#406 – Barbara Drazga’s Unique Way To Make Millions Of Dollars In E-commerce
What if resilience and innovation were the keys to e-commerce success? Meet Barbara Drazga, a marketing veteran whose journey from door-to-door sales at nine years old to managing a multimillion-dollar warehouse will captivate your imagination. Barbara’s story is filled with rich experiences, from her days as a photojournalist in Europe to navigating the financial challenges of the 2008 economic crash. Her ability to turn setbacks into triumphs is nothing short of inspiring.
In this episode, we pull back the curtain on Barbara’s diversified e-commerce strategy. She underscores the importance of not putting all your eggs in the Amazon basket and shares how platforms like TikTok Shop, Shopify, and your own brand’s website can dramatically amplify your business reach. Listen as she reveals innovative approaches, such as live-streamed sales by influencers, and breaks down the physical layout of her cutting-edge business setup. This isn’t just theory—Barbara offers practical steps to transform your own e-commerce operations.
Want to master the liquidation market? Barbara spills the secrets of acquiring unprocessed loads directly from warehouses and turning them into profit goldmines. Learn how to create value bundles, use barcode lookup tools for smart purchasing, and flip products for profit with strategic pricing. Through her expertise, discover the untapped potential in liquidation and returns. Barbara’s actionable insights and real-world examples make this episode a must-listen for anyone looking to thrive in the e-commerce landscape.
In episode 406 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Barbara discuss:
01:16 – Amazon Entrepreneurship and Collaboration
07:21 – Adapting to Changes in Online Business
09:45 – Opportunities in E-Commerce Trends
10:24 – Expanding Beyond Amazon in E-Commerce
14:17 – Live-Streaming Wholesale Showroom Concept
15:43 – Liquidation Market and Wholesale Operations
24:38 – Exploring Liquidating Business Opportunities
25:26 – The Liquidation Market Insights
33:30 – The Psychology of Product Bundling
37:41 – Creating Valuable Bundles for Amazon Sellers
46:39 – Mindset Shift in Amazon Sales
49:18 – Kevin King’s Words of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 406 of the AM/PM Podcast. My guest this week is a little bit different way of making money in commerce, not just on Amazon. She sells some stuff on Amazon but she makes her money across an entire spectrum of the e-commerce landscape by doing liquidations, by doing bundles, by processing returns. It’s a fascinating podcast, I think, you’re going to find a lot of insight into. It’s Barbara Drazga. Barbara Drazga is my guest this week. She’s an old school marketer and is running this huge warehouse, driving the forklifts and doing millions of dollars a year all by herself. Enjoy this episode with Barbara.
Kevin King:
Barbara Drazga, good to have you on the AM/PM Podcast. How are you doing?
Barbara:
I’m doing fantabulous. Thanks for asking me to come on.
Kevin King:
That’s right. You’re in your warehouse. We’re going to be talking about that in a little bit. You got a big warehouse there. It sounds like you just driving it to me a little bit ago, but you know, I don’t think have we ever met in person or have we just met online?
Barbara:
We’ve met online. I torment you occasionally responding to your emails.
Kevin King:
I know you sent quite a few subscribers to my Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter and then I’ve plugged your course a few times in exchange, so we’ve helped each other out in some ways there. You’re doing some stuff that a lot of people don’t do on Amazon, so it’s going to be great to have a discussion with you today and talk a little bit different side of how you make money on Amazon. How long have you been doing this game? Were you in retail or doing something else first before you got into this e-commerce or what’s your story Barbara?
Barbara:
Well, thanks for asking. I was listening to you being interviewed by a German gentleman this afternoon and you told your story, so I wanted to kind of hook in a little bit with your story. You said at three years old you were selling stuff, so I’m a little bit behind the curve. I started selling stuff door-to-door at nine years old, so you’re a little bit ahead of me
Kevin King:
That’s good.
Barbara:
It was engraved social security plates and greeting cards. And my why was? Oh, and of course, Girl Scout cookies. I was like the top seller of Girl Scout cookies back in the day when kids could go door to door safely. But my why was? I wanted a camera. I wanted my first camera. That’s why I did it.
Kevin King:
Wow.
Barbara:
I have shoveled snow.
Kevin King:
Was it a Polaroid camera or was it a film camera?
Barbara:
It was a 110-film camera.
Kevin King:
Oh wow.
Barbara:
And it was actually in an Easter basket. You remember like there was Rite Aid. I think they might be going out of business. They had all these baskets lined up and in one of the baskets was a 110 camera with a little 110 cartridge film. And man, I wanted a camera so bad. So I went to the back of the comic book. You know where they had all the ads in there of things you could sell. And I chose a couple things and I sold them and darn it, I bought that Easter basket. I bought the camera.
Kevin King:
That’s awesome. And what did you do with the camera? Did you become a little aspiring photographer at nine years old, or were you taking pictures of pets and animals.
Barbara:
Not at nine, but it did feed into. I was a photojournalist for about eight years of my life. Fast forward a long time after that, I went to university in Buffalo, New York. You can tell by me calling it university that I ended my university stay by moving to Germany and finishing my university in a German university, and then I just moved there because you know why not. Then I lived in Holland for a while. Then I moved back to the States in ‘93. And I started a publishing company in the global energy industry completely not related to e-commerce but it’s part of the story and I put all my money this is the transition. I put all my money into real estate and the stock market and then I exited my business. I sold the business and then everything crashed in 2008, 2009, 2010. And all of the real estate went away and I was very upside down on that real estate.
