how to sell on ebay - lee bienstock interviews andrew lock

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Lee Hi, my name is Lee Bienstock and I competed in Season 5 of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. As you may know, I ended up landing my dream job with the Trump organization. I now work for Trump Mortgage as their Associate Vice-President of Corporate Development and I’m sure that my entrepreneurial background and experience in all kinds of businesses over the years led to that success. And today I’m interviewing Andrew Lock, who has become known as the Renegade Auction Seller. Now, he’s also the author of the book EBay Exposed. Andrew’s EBay strategies and techniques are truly revolutionary, so much so that they are causing quite a stir in the EBay community. As an entrepreneur myself, I have a passion for unusual and even renegade business strategies, a lot of which I employed while on The Apprentice. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted so much to the system that Andrew’s used for success on EBay. So, welcome Andrew. I’m looking forward to hearing more about your system. So tell me, how did you first develop your unusual strategies for profiting on EBay? Andrew Well, let me say first of all Lee, it’s certainly a pleasure to speak with you today and I’d

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Page 1: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Lee Hi, my name is Lee Bienstock and I competed in Season 5 of Donald

Trump’s The Apprentice. As you may know, I ended up landing my

dream job with the Trump organization. I now work for Trump Mortgage

as their Associate Vice-President of Corporate Development and I’m sure

that my entrepreneurial background and experience in all kinds of

businesses over the years led to that success. And today I’m interviewing

Andrew Lock, who has become known as the Renegade Auction Seller.

Now, he’s also the author of the book EBay Exposed. Andrew’s EBay

strategies and techniques are truly revolutionary, so much so that they are

causing quite a stir in the EBay community. As an entrepreneur myself, I

have a passion for unusual and even renegade business strategies, a lot of

which I employed while on The Apprentice. That’s one of the reasons I

was attracted so much to the system that Andrew’s used for success on

EBay. So, welcome Andrew. I’m looking forward to hearing more about

your system. So tell me, how did you first develop your unusual strategies

for profiting on EBay?

Andrew Well, let me say first of all Lee, it’s certainly a pleasure to speak with you

today and I’d definitely like to congratulate you on your job appointment

with Trump.

Lee Thank you!

Andrew I don’t know whether you know this, but I was in the audience the night of

that finale show in Los Angeles and the atmosphere was just electric,

wasn’t it?

Lee It was amazing, you know, I was just so much into the zone. My parents,

grandparents – everyone was in the audience. I was so much into the zone

I didn’t even pay attention to any of that. I tried to even zone out the

Page 2: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

thousands of people that were in the audience because going on live TV

was pretty nerve-wracking.

Andrew Your parents were very lively and passionate.

Lee Yeah, they did a spoof on them on Leno.

Andrew Oh, did they?

Lee Yeah, they did a spoof on my parents and my family and everyone else

that was in the audience on Leno.

Andrew Yes, it was really nice to see that because they were so supportive of you

and I think it’s great that you were able to land your dream job.

Lee Well, thank you, I appreciate that.

Andrew So, in answer to your question, I’m a very logical thinker, but I also think

outside of the box and one of the things that I identified with that you did

on The Apprentice was, when you worked on pulling in these big deals,

you know, selling in larger quantities of an item rather than selling in ones

and twos – it was that kind of thinking outside the box and analyzing a

better way of selling on EBay, that’s what would led me to think that most

EBay sellers are doing it wrong and so there’s a far bigger opportunity

than most of them realize.

Lee Yeah, I definitely understand what you’re saying. I was reading over all

the materials that you have and they’re phenomenal. It seems like I’ve

been doing everything wrong and when you think that most sellers are

doing it wrong, you know, obviously they think they’re making money

Page 3: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

and I know I’ve made a tiny amount selling whatever garage items I’ve

had but not truly – everyone is doing it wrong.

