739 – Would you pay $100 for a used pizza box?: Tom talks Ebay Pizza Box

Episode 739 – Ebay Pizza Box
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 739 of Screw the Commute podcast. Let me ask you, would you buy an empty pizza box for 100 bucks? Or would you buy a used bra? Well, many people would. And I'm going to tell you how I sold one last week. Well, wait a minute. That was a pizza box, right? Not a bra. I saved the bra for myself. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 738. That was Anachronisms, which is an episode that I did about a cool and simple way to get attention for your products and services. And any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number. That was 738. All right. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:23] All right, let's get to the main event. So I sold an empty pizza box last week. All right. Now, you would not think that there is a much of a demand for pizza boxes that are empty. All right. And I guess that's not really true if you had a pizza shop, but I don't think you would stay in business too long if the boxes for your pizza cost 100 bucks each. Right. So how did I come about to sell an empty pizza box in the first place? And what the heck could you learn from what I did? I mean, you know, this show is about entrepreneurship.

[00:02:03] And even though I heavily point towards digital marketing, I'm okay with you making money from some physical products. I mean, heck, I used to do that exclusively long before you could even think about selling digital products. Now, before I tell you how I did it, let me give you the backstory. So I have a storage facility that's ten feet by 20 feet, and it costs me $221 a month. So what's in it? Well, a massive number of storage totes I inherited after my mother died. I mean, the whole place is floor to ceiling with these things. And I've been storing them for years and pretty much getting sick and tired of paying the $221 a month for the storage facility. Now, I knew the kind of stuff that was in the totes because my mother labeled them. So last week I finally broke down and I went to the storage place and I couldn't even remember how to get in to the gate. But but I finally got in and I opened the door to the storage thing and I grabbed two small totes marked McDonald's. See, my mother has been saving. I guess you'd call collecting McDonald's stuff since the mid 1960s. I opened the first. I got him home and I opened the small tote. I could barely believe what I was seeing. There were brand new McDonald's phones in there, sets of McDonald's Hot Wheels and NASCAR stuff. You know, McDonald's teamed up with NASCAR at one point.

[00:03:40] Brand new writing tablets with stickers, boxes of unopened colored markers. Mcdonald's serving trays, holiday plates, even apple pie boxes and a and a bunch of other stuff, including McDonald's pizza box. I don't remember McDonald's ever selling pizza, but apparently they did in the early 1990s. That's where all this particular tote was dated from. So now it's the time. I tell you how I sold the pizza box. All right. Here it is. Ready? Ebay. See, I used to be a power seller on eBay doing about $7,000 a month, and I got away from it when I went mostly digital. But I have maintained my accounts for mostly buying stuff. I buy a lot of stuff. Off eBay. And I'm sure many of you have stuff laying around that you could turn into cash just by selling it on eBay. And I'm going to tell you a super trick to see how much to sell your stuff for. So let's use the pizza box for an example. I had no idea if this pizza box and it had a copyright notice on it of 1994. I had no idea if there were thousands of them floating around making it worth maybe a dollar or so, or if it was kind of rare. So here's what I did and what you can easily do for whatever stuff you have that you don't know if it's junk or not. So when you go to search for something on eBay, to the right of the search box is a little link that says advanced search.

[00:05:23] You click on it and then search for your item. But you check a box that brings up listings for that product that actually sold in the last 90 days and how much they sold for. So I couldn't find this pizza box at all. All right. So that's a good sign. That means it's the market's not flooded with them. So I did a regular Google search outside of eBay and could only find one of them for sale anywhere on earth on a collectible site. And it was listed at $45 plus $10 shipping. I'm thinking I just hit hit the mother lode here. So I went back to eBay and I listed my box as very rare in the description and everything. And within one day, someone bought it at a buy it. Now price of $65 plus shipping. I was over the moon happy. And that's when. Here we go, folks. My reeducation began. All right. See, I hadn't sold anything on eBay for years. I couldn't believe how easy they have now made it just to list an item. So I also bought the postage off of them at a 24% discount from going to the post office. I'm just thrilled about this. I'm so happy. So then I packed up the pizza box so that I mean, if a nuclear attack hit, the empty pizza box wouldn't get damaged because you remember, this is pretty much a one of a kind kind of collectible.

