The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The New Best Way to Make Money Reselling Online?!⏐Ep. #245
Episode Date: November 10, 2025Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com�...� and join my new community at https://TKOwners.com━If you want to learn more, join Shannon’s mastermind at https://shannonjean.com/mastermind━In this episode I’m back with Shannon Jean to dive deep into the world of live selling and how creators are making serious money on apps like Whatnot, Poshmark Live, and eBay Live. Shannon breaks down how liquidation deals on sites like Hanes’ auction platform let you buy truckloads of brand-new apparel for pennies per item and resell them live without taking a single photo. We also talk about tools like Whatnot Spy that let you track and reverse engineer other sellers’ auctions, plus a wild vending-machine idea that turns Amazon returns into “mystery box” machines.You can find Shannon on X: @ShannonJean (https://x.com/ShannonJean)Check out Shannon’s Free Auction Starter Guide and see every auction we mentioned at https://shannonjean.com/auctionsAnd learn more at: https://shannonjean.com/Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Five pallets of toddler t-shirts, 4,300 units.
They're selling for five cents each, $200.
That changes everything.
No one's paying attention to it yet.
This stuff sells for nothing, and there's multiple brands out there that are selling this product for pennies, literally.
These deals are up there all the time.
This was on the side of the road in Germany.
It's basically a big vending machine with lost packages.
That is amazing.
I want some of those.
People would buy that.
Oh, all day long.
Mr. Boxes really sell, and you're selling.
selling an opportunity. You can track the entire stream of any auction. You get all the analytics.
You even know who they're selling to. You get everything. It's just a game changer, dude. It's amazing.
What is this app cost? It's free. How do you start from scratch on? All right. If you've never heard of
whatnot, you might be living under a rock. It is the live selling app that just raised a round of
funding at a $12 billion valuation. Live selling is here to stay. It's not going anywhere.
And of course, Shannon Jean knows all about it. So we talked about how to go from zero to
live selling pro on whatnot and comparable apps. We also talked about bin stores, buying Amazon
returns, Costco returns, pennies per item, putting them in vending machines. Oh man, headache
worthy stuff. You're going to absolutely love this episode. Please share with a friend.
I want to talk about lower dollar items. This is, we're looking at the Haynes liquidation site.
And Haynes makes all kinds of, you know, everybody knows probably underwear to sweatshirts to
t-shirts to active wear, all kinds of stuff.
And they have this massive liquidation site.
There's, like right now, you have a truckload of men's, uh, women's hoodies, sweatshirts,
joggers.
They say, which is a lie, that their MSRP is $442,000.
And, you know, I would say cut it in half.
So, you know, maybe it's, it's 220 grand, which I think that's still too much.
So let's cut it in half again and say it's, you know, 100 grand.
Right now it's the bid is $5,000.
So 1% those 39 cents per unit.
Okay.
Wow.
Because instead of competing with like, we don't really want to price this against Target,
we want to be closer like T.J. Max, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or, you know, eBay and whatnot.
Yeah.
And, you know, all those kinds of places.
Typically, I would steer people away from this because it's like this deal here.
It's 13,000 pieces, right?
It's a massive project.
It's 24 pallets or so of this product.
And I've done this before.
I did it with NFL license gear.
and very profitable, but a ton of work to sort, ship, all that kind of stuff.
What I think changes the game now is the growth in live selling, where you don't have to take pictures.
Number one, there's two tracks here.
You should be wholesaling this stuff to other sellers as well.
If you buy this product, and it'll sell for like under a dollar, okay, it'll be less than a dollar per item, I'm sure.
I watch this each week.
So you should be finding other retailers that you could sell it to for $2 an item.
people that want to buy it with screen printers.
Screen printers all want to do this or other people that say, well, I can't take a truckload,
but I can buy a pallet, you know, and so you could, you could sell a couple of pallets of this stuff
and get your original investment back.