Andrew Well, you’re right in that some sellers are making some money but in

actual fact, the number that are profiting in any kind of substantial way are

far lower than most people imagine. In fact, there’s what I consider to be

seven major reasons why most EBay sellers end up giving up. And you

have to remember that EBay is attracting a continual stream – I think the

last figure they quoted was about 50’000 new sign-ups every day, so

they’re attracting a lot of people in the front end – a huge amount – but

what they don’t tell you is that they’re losing a lot the other end from

people who have just given up. So there’s seven reasons that I’ve

identified why most EBay sellers end up giving up. They are, number

one, the source of goods dries up or becomes unreliable; that often

happens. Number two, the EBay and Paypal fees become too high

because they don’t know how to manage they’re auctions effectively to

reduce the fees. The third one is that their own customer service is lacking

and they accumulate too many negative feedbacks. Again, people just

don’t understand what we would consider to be fundamental –

Lee So basic.

Andrew Yeah, the ways of looking after a customer.

Lee Exactly.

Andrew You may have experienced this yourself, if you ask an EBay seller a

question about an item, very often they’ll reply with a curt, one or two

word response and that’s not the way to win customers, so sooner or later,

people start to get these negative feedbacks.

Page 4: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Lee Yes, you see that very often with EBay and over the internet – there’s no

accountability, there’s never a face-to-face interaction and it’s so myopic –

they say ‘oh I’m just selling this once’, they’re really losing an on-going

customer and that’s really what’s going to propel bigger money and more

revenue in that you’re continually having someone come back to buy from

you and recommend you, saying ‘oh, I’ve purchased something from that

person before’. It’s just so myopic to think that you’re going to screw the

customer once, or not even screw the customer – just have terrible

customer service and it’s just a basic business practice.

Andrew Yeah, I’m sure you understand that principle being an entrepreneur and

also in your business with Trump Mortgage.

Lee Customer is always right.

Andrew It doesn’t really matter what the business is – it’s just basic. But again,

many people don’t realize that when you accumulate even just one or two

negative feedbacks, it has such a drastic effect on your EBay business that

you might as well just start again, because people just won’t buy from you

once they see too many negatives. So the fourth reason is that a

competitor starts selling the same product cheaper and I see this one over

and over again because people fall into the price trap; they think that the

only reason customers buy is to have the cheapest price and that just isn’t

true. It’s a mindset – we have to get out of that thinking that customers

only buy on price: there’s plenty of other reasons why customers buy and

if a competitor starts selling the same product cheaper, then oftentimes

that will just destroy a person’s EBay business because they will just try to

undercut, undercut until the margin is eliminated and there’s no profit left

anymore.

Lee Exactly.

Page 5: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Now number five is when a product trend goes out of fashion. A lot of

people I see on EBay, they jump on these bandwagons of trends and the

classic one I like to refer to is Beanie Babies – you remember those? It

was huge, wasn’t it, for a time and people couldn’t sell them fast enough –

it was extraordinary.

Lee I had a couple of Beanie Babies – I’ll admit it! It’s the same sort of thing

– these Tickle Me Elmo dolls and all these other things, people couldn’t

get them fast enough but after a while they just go out of fashion.

Andrew That’s it, and so if you put all your eggs in one basket… I know a guy who

made a lot of money with Beanie Babies but when the trend stopped, he

had an enormous stock and he lost a huge amount of money.

Lee What can you do with them after that?

Andrew Well, he couldn’t even give them away. It was crazy. He had to move on

to something else but because he didn’t see the end of that trend or he

thought that the trend would continue forever, he lost out bigtime. That

often happens. The number six reason is that people resent being tied

down and what happens is that a lot of people go after the EBay dream but

they don’t set it up properly. The way I teach people to do it is so that

they can have it on autopilot so that it’s not a problem when they want to

go away – it will just continue to run. The trap that most people fall into is

continuing to ship physical products by the truckload so that they’re

processing anything from twenty to hundreds of orders a day – what

happens when they want to go on vacation? And they end up resenting

that and so they just –

Lee Give up.

Page 6: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew They give up, yeah. So then the last point – the last reason for failure – is

that they lack a system and the intense physical effort that’s involved –

particularly in listing one by one products, you know, individual products

– is ridiculously time-consuming and most people just-

Lee Give up, they give up. Yeah, I know that when I’m on EBay, if I can’t

figure it out, I just give up.

Andrew Yeah, it’s a hassle.