Barbara:
And the transition into e-commerce happened because I had to do something else after that. I’m like you know what I need to touch stuff. So I went out and I started buying pieces of furniture and even picking up pieces of furniture for free, refurbishing it and then reselling it locally and there was just something about I’d always like to refurbish furniture for myself. There was something about touching physical products that was cathartic, you know, after that crash of you’re on top of the world and then suddenly whoa, what the heck just happened. That’s how I got into physical products, because it felt good to buy stuff and resell it and make money on it.
Kevin King:
Well, as part of that, though, is it the buying of it, or is it the hunt I mean like in photography, the photography with that photography background, you’re like it’s the hunt for that perfect framing of the perfect picture.
Barbara:
You had to understand lighting. You had to understand f-stops. You had you had to understand depth of field, everything. Nowadays people point a cell phone and take it and then touch it up. Back in the day, you had an eye or you didn’t. So that was so the hunt that feeds into that.
Barbara:
I started buying at auctions. This is kind of my transition to Amazon. I was buying locally. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, at this big auction and I was a regular there and you get to know the other regulars and this guy and his wife were scooping up all the books and I asked him why. I mean, but we’re talking like university books and college books and he was buying them by the pallet because nobody was bidding against him so he’s getting them for nothing. And I said what the heck are you doing all these books? And he pulls up his Amazon seller app and he said my wife and I paid off our house. He showed me and I didn’t believe him. Like come on, come on. But it planted a seed and that was the year that I started digging into Amazon. That was 2015.
Barbara:
And I very quickly pivoted. I went from you know, RA skipped right over OA, did some wholesale and then went straight into private label and bundles, because to me it was, you know, RA, running around after stuff was a way to learn Amazon, but it didn’t feel sustainable to me. And now I have two private label brands. I have a bedding brand that also borders on baby, because I have beddings for babies as well, and I have a pet brand and I’ve manufactured a couple of other, like home decor products, but I didn’t build it out into a brand. So that’s the fast version. I’m sure there are a lot of holes in there but ask me anything.
Kevin King:
So in the RA did you treat that more as a learning process or was it because it didn’t take the big investment. You could cash flow and work and turn products.
Barbara:
Well, that was back in the day 2015, 2016, when it was shooting fish in a barrel on Amazon, really and it’s a different world now on Amazon, as everybody knows. I don’t need to say that we don’t need to make this a session, but I believe here’s the lesson I learned. Change is part of business and you pivot and if you go online okay, everybody write this down, I’m going to drop these little nuggets here. If you go online and you start moaning and complaining and whining and this happened. You’re not actually putting any energy into solving the problem; you’re just feeding the problem. So just assume that being a business is going to have especially if you’re on somebody else’s platform is going to have challenges, and the people who pivot the fastest and complain the least and get to work solving a problem, they’re the ones who are going to come out ahead.
Kevin King:
I agree. The opportunity is still there. It’s an evolving, changing marketplace and, yeah, Amazon’s fees are quite a bit higher than when you started in 2015. Now, but you pivot and you find products that have better margins or you change the way you’re doing stuff or the way you’re distributing or what you’re focused on and the opportunity is still the best it’s ever been. People always ask me has Amazon jumped the shark? Is it too late to get an Amazon? It’s like no, but it’s a different game now than it was nine years ago and you got to go in with a different mindset and probably a different bankroll as well, if you’re going to live off of it.
Barbara:
Well, and anybody asking a yes or no question this is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine is Amazon opportunity over? They’re not giving you leeway room to answer that question in a well, it depends, they just want a yes or no answer. So I’m very big on problem solving, creative problem solving. That’s actually one of my, not you, but people listening to this. If you’re one of the people who ask is there any opportunity left in Amazon, yes or no, instead of making that a binary question, make it an open-ended question, something like where does the opportunity lie now selling on Amazon, and that leaves you open to brainstorming all kinds of ideas.
Kevin King:
Where is the opportunity right now for selling on Amazon? If someone was to ask you that one of your group of 5,000 people that you mentioned, what would you say is in your opinion, right now, in 2024, where is the best opportunity? And I guess there’s a few caveats, it depends on how much money you have or some other things, but where would you say people should look? Is it still private label or is it something else?
Barbara:
So Amazon and you have such much smarter people on your podcast to answer these questions, my humble opinion is Amazon is pivoting to inviting brands and getting rid of smaller sellers, R-A-O-A, and they want brands. I don’t know if you’re going to agree with that or not, but that’s my opinion.
Kevin King:
I agree with that.
Barbara:
And I would anybody who asked me that question. I would challenge them to reword the question to ask to replace Amazon with e-commerce, because that’s a much more interesting thing to answer because we have more control. If we look at you know what are the possibilities in e-commerce moving forward 2024 and on.
Kevin King:
A lot of people say Amazon’s 40% of e-commerce in the United States. So yeah, there’s another 60% out there and that’s a big market. That’s out there. You know, it’s TikTok, Shopify, all the other tons of other marketplaces, your own, whatever you want to do. But a lot of people say, well, if you don’t focus at least partially on Amazon, you’re going to be leaving a lot of money on the table. Would you agree with that or disagree with that? And how come?