But live selling, and maybe you're supplying the live sellers if you don't want to be
on whatnot or TikTok shop or Poshmark Live or eBay Live, it eliminates the prep.
It eliminates having to set this thing out, take a picture, take 12 pictures, create a listing,
do all that. It takes so much time.
Yeah. I've never thought of that.
Like the time you would normally spend to take pictures and Lissa on eBay is just time you're spending live selling it.
You're in front of the camera going, I'm selling boxes of 10.
Here's the hoodie.
We're going to start the bid at eight bucks.
And they just go from right there.
And you watch it.
It's another, again, don't watch Netflix, watch auctions.
Go download the What Not app and start watching people every night and start watching people sell.
a pair of shoes every 25 seconds, every 30 seconds.
Over and over.
Start crunching the numbers on how much they're making.
Boom, boom.
Okay, got these shoes.
Da-da-da-da-da.
Customer turned.
Here's what the shoe looks.
They're holding it up.
And then it's like, boom, sold.
Okay, great.
We'll go to the next one.
Da-da-da-da.
And then the next day somebody comes in and there's all this product.
They put it in a, you know, a plastic bag and out the door it goes.
That changes everything from this, especially this kind of product.
And no one's paying attention to it yet.
It's very, because this stuff sells from.
nothing and there's multiple brands out there not just haines this is just the example i'm using
here that are selling this product for pennies pennies on the dot literally you know like here's five
pallets of toddler t-shirts 300 units they're selling for five cents each that's an opening bid
there's only one bid 200 it's going to sell for not much more than that so that live selling
in the way you start to learn about live selling let me see what else today oh yeah this is another
one that we'll keep talking about live selling. Once you get registered on the Haynes auction liquidation
site, and if you want the link, just go to shannon gene.com slash auctions, and I'll get you the link.
These are men, these are scrubs, brand new scrubs. I didn't even know what Haynes made made scrubs.
But when I logged in today, they're like, hey, Shannon, do you want to buy scrubs? Of course I do.
So you can just make an offer. There's all these loads, 300 pieces, men's three pocket vina,
you know, over over and over. You get the sizes, you get the whole thing. You get, I don't think that's a UPC.
but it's their model number or something like that.
How many?
All these loads, 300, 300, they say their retail's 30 bucks.
Maybe they're worth $8.
So you can come in here and just say, okay, I'm going to pay 2%.
And I'll buy 300.
And 2% is like an acceptable offer.
Like that's in the ballpark for what people accept.
That kind of stuff.
Yeah, 2%, 3, 4, especially for apparel.
It's so inflate.
In any other industry, it's like, hey, how much would you offer?
98% less than what you're asking?
deal I'll take it sold yeah but they just want that stuff out of their warehouse dude they've got
yeah somebody's calling them going hey look there's 10 truckloads more coming in you you where's it
got to go it's got to go the holding costs are so expensive this is why fb a amazon fb a they're like
hey janet we're shipping your stuff back because it's not selling you you're going to pay us and we're
getting rid of it because it's in their warehouse so you can submit these offers these deals are
up there all the time you can do this for home depo you can do everything it's it's amazing it's amazing
But what I'm real excited about is for live selling, we're talking about, this is a new Chrome extension.
It's called a whatnot spy.
It's made by a company called Resale Bot.
And I know the developer, that Resale Bot app is amazing.
I used it when I sold 7,000 handbags up on Poshmark to keep all my whole closet, my store running.
But you can track all the entire stream of any auction.
It pulls out.
you get their sales tracking you get the feet you get up these updates you get the total sales revenue
what they're giving away you can monitor multiple streams and you get all the analytics so you can
like just do this backward so you can go well this guy's selling shoes well I'm going to go
well this guy selling haynes sweatshirts is Shannon really full of it or is that real you go find
somebody you search for haines go to whatnot launch this app the the uh what's it called what not spy
launch this app, pull all this data.
