Hi, this is Phillip Todd today and I have a Mrs. Jenni Hunt on the line with me. Hi Jenni, how are you doing today?

Transcription

1 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 1 of 10 Hi, this is Phillip Todd today and I have a Mrs. Jenni Hunt on the line with me. Hi Jenni, how are you doing today? I m doing great, thank you. We do appreciate your time taken out to talk a little bit about your product and how you ve been working with ebay, and I m just gonna jump straight in here with some questions that I know our listeners would like to hear your advice on. I understand that toys and child clothes are your specialty and how did you get started in that product line? I kinda was thrown into it because I had children. When my first son was born, we were unemployed for 18 months and this was back in 99 and money was really tight, so I started going to garage sales for different things that we needed for my son, and I realized that I could get some very nice gear and clothing and toys cuz kids would outgrow things before they got really worn out. So, later when I was pregnant with my second child, we were still doing this and I had bought a stroller for $15.00, didn t really care for it once I started using it, so I decided to try out ebay, and I sold it for over $ and that immediately hooked me. So, I was already in the toys and children items market before I even went into ebay, and I quickly realized I could pick up children s items in excellent condition and turn them around for a really nice profit. So, I started doing research to find out who was selling well and ended up meeting a woman who she was previously a successful power seller, but she had burned out on selling and I think at the time I had 10 feedbacks and I found her actually on craigslist, and she hired me to sell for her and she gave me all the training that I needed. She educated me on the importance of a title, she explained how to measure how a determine pricing and after a few months, I realized, Wait a minute; I know how to get these deals at garage sales for these things, why split the money. So, I went out on my own and started buying my own inventory and applied all the stuff that she had taught me and kind of went on from there. That s great having a mentor like that. That s kind of like James Jones has kind of done for me so that s really cool. Yeah. So, that first auction that I listed was back in 2003, and so I ve been doing it for a while, and I really have turned into spending more of my time researching, and I have a few reports that I send out weekly to some of my readers, and I ve been doing that since So, the last four years, weekly, I ve been on ebay Page 1 of 10

2 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 2 of 10 scouring for just doing all kinds of research in the children s items market to find out what s selling, but I m there all the time spending my time just learning and watching for trends and all that, so yeah a good four or five years. Yeah, and I think that kind of leads into our next question is how do you find out about what s selling well? How do you know what products to go after at certain times? You know, for me I was spending time looking on ebay searching, I would search for look in children s clothing and sort by highest first, and start looking and seeing what s things are going for. What I noticed was the things that were at yard sales that I was seeing for a dollar, were selling for $20.00 to $50.00 easy on ebay and it was the same brands and the same I mean it was just silly to me that these people having these yard sales instead of they were just leaving money on the table, they weren t headin out to sell so. Ok, and does certain things sell better like during certain times of the year like winter jackets during the winter or vice versa? I guess I m saying is what sells better? Do certain things sell better at certain times? Absolutely, and especially with children s clothing it certainly has its ups and downs, and basically the holidays and the summer months are what I call the dead zone for children s clothing. Back to school clothes, they usually pick up in late July and that s the start of a new selling season, so you do back to school clothing for all the parents that are looking to build their wardrobe for their kids for the school year. And then in early September, it transitions into Halloween costumes, and then immediately after Halloween, it goes right into Holiday clothing, but by the time Thanksgiving hits, it s just completely dead again for clothing and most children s items, not toys, but children s items. The other selling season that s really high for children s clothing is spring and that starts at the end of January, and a lot of sellers think that, Right now we re at the middle of May, start selling summer clothes, summer s not here yet, but it s coming, but really if you go to the stores, summer clothes are already discounted and the selling season for summer s over. So, spring and summer, they start at the end of January continuous for a couple of months and usually around April when everyone s looking to do their taxes, it slows down quite a bit. You can still make something with 4 th of July items, but for the most, it s best to focus on different parts of your business during the slow summer months for children s clothing; Page 2 of 10

