#51: The Rise of Ebay - Utilizing Social Media

Date:  October 16, 2020

Episode: 51 

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces John Lawson, CEO of 3rd Power Outlet, CEO at ColderICE Media and an eBay Expert.

Subtitle: The changes in eBay and it’s benefits to the sellers

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-51-the-rise-of-ebay-utilizing-social-media-w-john-lawson/   

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces John Lawson, CEO of 3rd Power Outlet, CEO at ColderICE Media and an eBay expert.

John Lawson is a Award Winning Author and  an international keynote speaker. He discussed strategies to be successful on eBay, Social Media, and Amazon FBA in 2020.  

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 5:33 : A bit about John Lawson
• 13:43 : eBay and Amazon comparison
• 20:03 : The Do’s and Don’ts in eBay
• 22:59 : Importance of having a backup source of income
• 32:33 : Tips to drive traffic to your store
• 36:57 : John’s Golden Nugget
• 42:53 : Products that you shouldn’t sell on eBay
• 44:34 : Listing your items from Amazon to eBay

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/colderice/
• https://www.johnlawson.com/
• john@colderice.com
• https://www.facebook.com/ColderICE/
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecommercegroup/
• https://twitter.com/colderice
• https://www.instagram.com/colderice
• https://shoploop.area120.google.com/ 
• https://www.inkfrog.com/ 
• https://www.joelister.com/

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Norman  0:02  

Hey, everybody is Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy here and don’t you love going live? For the last six minutes, we’ve been trying to connect our cameras. But anyways, we’re here. I haven’t passed out. I’m not in the fetal position and I guess we can carry on. So welcome to another Lunch With Norm, the rise of the micro brands.

Norman  0:33  

It’s hilarious. Anybody who knows me, especially a year or two ago or three, I get absolutely in panic mode.

Norman  0:45  

First of all, doing stuff live, second of all, talking in public and third of all, when things just aren’t going right. So who, anyways, if you see me sweating a little bit or shaking a little bit, that’s not the camera that is me. So today, I think we’re gonna have a great podcast. Our guest today is an eBay Platinum power seller, John Lawson, and we’re going to discuss eBay, social media strategy, and Amazon. So John’s gonna be discussing his success on eBay and I’ve talked about this a lot, where there’s all these other platforms out there that we got to check out and this is one of them. I’ve got a couple of eBay stories to share myself. But I can’t wait to hear what he has to say. We’ll also dive into social media strategies, some other social media strategies and if Amazon sellers should think about selling on different sales channels. So before we introduce John, I just want to let everybody know that we are broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn and as Kelsey, I know, he’s gonna say this, and on our new Facebook group.

Norman  1:54  

So he’ll talk a bit more about this and I might as well bring them on now. Hello, Kelsey. Are you there?

Kelsey 2:02

Hello, I am here. Yes. Hello, everyone. Happy Friday. Hope you’re ready for the weekend. Have some plans maybe? Oh, I think for those that don’t know, it’s Norm’s birthday today and we’ve already got some birthdays coming in. Happy birthday. 

Norman 2:21

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. 

Kelsey 2:23

Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Golem.

Kelsey 2:25  

Yeah. So, we have a brand new Facebook group. It just launched. I think we launched it Sunday night. So I’m going to add the link right now. So anyone watching, you can go press the button and go straight to it.

Kelsey 2:42  

You can just search Amazon, we’re also on LinkedIn, and I think personal page, you can just search Amazon, Lunch With Norm Amazon and e-commerce Collective and you’ll be able to find it. So join us. We’re going to be diving into different topics. Today we’re going to be talking about product research, putting your struggles or advice questions and we’ll have a bunch of fun stuff lined up for that. 

Norman 3:11

Right. Okay, so let’s see what we have here. One thing I wanted to remind people is that we do have a newsletter as well. It doesn’t suck. That’s the key. The key word is suck. It does not and you can find that on Lunch With Norm or you can go to NormanFarrar.com, and you can subscribe there. It’s full of content for Amazon, online sellers, digital marketing, social media, everything you can imagine to become a better seller, similar to what we want to provide in our group. So I think that’s probably it. Okay, if you have any question, what’s that?

Kelsey 3:50

Oh, just we got Dr. Cause. Simon. Happy birthday Normskie. Looking good for 38 and we have Donna. So yeah, that’s it for now. 

Norman 4:02

Donna. Oh my gosh. I know Donna from way way back 20 years ago. So yeah. Happy Birthday sister and all these people. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I really appreciate your birthday wishes and yeah, can’t wait to be another year older. I do have to tell you that my birthday cake now, when I added that extra candle, it was a fire hazard. All the smoke detectors went off. I cannot grow another year older. So and I don’t want to either. I’m going to stay at whatever I am now. I don’t even want to think about the age. So again, if you have any questions, throw them over in the comment section. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show and after that long intro, John. 

