medical stuff, because we get really, really good deals on medical devices, for whatever reason it is. We can find a lot of different medical devices at yard sales, thrift stores., Just people, they, they don't need them anymore.
And the thing with eBay is if it has a prescription, if it needed a prescription to actually purchase that medical advice or device, they will not allow you to sell it on eBay. Yeah , anything that needs a prescription, anything that doesn't need a prescription, you should be able to sell it on eBay.
And there might be a couple little caveats. I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but typically for us, anything that did not require a prescription for first to be purchased. You could sell it on eBay. And anything that did need a prescription, eBay deems that as, no, you need a doctor. Yes. Or a, a physician to actually prescribe it.
So they don't want secondhand that being sold to somebody who might not be able to get it prescribed from a doctor, so, it does make sense. It kind of stinks for us because we could find some really, really good deals on, I know oxygen machines, on all these different things.
Melissa: We did sell those.
We sold a couple of those for a while. We did, and then you got a warning. And that's one thing, if eBay does give you a warning, don't keep trying to sell it. No. If you list it again, if they warn you something and take it down and you re-list it, you can get your account closed. So it's not worth the risk to try to, like, we would sell some and then we sell some on another account and then we were done.
And they're like, all right, we can't do that anymore. So.
Rob: The crazy thing is you can actually go on and check some completed listings for, yeah, some of these prescriptions items. And some of them will get sold so quickly once they list them. eBay doesn't have the chance to pull them off or delete them, they'll get sold quickly.
And then you'll go in and see the, the comps on it and you're like, oh, I can buy this on, I can list it. Somebody else sold it. But then eBay might find yours before somebody buys it and they'll end the listing and then you can't re-list it. You wanna make sure that you don't get on eBay's bad, their blacklist, you don't wanna do that, you don't want them to injure account.
You can make so much money on eBay, when you're doing stuff by the book that they want you to actually do so.
Melissa: But it does kind of stink 'cause people do need that stuff and they could use, get it at such a bigger discount if you could sell it. Some of the stuff that is , classified as medical, but it's not a prescription that you sold.
Like those stretchers were one. Absolutely. That you did. We bought 12 stretchers for $2,200? $2,200. So some hospital was upgrading their stuff and you ended up buying them and then sold them for, I think we upwards like $30,000 or $45,000. I think $40,000
Rob: or $50,000 is what we got out of them.
And the first ones that I sold, I sold them way too cheap because I wanted to get my investment back quickly. But I sold them way, way too cheap. Still sold them for, I think it was like $1,500 a piece on the first ones that I sold. The next ones as we started going through the them, I started selling them for more and more money.
And by the time we sold the last one, I think I sold the last one for like either $5,500 or $6,500 , and they were a couple different models, I think two different models that I had. So some of them were a little bit cheaper, but I could have got more money than $1,500 for the original ones. But we actually went through and made really, really good money on those.
And yes, those are medical devices, but they're not prescription, they're equipment, they're not prescription equipment. Yeah, absolutely. And those are the things that you can sell. So you can sell some medical devices. It's just the stuff that requires a prescription or the ones that you can't.
Melissa: And it was like mom and pop, type, yeah, ambulance, because they, they subcontract that out.
They do, right? They do. Like, is that what they do? Yep. They subcontract it out to the, to some people. And so those were typically the people looking for them. Yeah. So somebody bought four of them, I think, right?
Rob: Yeah. He had a, and he was, he was actually local. He bought four local and he came and picked them up.
And he was super excited. Like I said, I think we sold them for, for like $1,500 and he probably like $10,000 easily. Exactly. The ones that I sold for 15, the first ones were probably $10,000 or over, and he got them for a heck of a deal. Plus very little use out of these. These are beautiful machines.
The last one that I sold, I remember, I think it, it was either $5,500 or $6,500. It went actually to Puerto Rico. We shipped it over to Puerto Rico , and the guy that got it, he's like, this is so amazing. It's awesome. It looks like it's brand spanking new. This was definitely better than I expected, because on all of our items, like kinda we under promise, we overdeliver on everything that we do.
So we told people that these are used items, please expect normal wear , but they're very, very good items. So that last feedback that I got from that guy in Puerto Rico, very, very cool. He was very excited about that item, that he got a really, really good deal. Like I said, $5,500, $6,500. He probably saved $10,000 'cause this was a more expensive or higher end one that probably would've cost him $15,000 to $20,000 to buy them if he was gonna buy it new , but he got one that was next to new and he got it for yeah, $6,500, $5,500. Whatever we sold it for, I don't remember. I have to look back at our, our paper.
Melissa: He also sold that knee brace machine.
I did. That was not a prescription.
Rob: A rehabilitation knee machine. We actually bought that at the flea market. I was walking around the flea market. I saw it. The guy I think wanted $80 or $80 or a hundred bucks for it on my way back. I actually made it all the way back to the car and then I was like, oh shoot, I wanted to go back and check that thing out.
So I pulled out my phone, I started doing some research on it. Come to find out they're like three to $5,000. So I went back. I bundled two chairs, which we still have those Tommy Bahama chairs. Oh yeah, you probably didn't that. I bought those with that.
Melissa: No, we use those all the time.
Rob: So I got two beach chairs, the Tommy Bahama Beach chairs.
I bundled those together and I bought the knee brace machine. It ended up being, I think you remember that 60 or 70 bucks, that I bought them all together and then we turned around. The cool thing about that knee brace machine was the comps on eBay were low. They were like at $600 or $700. Now the retail on it was, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was between three and $5,000. And I was like, these are way too low. There's not a lot of, competition with this. So I reset the comp and what did we sell that for? Like $1,700. $1,700? $1,750? by
Melissa: $1,750. Because you like that number? My favorite number.