3 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 3 of 10 toys are a different story. New toys, they sky rocket during the holidays which is no surprise and then they can sell well year round, but it can be difficult to play that game other months of the year. Used toys I like a lot better and they always seem to sell well. You can pick them up for pennies on the dollar at yard sales and thrift shops and the profit margins usually quite a bit higher than with new. I actually put together a calendar for selling children s items, when is a good time to start listing certain types of items and I ll mention it at the end, but I put a resource page together and there s a link to the calendar that you can download for free. It s for 2008, but it applies year round for the months of the year. Alright. Now as far as you know, like say I wanted to start in on this kind of business. I ve been in the ebay business for about a year and a half now. I mean what s some research tips that you could share with us like if I wanted to go out starting next week; I wanted to start doing something like this, what s a good way of me starting my research? Well, it s a great question because you have to know what s selling to be able to make money on ebay, and I know a lot people who think they can just sell anything in their kid s closets because they liked it, they thought it was cute, they bought it, and they think other people will too, but that s not the case; you can t assume that. So, you really do need to do your research, and you can - I think that whether you re new to ebay, or you re just good at selling children s items, the best education that you can get is on ebay itself; so you educate yourself by browsing the current listing and also the completed listings. If you re new, I recommend being a buyer first. Now you said that you ve been doing this for a year and a half, but for other people if they re new and haven t really gone through the process of being a buyer or a seller on ebay, I really recommend being a buyer first and consider it hands on education. But if you re familiar with ebay already, spends some time in the children s items and the toy categories, sort by highest first, stay away from lots, and take note of the brands and the sizes that are selling well. As far as research specifically, you know, people they can tell you what s selling, they can make predictions that you can t go wrong; like I said if you look at ebay and current trends. A couple things to consider when you re selling is that not all name brands are created equal. You ll notice when you re looking at the items that have the most bids that one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on was to assume that all brands were a good seller, but cute doesn t sell. So, you ll see a lot of titles have the word cute in the title, but they probably don t have many Page 3 of 10

4 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 4 of 10 bids because it s not the cute. People aren t in there looking and having things catch their eye; they re actually buyers coming in with something in mind. They know what brands are good quality so they re gonna stick to that since they actually touch the products themselves, so pay attention to how people are listing things and there s a few brands like what I did early on I thought, Well Gymboree, that s a real high end brand name and Gap, those tend to sell well, but not everything does. And when I started, I went and I bought, I would find all kinds of different little shirts or whatever, dresses, and buy them and they didn t sell and it was because they were just your basic white shirt, there was nothing unique about it. So, it really pays to just keep an eye on if you sort by highest, watch what s getting the most bids, I think five or more bids, more than two bidders and pay attention to how people are listing and what it is that s really making their listing successful. Yeah and mentioned earlier about staying away from lots; is that because lots may sometimes have a couple bad apples in them? Well, I think it s really hard to determine what is making a lot successful. I m not saying don t sell lots, but when you re researching to find out what it is that s selling then it doesn t really help to see a lot selling for $200.00; you don t really know what it is, it could one item in there that s really pushing the price up. And it s really hard to determine that just from looking at the lot as a whole whereas if you re looking at I mean there s outfits and individual items, you ll get a better feel for what it is that s really selling. That makes sense, yep. You had mentioned kind of going back to the title; I really like what you said about the word cute. When I first started, I bought some Boyd bears and I put in there Two cute vintage Boyd bears, never sold them and I use that sell up on tool, view tracker, that helps me track what people are searching for in my listing and the word cute never came up, never. I m glad you brought that up because I thought, Well, you know, they re cute looking; why wouldn t someone want to buy that. So I m glad you kinda said that because now it kinda makes me understand a lot. Yeah, well you know your title is the most important thing for getting buyers to even see you listing because a lot of them are searching for specific words and if you fill your title up with words like cute or must see, people don t search on those terms, they search on brands, they search on sizes, they search on what the Page 4 of 10

5 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 5 of 10 item actually is, and a lot of people leave that information out of their title and missing out a lot. Yeah, I ve learned and again that view tracker thing, I m not sure if you ve used that - No, I don t. If you go to a website called sellupon.com, they got a view tracker that s like $9.99 a month, and what you can do is put that code in part of your description behind the html. And what it does is as people come to your product or your item, it tells what they searched on, it tells how they sorted, I mean it s a really great tool. Yeah, I mean it s helped me change around some of my things to eventually sell them, so I thought that was pretty cool. Sounds like a great tool. Yeah. Do you have any examples of some really cool things that you sold on ebay that you don t mind sharing with us? Actually, you know what I d love to share with you is I was looking through like what I had mentioned earlier, I have a weekly report that I send out and each one has 25 auctions that are currently selling well: one of them is for toys, the other one s for children s items. So, I was kinda looking through last weeks list and there are some consistent used toys that sell consistently and have been, like I said I ve been doing this weekly for years and see these coming up all the time; one is vintage fisher price. Not all of them do well, but if you watch for sets or little people, the vintage ones, those tend to sell well. The Blue s Clues handy dandy notebook. Now this ones great because now these are used toys; I noticed this a couple years ago and they re still selling pretty well. I was at a yard sale last year I think it was and I found three of them these little notebooks for $.25 each; they re selling for $30.00 to $40.00 on ebay so a huge profit margin there. Now they re not quite selling that high now, but if you can pick them up for under a $1.00, they re turning around for about $20.00 now. But I think - just think about when you re looking for used toys, those toys that tend to be really hot sellers are parts and pieces to toys, so like replacement parts like there s the little tykes, the play kitchens for little kids, and there s parts that those came with like a little pitcher or ice cubes, or a dish tray, and you can pick up just those pieces at yard sales for easier to ship than the big kitchen, and some people will be missing those pieces and they ll pay $20.00, $30.00 for that. Another one is like a little tykes garden that s kind of big and Page 5 of 10