John 4:52

Hello, sir. How are you? 

Norman 4:55

Good, good. Hey, are we gonna have a beard off or what? 

John 4:59

Nah, man, I can’t even compete.

Norman  5:02  

Just give it a little bit of time, it is November, right? 

John 5:07

Oh, that’s right. Ah, all right. Almost. 

Norman 5:11

So all Yeah, almost. So all of our guests that are coming on, they have the beard off challenge.

John  5:18  

Oh, I can’t do it man.

Norman  5:21  

I think you can.

John 5:23  

You got to grow it on.

Norman  5:26  

Say, Hey, John, for any of the people listening right now, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

John 5:33 

Sure. I mean, I’ll give you the short version. I mean, back in 2001, I was about to go bankrupt, because a friend of mine had an idea and the idea was, let’s flip a house and make $10,000. So we ended up purchasing this house, I was the guy that had credit. So I did the signing. He was the one that didn’t, he was the hustler, right? So he didn’t have to go to work every day, I had to go to work every day. So his job was to make sure that the work got done at the house. Long story short, that didn’t happen. I got stuck with a second mortgage and I started selling used books on eBay and fast forward, like three years later, I left my corporate job and started doing e-commerce with eBay 2005 or six, eBay, I was top level eBay and they Amazon was looking for, beta testers for FBA and or actually not FBA, but for their third party sales channel in general. Right, so this is pre FBA even and so they went to the top eBay sellers and asked them if they were beta tested. So I was actually a beta tester for that. So I’ve been on Amazon since the beginning and that’s kind of my song and dance. I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years now. 

Norman 7:14

Wow. So you say that you started eBay back in 2001. So that was, those are the early years? 

John 7:23

Yeah. Yeah, that’s when it was fun. 

Norman 7:25

I was involved with eBay and I was not.

Norman  7:30  

I was on it. Put it that way. I think everybody was, I was not a big seller. But I do know, when I got involved with Amazon, I really loved it. Like it was, any time that you put a product up, I don’t care if it was a plastic shoe stretcher. A gnome by the name of Norm.

Norman  7:50  

You could make money. It’s a little bit, it is a lot different now. But you can still make money out there. I’m curious, what’s your favorite platform? Of the two?  

John 8:01

You know what? Of the two? Okay. Okay. Of the two.

John  8:08  

It’s just things have changed so much. That if I were starting again, I would probably do eBay again. But my I think that the environment has changed so much in e-commerce that I probably would go with starting my own store, honestly. Because, there’s a thing every year I speak at events, right? So I do a lot of speaking now and one year, I’ve been speaking at this event for like six years now. But I remember the first year they invited me to speak and he was like, well, you’re going to speak, but these guys are store creators and I mean, I was like what do you mean? He’s like most of them started on our platform. Their platform is the shopping store platform. He’s like most of them started on that platform and they don’t know about marketplaces. So I want you to come teach about marketplaces. I was like, oh, okay, that’s, that’s cool and what ended up happening is I found this entire community of people that had no idea that they could expand their business by using Amazon, and eBay and what was interesting was the thing for us, which seems to be like speaking Chinese, which is driving your own traffic to them was the norm and to them trying to figure out how to sell on a marketplace was Chinese. It was really weird and I recognize it’s the water that you swim in and you get used to that water. But for those guys, it wasn’t scary to drive their own traffic. They know how to do their SEOs and get rankings and you try to teach somebody in Amazon and they’re just like, Oh, God, I can’t do that. That’s too hard. That’s why I pay 15% of all my income to Amazon plus another 15%. So I can show up in search. It’s really very interesting. The two worlds that are available to us, and we should, at least for me, what I really learned is that there is a lot of opportunity out here, all the way around. 

Norman 10:42

Yeah and that’s why we’re doing this podcast because, do you know Elena Saris?

John  10:47  

The name sounds familiar. 

Norman 10:50

She’s an incredible seller. So she got off of Amazon when she had two product infringement claims. Two years in a row, about a week before Black Friday, and she only got her product back selling after December and anyways, it got to her and she started exploring, she saw this 23 year old guy that was selling 20 million on Shopify, through drop shipping and so she just said, she got out of her comfort zone. She took a couple of courses and now that’s what she’s doing. So she abandoned the Amazon models. She went over there and then, Todd Snively, he’s got a wholesaler model. There’s all these other models out there that you can use, and yeah, you just have to go like you, you were talking about external traffic. We talked about this a lot and we can talk about it all day long. But there’s only a handful of people that will get out of their comfort zone, and learn or try to figure it out and once you do, it’s really unlimited of what you can make. 

