Podcast Episode 034 : How the eBay App Can Help Amazon FBA Sellers Make More Money

You don’t have to buy and/or sell on eBay to benefit from the platform! Creating an account and downloading the eBay app is free, and today we’re going to talk about how you can leverage this app to support and boost your Amazon business.

Not only can you use the eBay app to check the profitability of an item with no product page, but it can also help you overcome the hurdles of restricted or damaged/used items that are a no-go on Amazon. Some products are not a good fit for Amazon, and that’s where eBay and its app can help you fill in the gaps. Be sure to tune in to learn more!

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Key points from episode 34:

• Creating an account on eBay and downloading the app is free and easy to do.
• How to use the eBay app to check the profitability of an item with no product page on Amazon.
• Learn how you can get some capital back when a customer returns a used/damaged item purchased on Amazon.
• Advice about restricted items on Amazon and using the Scoutify app to search eBay for that item.
• Use eBay and the eBay app to sell products that are not a good fit for Amazon.
• Getting more eyes on your products by letting Amazon fulfill your eBay orders.
• The importance of choosing the right items to be listed on eBay.
• And more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• eBay App

• Scoutify App

• InventoryLab

• InventoryLab 101 Webinar (with special bonus offer)

• JoeLister – Multi-channel Fulfillment Service

• JoeLister Review

• How to see if an item has a product page on Amazon but is currently out of stock and suppressed

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In fact, I have discovered the secrets to making hundreds of dollars a week selling new and used board games, and I want to pass on my strategies to you.

While I find profitable board games at garage sales, thrift stores, retail stores, online stores, and so many other great places! I’ll honestly run out of money before I run out of board games to find and resell. It’s because of this abundance of opportunity that I decided to create The Reseller’s Guide to Board Games: How to Turn Play Money into Real Money. This course is a combination ebook and video course that walks you through everything you need to know about making big profits buying and reselling board games.

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Episode 34 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:21.6] REBECCA: Hello there and welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show for today. We are so glad you’re here listening with us. Today we’re going to be talking about how the eBay app can help Amazon FBA sellers. We want to show you ways that you can use the eBay app with your Amazon FBA business and this is not going to necessarily go in the direction you think it is.

Stephen, welcome to the show.

[0:00:44.0] STEPHEN: Hey there, I’m excited to be here.

[0:00:46.4] REBECCA: I know you’re excited.

[0:00:47.9] STEPHEN: I’m always excited.

[0:00:48.9] REBECCA: Right. I’m going to get you a thesaurus so that you can keep finding new words to say how you are feeling about each episode. All right, anyway, on with our show.

Last week on the show, we talked about the top nine free tools that Amazon FBA sellers can use in their business and we covered several different apps and extensions and websites that you can use that are either free or have a freemium version and so today, we’re going to be talking about the one that we ended up on number nine on that list was the eBay app.

Stephen, start talking to us about how the eBay app can be helpful to FBA sellers and this isn’t about buying things on eBay to sell on Amazon is it?

[0:01:35.5] STEPHEN: No, it is not. We’re not going to be focused on that for this episode but yeah, the eBay app can be really helpful for Amazon FBA sellers. Even if you’ve never sold on eBay before, the eBay platform is a free place to get a signup for an account and once you have that account, you can download the eBay app and you can log into your account to gain access to the features and functions that we’re going to be focusing on that can help you grow your Amazon FBA business, make better decisions and possibly make more money.

[0:02:05.5] REBECCA: All right. What’s the first thing that we’ve got here?

[0:02:09.1] STEPHEN: The first way that you can use the eBay app with your Amazon FBA business is what happens if you come across an item on Amazon that has no product page? You can use the eBay app to check the profitability of that particular item. There’s times when I’m out sourcing, I scan the barcode of an item and there is no match and then I try to use the keywords to find that particular item on Amazon and still, there’s no match.