Rob: I love selling stuff for $1,750 or $2,250 or
Melissa: $2,250.
Rob: So anyways, we reset the comps on that at $1,750. We sold that and made really, really good money on that as well. But everybody else was selling them way, way underneath what they're actually worth. So we reset it and typically where we start on a good device, and it wasn't medical device, it was a knee rehabilitation.
So you put your knee in it and then it went up and down slowly. So it worked your knee, by itself. It was really, really cool. But we were able to reset those comps to make really, really good money on those. And it was a medical device that didn't require a prescription, I don't think it did, but they allowed us to sell it.
So, and multiple ones had been told before as well, so. So don't always think that medical devices, if you see one, don't always think, oh I can't do that. It's a medical device , make sure that it look up. Yeah. Yeah. It requires a prescription and don't always just go on either what the comps are, don't jump on and see, hey, this one actually sold, so I should be perfectly good 'cause that's not all always the case either. Sometimes if they is sold eBay didn't catch it and it's sold before they caught it. And then when you list it, it could get pulled off and you won't be able to sell, and then you'll be stuck with it. I have one of those machines right now, the vest.
Melissa: Oh yeah.
Rob: I don't remember what the,
Melissa: you sold two of those before, I think. Yeah.
Rob: So it was, it, it was like
Melissa: two or $3,000.
Rob: So I was super excited about the first one that we sold. It's a vest that you put on. It's got air pockets inside of it, and then this machine pumps air into it really, really quickly and it, it beats your chest.
I don't remember what exactly it's for, for, stuff stuck in people's lungs. It loosens it up so it kind of vibrates your lungs with it. But the first one we sold, we sold it for, I don't remember it was $3,000.
Melissa: I think it was $3,000. Yeah.
Rob: So 3000 bucks. And then I found another one at the flea market and I bought it.
Come to find out when I listed it, it sold quick. I wanna say it sold within 24 hours. Yeah. The first one that we sold, the second one we listed it. It stayed on for a couple days and then eBay pulled it off and I'm like, this is crazy. We actually sold one of these, but it is, it's a prescription machine, so I have one of those sitting in my warehouse that I probably could sell locally, but
Melissa: you can't get the money locally is the problem.
Rob: You can't make as much money as you can on eBay for somebody who really needs it, who doesn't wanna go spend $10,000 if their insurance doesn't cover it and they gotta spend all that money up front. We are trying to, that's the crappy part about, that's it. We're trying to give them a great deal on it, but eBay will not allow you to sell anything that's prescription.
So.
Melissa: And the, the , bad part about that too is a lot of times even thrift stores won't sell that stuff. And so then all this stuff just goes to waste and then people have to buy the new stuff stink. And it's just kind of, anyways, that stinks. Kind of annoying. Can you think of any other categories? Right? I mean, that's the one that we've been flagged with the most.
If, I mean, once we're flagged, you don't do it anymore. No. Yeah, but what can you really think? I don't, you pretty much can sell a lot of almost anything, like a lot of things on eBay. Now, obviously you don't wanna sell like broken junk or something. You're not gonna get a good rating, you're not gonna be able to grow your business that way.
Rob: Well, it depends. If something's broken and you advertise, it is broken, somebody else. Use the parts. Absolutely. That's true because we've sold many, many things. The parts. That might not work. And we'll sell them for parts and somebody can use the parts and the parts are worth money. So you can do that as well.
But absolutely the biggest thing with eBay is under promise and over deliver because people are buying and giving you money before they're able to inspect the item. So you wanna make sure that you're giving them the proper expectation on that item. That's the biggest thing about eBay is giving them the proper expectation before you actually ship it out and they receive it , 'cause that's what they're going on is your pictures and your description before they even get to , touch the item, they're already paying for it and you're already doing the transaction. So.
Melissa: So one other quick, note I wanna say, if you have not opened your eBay account yet, this is the push to go do that.
Open your account today, and start listing some stuff. I will say one thing I wanna say if you are brand new to eBay is there might be people that reach out that are scammers at first and they're gonna try to, either offer you, like, sometimes they send offers for what the amount that you already have it listed for or they send you more money, like they'll give you an offer of more.
Oh, hold this for me, or like, they'll just offer you more money for it. Those usually just happen in the beginning. Like we don't hardly Facebook marketplace, they're still all the time, but on eBay, like once you get a couple feedback and you start selling, you rarely see them. So you can pretty much, they're pretty easy to spot.
You know, and when people are emailing you, if it just seems weird, like, why are they asking you this question? Why are they trying to give you more money? Like, you know, just know it's not, if they want the item, they'll buy it like that. It's pretty much, pretty much what is it? Straightforward.
Yeah, they want the item, they'll buy it. So just, you know, kind of be on the lookout for that for the first, you know, but once you get really even like 20 feedback, you probably won't see them anymore.
Rob: For sure. For sure, for sure.
Melissa: So I just wanted to add that. So go get started on eBay. So.
Rob: Awesome guys. We appreciate you. Anything else?
Melissa: Yeah, and I was gonna say too, if you, like we do like eBay, that is our favorite platform. Obviously our business model is a little bit different than a lot of resellers. We tend to go towards the higher profit , items like we're. Our goal is really a thousand, $2,000 per sale is kind of what we're at.
So if you would like to learn more about our business model, we put together a new workshop. If you wanna check it out in the show notes below , the link will be there and we would love to see you there.
Rob: You guys are amazing. Thanks for joining us today. We can't wait to see you on the next episode.