Norman  12:00  

Not everybody copes, it’s a little bit different right now. But not everybody loves Amazon. Right? Not everybody loves eBay, you can go onto Facebook, drive some traffic or go to Pinterest, if you’ve got like, I’m working with a client right now. perfect product for ladies. Pinterest, you can drive so much traffic, it’s cheap and I think it’s still the highest average order value that you can get out there and you don’t have to be on Amazon for this. It’s great. But let’s talk more about eBay, eBay excites me, because I had the opportunity to go with Empowery which is a coop for Amazon sellers to to the eBay head office and we had a just a day with them and they were showing us some of the stuff that they were into right now and trying to launch and you know what, we’re actually just before the call, I’ve got an like a few eBay stories. This is one of them. So the head of business development was there and they were talking with us, and who’s on eBay, or who was on eBay? Everybody put their hands up, who’s on eBay now? Maybe 5% put their hands up and the common denominator was eBay sucked and now they’re coming back and they’ve got all these new tools and anyways, go that’s my eBay story and that got my eyes open and started exploring it again. So can you tell me a little bit about your eBay experience? How it evolved? 

John 13:43

Yeah, my eBay experience and I mean, it was very educational and it was really about customer experience. That’s really what was the most important part in our time with eBay is you got to learn about what the customer wanted. You were able to create your own branding and people would shop with you versus shopping with eBay necessarily, even though they’re eBay, quote, buyers, they recognize and understood that they were buying from a third party, which we missed that on Amazon. That’s the difference between the two platforms and there’s benefits to both, but one thing that is unique about eBay is there is a greater opportunity to build a brand on that platform in my opinion, than there is on other marketplace platforms.

John 14:54  

Or at least when you compare that to Amazon. So we were able to grow a business that started at the kitchen table to like you said, platinum level, and doing really great volume on the platform. Now, what ended up happening with us, 2008, 9, the products that we were selling at the time, where I sell hip hop gear, right, and hip hop jewelry, and was like my number one seller, the fake gold chains, and the big, flirty and all that shit and Oops, I’m sorry and the deal was, as the economy started falling apart, even the people that wore fake jewelry, didn’t want to wear fake jewelry anymore. Because, everybody knows you’re not a baller in 2008-2009. I mean, we’re all feeling the economy shift. So that led us to looking for more opportunities and that’s when I started taking Amazon more seriously and of course, if you talk to a lot of Amazon sellers, they’ll tell you, they started in 2010, 2014, 15. So we were able to rise with the tide on Amazon, to the point where it was like, Okay, I got two platforms, which 1 am I going to focus on? eBay at the time was going through a lot of change, trying to find their footing in this new world of buy it now, or pricing that was static and they ended up kind of abandoning the actual thing that made the platform what it was, which was the auction model and I don’t know, here we are today, and probably 80, 90%, of sales on eBay now, unless they’re high end electronics that people want are pretty much buy it now sales. So that makes it much easier for an Amazon focused seller to come over and do business on eBay. Because now you don’t have to learn the auction model, you are literally just able to list and to list on that platform is very cheap. So you can set up a store, list your products, and as they sell, you can fulfill it yourself. Or you can use some software that allows you to sell on that platform and fulfill it with your FBA. But the big difference is, you’re not paying FBA fees, the same as you do when you’re selling it on the platform of Amazon.

Norman  17:54  

Right and also, one of the things I learned during that session over there is their ability to actually, they want brands, they want to build. So Amazon at the time, just launched Amazon posts. They’re starting to build that Amazon social media kind of community. But eBay was already there and people didn’t know that you could build a website, you could build your brand. You didn’t have to have 1000 sellers selling it, eBay was looking for brands that you could start posting and working with eBay to develop a really great customer interface.

Norman  18:36  

Also, I don’t know about you, but their search model blew me away that you could go in, you could take a picture of Norm the Gnome, and it would show up at your store.

Norman  18:49  

I’m shopping at Walmart, I’m shopping wherever I take a picture of Norm the Gnome, and it goes to my eBay store. 

John 18:58

You mean in the eBay app?

Norman 19:02 

Yeah. That’s crazy. So man, I mean, it’s just they are ahead of the game. Look at when you want to sell overseas. So I don’t know if people realize this, but they have their own distribution and you can sell overseas very easily. They take care of it. 

John 19:20

Yes. End to end now. 

Norman 19:22

Yep, end to end.

John 19:23

Yes end to end now. They will help you with the fulfillment part, as well as the selling part. 

Norman 19:29

So let’s kind of go through some of the tools.

Norman  19:33  

Well, first of all, no, let’s go through becoming an eBay seller. So there’s a lot of people, I can guarantee you there’s a lot of people watching this that have abandoned eBay, have no idea how to work with a multi channel provider. How would you go about listing like what are the do’s and don’ts of listing your product on eBay?

John 19:56

I mean, take good pictures which you already have. Okay, that’s a do.