I mean, it’s potentially, maybe it’s out of stock on Amazon and Amazon is just suppressed that particular product page but if you’re using a sourcing app and you’re searching for that particular item, usually you’re still able to find suppressed items by searching on the Amazon seller app or Scottify. But you know what? Even though Amazon calls themselves the everything store, sometimes they don’t have a particular item.

If you want to see a well, I wonder if this item is even profitable if it’s selling on other platforms for some good money. If I’m going to create a listing, I want to make sure it’s worth my time so you can use the eBay app right there in the store, right there when you’re doing arbitrage and check to see if it’s selling on eBay so you can go in and search for that particular item, you can use the UPC barcode or you can use same keywords.

You can do the advanced search option and be able to look at the completed items and even filter it down even further to look at the items that have sold. You can see, what has sold of t hose items with your word search that you’re looking for and you can see if you can find the item that you potentially could purchase. It’s a few extra steps but it could potentially make you a few extra hundred bucks with this particular strategy.

[0:03:44.5] REBECCA: All right, that’s a really good one using eBay app for your research on Amazon with this. These items that might not have a product page. All right, the second thing on our list, talk to us about what happens if a customer returns an item that you were selling on Amazon and what way can the eBay app help you with that?

[0:04:05.3] STEPHEN: We had this experience before where we’ve all experienced this before, you get a particular return, you get it back in your possession and great, it’s still in new condition, I want to send it back to Amazon. Sometimes the item comes back to you and it’s not in a new condition. Maybe there’s a particular category that only allows you to sell things in new condition on Amazon.

Well, how can you still get some of your capital back, you can check and see if it is selling on eBay and for what price and so if you have a customer return, it was damaged and you just can’t sell to Amazon, real quickly, look at eBay, that’s probably the second best place to try to, yo know, after Amazon, to sell that particular item so if you can’t sell it on Amazon, try to sell it on eBay. And maybe not in new condition but maybe used condition, like new, very good condition, a lot of people are understanding on eBay when buying things that are used and that’s a good opportunity for you to get some capital back to put back into your Amazon business.

[0:04:58.6] REBECCA: Yeah, I think that people are more interested in buying used items off of eBay than on Amazon. Okay, the third item here on our list is somewhat similar I would say. What about restricted items.

[0:05:13.2] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s a similar situation. Say you’re sourcing for a particular item, you scan the barcode, you’re looking to see what’s profitable on Amazon and wait, it’s profitable on Amazon, that’s great but you happen to be restricted from that item. You go in and try to seek approval for that particular item and you realize, they’re wanting to get invoices and you’re just like, I am not in the stage in my Amazon business to start getting wholesale relationships with this particular brand.

I’m not going to get approved right now. Well, you can very quickly check to see again how well it’s selling on eBay, what price it’s selling for so again, you can use the advanced feature, look at the sold items that have been recently sold on eBay and check and see if that particular item is profitable for you.

This is another one of the reasons why I love the Scoutify app. I’ve talked about InventoryLab and Scoutifyy a lot on this podcast and on our blog. Scoutify has a quick link to eBay, right in their app so we are using the Scoutify app and you can click and search on eBay for that particular item that you are looking for. You can do it on the eBay app or you can do it with a quick link through Scoutify app and you see, hey, I can’t sell this on Amazon but eBay will let me sell it so I’ll sell it there instead and make some good money.

[0:06:24.8] REBECCA: That’s a great tip about using Scottify in conjunction with eBay, all right, talk to us number four about online arbitrage and how eBay can be connected with that.

[0:06:36.9] STEPHEN: So, one of the things about online arbitrage that is one of the hurdles to overcome is that sometimes when you get your stuff delivered from a particular online retail store, it might arrived damaged. Maybe the box was damaged, maybe it was damaged in transit. You do have the option for most retail stores to be able to return that item but what if you can still make some good money selling that item like new condition on eBay.

So if the item is damaged you don’t want to sell on Amazon because you want to make sure especially if it is a new item, new items are almost always more profitable than used items. So if it is not profitable to sell on Amazon as a used condition maybe eBay is the answer and so again, you can go check out the profitability on eBay to see if you can sell that item that was damaged from your online arbitrage order.