You find out you even know who they're selling to.
You get the buyers.
You get everything in a spreadsheet that you can download this thing.
It's just a game changer, dude.
It's amazing.
What is this app cost?
It's free.
He sells a product called Resale Bot, which I highly recommend.
And if you're going to get into it.
But right now, this is just a free extension.
Walk me through an example of how you could really reverse engineer someone else
or how you could monetize with a tool like this.
Yeah.
So what I would do.
like I'm intrigued with this Haynes product, but I don't have the data yet to say,
is it worth buying 9,000 pieces or whatever because it's such a massive load.
Now, I know from a wholesale level, I could sell pallets, but that's not, let's just say,
we're going to just do live.
So I would go to What Not.
I would search for Haynes because I know other people are doing this on whatever level.
I would bookmark those sellers and then get, I would turn on notifications, get alerts
when they're starting to sell.
I'd go up.
I'd launch the What Not Spy and I'd start screening.
I'd let their show, maybe their show is an hour long. And I wouldn't, at the end of that show,
I'd have all this data. Is it really selling for eight bucks like Shannon says? No. Maybe it's
selling for five bucks, but I've seen it. It's, it's going to sell for more. But you'll have the
data. Then sort it. Okay, what's the average sale price of this brand new Haynes T-shirts or
toddler shirts, whatever category you're going to be in? And it'll tell, it tells you the decision.
It will tell you what to bid. So it'll say, all right, this, this guy sold in,
an hour, he sold 200 pieces, and the average price was $6.80. Well, then you go back to your,
where are we at? No, that was that. You go back here and say, oh, sold for $6.80 on average.
I'm going to pay, if this is 40 cents, there's going to be freight. How much with the freight?
Okay, I'm going to do this for, you know, $1.83. The freight's going to be the most expensive
part of all these deals. I'm going to do it for $1.803. What are the, what other fees,
handling fees? Okay, I'm going to do them for $3. You're going to make $5 a piece.
So what do you do as a brand new whatnot seller? Because I think a lot of whatnot is having like followers, people that are notified when you have a live event. How do you start from scratch on what? Yeah, yeah. You don't go buy a truckload of Haynes to start from scratch. You sell stuff you already own. You start holding shows. You do giveaways. But the best thing you can do is start surrounding yourself with other people selling on whatnot. Finding, you know, we have people in our mastermind that are doing whatnot sales. And we do workshops and it's like, hey,
here's how you do it.
Here's what you learn.
You have to build an audience.
You have to build a reputation.
It's just like similar to eBay.
If you open it up an eBay account, they're going to limit you, right?
Because they don't know you.
So you want to start small.
You want to sell stuff.
You don't want to go buy things.
Just go register for those accounts today.
Start a little bit.
Start buying.
Start getting some things.
You should definitely buy 10 items and leave good feedback.
And they'll get view feedback so you can start building up a score.
And slowly building your credibility.
You have to start today.
You can't buy and then wait, right?
So that's what you have to do.
I've heard that What Not is trying to make a name for itself by being a lot more seller-friendly
as opposed to eBay hate sellers, basically.
Is that what you've experienced?
My experience with eBay is they don't hate sellers anymore.
They used to, but now they're very seller-friendly.
And there's ways that you need to connect with, like if you're selling an eBay and let's say
you're selling in the apparel category or the luxury goods category.
Find the manager.
You have to find the manager.
the category manager and connect with them.
Otherwise, you're nobody, but you connect with them on LinkedIn and don't ask them
anything.
Just say, hey, I'm here.
I'm selling.
I'm great.
Just want you to give you heads up.
If there's anything ever I could do for you, you'd like people to speak at a conference
or share their experience, I'd love to help.
That's how you start to level up.
If you don't do that, eBay, are they going to side with you in many cases?
They are, they are very, yeah, they're very buyer-centric from dispute, right?
Just like Amazon.
Because they're going to tell you.