John 20:03  

Do make sure you fill out all of the item information that you can. Alright, so they’ve got multiple, one of the things about eBay search is that they have to build in some tags that you have to fill in to make sure that your item comes up in their search. So you want to make sure that you’re filling in all of that stuff, make sure you’ve got, if you got UPC codes, put those in, color, size, all of that, throw that in there and then I mean, basically, use keywords but don’t stuff, right. You want to use keywords in your titles, but don’t overstuff it, and don’t necessarily, it doesn’t actually have to be readable and that’s kind of different, I think in Amazon, you need it to be readable. If you see it, at the end with a bunch of keywords in the end, it feels kind of funny. But on eBay, that’s kind of normal, there’s always been this extra stuff at the end of a title that gives it a greater boost in search. So you do all those things. Look at the previous sales history, that’s one thing that is really great is that you can do a lot of search on eBay on what products are selling for how often the frequency of sales are, and really do deep research on your competition. That’s one thing I kind of like about platforms, and I hate about platforms is that your business is transparent. It’s pretty transparent. If you put all the signals together, I can almost tell what you’re doing in sales month to month, annually. You can do that on specific products and specific skews. On eBay, you actually get the actual factual information on Amazon, you get a tool, or there’s a couple of tools, but all of that information is estimated and that’s a big difference and this is an estimated sale of the buy box on Amazon. On eBay, it’’s actual facts because I can look at the history of an item being sold. So do that kind of research, do that kind of homework.

John 22:33  

What other things that you need to do there, you do have to write an actual full formatted description, you’ve got HTML that you can use, that is really great. It gives you a lot of opportunity to add more photos than you might & I mean, just other than that, once you get it kind of set up and ready to go, you’re ready to rock and roll.

Norman  22:59  

Right, and they do have other sorry, they do have like deals of the day, and it’s not that tough right now, to get a Deal of the Day and what I absolutely love about eBay are the fees. They really, they’re trying, they’re really trying to get the sellers back and in fact, they have a special program. I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, because you’re already a platinum seller. But for people that are trying to get into eBay, when you call them in your business, they’ll assign you with somebody that’s going to help you transition Amazon to eBay. They’re going to give you an I, I don’t know if this is still going on. But they give you a cut in commissions. They show you how to work the app and the like try to build your client base. These guys are hungry for your business. They got to be another platform that you automatically go for. Yeah, I think it is really cool. Yeah, that you can reach out. 

John 24:15

I mean, definitely do that and take advantage anytime they’re giving you an opportunity to talk to people, do it. Because you don’t want to just come in, fresh and not understand the platform, not taking in your opportunity to speak to client managers, because a lot of people get started on the platform and then they’ll limit your ability to sell, right? Because they’ll say hey, you’ve got let’s say a 2000 or 20 item limit until we verified that you are a real business. But if you go through like you’re saying those channels, you’re talking about it will fast track all of that for you and they will take into account what you’re doing on Amazon into your eBay numbers and you’ve just figured like this man, it is a serious race for eBay at this point to say, let’s go and poach some of those Amazon sellers, because they’re understanding that the big fish are fueling the tuna net, right now. Because they’re trying to capture all of these other people that are trying to game the system and some of the bigger fish are getting suspended or having their things suppressed and it can be a frustrating feeling when you’ve worked very hard on any platform to establish yourself, and then have that shut down. That can be crushing and it happens, it’s happened to me, it’s happened to most large sellers, I know, where they’ve had an experience on a platform where they turned off your ability to to make money. It can happen and if for nothing else, trying to have some backup income, and multiple streams of income are really what are going to make your product and your business way more successful. Because, it can be devastating to have any channel shut off. But at least if you’re a multi channel, you have other options.

Norman  26:42  

Yeah, that’s so true. This, I’ll give you the horror story. So the other day, we all know that Prime Day was happening on the 13th and 14th. So just before Prime Day, I’ve got this client that is a very large seller into the seven figures per month on Amazon, a very good seller and what happened on all their main products somebody came in and changed their images to swimming products and this is nowhere near to swimming products. Well guess what happened? Because the swimming product was there, their category guys switch from what they are and what they are best sellers into, to a swimming product. We tried forever to get it back without success. We own the brand, or they own the brand, they did everything right. The images were there, they couldn’t change the images. Amazon wasn’t responding to this and the all like we’re talking about, they would have probably done $100,000 that day or 200,000 with all of their products.