Lee Right.

Andrew So that causes a lot of people to fail too, so seven major reasons there why

most EBay sellers give up.

Lee Yeah, I can see myself identifying with a couple of those! So what is it

about EBay, in your opinion, that makes it so powerful?

Andrew Well, this is something I could talk all day about. The benefits of building

an EBay business – the right way, I should say – are extraordinary. In my

opinion, it’s one of the fastest, easiest, and most profitable ways to set up

any online business. So if an internet business appeals, I think that EBay

is the way to go and I’ll give you just one reason why, which I think is just

extraordinary. Everyone naturally thinks of Google as the largest search

engine online, don’t they?

Lee Of course.

Page 7: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew A few people might dispute that but actually, EBay announced in a recent

seminar that they now process more searches on average per day than

Google.

Lee Wow.

Andrew Which makes EBay now the largest search engine. If people grasp this

point - EBay searches are all potential buyers, which is another huge thing.

You can’t say the same thing for Google.

Lee And a lot of people advertise on Google but a lot of people are just going

on there for research and not actually for buying a product.

Andrew Exactly. And I’ve got personal friends who are spending tens of

thousands – even fifty thousand dollars a month on Google Adsense,

which is crazy.

Lee I guess people might be making a lot of money off that but EBay might be

better served….

Andrew Yeah, so the fact that you’ve now got the largest collection of buyers

online of any website, all in this one location, and all you have to do is slot

whatever it is you sell in front of these people – and that’s what I teach

people to do in this system – that’s proven to work for just about any

product or service, and you’ve seen that through the materials that you’ve

read.

Lee You can sell service on EBay?

Andrew Absolutely. Very few people realize that you can sell just about anything

– I’ve seen some pretty weird and wacky auctions. You may have heard

Page 8: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

of fighter jets being sold on EBay and – you know, it’s pretty crazy –

down to the grilled cheese sandwich with the virgin Mary on it. You

know, as long as it falls in line with EBay’s policies, and they have a list

of items that you can and can’t sell, you can sell just about anything and

that does include services.

Lee It seems like you can just about sell anything.

Andrew Yeah, I mean there’s obvious things which you can and can’t sell, like

counterfeit goods and firearms, you know – the obvious things – alcohol,

because you don’t know who’s on the receiving end. But other than

that…

Lee It makes sense.

Andrew It’s wide open.

Lee I had no idea that EBay had become such an amazing resource – it seems

like it’s become, in a sense, the ultimate shopping mall where you can buy

just about anything you want, is that right?

Andrew Yes, absolutely. In fact, when my wife and I are thinking about any major

purchase, EBay is the first place we look and every year we actually save

tens of thousands of dollars by buying direct from reputable sellers. And I

guess it’s a relatively minor thing in the course but I also explain-

Lee How to find reputable sellers?

Andrew Yes, but also how to become a reputable seller because like any huge

marketplace it has a small percentage of sellers who are unscrupulous and

so on, but if you work it smart and you know how to identify the reputable

Page 9: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

sellers, you’ll never have a problem. So far there hasn’t been any item

that we haven’t been able to find on EBay, so I encourage listeners to

check it out from that perspective too, of saving money on things that they

buy. It’s pretty astonishing what you can buy on EBay these days.

Lee Well, I mean, we were talking about EBay’s policies and acceptable items

and I have to ask you, what is EBay’s view of the system that you teach?

Does it break any of their rules?

Andrew Great question, and I get that a lot, as you might imagine, because it’s so

revolutionary and I’m referred to as the Renegade Auction Seller. The

thing is, I have a great relationship with EBay – I’ve actually been trained

as one of their Education Specialists – and I certainly don’t advocate or

encourage that anyone break EBay’s rules. To do that would be short-

sighted and, in all honesty, I would say that would I teach does go to the

edge of some of EBay’s policies and some areas are viewed as gray areas

within EBay, but I definitely encourage people to run their businesses in a

legal, ethical way and, like I said, to break EBay’s rules would just be

pointless. If you’re planning to have a longterm, successful business, stay

within the rules. Yes, go up to the edge of them – there’s nothing wrong

with that – and it makes sense to exploit those things, but don’t go over

that edge, and then you’ll have a successful business.