Barbara:
So Amazon should be part of a larger strategy, instead of the focus of your e-commerce business, and you can argue with me about this, I’m okay with that. Instead of making I’m an Amazon seller and then I’m adding these other things, if you make Amazon as part of a larger strategy, that all of the flywheels fit together, I think that’s a healthier perspective on e-commerce.
Kevin King:
Well, there’s a lot of people right now that are saying TikTok shop is the next big thing. I’ve had sellers that are big, that have been on Amazon. For a guy just on the podcast last week that said, you know, look, my focus right now used to be Amazon first, because that’s where the eyeballs were. Then I went out to Shopify or Walmart or some of these other or eBay or wherever, and now he’s like I’m going to actually the TikTok first and Amazon second and he said even though a lot of people are not buying on Amazon I’m sorry on TikTok shop because they don’t quite trust it yet. I’ll get some sales there, he said, but the impact that it makes on my Amazon business because that’s the shopping cart of choice for a lot of people, then this place that they trust, is tremendous. And so that’s where I think a lot of people they get so myopic on focusing on Amazon.
Kevin King:
Amazon is still a great place to launch. It’s still a great place and you should be there, but too many people make that their sole focus and they don’t expand off of that or they do stuff like they open up a Shopify site before they actually expand Amazon to Canada. I mean that’s an easy one step that’s probably going to add more revenue than opening up a Shopify site and having to do a whole different way of marketing, a whole different way of customer acquisition, all that kind of stuff. So in e-commerce, right now, where should people be thinking beyond Amazon? Which should they be looking at?
Barbara:
Okay. So I have a teeny bit of a different perspective approach on things. When we are platform centric and we are looking for the next big platform, that takes us away from looking at things from a bird’s eye view and seeing how everything fits together. I have a TikTok shop. I have two Shopify, so I have a Shopify and a WordPress site. I sell to retail stores, so I sell wholesale to retail stores. I buy and flip liquidation. I don’t sell the liquidation most of the time on Amazon. There are some caveats to that, but I look at it as a holistic approach to my business, with these different opportunities being a part of that business. There’s Google Shopping, there’s Depop, there’s live selling one of the things you’ll see.
Kevin King:
Facebook Marketplace, that’s huge right now.
Barbara:
Huge one of my and one of the reasons why-
Kevin King:
Only thing going on Facebook is down on their track. I think their user just general traffic with marketplace is way up. I just saw something is about 15% and normal and down the six.
Barbara:
Yes, and so they just put a 10% fee on if you ship it, if you have, if you set up the capability to sell locally, which I have. We talked about this off camera before it went on. If you notice, behind me there’s a door. There’s another door over there. I rented the second space on January one in order to have spaces where people could. Next door is my boutique/wholesale showroom. They can go over there, wheel product over into one of the rooms. We’ve got our ring lights in each of the room and if they have a following, they can sell it live on multiple platforms and after we’ll invoice them and then they can ship it and then pay me, and that way people aren’t out of pocket for product and their garage isn’t getting overwhelmed with stuff. And then I’m training these people to be wholesale buyers. Basically.
Kevin King:
So you start people off by, these are influencers, people trying to make a little extra buck, yeah. And they’re coming in and you’re finding stuff either your products or stuff you’re getting in liquidation or wherever and you’re saying, what do you want to sell, like, oh, I love this, this is a cute little outfit, or this is a cute hat, or whatever. They assemble a wheelbarrow of stuff, and they wheel it over to another room where you have all the lights and everything set up for them to live stream right there. That’s pretty cool.
Barbara:
All they have to do is bring the audience, so I have. Would it help if I described my physical layout here?
Kevin King:
Yeah, that would be awesome. Yeah, let’s do that.
Barbara:
Yeah, so I’m pointing that way because I’m in this commercial strip area that’s one block off of a main strip. If you’re in Phoenix, it’s Bell Road and 53rd Avenue you’ll know that that’s right there. But this is a really nice commercial place four minutes from my house. I got really lucky. I have unit four for two years. Prior to that, I had another warehouse up the street for two and a half years. I moved into that one in 2022. And in the front it was office space. So we tore down the ceilings. It was drop ceilings. We tore out all the walls. We made the front a boutique area which was basically I was only selling online and I’d go in there and I pull the products, right. And then, as a sample place for people local people to come, like souvenir shop owners will come and pick things off the shelf and I’ll sell them to low MOQ so they can fill their shops up without having to ship in a pallet of stuff from ASD. They save money and they come back and become repeat customers.
Kevin King:
Where’s this inventory coming from?
Barbara:
I buy liquidation, closeouts, wholesale. I manufacture some of my own, but it’s all new. It’s all new. Right, okay? So then you walk through the double doors and we pulled out everything, raised all the ceilings, put in a bunch of pallet racking and there’s three rows of pallet racking that go three levels up and that’s where I keep the pallet sales and what goes out of that space is that’ll be like wholesale shipments. I had two pallets of pet things go to a liquidator last week, eight pallets of pet product go last month to another liquidator. And then I rented this space January 1. The lady moved out and the management company is privately owned. It’s a family. They offered it to me for a crazy price, just tacked it onto my lease.
Barbara:
I’m like this is perfect because the back, zone three is another warehouse space but it’s low ceiling. So I’m like this is perfect because the back zone three is another warehouse space but it’s low ceiling. So I’m now doing pallet sales. I’m pointing that way because I can see through that. Right, I can now do pallet sales out of that space back there.