Norman  27:58  

They did squat because they were recategorized and it was showing slides instead of other products. So that’s the crap that happens but it’s a love hate. I love Amazon. I know they’re not doing this on purpose, but it’s just such a huge company that they’re well when it has to turn right but with eBay is this is this is the big story I got to tell you, I think you’re gonna love it is I have a client three times they got nailed for hazmat. So they’re in the middle of building their sales. They were doing about $124,000 a month, when the first hazmat restriction came in, they finally came back and they got their product relisted, we got them up to about 60, 65,000. Another hazmat, this is all geared by the competition and then the third one, we could only get it up to about 25. Because each time the hazmat and we were trying to get it ranked again. It costs us a lot more and at the end, the client just decided that it wasn’t worth the aggravation of the hazmat. Well guess where we looked? We went over, this is the first time I really looked at eBay. We put three products on eBay and this is absolutely not the norm. This was a home run. I can’t explain why I know one of the products was a brown bag product. One was everyday like it was shampoo, conditioner, and hair serum and a brown bag product and we hit on those products. Get this, $150,000 a month on those sales. They were doing fantastic like the Amazon sales. It was outperforming Amazon on eBay. Now when I talked to the business director at Amazon, they were definitely saying that this is not the norm at Amazon or at eBay but we got him, and again that came through that business. The consultant that they gave us to put the product on, did nothing special. They helped us out. 

John 30:15  

That’s pretty exciting. 

Norman 30:19

That is exciting. I can’t believe that that happened on eBay. So I am a big, I’m a big eBay fan. I just can’t get them to talk to me. I don’t know, like the two incredible guys that we had working with us, the business development guy and the guy that worked right under him, absolutely incredible. I don’t know about you. But I’ve reached out to eBay to talk to business development people, and I can’t get them to return my calls. I don’t know if you can.

John 30:51

No, but it helps to go to eBay events. It helps to go to eBay events on that. Absolutely.

Norman 31:00

Well, we have to check that out. Because when I went to the eBay event, you’re 100% right. We had tons of opportunities. 

John 31:06

Yes, you do. 

Norman 31:07

Yeah and we will post it if we find out that’s something that is coming up, we’ll let everybody know.

Kelsey 31:15

In our new Facebook group.

Norman 31:17

In our new Facebook group. Hey Kelsey, are there any questions? 

Kelsey 31:21

Yes, yeah, we have a couple of like three or four, if you want to just quickly go through them. So first, we have Simon, we all know about Helium 10 for Amazon, is there a similar tool or set of tools that must be used with eBay?

John 31:37  

So eBay has its own set of tools. So when you get to the eBay dashboard, they have their own set of tools, that’ll give you that kind of insight. So just use it.

Norman  31:49  

Free of charge?

John 31:50

Free of charge. Yeah, they want you to do that kind of research, so that you can position yourself properly. 

Norman 31:59

So people that take action, this is what I love, the people that take action, and they just don’t have intentions, will make it on eBay.

John 32:09  

It’s funny that people think that.

Norman  32:14  

I don’t know, I don’t get it either.

John 32:17  

It’s just a different environment. It’s a different environment. I love that. Yeah.

Kelsey 32:24  

All right. So Doctor Cause. Hey, John, what is your best tip to drive traffic to your store Google Shopping being?

John 32:33  

The best. I mean, there’s no, like, take this medicine, right? You have to test it and try it. If you’re doing single item stuff, I love learning how to run Facebook ads to your landing page to purchase a single product. Right? Google, here’s the thing. When it comes to advertising for marketplaces, it is best to learn the advertising marketing platform. eBay has its own marketing platform that you can use and so does Amazon has its own marketing platform. Those are the best platforms for driving sales on those platforms. All right, externally. Check it out. Like he was saying social traffic is great, hard to scale, paid traffic, Facebook, Google, YouTube, do not overlook YouTube. Alright, because YouTube is like Facebook five years ago in terms of how cheap it is, and how effective it is. Because a lot of people are not using that for these kinds of hard good products. So if your product can be demonstrated with a video, definitely look at YouTube as well. But I mean, test it out and see which ones, which marketplace actually responds and when I say Facebook, you understand that that does include Instagram. So, even when you’re doing Facebook marketing, be able to identify whether you’re getting more traffic on the Instagram side of it, versus the Facebook side of it, because you might want to just go 100 Instagram, and not even bother with the timeline or fee with Facebook. 

Norman 34:25

Have you ever worked with influencers or influencers to become brand ambassadors to drive traffic over? 

John 34:33

I definitely have not. Because I am the influencer. I am the Shoestring King, but I do teach about that a lot and one of the things I’ll give you a story, here’s a story.