Lee I’m known to go along with the rules, but to go to the edge and oftentimes

that’s where you’ll find the success. But like you said, if you break

EBay’s rules, they’d probably throw you out pretty quick!

Andrew They absolutely do.

Lee They’ll fire you on the spot!

Page 10: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Absolutely, and I saw that tendency with you. Definitely because of your

entrepreneurial background - you had more of an entrepreneurial

background than many of the candidates that were on the same season of

The Apprentice as you. I love the program; I learned such a lot myself –

not just through the positive things but actually from learning through

other people’s mistakes too, it was very beneficial.

Lee I agree. I also learn a lot from mistakes, even from past contestants.

Andrew Absolutely. Did you have opportunity to review previous episodes?

Lee Yes – I have the first season on DVD, so I watched that. I also watched

some of the other episodes that I could get my hands on and I read the

books – you really get to see Mr Trump looks for, what other mistakes

people fell into previously and you try not to make those mistakes. That’s

not to say that it’s not easy to fall into the same mistakes – it certainly is –

and I found myself doing that at times, you know, people make mistakes

but it’s important to learn from other people’s mistakes and that

sometimes can add years of experience that you don’t actually have.

Andrew Did you actually look at your series afterwards? That must have been

interesting.

Lee Oh, of course, I was like ‘I can’t believe I did that’ and ‘I can’t believe I

came up with that great idea’ so sometimes you watch yourself and it’s

like you’re watching a home video. You know, when you’re looking at it,

you’re like ‘I can’t believe I did that’ and it’s so stressful and you’re not

getting any sleep and you’re not eating much.

Andrew Yeah, I saw that – it’s like you get worn down through the process, don’t

you?

Page 11: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Lee Yes, some of the people even said they were relieved to hear they were

fired.

Andrew I can understand that.

Lee Yeah, so… I know that one of the benefits of your system is vastly

reduced EBay and Paypal fees. Surely they can’t be too happy that that’s

one of the benefits of the system that you teach?

Andrew What I always say about this is that if there’s a choice between paying

more or less fees – legally – which one would you choose?

Lee Of course!

Andrew If you take the advice you can – legally and legitimately – pay less. And,

in the grand scheme of things, out of 200 million or so registered EBay

users, my students aren’t even going to make a dent in the overall profits

of EBay because we’re talking about less than one percent of sellers that I

have influence over in terms of these strategies, so it’s really a tiny drop in

the ocean of the EBay marketplace. I guess they wouldn’t be happy if

everyone was using this system, but they know that they have nothing to

worry about.

Lee Right. And I’ve heard you relate what most EBay sellers are doing to

being invited to a sumptuous buffet, only to ignore the food on the table.

They eat the scraps on the floor and then they just leave. Can you explain

what you mean by that? It’s an interesting metaphore – what do you mean

by that?

Page 12: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Well, I liken it to the fact that most sellers say they look for junk around

the home and they sell that, and that’s the scraps on the floor. That’s fine

to start with but it’s certainly no way to set up or run a business because

everyone runs out of that kind of stuff to sell; you know, there’s a limit to

it. And so most people are blinkered to only see those leftover scraps, as it

were, rather than the much bigger picture of this sumptuous buffet of

profitable items that they could benefit from selling, so that’s basically the

gist of what I meant by that.

Lee We touched on this earlier but I’m an entrepreneur at heart – I attribute a

lot of my success to that – and a lot of people have said that I’m successful

because I have an entrepreneurial spirit. I love discovering interesting and

fun ways of making money, so would you say your Renegade course is

designed for entrepreneurs?