[0:07:25.8] REBECCA: All right, then tell us about the 5th one here on our list.

[0:07:29.6] STEPHEN: So the next reason why eBay and the eBay app could be useful for Amazon sellers is because honestly, there are some items that you might come across that are just not a good fit for Amazon. Maybe those products a require a detailed description with multiple pictures. Maybe that item is so rare, so special or so available for a short term that maybe they are missing some parts, maybe there is something that is – you want to make sure that the buyer understands before they purchase that item.

Well, then selling it on eBay and checking the profitability of it on eBay is a lot better option than just moving on and realizing that you are not going to sell it on Amazon. Even though Amazon does allow you to add a particular product description and add pictures to the product description for items in used or collectable condition, most Amazon buyers don’t read those. They don’t read those detailed descriptions and looking at those pictures on Amazon.

But eBay buyers while still someone will still buy without reading the description, most eBay buyers will read the description, will look at all the pictures and so again, if you come across something that is rare or special or just needs those extra pictures or extra description, eBay is the way to go and the eBay app has a right way to see if that item that you are looking at is even profitable.

[0:08:50.5] REBECCA: All right, so that leads us into our 6th and final reason why you should consider using the eBay app to help you with your Amazon FBA business and I really like this one. This is one that we’ve been doing for years now, how can you use the eBay app with multi-channel fulfillment?

[0:09:06.9] STEPHEN: So in case anyone doesn’t know already, multi-channel fulfillment is using Amazon to deliver your products that are purchased off of Amazon. So say I am selling on eBay and I am selling an item on Amazon. I can also make sure that Amazon is set up to fulfill my eBay order. So they are stored in an Amazon warehouse and if I get an order on eBay, Amazon can deliver it and a lot of times that’s a good strategy if you are wanting to get more eyeballs to see the products that you have on Amazon.

Because with multi-channel fulfillment, you can be able to have more people see and Amazon would totally take care of the shipping for you. We use a service called JoeLister, which automatically connects our eBay and our Amazon accounts together so that we have our Amazon products that are in Amazon warehouse, we can go through and choose which products that we want to sell on eBay and have Amazon fulfill those orders.

And the cool think about JoeLister that if an item sells on eBay, it automatically goes in and change the quantity level on Amazon or if it sells on Amazon, it goes in and changes the quantity of available items on eBay. So we never have two sales for the one product that we have. So it helps us avoid double sales and so when you are deciding to go through because when you set up a JoeLister account, you pay for a certain number of items on Amazon to be listed on eBay.

And so you want to make sure your choosing the right items. Again, you don’t just want to choose random items that might not be good for eBay. You want to go through it and just pick the right ones depending on whatever level of JoeLister services that you’ve signed up for. So the eBay app, again helps us go through and see which items are doing well on eBay that we can also just make sure that we maximize the eyeballs on our products so that we can gain more sales and eBay helps us to choose the right ones to do that.

[0:11:00.6] REBECCA: All right, so that about wraps it up for this episode and just a reminder as always, you can find any links and more of the description in the points that we were covering in the show notes for this episode. That would be at fulltimefba.com/34, the number 34 for episode 34.

[0:11:19.7] STEPHEN: Yeah.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:11:23.2] STEPHEN: Next well on The Full-Time FBA Show we are going to be talking about why some Amazon sellers sell at a loss. I’m sure you have seen this before, you are searching for items and you’re like, “Why is this person selling for it so low? Why are they priced so low? They can’t be making any money” well, there are some reasons why some Amazon sellers sell at a loss. We are going to walk through these reasons for you to better understand because there might be a time in your Amazon business that some items you might need to sell for a loss.

There are strategic ways and reasons why people sell at a loss. So we are going to walk through that in the next episode of The Full-Time FBA Show.

[0:12:00.2] REBECCA: That sounds like that one is going to be a good episode too. We look forward to seeing you next week.

[0:12:04.6] STEPHEN: Have a great day everybody.

[OUTRO]

[0:12:08.9] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today so you can find success at turning part time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]