John 34:50  

A lot of people say well, I want to hire an influencer. Great. There’s a lot of platforms out there that will help you find influencers. My thing is, understand that you can get an influencer that has, let’s say, 100,000 followers, but they’re gonna cost you a lot. As opposed to getting five or 10 people that got five or 10,000 followers, they’re still as influential, but they’re a lot cheaper and you can get multiple ones of those, and then find out which one is really growing and stick with that. The story is that I used to watch this show called Jersey Shore, right and one season, one of the girls on jersey shore was running around the house and she had on these slippers that look like animals, right? They look like little bunny rabbits, and she was wearing them on all the scenes in the house and I was like, Oh, those interesting, come to find out a few years later, the guy that invented those was on Shark Tank, right? He’s looking for new funding. He was talking about the millions he sold, they asked and he said, How did you sell so many of these so far? How did you grow this business? He said, I made a deal with Snooki when she was nobody on that show. It was a hot show. But nobody really knew about it. He cut a deal with her one summer she wore those on the show no other, she wasn’t pitching it or anything and amazingly, it sold millions of dollars. So don’t underestimate the power of an influencer, even when they’re just getting started.

John 36:32  

Let me, ask me the next question. I want to find this thing that I just talked about yesterday, because Google has done something extremely interesting that you might not know about yet. I got to pull up my slides. So go ahead ask me the question. 

Kelsey 36:50

All right, the next question. Let’s do any recommended integrations for Shopify to eBay? 

John 36:57

Yes, absolutely. The integration that is the easiest is that eBay has created one in the App Store on Shopify, get that. It will allow you to list products and push it back and forth between your store for fulfillment. So that makes it stupid, simple and easy. I’m sorry, if I’m not looking directly at you, it’s because I can’t hold up the pain. But there is a plugin for Shopify that eBay themselves developed, which is awesome. Alright, so here’s the thing you guys want to look up in Google. It’s called Shop Loop. All right. This is the QVC that we’ve been waiting for on social media. All right, this is done by Google. It’s in their Google Labs, they don’t call it the labs anymore. But it’s in beta and you’ve probably not even heard about it. But it’s a TikTok experience, full of influencers that are demonstrating products and when you press on it, it goes directly to the vendor store. So the customer can put the item in their cart. This, I believe, is the beginning of something that is going to take over. I mean, you see how TikTok has just come from nowhere and taken over right now in China, influencers are literally creating their own QVC channel type thing, where all day long, they’ll just sit there and demonstrate products and grow their own audiences. I’m telling you, influencer marketing is going to take off in 2021. Seriously here in the United States and Shop Loop, wait to see this and especially right now, like I said, it’s in beta, but if you’ve got a beauty product, they’re looking for beauty products, go over there and try to get connected, because it’s sometimes it’s always about being first. That will make you a lot of money. 

Norman 38:56

We’ll take that down. I have not heard of that and I gotta check that out. So take that down.

Kelsey 39:01  

Yeah, I’m gonna write it down and I’ll put it in the group too, as well. So we just have two more questions. We’re at 12:45 right now. Okay.

Kelsey 39:11  

All right. From Marina. Somebody has all my listings from Amazon listed on eBay for a higher price. Is it allowed on eBay?  

John 39:18

You know what, here’s the thing.

John 39:20  

If you’re not on eBay, Okay, I’m gonna, yes, not really, it’s not supposed to be done. You’re not supposed to list dropship products on eBay as if you are the seller. So yes, that’s a violation. I did a search on my products on eBay, and came to find out, somebody was doing drop shipping with my products. At first I was like, I’m so pissed. Then it was like, you know what, I’m not there. So I don’t care. They’re still selling the products. For me. They’re taking their cut. They’re adding very little value, but let me know that I could go over there and just immediately jump in because they can’t sell it for the price that I can sell it for, because they got to make their cut. But to answer your question, no, that’s not legal. But if you’re making the money.

Norman 40:24

You know I saw that, like, I sell soap and I’m going through eBay, I’m looking at different prices, and all of a sudden my soap starts, and lots of it started to pop up and it was like, freak out, freakout time, calling over trying to figure out what’s going out, somebody stole my idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and then I figured, well, they’re buying it from me and they’re reselling. I don’t care.

John 40:49  

I’m their supplier. I did it.

Norman  40:54  

So if they called me directly, they could have got a wholesale price. Keep buying from Amazon.

John 41:04  

We could partner up right. 

Norman 41:05

Hey, there we go.

Kelsey 41:09  

Alright, last question. We have from Constantine. Is it possible to report eBay sellers that use your images? 

John 41:18

Yeah, absolutely, you can definitely do that. Another thing you can do, Oh, God, I cannot remember what it’s called. It’s been a minute since I’ve done this. But you can first file this on the internet, I cannot remember what it’s called. But if somebody is using your thing, there is a formal complaint you can file. If you file that first, right with the internet, gods of the world, I can’t remember but follow up guys and I’ll give you the information, you file that first, then go over to eBay and report it, it has way more weight. Right? They’ll get rid of it immediately. Because it puts eBay in jeopardy if they keep allowing that to go on after you’ve filed this with the government of the internet gods and I can’t remember what it’s called. But do that first.

Kelsey 42:18  

Okay, so that’s it on my end, it is just about 12:50. So you can start wrapping things up today and done. If you have to go at any time you feel free to just pop out. 