Barbara:
I’m sure you can’t see it with this light, but there’s, yeah, so now I can roll pallets from next door to the backspace here. I can rework the pallets to sell them as mixed SKU pallets and I just started mystery boxes but themed mystery boxes. And then zone four is what you see here. You can’t see it all but it is an office space with four and a half offices and I’m using as the training space. But the way that I’m setting it up is so that it’s got cute sofas. It’s not like all these you know chairs set up side by side. To be real, it’s more like come on in, plop down on one of the sofas and the comfy chairs. There’s a little kitchenette on this other side and then we do workshops out of here teaching people how to buy and sell liquidation which feeds into the two warehouses.
Kevin King:
So you’re flipping liquidation?
Barbara:
I just started the flipping of the customer return pallets. Recently, I did two test buys. Now I’m ready for a truckload. But yeah, I flip liquidation.
Kevin King:
So is this from Amazon or is this from other retailers, from liquidation.com? Or from wherever.
Barbara:
Depends. Not liquidation.com. So for the past four years or so I’ve been building relationships with some decent-sized liquidators. Some of them aren’t even on the radar. They don’t go to ASD, they don’t set up anywhere. You just kind of get into the community and then you get referred and referred, and referred. And now I’m on text. I get first dibs for things.
Barbara:
I’ve also bought abandoned goods at port last summer and all broker deals too. This was a broker deal. Does this at all relate to any of your customers, your Amazon people?
Kevin King:
Yeah, no, this is awesome. This is good.
Barbara:
Do you care about this?
Kevin King:
Yeah, oh, yeah, yes.
Barbara:
So there were 16 pallets of blankets that had come into the port and they were at a custom broker. By port I mean, LA, they were in long beach and the custom broker needed them gone and they were made for Ross, Ross Stores and they were beautiful blankets and it was beginning of the summer and they were in black gift boxes.
Kevin King:
Did Ross abandon them or?
Barbara:
They abandoned them so their numbers were going down is what my research showed, and it was a Christmas product. So they’re like you know what? Let’s just you can keep them. So this custom broker has got these 18 pallets of things, of these blankets, sitting there. I ordered a sample and two or three people were bidding on this lot, but because and this applies to doesn’t matter where you’re selling because of the relationship I developed with the loss prevention guy at the broker, I was the lowest bid and he sold them to me but they had to be processed. They had a UPC on it, but they had a raw sticker on it. So I didn’t have the second warehouse at that time. So, in order to take them in, did I mention I’m in Phoenix?
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Barbara:
In the beginning of the summer, 118 degrees I would have had to rent. There’s storage units all around here. I would have had to rent three storage units and they were in closed black boxes. So I’d have to open the box, reprint the banner because the price was printed on it and repackage it. I would have made a lot of money if I had 18 pallets of beautiful blankets. So what I did was I called another liquidator and I said what will you pay me for this load? And I flipped it.
Kevin King:
And he did all the related ones.
Barbara:
He wired me money. I wired them money. I made money in between and it went from there to there. I never touched it and I made money. So the liquidation market, there are so many different opportunities, it’s not just one. But I have very strict buying criteria.
Kevin King:
What’s that?
Barbara:
So I look for new products. I used to say I don’t sell customer returns but I’m starting to play with that in the pallet business. Just flip the pallets to some resellers. But everything that I sell now is a new product. I like it to have retail ready packaging and a UPC. For all you private label folks out there who are producing your packaging that only has the ASIN on it. Stop doing that. I mean, don’t stop doing it, but put a UPC on it, because in order to sell into retails, I’m having that devil of a time moving pallets of a certain product from a failed Amazon seller. She’s got herself into a little bit of trouble, but the product is really nice and none of my liquidators will take it because they can’t sell it to the retail stores without the packaging is like plain white. We should have samples or something and there’s it’s just an ASIN on it.
Kevin King:
You can’t re-sticker it over the ASIN?
Barbara:
Sure they could.
Kevin King:
And labor, labor.
Barbara:
Now you’re adding more labor. So for all your private label sellers out there, make sure your packaging is retail ready and it’s got a UPC on it you can put your ASIN.
0:22:16 – Kevin King:
All my packaging is always retail ready with a UPC.
Barbara:
You’d be surprised.
Kevin King:
A lot of people just put the ASIN, yeah.
Barbara:
I’m looking at the product on the other side of that door. There’s a whole pallet sitting there that is not retail ready, and that’s why it ends up. One of the reasons it ends up in the liquidation market is because it can’t be sold directly to a retailer. So they’re stuck. They’re stuck. What do I do with this? So it’ll be people like me who will buy it and then I might create a bundle out of it. I’ll reverse engineer it and call it deconstructed bundle.
Kevin King:
So most of these pallets all the same item or are you getting mixed Like if it’s a returns, it’s just a you don’t know what you’re getting. Or sometimes they make a manifest of like everything that’s on this palette. So you know, oh, this one’s got some electronics, or this one has some blenders or this has whatever it’s a mystery.
Barbara:
So your definition of liquidation is a common definition of liquidation that you’re buying these blind mix palettes or manifested palettes or rebit built palettes. What I’ve been buying is single SKU, new product only. So I got five pallets last spring. It was a Loewe’s product, no, I’m sorry, a Costco product and it was this big fireball, beautiful big fireballs and it ended up in the liquidation market because a Canadian buyer I found this out because there were these individual mailing labels on each carton to a Canadian buyer but the same guy so it looked like a retail store in Canada wanted to buy all of these and then canceled the order but because they’d slapped the mailing label on each of the cartons, they couldn’t put them back on the store shelf. If I could have gotten more of those fireballs yeah, that was a crazy deal. It doesn’t happen all the time but they’re new. That being said, I am-
Kevin King:
You just cover up the label?