Andrew Oh, absolutely. I definitely believe that having an entrepreneurial leaning

or background in any shape or form is an advantage. You know, if you’re

the sort of person who sits locked in a cubicle and is happy to just do your

nine to five stint and go home and watch tv for the rest of the night, then

this is probably not for you. And I don’t mean to be negative at all,

because that’s absolutely fine – people are different. Entrepreneurial

thinking, as you are well aware, is a certain way of thinking that makes

you more open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, and you’re just

continually thinking outside the box. I’ve also discovered that a lot of

people are content to make just a few hundred or a few thousand extra

dollars each month, in addition to what else they’re doing. Maybe they do

have an entrepreneurial background, but they just want a steady job as

well and my course allows them to do that. So the course caters for both

the serious entrepreneur who’s going to run with it and dominate a

category on EBay - which they can do with the system - as well as the

more casual seller, again someone who has an entrepreneurial leaning, and

Page 13: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

understands that EBay is one of the easiest ways to make a supplementary

income.

Lee Right. And the term ‘Powerseller’ – I mean, to me I feel like I really want

to be a Powerseller, but I understand that you dissuade people from

becoming a Powerseller – why is that?

Andrew Yes, for those of you who don’t know, Powerseller is EBay’s title for

someone who sells more than a thousand dollars worth of stuff for at least

three consecutive months, and once they’ve done that they become a

Powerseller, and they need to maintain that. And there are different levels

of Powerseller, up to someone who sells at least one hundred fifty

thousand dollars worth of goods and services each month.

Lee Wow.

Andrew Now, that all sounds impressive –

Lee Yeah! I want to be a Powerseller!

Andrew Right, well, it’s actually a big myth. What you have to remember, or

understand, is that having that gross income doesn’t necessarily mean that

you’re profitable. You see, you can be a Powerseller by EBay’s

definition, and be making a huge loss at the same time! So being a

Powerseller, in itself, is not as prestigious as it’s made out to be once you

start to analyze what it actually means. That’s one side of it. Actually of

more serious concern to the EBay seller is the fact that once you become a

Powerseller, you immediately attract the attention of other sellers, who

start to copy what you’re doing because there are people who trawl EBay

looking for Powersellers, because they reason ‘these are the people who

are making all the money – I’m just going to copy what they do’. So the

Page 14: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

short answer is, don’t become a Powerseller, because you open yourself

up to be copied. I attained Powerseller status easily within that three

month period when I first started out but then I started to realize, hang on,

what benefits am I getting from being a Powerseller? It’s just a title. And

if it’s the difference between having a successful business and staying

underground, staying under the EBay radar and the radar of predators, as it

were, or having this fancy title – to me it’s a no-brainer. So in the

Renegade Auction Seller course, I discuss this very point in detail and I

also review other reasons why it’s not advisable to be a Powerseller. And

I explain how sellers should be operating as an alternative. So, I think just

this one point alone in this interview probably blows the lid off most EBay

sellers ideas about how to operate!

Lee Exactly. And it seems like your system really teaches from your

experience – I’m curious, what more can you tell me about the Renegade

system?

Andrew It works on the principle that it’s easier to sell to existing customers, kind

of going back to what we were talking about earlier.

Lee About customer service?

Andrew Right. It’s much easier to sell to existing customers than to continually

find new ones, but most people don’t do that – they sell one product after

another after another to different people each time. And all those past

customers – they’re just distant memories. And so my system is about

attracting customers in the first place using Renegade methods, different

methods, and methods that are very inexpensive on EBay fees, and then

continue to sell to them over and over and over again.

Lee Repeat customers.

Page 15: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Exactly. So it’s actually a three-step system - which I refer to as the H3

system - for EBay. Whereas most sellers treat EBay as this online garage

sale – I think that’s very familiar to most people, to view EBay that way.

Lee Of course.

Andrew My system, what it mean is that the seller uses this three-step process to

first of all tap into EBay’s enormous visitor traffic – like we said, bigger

than Google – to hook customers that share an interest in a specific

subject. So effectively, you’re just getting people to raise their hands –

you’re saying, ‘is anyone out there interested in….’ whatever it is. And

they raise their hands and say, ‘yes, that’s me’. Then you quickly grab

them, using the processes that I describe. You hide them off EBay - that’s

the second ‘H’ - in what I like to refer to as a protected zone, so in other

words, other sellers can’t reach them and sell to them.

Lee So you eliminate the competition.