There's a lot more buyers than sellers, period.
They're going to tell you, Shannon, you may be right, but it doesn't matter.
There's a level of the business that you do that you have to eat.
It's just inevitable.
If you've never been in business for, you're not going to win every time.
It's not going to happen.
And you're going to let your ego, you're going to get your ego out of it.
And you're just going to have to understand that this is a business decision.
And two out of a hundred sales I make are not going to go well.
And I may just have to give them the money back and not even get the product back.
and that's going to impact your profit.
But you don't have time to fight those battles every day.
I see it where people get so wrapped up and they get so angry and they fight.
But you just have to let it go.
Just take a deep breath.
That person doesn't know you.
You're an unknown.
They don't know that it's Chris or Shannon selling stuff.
They think you're some huge company that's not going to, you know, they're not going to miss it.
You just let it go and keep moving on and go sell 98 more items.
Yeah.
Do you do anything with like sports cards, Pokemon cards on whatnot, like live breaks or anything?
like that? I don't, but I know there people, we know people that are doing that now,
which I think is a great opportunity. Yep. Yeah. All that stuff. So what not seems to be more
seller friendly. I think so. It's similar to what Poshmark is very seller friendly too. No returns.
What not. No returns. That's a big deal. Now, just because they say that doesn't mean you're not
going to get returns. Because if they, if people complain enough, you're going to solve a problem.
Just go yeah, go ahead. Send it back. You know, it's not worth it. It's just the culture. It's the culture.
They're trying to grow quick. They're trying to make a name for themselves.
you're on the ground floor with whatnot.
It's similar, like McCarrey was similar,
but they've really scaled back.
They had a hard time.
But whatnot is where you need to be right now.
I also think you should learn to sell live on Poshmark.
They do lots of different things.
You don't even have to sell it.
They have ways to piggyback your live items with other sellers now,
which I think is really cool.
And I'm not saying that you need to get up and sell it.
You may need to hire somebody to be your streamer,
to be in front.
Someone has a certain look you've got.
Right. Yeah. Or your wife or your kid or whoever. You know, you can be the brains behind the
operation, but you need to have somebody that is good at talking and jumping around and being on camera,
maybe some music in the background because you're trying to get these people excited. You're,
you're trying to do the opposite. You want them to buy with emotion, which is a huge mistake.
You want to. Buy with emotion. Copyright Chan and Gene. That's right. And so you flip the whole thing.
You invert. And so with that live selling, you're getting going. It's like an auction. And people get
crazy at auctions and they don't want to let it go and I want that thing and it's only one more
dollar and that's perfect over and over and over. I want to go back and look at that. Okay. So the,
the exercise auction sold for 535 bucks. It was totally wrong. But still, it's amazing.
Is it true that Amazon's starting to get into live selling? Have you heard about that? I haven't,
but I wouldn't. They have to, right? Yeah. I heard that they're going to be working directly with
big brands like Nike, like basically using individuals to sell big brands like Nike live.
I love it.
That could change the game.
That could totally change the game.
Amazon's offering their customer returns directly on their website now.
You can buy, you can go buy a palette of stuff.
They don't even know what it is.
They just give you a rough, it'll be in this category and you can buy it.
And then they have like some long term window to deliver it to you.
Can I show you a video that we just, I just posted on my Instagram like an hour ago?
Yes.
I want to get your real-time thoughts on this.
Yeah.
We just posted this like an hour ago.
I just want to get your, I know you haven't seen this yet because we've been talking since it was posted.
I want to get your real-time take on this business idea.
Okay.
All right.
Here we go.
This is in Germany, but it needs to be everywhere.
This was on the side of the road in Germany is basically a big vending machine with lost packages.
You can buy packets full of returned items and lost packages.
You can buy these vending machines from Facebook marketplace or any number of other places that sell them for other uses.
but sell them for other uses.
Why not put those two things together?
You're not selling products.