6 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 6 of 10 a child can actually fit inside of it, that s kind of how big it is, but it comes with three vegetables that are plastic: a carrot, an onion, and a radish I think, and those sell for $20.00 or $30.00 just those vegetables, so it s great because you don t have to deal with all the shipping. The other thing is doll house accessories, little tykes, fisher price are the two hot ones and I see the family dolls that go with a doll house as a set, those sell really well as well. Those are doing well right now and they tend to be consistent sellers for used, so I always keep an eye out for those types of things. But lately the Alvin and the Chipmunks plush from the 80s, those are selling really well individually and as a set and also small sets like Bob the Builder or the Disney Toy Story gang, even Telatubbies, a set of the characters on Telatubbies; those are selling really well. You can pick them up for $3.00 to $5.00 for a set and turn them around and sell it for I mean I didn t look at actually what they were selling for right now, but probably around $25.00 or $ And you re pretty much going to like thrift shops and garage sales and stuff like that? Right, I tend to do that; absolutely. I love going to garage sales and the thrift store and my secret with the thrift store, I bring my mom with me and she gets the senior discounts so I get an extra 40 percent off on Mondays and it s just amazing what you can find. One thing that I ve been kinda throwing out there to you guys that are experts at this stuff and that is shipping and handling and like international. The first question is do you do a lot of business internationally? You know, I ve always offered it and most of my business is not international and it s just the way it s turned out for me. I did sell - a couple years ago I had a Ikea leaf canopy and I think I paid $12.00 for it; I bought two of them I was going to do the kids room and use it to decorate with and I decided to go another route. These were sold out, they were only in the stores in the U.S., they were sold out in Europe, and so I sold each of them for other $50.00 internationally and I ve been thinking about this and I really think that there are some sellers who just they don t offer international shipping usually for one of two reasons. One, they don t know how or they haven t taken the time to try it out, they re very intimidated by the process and two, they ve been burned by international buyers, and so they ve just boycotted selling internationally and I really think that these sellers are missing out on sales and opportunities. There can be, but - Page 6 of 10

7 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 7 of 10 I agree because my thing is, I ve sold a couple things international and each time I ve been paid for them and 50 percent they got it, they were happy, or either I got them returned and I never did could get a hold of the buyer ever again, so I just refunded the money back to the person, and never did hear from them. And filling out the customs forms and all that seems pretty easy. Yeah, it s really not difficult and the thing is to keep in mind is that you might not even have if you offer to international, you re gonna get more bidders, so even though you might not even be selling to as many international as you could, but if they bid half way through the process, they re just pushing up your ending price so I think people miss out if they don t sell internationally. I would, though, at the end of every listing is have some sort of section specifically for international buyers explain the process that you have for shipping, stuff like it takes longer to reach their destination. Usually they know that, but I did have somebody leave me a neutral feedback because they were upset that they didn t get it within a week of me shipping it which was completely unreasonable for her and it was out of my hands too; I shipped it promptly and you know, you can only do so much. But the other tip I would say is make sure communicating with your buyer and this should be for international or domestic, but especially for the international because it is a longer process for them to receive the package if you re constantly communicating with them, explaining to them the process, ing them once the item has shipped, send them any tracking numbers, letting them know that you ve gone the extra mile and you ve done everything you possibly can to get them the package as soon as possible even if the post office or whatever messes up, they will see that you ve been doing your part to get that delivered to them. Yeah and I ve had a couple people come back and tell me because I ll do that like for a while I was selling guitars and guitars take time because they re such a large package, and as soon as I got a tracking number, I would it to them and that tickled them. I sold a guitar to a guy in Alaska and I bet we had 10 s back and forth, he finally got it, he was tickled pink, he was concerned that it could get lost, but it worked out. Couple more questions and I ll let you get on with your day here. What are, if any, the disadvantages of toys and children s clothing? I was thinking about this and I think a few things. First of all the disadvantage for used toys is there a higher risk because there s no returns usually. Thrift stores, you can return; depends on the policy, but like with a yard sale or through craigslist, but you have Page 7 of 10