John 42:33

Okay, cool, guys, I appreciate it.

Norman  42:35  

So I do have one last question for you. Or maybe two quick ones. Is there anybody?

Norman  42:44  

It’s not a platform for everybody. What are some groups that probably shouldn’t go on to eBay? Are there any that you can think of? 

John 42:53

No, you know what, honestly, I can’t, I mean, if you are selling, let’s say name brand purses. Yeah, okay, that gets into a problem, just like high luxury products, in general, can be a problem, simply because, there’s a lot of counterfeit, still in the world and literally, I mean, you kind of put yourself at risk. If somebody says it’s counterfeit, they don’t really have to prove it, then adds both platforms. But that’s the only thing I would actually say, because I’ve seen all kinds of, I mean, high end jewelry, all kinds of high end stuff. But, the purses are the only thing that I would like, I wouldn’t touch. That’s just me, though. 

Norman 43:40

Hey, did you see the new platform Amazon launched? About a month ago for luxury products? 

John 43:45

Or luxury goods? Yeah, yeah. 

Norman 43:49

Well, we’ll see how that’s gonna go.

John 43:51

We’ll see. That’ll be interesting, because eBay tried this a while ago. They tried to separate their platform into two different experiences and it didn’t work very well, back when we were talking about buy it now versus the auction model. They had tried to split those two, and it just didn’t work very well. So we’ll see if Amazon is going to be able to generate the same kind of traffic for those luxury goods on that site. Interesting.

Norman  44:18  

Alright, so we’re down to the last question. Yeah. Do you have any other tips, tricks, anything for eBay? Anybody who’s listening who’s not on eBay? Anything that you can add? 

John 44:34

Like I, there is an act, I can’t even think of it’s what it’s called. There are some tools that will allow you to list your items from your store on Amazon over to eBay, and it will do the calculation for you automatically. I don’t suggest using that long term, but I do suggest it for testing an item or a few items or skew a family of skews to see if they’re going to be some traffic on that platform. Why not try it? Give it some time, learn the platform before you ever sell on the platform, buy a couple of things from other sellers, so you can feel what the process is for your seller, because the experience is a lot different than it is on Amazon. So do that. First just to get your feet wet and go for it, man. Just make sure you fulfill and keep people happy. Because that is just important on eBay as it is on Amazon. That feedback is very important.

Norman 45:42

Is that app called Ink frog?

John 45:45 

Ink frog’s one of them, there was something like Jack the Ripper or some crazy like, it’s not Jack the Ripper, but it sounds sort of like that. But yeah, there’s a couple of them. But yeah, inkfrog does do that, too. 

Norman 46:00

Just to comment on what you were saying about the customer experience, you said it earlier, you just said it, you refer to it now and one thing that’s so important, we talked about this on other podcasts about the customer experience. If you’ve never bought your own product, do yourself a favor and each time you order the product and it’s in stock, make sure you buy it to find out what the customer experience is. Open it up, smell it, see what it looks like and then you’ll know why you’re getting one star, two stars, three stars, four stars, and take that opportunity to improve it for your next order. So I’ve been surprised on receiving product that is so horrible.

Norman  46:45  

I can’t believe somebody would send it out and it’s because they’ve never bought their product. 

John 46:52

Okay, so there’s somebody who put it in the room. Thank you, Miss Yang. It’s Joe Lister. See Jack the Ripper, Joe lister.

Norman  47:00  

Well, you’re close.

Norman  47:04  

I thought Joe Lister was one of our subscribers, but.

John  47:09  

So that’s it. It’s called Joe Lister.

Norman 47:14

Fantastic.

Norman  47:14  

All right. How do people get a hold of you? 

John 46:17

Colder Ice Man, right there. @ColderICE on any platform. You put that in Google? I’ll show up. You put that on Facebook, It’ll be me. Twitter, me, Instagram, me. I’m calling Colder Ice everywhere. 

Norman 47:32

Nothing like branding.

Norman  47:35  

All right, sir. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and I think we got to get you back on to talk more about eBay. I think we just scratched the surface. 

John 47:45

Absolutely. I got somebody for you, too. I got another beard guy.

John 47:50  

He is the eBay guy. 

Norman 47:53

All right. Well, I can’t wait. So thank you so much. We will be in touch and hey, that was rhyme. I never knew I had that in me.

Norman  48:04  

But anyways, thank you. I know you got to run onto another call and really appreciate it, John. 

John 48:11

Thanks, buddy. You have a great day.

