Problematic Resellers

[almasty]

I got scammed – $1000 Mystery Box

I don’t routinely look at flipping or follow along with all the myriad associated dramas of resellers on the internet, but I’ve had a lot of time during the pandemic to just sit and read and watch videos that I normally wouldn’t bother with. This thread in particular caught my eye.

I have long espoused my feelings on this forum about resellers that offer courses, mentoring, tutoring, “universities” and the like. I do not feel it is right to take advantage of people who may be stuck in a rotten job or recently fired from one to think that one day they too might make $1,000,000+ online (which is of course gross earnings over the course of YEARS, not per year as some of these resellers make it out to be) for personal gain. I go along with the philosophy of it taking time and a lot of patient hard work. I am much more interested in the complexities of reselling in total than just reselling for a hot minute and becoming a “guru” to earn a full-time living that way. Selling whatever you’re interested in is fun and the reason so many of us are selling online and not doing any number of other types of work in order to make a living – always “teaching” beginners is a chore and not what I signed up for.

Seeing threads like this also reminds me why I dislike the term “hustle” so much. Even though so many claim it is the urban dictionary definition of the term:

To have the courage, confidence, self belief, and self-determination to go out there and work it out until you find the opportunities you want in life.

I have always felt like it is the actual dictionary definition of the term:

to sell something to or obtain something from (someone) by energetic and especially underhanded activity : SWINDLE

Now, that is not to say that I find the behavior in the original thread linked to be the utmost level of disingenuous behavior. I feel it is more in the continuum of accepted behavior for resellers, and I do find it to be problematic.

[Jay]

I had no idea mystery boxes for resale were a thing. I also had no idea how far RalliRots had gone into the hole of the guru world. Their influence is really incredible. Wonder how much they make being gurus.

If I had all these concert t-shirts worth hundreds of dollars, who would I sell the to you for a lower price? The fact that someone paid them $1000 for ten t-shirts in really the power of how hungry people are for quick money.

I also have always hated how “hustling” has been embraced. It brings to mind ways to find shortcuts to what normally would just be “work”. Maybe we can bring back the idea that work is cool 🙂

[IndySales]

Only a matter of time before RalliRoots does something crazy and gets wiped off the face of the earth by the IRS or something. I read through that post and apparently they’d requested the buyer purchase the item via PayPal’s “Friends and Family” option. What kind of business requests you use that function? No PayPal fees if you do that, right? And the charge can’t be reversed or disputed (apparently.)

90% of the time I see their name pop up online, it’s them defending themselves against a new line of accusations. It’s a miracle that they’re able to operate and pull weird scams like this despite all the information being out there about their various bad dealings.

[Retro Treasures WV]

Mystery boxes…I’m no gambler so the little voice in my head telling me I should get one is pretty darn weak and easy to ignore.

The local $5 bins place has been doing $50 mystery boxes during the shutdown. They play a great game having people pose with their amazing finds for a photo – some even getting boxes with $100 bills in them. Strange…you don’t see any posts from the 49 other people out of 50 that got total junk.

The BOSS reseller group on facebook has also been doing vintage clothing mystery boxes. They make it look sooooo good. These are veteran sellers – why would they sell off prime inventory for cheap in bulk like that? Simple – because the math makes sense. A few people make out very well, while a higher percentage get junk and barely make their money back. Meanwhile the BOSS people offload a ton of slow dime inventory all at once and are flush with cash.

[scott2]

I just shake my head when I hear these things, a $1000 mystery box? Who in their right mind would buy something like that?
I guess it’s just a continuation of the consumer insanity and getting people used to spending more and more on things they do not need. Seems like everyday there are articles like “best headphones under $300” etc. It really does seem like a push to get people to buy useless garbage for inflated prices.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by scott2.

[almasty]

One of the comments in the video:

We bought 4 or 5 boxes from them, and figured out they were scamming with these boxes. We’d been tracking the profits on these boxes after actually selling each piece which came out to NEGATIVE 20% Gain. We’re never buying from them again. It’s a shame they are abusing their popularity to sell terrible mystery boxes. I’ve bought from plenty of smaller sellers and hit 50-75% profit margins.