[00:07:04] And then I headed to the post office. I had the prepaid postage I got from eBay on the box, and I thought, you know, I should just double check everything's cool because I hadn't done this for a long time. So I waited in line and I went up to the counter. All right. And apparently the post office people think that Idaho, which is my shipping destination for this pizza box, I don't know. Apparently they don't know that it's in the USA because they wanted between $51 and $92 to ship this extremely light but oversized package. Yikes. So I took the box back and I went to the local pack and ship place thinking, Oh, well, they have all the carriers and this will be way better. No, it wasn't. So I went back to the post office or I actually went online and I found that there's a flat rate box big enough to fit the pizza box if I folded it flat and everything. So I went to the post office, drove back to the post office, got one of those boxes. Drove back home. Unpacked my first box and then folded down the pizza box. So everything was nice when they opened it back up and I got it to fit in the flat rate envelope and that was still $22.80. So I headed back to the post office to dump it off. So the value of this box with its cost and plus shipping, plus me running all over town three times and burning gas was about 100 bucks, which paid for my education on larger items and what I'd have to charge and the shipping and all that stuff.

[00:08:50] But even with all these problems, I mean, I'm typically in a learning mode. I said to myself, okay, I have to learn about shipping prices, but I'm sitting on a gold mine with all this stuff in the storage facility to sell. And my original goal was just to get rid of this stuff so I wouldn't have to pay the $221 a month storage fee. But what I don't want you to get too excited for me because in the last ten years I've spent over 20,000 bucks storing all this stuff. So I got a long way to go to break even if I ever even do. All right. But here's the deal, folks. There are still a booming amount of traffic on eBay where you can make some cash flow from things you got laying around the house or you can get free stuff off of Craigslist and resell it on eBay. Believe it or not, you don't have to have a big collectible collection to do this. I know one lady that goes to yard sales every Saturday. She takes between 80 and 100 bucks. Her name is Lynn Raleigh. And she uses that advanced trick. So she sees something. Let's say she sees a Tonka, one of those metal nice real toys for going for five bucks at the yard sale.

[00:10:06] Well, she might go on eBay and use the advanced search on her cell phone or tablet and see it's selling for 50 plus shipping. So then she'll buy it. But if it's selling for $7 on eBay, well, then she wouldn't buy it. See? So. So. And then she's clearing she nets about 1000 to $1100 a week, just doing this one day on Saturday and then listing the other stuff and hauling it to the post office. That's the last time I heard of how much she was making. Now, I met another guy. I was buying something off of eBay, and I thought, This guy's really weird because I'm down in his basement and he's got he's got hundreds and hundreds of bras hanging from the ceiling in his basement. And I'm thinking, Oh my God, he sucks you in on to buy something and kills you and hangs your underwear up. I'm thinking all these things, right? But it turns out his daughter sells $200,000 a year of used bras on eBay. She goes to thrift stores, buys them all up, cleans them up, repairs them, and resells them on eBay. The odd sizes go the best. So I'm not really kidding about that. So I wouldn't buy used bras. You know, I like new ones myself. You know, people ask me, Tom, how much weight are you trying to lose? I said, I just want to get down to a B cup.

[00:11:29] So so if you want some cash flow and again, you're working online and a lot of this stuff, you don't even have to have a PayPal that eBay is starting to collect the money for you and do all that stuff. So you just have to hook up a checking account so they can pay you and they bend over backwards to teach you how to list things. And it's just so easy compared to what it used to be. So so that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Sell some stuff on eBay, get a turn some some of your junk into somebody else's thing. And you might be surprised. You might have stuff at the house that people are collectible. Maybe you have some old junk glass or something your parents had and left you glassware China or whatever, and you got to be careful shipping that stuff so it doesn't break. But but there's all kinds of things that people will pay for. You just be amazed. There's millions and millions of things. If you go over on eBay and just look at the stuff that people were buying and selling, it's just amazing. But this kind of stuff, especially if you have it already, you have no cost of goods sold. It's all profit except for the listing fees. And and you can make the other people pay the shipping. Just be careful on how you do the shipping. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll see you on eBay.