Barbara:
No, I sold them local. I just sold them local, heavy to ship. Why wouldn’t? Yeah, they sold like Facebook marketplace people buying, two, three at a time and then when they come in, I take them through the boutique so they buy other stuff. I have about a 55 cross sell rate. When they come in, I take them through the boutique so they buy other stuff. I have about a 55% cross-sell rate. When somebody comes in to the retail area, the showroom, to take them through to buy something from the warehouse 50, 52, 53.
Kevin King:
It’s fireballs on Facebook Marketplace. You say, yeah, here’s where you can come pick it up. Come down to my boutique. They walk in and end up upselling them to some other stuff. Oh, wow, got all this other stuff too.
Barbara:
Yep. And then I asked them a critical question, have you ever thought about reselling stuff? Oh yeah, my sister does that on Depop and she does these live posh shows and I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve got a deal for you and I’ll buy companies going out of business and then your definition and a lot of people’s perception of liquidation that you just mentioned.
Barbara:
I am starting that now by buying truckloads of Amazon mediums, 3PL returns, store returns from different areas, and those are the I call them dirty loads because a lot of times they’re not new product, they’re customer returns. So it’s a different model than what I’ve been following. So each pallet I’ve netted about $2,500. And that was selling them 50% off of retail. And they were. I got lucky. They were all new items. I got lucky, but not lucky, because when I went into the place I asked them to tell me when their trucks were coming in. I wanted unprocessed loads. I didn’t want them breaking it down and cherry picking and I can tell when they do that too. To me, it’s really obvious a processed load versus non-processed load. So I want when that truck comes in, I want them, I want to see them coming off that truck and then I choose them coming off the truck. When you ask me what my criteria are, that’s one of them.
Kevin King:
You’re seeing, actually, what the boxes are because they’re wrapped in the cellophane and you’re like, are you typing something in like real quick, what the hell is this? And are you just you know you’ve been doing it long enough, you’re like, I know that’s a good thing.
Barbara:
Yeah, it’s like I want that, I want that, I want that.
Kevin King:
And this is a local warehouse in the Phoenix area?
Barbara:
Yeah, but they’re everywhere. And a lot of people I know they go to liquidation.com but everybody knows about them, so I wanted to get close to the source.
Kevin King:
There’s a guy in Tennessee that does a lot of Amazon returns. I’ve spoken, met him at an event and it’s crazy what he gets in. He gets all these pallets in and then, like every Saturday, he opens up to a local market and does millions of dollars in business. Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t realize how big that the returns and industry. It just returns by itself, forget canceled orders or abandoned orders. Like you said, it’s $91 billion, I think, in e-commerce I believe I read that or something like that just on e-commerce alone, not store returns. That’s another. I don’t know what that number is got to be higher but it’s a crazy amount of stuff that’s coming in and it’s got to go. It’s got to go somewhere.
Barbara:
And those returns end up in the liquidation market. It’s like this whole subculture, like this is a. It’s a target product. You recognize this? The brand boots and barky UPC. And this ended up in the liquidation market locally and I bought every single one they had for a dollar. It’s dog toys but the reason I got it is not because it’s shaped like a Christmas stocking. I got it because it’s dog toys and none of them are themed for Christmas. In fact that’s a sloth. So we all know sloths have a passionate niche market. I love passionate niche markets. So what I do is you ready? I just deconstruct this. Let’s do a real quick bundle class. I deconstruct this, I open it up. I’ve got a table set up there for these and I went and I got these at the Dollar Tree. It’s a treat jar. This is positive vibes and I fit all of those little suckers in there, plus a little backpack with dog prints, plus a little notepad for dog owners and that’s my bundle and the cost was $3.
Kevin King:
And that goes. Where is that sold?
Barbara:
We’re just putting them together right now, so I’ll put them up everywhere.
Kevin King:
It’s fascinating. A lot of people always wonder what happens to my returns. What happens if I cancel an order? Where does it go? And now they’re learning exactly. There’s a whole another business out there that oh, business, let’s describe it very, very lucrative.
Barbara:
It’s a subculture. It’s huge, it’s huge.
Kevin King:
What’s a typical price for a liquidation pallet off of retail? I mean, I know it varies, but is it typically about 10%, 15%, 5%? What would just be a rule of thumb like is a good ballpark?
Barbara:
As a buyer of liquidation products, like when I buy somebody’s you know 16 pallets of blankets, I’ll pay maybe 5% to 7% of retail and that’s like I’ll go to bar barcode lookup.com. If you guys haven’t gone there yet, because I don’t just want to go to Amazon and look at what it’s selling for, even though you know I can see, keep it. But a lot of people who just look at Amazon as let me go see what it’s selling for on Amazon but they don’t have the tools we do, they don’t see that that seller has ramped up their price by 50 in order to say that they’re liquidating it for 90% off. So if you’re buying liquidation, you don’t have the tools installed that let you see that somebody has manipulated the price. Go to barcode lookup.com so you can see all the places it’s selling. You want to see what eBay sellers are selling that product for, and walmart.com and Amazon and any other niche store. If you scroll down to the bottom after typing in the UPC, then it’ll tell you everywhere that’s being sold. Get the real price and then offer them five percent off of that price. I’m sorry, five percent off that price.