I know they delete their sales on their main Ebay store, but you can still see what they’re selling based on their feedback. If they are selling items for $10-30 apiece on Ebay, why do people think they’re going to get much more valuable items in mystery or reseller boxes? Wouldn’t the more valuable items into their Ebay store?

The mystery box fad is getting out of control. There are even a ton of mystery box book lots on Ebay. Not the subject mystery books, but “mystery box of books.” I don’t know who’s buying those, either.

[sonia]

When I read the term “side hustle”, I don’t think of swindling. I think of hard work – rushing about to make extra money.

[Jay]

When I live, lots of guys have full-time jobs and families. They also cut grass on the weekend for extra money. They would never call it a side hustle. They’d call it “side work”. Or just work.

Or I know guys who build cabinetry on weekends. They dont call it a side hustle. Its a business for them, even if it is on their off-time outside of their jobs.

Its all semantics and I understand that “side hustle” and “hustler” has taken on new meaning. I just think “hustle” doesnt give someone the full acknowledgement of what they’re doing. IMHO.

[sonia]

Different strokes for different folks – that’s my point. I wasn’t trying to say that my definition of “side hustle” is the only correct interpretation, but simply to share my contrasting view point.

I would never call something a gew-gaw (except maybe on this forum!). I would also not use the word “pop” when referring to a canned carbonated beverage. Also, words evolve with time. My mom would never consider something she likes to be “cool” or “sweet” – to her those are words that refer to temperature and taste. “Wicked cool” would definitely not have positive connotations for her, but it does for me. Just like “side hustle” is negative for you and positive for me.

The way you have described how hard you worked when you guys first started – just listing listing listing all day long with construction work going on all around you – I would call that hustling. And not as an insult or criticism.

[So Cal Joe]

I just looked through a bunch of the sold listings, for mystery boxes.

Boy, people must be bursting with stimulus money.

I have little sympathy for people who buy these items and then complain when they are disappointed with the contents.

[Curious Curator]

I used to watch (I won’t mention her name here) on YouTube. This ebay seller is in Georgia and sells many items on ebay. From what I know, she has 2 stores. One is just a golf store where she sells golf items. I guess golf is a “thing” in Georgia, I know nothing about golf. Said YouTuber also has a regular store. I used to enjoy and look forward to her videos. She was very knowledgeable, was always businesslike, dressed businesslike, and presented her videos in good lighting and always changed her background. I thought, wow-she is really a hard worker! And I still believe that. However-she started offering “listing” services, where she would list your item for you. Ok. Not a bad idea. Then she started offering e-books. Not my favorite, but eh-I won’t purchase, but maybe someone else will benefit from it. Then said YouTuber started offering store critiques (at a price). Well, the next thing you know, now she is traveling from state to state and selling “lunches” with her. Ok. Enough. I cannot even watch her anymore because as you see, she is selling everything! How does she have time to sell in on her ebay store? I had had enough and refuse to watch her now. I have not watched for for at least a year because in each video all she did was promote her services and there was less of her sharing her selling experiences, tips and more of her self-promoting.

This reminds me of these people who buy the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” speaking engagements. Oh my gosh! I cannot believe people still buy into that. A family relative of mine told me he went to one of those speaking engagements. I was stunned. I waited about a year to bring it up again, but not in the context of him attending, but in general terms. My relative asked me why I did not think these speaking engagements were effective. Mind you this person is obsessed with “how to make the most money with the least effort”. I gave him the example of a billionaire friend of mine. I said to the relative: John (not his real name) is a billionaire-NOT because he attended a paid speaking engagement, but because John rolled up his sleeves when he was young and got in there and did the actual work.

[almasty]

Okay, this is a fun one. Just found her ebay store/youtube/webpage by googling that information. What is a “teaching” store? What does that even mean?

“This store is used to demonstrate many aspects of eBay selling including writing titles, photo best practices, writing descriptions, setting up shipping, pricing, and using eBay features.”

I opened a random listing and under condition notes:

Condition:Pre-owned
“Good preowned condition”

Uhhh…what does that mean for clothing??