Andrew Right, exactly. And then the third step – the third ‘H’ – is to hold onto

them for many years by continually serving them a very high quality diet

of information-based products or services until their appetite is fully

satisfied. And what I’d like to emphasize is that my system is about

developing a very successful, long-term business. It’s not for the person

who wants a fly-by-night, come and go income, because what you sell has

to be high quality. If you’re selling rubbish, then this isn’t going to work

for you.

Lee And when you look at the system, you do get a lot of information – you

learn when the best time to put a listing up is, when’s the best time to take

down a listing, what’s the best way of selling items on EBay.

Page 16: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Exactly – all the work’s been done for you. This could be years of

research time if you did it yourself but it’s really the shortcut system to

success.

Lee Yeah, and on the tv show – on The Apprentice – we constantly had to be

on our toes or be fired by Mr Trump.

Andrew As we saw! Out of interest, what do you call him now? Do you call him

Mr Trump or..?

Lee I call him Mr Trump, everyone calls him Mr Trump, you know, that’s just

the way it is. Even the people that have been with him for thirty years –

he just commands this respect.

Andrew Oh yeah – such an authority figure, isn’t he?

Lee Oh yes. On the show, as viewers probably saw, the working environment

we were in was continually changing and we had to adapt quickly and I

look at me before, you know, we weren’t eating or sleeping and it was so

fast-paced and in a similar way, EBay strikes me as a continually evolving

marketplace where you have to keep focused and aware of the changes.

Andrew Well, I quickly realized early on that I would have to provide a means for

sellers to keep up to date with the latest changes on EBay because it’s a

fluid marketplace and obviously there’s new and successful strategies that

I continually develop and so my solution to that challenge to keep up to

date with all the constant changes was to develop a monthly printed

publication, which is called the Renegade Auction Seller Insider. And

that’s a newsletter; we have monthly interview CD’s with successful

underground EBay sellers and entrepreneurs, like yourself, that most

Page 17: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

people would never know about because they’re underground. So these

are people that you would never ever come across if you were just

searching EBay – we’ve developed good relationships with these people

and they know that it’s very very strictly limited information – it’s not

going to be broadcast out there to millions of people. And this Auction

Seller Insider newsletter, it covers these Renegade strategies that are

distributed to some of the top sellers on EBay to keep them informed and

educated on little-known ways to profit from EBay and one of the things

that I’ve discovered is that there are countless ways to profit from EBay.

You know, people get into this trap of thinking well, you just sell one

product…

Lee When, really, you run into the same problems we spoke about earlier.

Andrew Right. So there’s plenty of room for all of us still to profit from EBay and

so, by means of this newsletter, these sellers all get to share this Insider

information. They receive it way before other sellers even identify these

tricks and tips and techniques, and so it gives them a real positive

advantage.

Lee That’s great. We talked about it a little earlier – one of the other aspects

of The Apprentice was that – quite unique for our group - we were able to

go back and get the DVD and watch all the previous episodes, because the

show had already been aired several times so we were able to learn from

the mistakes of other contestants, and there were a lot of them. And sure,

we made our mistakes as well, but that was definitely a big help to be able

to go back and say, wow, that was a huge mistake – I don’t want to fall

into that pitfall, and so how important do you think it is for EBay sellers to

be able to learn from the mistakes of other sellers?

Page 18: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Andrew Yeah, I think that’s a great point that you bring up and you’re very

sensible and wise to go back and watch them – you can learn so much. I

see so many sellers making fundamental mistakes, to the extent where

really it’s a bit like the blind leading the blind because you’ve got this

situation where, without exaggerating, you’ve got 99.9999% of EBay

sellers who are doing it wrong. And even though some of them are

making money – and some of them are making decent money – they’re

actually doing it the hard way, because when you talk to them, they’ve got

countless employees and big warehouses and yes, they’re making money

but at a cost, and they could be doing it so much easier. Within my EBay

business, it’s myself and my wife – that’s all we need. Who wants to be

bogged down with employees? It’s a hassle. And so, it’s essential not to

assume others are doing it right just because you see them selling on

EBay. Like I said, when you start to get into the nitty gritty, you realize

that actually, they’re exasperated at how complicated their business is.