Kevin King:
And then you should be able to sell that. For how much of retail? Because these are typically. If it’s a discontinued product, that means it probably wasn’t selling. If it’s an abandoned product, it means people don’t even know about it. But what can you typically sell that for off of its normal retail price if you were going to go as a retail.
Barbara:
It depends where you’re selling it. So if I’m flipping, so if I buy a pallet of dog collars because I’m looking over there at a bunch of dog clothing, dog collars and they’re $9.99 in retail stores, $7.99 on Amazon, I’m just making these numbers up I might buy them for a quarter. Like that’ll be my target price for a quarter because my exit strategy on those is to flip them to somebody else. I want to flip them to a retail store.
Kevin King:
You always have a buyer before you flip them or sometimes you take the chance to find a buyer.
Barbara:
It depends. It depends on the product but I’ve been in this a while, so a lot of times, like the auction house guy, he’ll send me because he’ll get Amazon sellers who will come to him and say, you know, can you? Just I’m getting out of the Amazon business, can you take all my stuff? And they’re still in love with their product and they say something like this I just want to get back what I put into it. So he sends it to me to run it through. I’ve got a spreadsheet and a process of. Here are all the criteria I look for is it retail ready? Is there a UPC on it? Where is it selling for what? Here are the pros and cons of this product. Here’s how much competition is in the marketplace for that product. And it takes about an hour for me to evaluate a load on paper. But in my head I can run through a lot faster just because I’ve been doing this a while. But you should have a process so that you’re not just buying something from emotion.
Kevin King:
So if I’m an Amazon seller or I’m a TikTok seller or whatever, I’m selling and I’ve got extra stock. I saw some webinars. Somebody said you can make a fortune doing this. I can get my new Lamborghini in my new house and go live on the beach. Things didn’t turn out that way and now I want to get rid of my inventory. What do you recommend they do? Who do you recommend they contact? People ask this all the time. How do I get my money back out? And, like you said, they’re probably not going to, but how? Do they get something back out of it so they can wash their hands of it and walk away.
Barbara:
What’s the best way to do that? So first I would coach him a little bit to have a different mindset about e-commerce. I don’t start with product, I start with niche market. So when I see a product that I might want to sell, I’ll ask you know who would buy this? Why? What else do they want? Because I’m a bundler who would buy this and why? It’s not just a water bottle. It’s purple. So maybe, since purple is the color of people who have fibromyalgia, the niche market for this is women with fibromyalgia. What else will they buy? That I could bundle this together and that’s just real quick. What runs through my head? Like I don’t just see this as a water bottle. I will see the potential markets for that product that maybe the seller didn’t think of and I would encourage them to think outside the box.
Kevin King:
You’re not selling products, you’re selling avatars.
Barbara:
Yeah, and I heard you say this in one of the other podcasts of yours that I listened to today. Yeah, I look for passionate niche markets. I don’t buy product. I look for passionate niche markets. What problem does this product solve or what passion does it feed? And then how can you build a moat around it, like, what’s the barrier to entry for anybody else to go? Create a purple water bottle?
Kevin King:
What is it about bundles that are attractive psychologically? Is it because you’re supposedly getting a deal with multiple items? Or what is it about the bundling process that people are missing when they’re doing bundling?
Barbara:
People being the buyer or the seller.
Kevin King:
The seller, people putting together bundles, when people are like I don’t want to do that or I don’t know what goes together, what are they missing? On the psychological side, how should they be approaching it?
Barbara:
They are approaching bundling from a product centric mindset. All they have to do is switch to a customer centric and the three questions are who would buy this? So now they’re starting to describe that ideal buyer. Why are they buying it? What problem is it solving? What passion is it feeding? And then, what else do they want? But all they’re doing until they learn how to start thinking like the customer.
Barbara:
They’re seeing a purple water bottle. Well, I could put a purple keychain with this but they’re not asking why would your buyer for this, why would your market for this want a purple keychain? All they’re doing is throwing something in so nobody else will compete against them. And that is the competition. That is the huge mistake that Amazon and e-commerce sellers make, where they product centric perspective that gets me a whole ton of great liquidation product because they didn’t think like the customer
Kevin King:
They think a bundle is taking a toothbrush and toothpaste, putting them together. That’s where a lot of e-commerce sellers that’s how they approach bundling what’s an accessory or what’s something I can add to this that they’re going to need anyway, and what you’re saying is that’s the completely wrong approach.
Barbara:
Yeah, because they’re not thinking of the customer, they’re thinking of themselves. It’s very narcissistic.
Kevin King:
Well, they think of bundling, as let me do. Here’s a bundle of three or five or seven or 10 items, not by having different things in there.
Barbara:
Well, well, that’s a multi-pack, if it’s not different things.
Kevin King:
But yeah, that’s what it is but people call that sometimes bundles. Yeah, no. It’s a misconception.
Barbara:
The emotion that I want a customer to have when they see my listing anywhere is shut up and take my money. Oh my, I have to have this. We could do a whole, do webinars on this. We could do a whole class on this, where I could share my screen and make you have that response.