Good preowned condition – no defects

That is as generic as most book descriptions out there. For clothing, I want more detail! Good can run the spectrum from clearly worn to just out of the department store.

99.6% Positive feedback

🙁

Item not as described, poor color & material awful. Embroidery has loose thread
Follow-up: No communication from buyer, we ALWAYS refund – our goal is happy customers!

Bad customer service. 🙁

As a member of the Premium Video Library, you receive access to:

293 in-depth training videos
89+ hours of binge worthy eBay knowledge of play time
$20 a month subscription fee

Do people really need that level of instruction to sell on Ebay? Is it really that hard? Oh my god.

[sonia]

Is there really a good reason to pile on the criticism on a woman who is just trying her best to make a living? I’m sure that if any of us semi-anonymous people made our stores public, there would be lots to criticize there, too. Glass houses, etc.

A teaching store is one that she shares publicly, and discusses in her videos. It doesn’t have anything to do with golf, at least not anymore. She might have another store that she does not share.

Personally I find many of her free videos useful – the “what sold” videos.

“good pre-owned condition” is very similar to the often-used “minor wear” in J&R listings. Very vague, but it works for them. I myself try to include a lot more information than that, but so what?

If you don’t like what she’s selling or how she’s selling it, don’t buy it. I don’t buy anything she sells either, and frankly her style isn’t always to my liking, but she is an experienced and successful reseller.

I love scavenger life b/c of the overall positive and inclusive tone that J&R have cultivated – for all styles of sellers. This thread is veering in the opposite direction.

[Retro Treasures WV]

These threads always veer this way. I once posted a link to a seller who documented shipping a HUGE Harley Davidson store sign. It was very impressive and shows just how far you can take “sell anything/ship anything”.

Instead of getting comments on the specific context of my link, I got a bunch of people bashing the seller because he sells E-books and leads a paid selling group.

I didn’t give one crap about any of that – it was just a cool sale!!!

Me personally, I don’t give one hoot if a seller takes off on social media and starts to make money off of it. I bet Jay and Ryanne have been told 1000’s of times they should do all of the things other sellers are doing. They have chosen not to, but I have no doubt they’d be GREAT at it. I wouldn’t fault them a bit for doing it, but no matter what there will always be the naysayers that would tear them down for “selling out” and “ripping people off”.

[VintageTreasures]

Sonia, I agree with you completely. There are a lot of people out there making a living in ways I don’t agree with but unless it’s illegal it’s a free country, and to each his own. I don’t agree with selling reselling courses, classes, lunches or the like but it’s legal and the fact that I don’t like it is my own problem. If I don’t like something I just don’t participate, and we all have that freedom of choice.

[IndySales]

ebooks and consulting are fine, but things get scummy once we get into the courses and “reseller schools”.

These courses are often presented as get rich quick schemes. Many claim you’ll make the cost of the class back from your first week/month of sales alone. The same thing is said in multi-level marketing schemes. We’ve already seen articles/reviews confirming this.

Legal status as a metric for right & wrong just doesn’t seem like a good mindset to operate under, but since we’re mostly talking about the morals of some obscure YouTube reseller taking large sums of money for basic Google search knowledge I don’t think it’s worth the time to deconstruct it.

Also, J&R should sell a 1 page PDF that just says “SELL TRASH, BE FREE.”

[debitendcredits]

I had a look at some of the feed back from the Mystery Box Accounts. None of them have good feedback and all of the negatives are the same “I got junk”.

You would think people would just open up INADS and move on.

[almasty]

To be honest, my initial criticism of these sort of people was as muted and positive as it could be.

Lets say I’m a potential course customer of a reseller that is selling courses. Oh good, I found a “testing” store of theirs. The first thing I would look at is their listing style. How do they describe their clothing? What would I learn in their course? Good? What does that mean? “Good” could mean anything. Why isn’t it more descriptive? Am I going to spend $20 a month to learn how to describe clothing as “good?” What am I learning to do that I just can’t emulate myself after looking for 1 minute at the testing store?

It is completely different to compare sellers that have “testing” stores up in order for you to buy their courses or eat lunch with them vs. resellers that seek no financial gain from what they are doing.