8 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 8 of 10 the advantage of you spend $.25 on a handy dandy blues clues notebook, the risk is really low. The other thing that can be difficult for used toys is to find inventory. You don t want to spend your whole weekend going out shopping and not finding anything so there are some things that you can do. I had mentioned the blues clues notebook, and I had noticed this a few years ago that those were selling really well and at the same time I noticed the other blues clues items were reselling well too, and this tends to be how it goes so used toys will sell well in themes. So, if you can educate yourself with different themes that are selling well, you don t have to find the handy dandy notebook, you can go and find a set of little figurines, so you kinda know, Ok, I need to keep an eye out for blues clues, and it makes it a lot easier to find inventory. Let s see, for new toys, disadvantages would be a possible lower profit margin. You really can t beat buying something for $.25 and turn it around and selling it for $30.00; you just won t see that kind of profit margin for a new toy cuz with new you re usually paying retail, sometimes you can get a special discount which I recommend to do if you can and so you re counting on it selling for more than retail. Profit margin is not as high and there s a higher investment, lower risk though. With new toys, you really have to watch the trends carefully because an item that can be hot one week, it can be dead the next because it s over saturated, so it really has a direct relationship with what s on the shelves in the stores. If they re out of stock one week, you ll see them skyrocket on ebay. The next week all the stores have restocked and it just plummets so you really have to be paying attention, but what you can be doing is looking for popular toys that have been discontinued. And you can shop at stores, this is what I like to do, shop at stores that tend to have an older inventory so drug stores, Walgreen s, Rite Aid, Longs that carry a few toys tend to have an older inventory. In Oregon, here we have BuyMart, they tend to have things that were new at Toys R Us a year or two ago; so you can look for things that are being discontinued, or they re not carried at Toys R Us so much because they were from a couple years ago. But for I think to combat any disadvantage for clothing, children s gear, or toys is really research. You ve gotta know what it is you re looking for and how to sell it for the highest profit and you ll find it takes a lot of time to do the research, so the best way to combat that is have someone else do it for you. So, I have a couple resources on the resource page that show how I can help you do that, but I think that knowing what it is that s selling, knowing how to list it for the highest profit is gonna get you around any disadvantage. Page 8 of 10

9 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 9 of 10 Right. One question I m gonna slip in here before the last one and that is do you pretty much always auction things, or do you do fixed pricing, or how do you determine - and maybe it s based on what s selling well or not selling well whether you either action it or list, list it at fixed price or store inventory it? That s a great question. First of all, I think one of the best ways to take advantage of having a store on ebay is to use it to help gauge the market, so for example let s talk about selling toys during the holidays. They usually start selling not in December; they re selling in September, October, probably more October, early November. Well, I don t know, they can go up into the middle of December, but what you do is you get your inventory, put it into your store for a price that you re happy with, and when they start moving out of your store, you realize, You know, let s check this out, let s try it at an auction, and you might be surprised at how high they go as an auction listing. So, that s what I recommend, putting it in your store for the price you re happy with. If you start noticing them moving, like let s say you put something in the store and it sells within 24 hours, I mean you probably will make more money as an auction and letting the market push the price up, so you can really use your store as a gauge for when to send something to auction or how to price it. As far as like a fixed price or an auction price, I really like the model of a true auction of starting it low and letting the market raise the price up and I think some sellers get scared of that. It works really well with used items because you re investment is so low, but those lower starting prices really bring in the bidders and the more bids you have, the more attention s gonna be brought to your auction and the higher it s gonna end up going. The other thing, actually, you can build up yourself a reputation, I have a friend who all of her auctions start at $.99, and people know that about her, so they go there and she does a great job with listing them and getting them to look at the other items she has available to so it raises it even more. Right. The very last question here and what places, websites can you point us to that maybe would help us out more with this product and the way they re selling on ebay? Sure, I have actually put together a resource page for you and I have products that can help with how to create a listing that s gonna bring in the most profits and the highest bids. And I also have a couple membership sites, where I provide the research. One is dedicated to toys, one is dedicated to children s items, mostly clothing, although there s some gear and one section for Page 9 of 10

10 James Jones JenniHuntToys_new Page 10 of 10 toys, but the resource page is and that s jennihunt/dailyhotitem. [End of Audio] That s fantastic Jenni and when we do the transcript, we ll make sure these are spelled out and correct before we show this out. Yeah, and I m actually just about to launch our summer toy guide which is great if you re just getting into toys, so a great way to start, the perfect time, summer is usually a dead time for other markets, I had mentioned children s clothing, it s just dead during the summer, but toys you can find toys at yard sales very easily during the summer and turn around and sell them the next week easily. And so, that s what the summer guide is all about; there s a report and it includes three months of the weekly reports which is each of those have 25 current hot auctions for toys, and that information s on the resource page too, but that s gonna be launched at the end of the month. Ok, fantastic. Is there anything else that you d like to add? I appreciate your time. I know James does. We re excited about this product and anything else you can add, feel free. Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to share some of the stuff that I ve learned and thanks for thinking of me. If there s any questions or whatever, my address is on the site; I m happy to help. Ok and I know you ve been real busy and like I said thanks again and just take care of yourself, take care of your health. Thank you, I appreciate it. Page 10 of 10