Kevin King:
So like on those dog products, as you show me that that came from within the Christmas, you’re taking those out. Who’s the avatar for that? You’re stripping those out and you’re combining it, you said, with a backpack and some other stuff
Barbara:
And the packaging is a treat jar, so I’m making the packaging part of the environment. These are for medium-sized dogs, so I got all these great keywords in there sloth, squeaky, aggressive, chew because it’s got that rope. So the avatar for this is, well, pet owners, as you know you’re in the pet market too, from what I understand are passionate. They’re crazy. We’re crazy about our animals. If you put a black cat on anything, I’ll buy it. If you put a black cat with a mid-century, modern kind of vibe to it, I’ll pay you double. That’s the passion. And then the little extra. I have a saying the difference between ordinary and extra ordinary is that little extra is a little notepad. So now, and the way that I would write the marketing around this is that never forget dog food again. In an ideal world it would have a magnet on the back never forget dog food again. You can make you a little list of all the dog things that you need. And then this could be a travel bundle. Throw it in the back of the car because it’s got a rubber lid. It won’t come off.
Kevin King:
So we made that bundle, did you? Were these just things that came in on different liquidations, or do you like? Oh my gosh, I’m missing a pad. I need to go find someone that’s liquidating a pad.
Barbara:
Well, since I’m in the pet market already, I have a lot of pet stuff, so I can use this pad in multiple bundles but if you’re starting, if you’re not like me and you’re not buried in inventory you want to be more deliberate. If you’re starting out, you want to identify a passionate niche market. Verify the market first. Don’t buy product first. Ever, ever. Identify the passionate niche market or the problem that’s being solved who is the buyer of that potential bundle and then you build the bundle out after verifying the market.
Kevin King:
And so when you make a bundle, people say you should actually lead with the best product in there. So if there’s one item in the photos or in the listing or in the marketing, you want to show the coolest, most valuable or the most desired item. If there’s 10 items in there, or do you disagree with that and you say, no, just spread them all out and show them what they get.
Barbara:
So that’s an Amazon seller’s approach because a lot of Amazon sellers have learned bundling from the product perspective. They’ll say, okay, I’m going to go to Kirkland’s and get a big tub of cashews and that’s the product that I’ll you know that center facing and then I’ll put a scoop with it. So clearly the scoop won’t have the same perceived value, where when I create a bundle, that bundle together is the has a higher perceived value. It’s not one item and then a bunch of stuff tossed in. This is for a dog lover who loves slaws, who likes to travel and likes things organized. Medium-sized dog. I like going even deeper. I’m in the Dachshund market. I like niche dogs and the Dachshund market is insane. Go search YouTube for Crusoe.
Kevin King:
I have a little Dachshund land right here.
Barbara:
There you go, there you go, so I have a lot of Dachshunds.
Kevin King:
I love little Dachshunds.
Barbara:
I have Dachshund jewelry sets. I have a whole like totes and backpacks and wallets. Oh my huge in the Dachshund market because it’s such a passionate market. The other passionate market is chickens. If I could take this over this laptop over into the boutique next door, you’d see chickens, pet chickens, you would see all the niche markets, all the niche markets of just go find me on YouTube.
Kevin King:
I’ve heard of pet chickens. I’ve heard of pet pigs.
Barbara:
Pet chickens. It’s insane, it’s insane. Here’s how I found out about it. Do I have any more on here. Bought 22,000 dog ponchos.
Barbara:
And what’s left is over here. And I woke up in a dead sweat the day I pulled the trigger on that because it was like a $30,000 order and I’m like I got all these pallets of dog ponchos coming in. Who would buy these and why? Right back to the questions. Who would buy this? Why? What else do they want? And it just so happens because it doesn’t every girl. I had a taxidermy chicken in my office because everybody does.
Kevin King:
Yeah, everybody does, of course,
Barbara:
I know right, it was at an auction and it was like $12 and there was something about it that was so cool. I don’t know why I don’t have chickens but it was cool. And at 3.30 then, when I wake up in a cold sweat, I’m like I wonder if I wonder what else these ponchos will fit. And I stuck one on Gertrude for those of you who know me, know Gertrude and lo and behold, it fit. And I was sleep deprived. And at four in the morning I posted on my Facebook as a joke. Check out, I told the story. Showed Gertrude, she’s wearing this cute little poncho.
Barbara:
I got so much engagement on that post, with people commenting with photographs of their own chickens with the names of the chickens. And here’s the bed, she sleeps in in the house and here’s our brood. It blew up. It was a joke and I think I put in the post. This is a joke in parentheses. Well, it wasn’t a joke. So I’m going to go, you guys go research the pet chicken market. If I can find anything with a chicken or Western, I’m looking over there. I have a birdhouse sitting over there with chickens on it. I have this really cool tote with a coin purse it’s got a chicken. I’ve got chicken wallets, I’ve got chicken anything I can find with a chicken on it. I’ll buy something about that image.
Kevin King:
So did you sell 22,000 of these?
Barbara:
Oh yeah, I flipped them. I flipped them in the location market well. I flipped 20 of them. I kept 2, 000 because I run those through auction two for five and then when they come in, they buy other stuff.
Kevin King:
Do you have you ever gotten something like? It’s just still sitting there three years later
Barbara:
Yes.
Kevin King:
You’re like god dang it. Should we just throw this away? Nobody will buy this, like I’ll give it to you take and nobody wants to come take it.