Also, this thread was intentionally posted in the “random thoughts” “brain dump” section of the forum.

[sonia]

Almasty,

I offered no criticism of your initial post.

As far as the picking on Suzanne Wells goes, you don’t have to purchase anything at all to learn from her teaching store. You can watch plenty of the free videos available and see what sold from that store, and how accounting is done, what purchases the seller regrets, what worked out well, what her goals are for the store and how she’s going about achieving them, etc etc etc. If her store and offerings are not to your liking, or you disagree with her minimalist “condition notes”, that’s fine, but that doesn’t make her a problematic or scammy reseller.

“Good? What does that mean? “Good” could mean anything. Why isn’t it more descriptive?”
Those are great questions. If you watched her FREE videos, you might find out. If you don’t need to find out, then you are clearly not her target market.

Same goes for J&R. They used to be super descriptive in the description section. Now they are super minimalist. If I were coming to their listings for the first time right now, I might also think “Who are these bozos who don’t even take a few minutes to describe what they are selling? Why should I listen to their podcast?”. But they explained all this in great detail on their podcasts, which a lot of us learned from.

So can we please just stop picking on this poor woman? Like most of us, she works really hard and does her best. She has a lot of big fans (I’m actually not a huge fan – I just don’t think she should be picked on), and if they want to pay to have lunch with her, good for her and them! Everybody walks away happy.

“Random thoughts” and “Brain dump” are not the same thing.

Despite my rants about positivity, my brain generates a LOT of pointless sarcastic criticisms I could dump out on this forum, but I make a big effort not to do so, in large part b/c of the early podcasts, which talked a lot about how this community is an escape from the dark depths of negativity on the ebay forum.

[almasty]

Actually, I had spoken about this woman I was completely unaware of prior to this in 1 post. That was all I had intended to do. However, it was the criticism of me criticizing her that caused me to respond. So now I am being criticized yet again for just responding? Okay, cool.

[Jay]

I think we’ve entered the rare time of this forum where we got some (very small) sparks flying!

It’s definitely not illegal to offer educational courses, or books, or even mystery boxes. Buyer beware. You can join Scientology if you want and commit to their Billion Year commitment pledge: https://www.scientology.org/faq/church-management/is-it-true-that-people-in-the-sea-org-sign-a-billion-year-contract.html It’s all good.

I do feel bad for new sellers who may really be seeking help and instead waste precious resources (money/time) on pre-packaged lazy tips and tricks.

Sure, spend $5 for an ebook to walk you through the eBay process. But spend hundred$ or thousand$ on some course to get secrets revealed to you? Yikes. Better spend that $500 on a carload of treasure and learn by doing 🙂

[Curious Curator]

Adding to what you said, almasty, the topic thread is “problematic resellers”.
Good for anyone who finds inventive ways to add to their income, I mean, after all, isn’t that why we are all here? I applaud anyone who finds genius ways to profit from what they know/learn as a result of reselling. I guess I should have articulated better. My point was that I guess these kinds of videos should have a warning that it is an “ad” or some type of advertising. Because, let’s be real, that’s what it is.

[sonia_pc]

Regarding the expression “side hustle”…

I find it really interesting the way some words and expressions become so loaded with nuances in understanding and morally/ lifestyle/ even ideologically charged.

I can totally see Jay’s point in disliking it as “work” and “putting in the effort” is what he values the most. No shortcuts. It is sort of a life’s ethic mantra. An expression such as “side hustle” seems to stray, in his view, from this ethic and devalues one’s efforts. I had never thought of that in that way.

I have/had an understanding of “side hustle” perhaps in the light of my own experience – having a full time corporate job, I still do work hard “on the side” on reselling. “On the side” because that’s on top of my job that provides the income for everything I need and that is my first priority.
Childishly, I feel kind of badass for doing something that is unusual on the side (at least in my circle of mostly high paid or at least white collar corporate jobs) and that is all my own. And the expression “side hustle” kind of has that flavour of something that is a bit off the beaten track.

Thanks for these conversations that shine a light on what’s in everyone’s minds.

Also thanks Jay and Ryanne for making this such a great and healthy space for everyone.

[Author]

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