Norman 48:13

You have a good one. Bye. All right, everybody. Well, thank you for joining the podcast today. It’s so like eBay is so cool. There’s so many things you can do with it and what John was talking about, please check it out. It’s so easy to just use Ink frog or the other one Joe Lister. Try it out. There’s nothing to lose, just test it out and you’re gonna notice that in eBay, like John was talking about, they provide the tools for you to succeed, including, I hope it’s still the same. Somebody that’s going to help you out to be, to help you with your success. Anyways, check it out. I sound like I’m pumping eBay. But I can tell you I’ve had some success with it with some of my clients. It’s a new chain, it’s a completely different eBay, if you used to be on it and it sucked and you got off of it. Try it out again. They’ve really rebranded themselves and they’re doing a lot of great things. They actually want your business. So check it out. Anyways, that’s it for me. I’m a long winded I’m a little bit long winded today. But please check out our whole podcast, it’s going to be on Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy. It’s also going to have a lot of different content with it and some highlight clips and if you just want to look at the beard, I don’t know why you would, go to YouTube. Check out Norman Farrar, and you can see a ton of videos and content that we’ve provided.

Norman  49:49  

I think that’s about it. Kelsey, where are you? 

Kelsey 49:52

Hello. That’s a good job covering everything. So yeah, follow us on social media. If you’re looking for the full episode of this and you want to watch it again, it’s probably the best, easiest to go straight to Youtube, Norman Farrar. You’ll find that also, with our Facebook group. I’m going to be posting like a post discussion thread. So if you have any questions about the show, you want to talk about it, discuss with other people. You guys can go ahead, I’ll provide the link for the YouTube video as well, in that discussion thread. 

Norman 50:29

Hey, before I just noticed and thank you everybody for the birthday wishes and I don’t know where the party is, I’m too old to party. If I have any stimulation, I die, that’s it. But anyways, I noticed that Todd Snively, if you don’t know him, he’s a great guy. He has an incredible wholesale model. Todd, if you are still on, he just launched a podcast and loves to be able to promote it here. I’ve had him on Lunch With Norm. I’ve also had him on I Know this Guy. You gotta check out his story. It’s incredible. So anyways, Todd, if you’re around, post it, and I know it just launched and it will be, just take a look at the trailers for it. You guys love it. But you still got to, look and promise me. You got to come back and listen to Lunch With Norm and that’s on every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Eastern Standard Time. Yeah, there we go. I get it. All right and I think that’s it. However, Friday, next Monday?

Kelsey 51:41  

Monday. 

Norman 51:44

Okay, Kelsey?

Kelsey 51:45

Did I mess up the script a little bit? 

Norman 51:48

Your script bastardizing me. Okay, that’s a new word. So, okay. On Monday, Joe Valley is going to be on. You don’t know, Joe. He’s an incredible person from Quiet Light Brokerage and he’s going to be talking about mergers and acquisitions, all that good stuff, when you work so hard and now you get paid out. So I can’t wait to have Joe on, been on his podcast a couple of times and he’s a great guy. So please tune in then and on that note, I think that’s it. I’m talked out. 

Kelsey 52:23

Yeah. I just, if I can briefly just talk about the group just a little bit more, because it’s brand new.

Kelsey  52:28  

So we’ll be both admitting it, we are looking for moderators. So if you’re super excited with lunch room, you can send me a message, k@lunchwithnorm.com, or message me on Facebook, you should be able to find me. Also, if you’re new, if you’re joining the group, I pinned up a post about introducing yourself. So we want to get to know you. So first thing you can do after you join the group and you’re accepted. Just go over, introduce yourself, we already have. So you should too and if you’re still watching, we’ll be covering different topics every day. We’ll be diving into the post thread discussions from each episode and even let me see, we’ll look at daily advice. We’ll have like a dumb question Monday and yeah, really grow the group. It’s not just Lunch With Norm. I’m going to try and not post any Lunch With Norm stuff or tryna or ease up on it at least.

Kelsey 53:31  

But just bear with us because we will be uploading files that we need. So I will have to put some stuff. Okay, but we want to keep this little discussion area in a community. So we won’t be throwing up pictures of Norm’s face too often. So don’t worry about that. But yeah, thank you, Simon for joining. Thank you for the change of pace from the usual Amazon chat. Awesome, and Nari. I’m going to check out Todd Snively. 

Norman 54:03

Oh, by the way, Nari, I met her at a conference and she is from Korea, too. So when I told her that you were teaching in Korea, yeah, you guys got to talk. You’d have a lot in common. 

Kelsey 54:17

Yeah, for sure. 

Norman 54:19

Yeah and also, I wanted to also think I saw a bunch of people come up. We didn’t have time to say thank you. But Michelle, thank you, Nari. Thank you. Dr Cause, Golem. I saw Dave Apperley come up. I saw Bev, an old friend of mine for I don’t even want to say from a few years back and if I miss you if I missed out on anybody. I’m sorry. But thank you so much for the birthday wishes and for tuning in and on that note.

Norman  54:46  

Thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of your day.