Barbara:
Those are the ones that I bite my tongue and I call up a liquidator that I know is going to give me a stupid low price and I refocus. I will have that space back, because I don’t look at my warehouses as in square footage. I look at it as, or in product that’s sitting there. I look at it as, or in product that’s sitting there. I look at it as 40 by 48 space. That’s the space of a pallet. And how many times I turn that space? So I do my best. It was a guy who owned an auction house that I used to buy a lot from.
Kevin King:
You snack on three high you said though right.
Barbara:
Well, I have three levels of pallet racking in the warehouse next door.
Kevin King:
Okay.
Barbara:
So each of those spaces, I don’t look at it as there’s a pallet of bling wine glasses. I look at it as how many times can I turn that space? Because in liquidation wholesale I’m not making a ton of margin.
Kevin King:
Sell per square foot almost in a way.
Barbara:
Yeah, it is. I’m not making a ton of margins so I need to flip my pallets fast.
Kevin King:
What’s a typical flip? What’s your goal for a flip? Is it within two weeks? Is it within a week? Is it within what?
Barbara:
It depends on the time of year and what’s going on in my life. I had a pet die last week so I did not get things done that I needed to get done. So that, you know, my metrics went out the window this month. When I start buying the liquidation loads, I want a load a week gone, so 26 pallets a week.
Kevin King:
How many people are working in your warehouse? Do you have a big group or is it you driving the forklift?
Barbara:
Stackers, my friend, stackers.
Kevin King:
Stackers?
Barbara:
I love my stackers. I named my Stackers. Does that surprise you? I named my pallet jacks too. I do have people come in who help. It’s very difficult, it’s really hard, to find competent people.
Kevin King:
So this is a multi-million. I’m assuming a multi-million dollar business that you’re running by yourself with no, there’s not even a.
Barbara:
Yeah, there’s helpers every now and then.
Kevin King:
So when you have a big relabeling project, do you hire from a local just friends and family, or do you go down to the labor place and go to Home Depot and grab somebody, or what do you do?
Barbara:
No, that’s unsafe. I’m a lady working, yeah, so that’s unsafe. But I’ll run into people like a local auction house closed and I knew a bunch of those people so I swiped them. Hey, can you work Monday, can you work?
Kevin King:
One of the things you do is you still like to help other people, because you said you have about 5,000 people on your list that you teach bundling to. That, you teach, you do a course and I promoted it for you in the Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter and you have a course on. So what is? Tell people what’s in that course. Is this for Amazon sellers? Is this for e-commerce sellers? Is this for people that want to do what you’re doing? Or tell me a little bit about the course and what you teach.
Barbara:
It’s called the Bundle Machine, but what I’ve done is start relaunching it or launching a smaller seven-day challenge of it every two months. That has me in there like private coaching during that seven days. That has me in there like private coaching during that seven days because I’m what I was finding over the years that people would invest in the bundle machine and then never go through it and that’s very frustrating. As you know, as a trainer, you’re putting your soul into teaching people and when they don’t show up and do the action. So I found out having a different version of it for a lower price point but very contracted and they have to show up like at 530 today. Of it for a lower price point but very contracted, and they have to show up, like at 5.30 today. Yeah, in an hour and a half will be one of our coaching sessions. It gets them through it. So, no, I don’t teach them liquidation.
Barbara:
The biggest thing I teach in that is a mindset shift. We don’t start with product, we start with passionate niche market. I have six steps, real simple, but it starts with passionate in its market validating the market, then looking for suppliers. It does not start with product first. You can use products as inspiration, but you can’t buy. You’re not allowed to buy anything until you’ve identified who would buy it and why.
Barbara:
That’s a completely different shift. As somebody who’s been selling on Amazon for a really long time, we’re taught to scan product, we’re taught to start with the numbers and dig into the tools right, and then we go buy stuff and we miss this really big piece. And here’s the kicker when you identify a passionate niche market, like people who love Dachshunds, then you can bring a line of products at infinitum over time, build social media assets, build an email list of people who love Dachshunds, and now you are absolutely not tied to any one platform for your business or your sales. And you’re creating this strategy. You’re creating a micro niche I call them that you could potentially sell to put your in a, who wants to go after the Dachshunds market, and you have products and an email list and social media assets around that niche.
Kevin King:
People do want to contact you, Barbara. How do they actually do that? What’s the best way to find out more about you? To learn about your Bundling class, or whatever?
Barbara:
You can always find me, even though my last name is tough to pronounce and type. You can just find me on YouTube, but I set up a giveaway for your folks, if that’s okay. I actually wrote the book, believe it or not, on How to create profitable bundles to sell on Amazon called Bundle Profits. So if you go to tinyurl.com/ampmpodcast, tinyurl.com/ampmpodcast, that’ll get you there. Just type in your name and your email and I’ll send it out to you.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, Barbara, this has been fun talking something a little bit different and different, whole different aspect of making money in e-commerce and it’s really cool and really fascinating. I know we could probably sit here and tell a lot more stories and we’ve been going over an hour already so I really appreciate your time and you coming on.
Barbara:
Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for inviting me on. I’ll see you again.
Kevin King:
There’s lots of ways to make money in e-commerce, as you can see from what Barbara’s doing. A one woman show running this big warehouse, doing bundles, liquidation, flipping pallets just awesome stuff. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and got some good insights on what happens behind the scenes and another way that you can make money selling on Amazon. We’ll be back again next week with another really awesome episode, but before we go, I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. The people you spend the most time with determines who you become. So love your family, but choose your peers. The people who you spend the most time with determines who you become. So love your family, but choose your peers.
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