hey guys it's mel welcome and welcome back to my channel well today i've got a video for you
answering one of my viewers questions that i got the other day and it's so funny because when i
talk to you guys in my videos and my vlogs i kind of just feel like i'm talking to all my friends
and all my friends that i've had for a really long time and sometimes i actually forget that i've
got new friends that are joining me here every single day and some people who join me actually
have no idea what i used to do in my ebay business like a few years ago so this question
came from a channel named rising reality what made you want to focus on selling books
how big is your space that you have allocated yourself here and your warehouse your workspace
and do you think you'll expand and what do you do with the items that you've had over a year
so we kind of got four questions there in one so i was like how can i answer this in like a
few months i can't okay so i'm going to go right back to the beginning here because some of you
might not even know this story but when i first started selling on ebay i actually started because
i was selling brand new pairs of nike sneakers that i was purchasing from the factory outlet
stores for cheap and then i'd sell them on ebay and i'd roughly make anywhere between about 20
and 50 profit per pair of shoes that i was buying so i've started selling the nikes just
kind of like a hobby because i was actually in the process of taking some time out from my previous
job which was a family photographer due to some health issues so by selling the nikes i kind of
felt like i was bringing in some supplementary income to my family but i was also still getting
my little bit of a photography buzz because i was taking these photos and styling them all
up of these nike shoes and i was still using my big camera so after a few months i started
to kind of reevaluate i was starting to gather quite a lot of these nike shoes in my home i was
feeling like i was investing quite a lot of money and had quite a lot of high dollar value shoes
sitting in my lounge room and so i started to question like how many pairs of these shoes was
i going to have how much money was i going to have tied up in stock sitting in my lounge room
like that was kind of quite scary i guess like it was okay selling a few pairs but when you start to
get a hundred brand new pairs of nikes that's kind of like a lot of money that you're dishing out to
to buy stock so i also started to realize that i was really reliant on this one nike outlet store
we only have one nike shop here in my whole state where i live the next nike shop is about three and
a half hours drive for me into sydney so one day my husband and i drove to sydney to have a look
at what stocks that they had and we found that the sydney store was actually much more expensive than
the store that we had down here and i started to worry about putting all my eggs in one basket like
my whole business that i was creating was reliant on one source and what happens if this nike shop
closed down by the way it still hasn't but what if that one nike shop closed down my whole business
would just down the glass so i wasn't having that so i started to explore the thrift side
of it by this stage i was following more and more resellers on instagram prior to doing this
i was not a thrifter in any way i didn't grow up with it my mum never took me thrifting it
just wasn't something that i did in fact i thought charity shops were smelly and
disgusting to be taught to be honest so when i started going to the thrift stores i was a
everything store i was mainly buying clothes shoes and books but i was open to really buying
anything i was plush toys board games dvds you name it i tried it and so i do just think it's
important to say though that even though now i am focusing on books when you are starting off with
having a reselling business i think it's super important to be an everything seller i think
it's a really important part of the process to learn about the things that you enjoy selling
to learn about the things that you dislike selling to learn about the things that you can actually
find in your area that are in abundance you can't be a full-time seller and niche down on something
that you can't even readily source in your area like that would be an absolute nightmare you might
absolutely love selling shoes but there's no point being a shoe seller if you can't get any stock
like you're just gonna make your life hard for yourself so i've been selling on ebay for
five years now i think it's five years this july that i started selling my first pairs of nike
shoes but for the last two years i have primarily focused on selling books so the book thing well it
kind of just happened because of covert i always had books in my store my store was primarily
based around clothing shoes and books and i probably had about 500 books listed in my store
you know a couple of years ago so i noticed that the books were starting to sell faster
for me because everybody was stuck at home with nothing to do so they started to read again
so i started to source more books and list more books and sell more books and it was kind of just
like this compounding snowball that started to happen okay so even though for the last
18 months i have 90 committed to selling books there has been some kind of hesitation within me
to go 100 to books and fully commit and say no to everything else i think there is a really big
difference between saying i'm going to try and do this to saying i'm going to do this so i would say
it's only in these last couple of months that i finally feel like i have the confidence in myself
my decisions and my own ability to be able to really commit to doing books 100
so to make the decision to actually niche down on books it hasn't entirely been easy
because i had to really learn to objectify my own emotions so so i guess what i'm saying is i had a
lot of internal conflict and a lot of unspoken fears about niching down into books entirely so
so when i started sharing more content about niching down on books i was told that i had
ruined books within australia i was also told that my videos would become stale and boring because
who wants to just learn about books like it'll be boring it's hard when somebody else's feelings
make you second-guess your own decisions it can invoke those feelings of fear rejection