And we’ve established already that a lot of people are losing money, even

though they retain the Powerseller status, the title. You know, nice to

have that, but they’re losing money! So we want to avoid all those

mistakes and that’s what the course is about.

Lee So with mistakes, can you give us some examples? What are people doing

wrong?

Andrew Sure, yeah, how long have we got?! I don’t mean that unkindly at all – it’s

actually frustrating to me, it really is, when I see the terrible situations that

sellers find themselves in. It makes me upset. Let’s talk about an

example: one common mistake I see people make over and over again is

in setting a reserve price for an auction. I honestly think that EBay should

just scrap that facility or feature because reserves are a complete waste of

time. All they do is turn people away because no one wants to be bothered

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with bidding on an auction where there’s a reserve, because if you have an

auction with a reserve, you never know where that reserve is going to be.

Lee Oh, they don’t tell you that.

Andrew No, they don’t tell you. And so you end up with a situation that benefits

no one. Another common mistake I see sellers make is to copy someone

else’s image – you know the little thumbnail gallery picture?

Lee Yeah, yeah.

Andrew So what happens with that is that you end up with ten, twenty, sometimes

more different sellers with the exact same product image. And not only

does that turn buyers away because they can’t see a real picture of the

item, because they just think it’s a stock photo and sometimes it is a stock

photo, the person who does have a unique photo – maybe the one person

out of those thirty or so sellers who are selling the same item – that one

person immediately stands out from the crowd, simply because it’s the

only one that’s different!

Lee Right, I’ve seen that and it’s so important for people to be able to

differentiate themselves and it’s no different with EBay I’m sure – you

really have to be able to differentiate yourself.

Andrew Right. If you’ve got thirty different auctions listed and they’re all at the

same price and you’ve got one with a different picture – a high quality

picture of the item – that looks as though it’s actually been taken by the

seller, and then you click on the listing and the seller gives a very nice and

long description of the item, you know, it’s a no-brainer. And so people

think the only way they can compete is on price – that’s complete rubbish.

You can actually charge more and if you do those simple things that we’ve

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just mentioned, you will actually attract more sales than those other

sellers.

Lee It’s no different to the tv show – I mean, how do you get on The

Apprentice? You have to differentiate yourself from a million other

people. So it’s a basic thing that you have to be able to differentiate

yourself from your competitors, from other people, and like you said, it

doesn’t always necessarily have to go on price.

Andrew Yes, in fact, with a lot of people, it’s the lemming approach – they look at

what everyone else is doing and they think ‘oh, I’ll do that as well’.

Lee Right, and they just follow along.

Andrew Yes, and then you just end up with carbon copy listings with nothing to

make you stand out. Like we said, to you and I, it just seems so obvious

that people shouldn’t be doing that and I hope that that point comes across

in this conversation because if people go away with nothing else from this

than the point that we’ve just discussed, then they’ll be infinitely more

successful on EBay.

Lee Andrew, how can people get your EBay course and the complete

newsletter updates?

Andrew Well, the website to visit is www.renegadeauctionseller.com and that site

has all the details of course which is by far – and I hate to say this, because

it sounds self-promoting – but it’s been referred to by others as the most

comprehensive course on selling on EBay ever produced. And certainly

it’s been years of my life in terms of my research and experience in

putting out this course.

Page 21: How to sell on eBay - Lee Bienstock Interviews Andrew Lock

Lee It certainly sounds like that.

Andrew And of course, I’m very flattered to have had that description – it really

does cover just about every unconventional way of profiting from EBay.

So I think people have realized from this interview that this is not about

doing EBay in the same way that everybody else is doing it – it’s

completely renegade, it’s completely unconventional. And readers can

review the course – risk-free – and there’s a nice guarantee on it.

Lee Really?

Andrew And they can decide what method appeals to them the most.

Lee Okay, so again the website is www.renegadeauctionseller.com. Thanks

for being willing to go on the hot seat today, Andrew, and I wish you

continued success in your business. It sounds like it’s going awfully well.

Andrew Oh, well, thank you, Lee – I’ve enjoyed our conversation and I wish you

all the best in your-

Lee I want to go out and start selling on EBay now! I’ll let you know how it

goes.

Andrew Great.