humiliation and i think it also can bring in that paranoia feeling of the mentality of scarcity like
there's not enough for everyone so i knew that those weren't actually my fears i knew that that
was somebody else's fears somebody else's scarcity mindset that there's not enough for everyone else
they're not my fears i don't feel like that after two years of me telling the world that i'm selling
books i'm selling more books now than i ever have so i don't believe in that scarcity mindset
but i did have to learn how to release those fears from myself and recognize that those were not my
fears that was somebody else's i think there are a lot of people who are kind of scared about
niching down and perhaps some of it does come to that scarcity mindset you have to become very
self-aware and realize what fears are actually yours and what fears are actually belonging to
somebody else if you follow me a long time you will know that i am a bit of a scatterbrain
self-confessed squirrel brain mill that is me so actually for somebody with my personality
who possibly has a little bit of add i think it is even more important for me to simplify
my processes and do the niche down process because it actually helps me to stay focused
keeps me on track everything in my life starts to become simpler and i become calmer when i work
to a system i'm focusing now on just growing my bookstore in the most simple way that i possibly
can so even though it might sound a little bit boring what i do every single day what i'm
learning is that by doing that boring stuff over and over and over and finding successful systems
that work for me like my photo station works for me my shipping station works for me finding those
successful systems and doing successful actions that boring work just compounds and it's like a
snowball and i know that if i want to win at this game long term then just doing those same systems
every day is going to be the best way to get me there i actually want to do the least amount
of work i can do on ebay every single day like i've got my ebay down to only a few hours work
every single day the rest of my days then can be spent on doing creative things doing fun things
did i totally go off topic there i'm i'm trying to the answer the question about why books
as for why books it just kind of happens like that and i think sometimes it does happen like
that and i actually love selling the books i enjoy reading books i enjoy flipping through
the books i just enjoy the whole book process find something that you like and then do more
of that the next question how big is your space okay so my husband converted this shed for me
um there is a playlist of shed conversion videos if you haven't seen them and you want to go back
and see from what this shed was to what it is now i think from memory this shed is seven and a half
meters long and that's from the front door here in front of me to the very end of the back room
and it is almost four meters i think it's about three and a half meters wide so for the americans
because i'm nice i will convert it into square meters for you and put it here here here somewhere
i think this shed is a pretty good size for a home office you know obviously if i wanted to step
it up to another level i would have to go to a warehouse with books i've already done the storage
unit thing if you go back to some of my old videos last year i had multiple storage units i got one
storage unit which quickly became two then three then four it becomes very expensive so you asked
if you think i will expand and i'm gonna say no i don't know what it is but some days i do feel
like i want more like i want bigger like i've got bigger goals than just being the mum in the shed
i'm not gonna lie i go through those like stages and i think it comes down to sometimes not feeling
enough maybe maybe it's self-worth issues should be bigger i should be doing more or i've got the
potential to be bigger and got the potential to do more but deep down i don't i don't think that's
what i want i don't think i want any more stresses of having to go to storage units or warehouses or
hiring stuff although it looks like my shelves and everything in here are quite full i'm
about to put some more shelves down the center in here i think i still do have quite a bit of
room for growth in here currently i'm sitting on about i don't know 3300 3400 somewhere around that
listings and i've always kind of felt in my heart that this shed will hold the capacity of about
5 000 listings for me i don't have any off-site storage or anything anymore for my unlisted
inventory whatever i have has to fit into this space and the last question was what do you do
with items that have sat in here for over a year while i've got the space those babies can sit
if i don't have the space then that's when i will start to look at you know moving those items out
of here once the imagery has been in my store for a few months i am starting to run more and
more aggressive sales on those items take more aggressive offers send more aggressive offers
and try and clear those items out because if the item has been sitting here for 6 or 12 months
it's probably not a great item is it because if it was a great item with a fast sell through rate it
would be gone so i'm kind of just more focused now on moving the old stuff out for as cheap you know
so if i can make my money back on that item to be able to go and reinvest it into something that's
better because i've got more knowledge now i've learned more maybe about books that are better
for me to buy a lot of the books that are old on my shelves have come from free hauls in the past
um which haven't always been the best books but they've been books i've been given for free and so
i listed them but they actually didn't have a fast seal through red and they weren't really great
books to list so now the idea is just to move them along get some extra activity in my store
and be able to reinvest that money into books that are actually better with a
faster sell-through rate so thank you so much for asking me those questions i actually kind
of like going down memory lane if you haven't worked it out i like to talk
i like to have story time so if you want to see more story time then hit me up guys with some um
story type questions and i'll see what i can do thanks so much for watching guys
i've got another vlog coming for you in a few days so stay tuned and i'll see you then bye
you