You're selling mystery, intrigues.
It's no different than people breaking packs of Pokemon or baseball cards.
Whole business plan here.
In today's...
That is amazing.
I want some of those.
That is...
Yeah, that is wild.
People would buy that.
Oh, all day long.
Because you're selling the mystery...
This mystery box is really sell,
and you're selling an opportunity.
And it's almost like a portable bin store, right?
The bin stores are, you know, $7 an item,
$6 the next day, five, whatever, and they sell.
That thing, you sit down, you don't have to staff it.
You just bring and fill it up.
Who's that kid on X?
Ethan Cohen that's got the bar, you know, vending machines.
Yeah, yeah.
He'd be perfect.
Dude, those things would be amazing.
You split the revenue with some places that you sell it.
You put them in specific areas, maybe like laundromats or some kind of place.
And you could have different ones.
You could have, it's a $10 one.
This is, you know, $30.
These are all the way up.
And you have a golden one like $100,000.
maybe a hundred bucks is your peak yeah i don't know i love the idea you could get you could get an
iphone in there you could get a pack of hair ties yeah you just don't know you don't know you don't know
but either way they're enjoying it they're enjoying yeah and you have to i would think i don't know
if you could just stuff it and then well it looked in there they were just stuffing them on
they didn't know what it was in they didn't know what was in yeah i think i think you could
actually adjust that and uh know you would know the seller would know what's in there so it would because
you don't want to
somebody spending 40 bucks and getting a pack of hair ties. You want some, you know, you want to make it like,
oh, I did okay. I did okay. Yeah. How much, how much do the, like if you were to buy a palette of
Amazon returns that are in like the polymailers? What, what's like the per unit cost you might pay for that?
A buck, three bucks, five? Less. Oh, less. Really? Yeah, like it depends on the, it depends on the
category. They have like they call smalls. I was going to say that. Yeah. If it's electronics, it might be
30 bucks.
Yes, but the smalls are, yeah, no manifest.
These bin guys, they don't look at manifest.
They just like per item costs.
And it's, it's pennies because they have to handle it, right?
And then there's, and all their costs associated.
That's how they can sell it for, you know, $6 on day one, five, four, three, two, one,
all the way out the doors, just less than the dollar.
See, I would just put like, like on the glass, on the plexiglass over the item.
I would put like electronics, clothing, shoes, just so they knew the category.
and then there was a price attached to each category.
Yeah.
And then I would even have like upsell options because if they, if they buy one.
Yeah, buy three for.
Right.
Because if they buy one and it's, they're not like thrilled about it, they're not going to
buy another one.
Yes.
But if like if before they pay, it's like, listen, it's one for 10.
Yeah.
Or three for 20.
Yes.
You know, they're probably going to buy three.
Of course.
And then not just that, not just that.
But then they have a higher likelihood of one of those three being a banger and they
come back and they'll forget.
And they'll forget the other ones that weren't a banger.
Yes.
Because that's human.
Because everybody, yeah, everybody wants to.
One person buying out the whole thing.
It could be.
Everyone wants to tell, share what the good deal is.
Everybody wants to.
And they will fool themselves into thinking that too.
Well, I didn't pay.
I didn't get this, but I only paid this.
This was a great deal, though.
I got this.
And they leave out that they spent $60 searching for that one item.
But that's okay.
That's part of the fun.
It's like on the, it's like being at the carnival, you know,
and buying the spending 20 bucks to win the big stuff to animal that the,
that the carnival paid $4 for.
Yeah.
That's,
I love it.
What I just showed,
you can buy that directly from Amazon.com now,
like a pallet full of returns.
Yeah,
but you can,
yeah,
you can buy,
you can buy those.
To get your money down,
you need to buy contracts.
And that contract would be like,
I'll take a truckload a week or whatever,
at this price point in these categories.
That's,
that's how you,
that's how these guys really drive it down
because they make a commitment.
And then they can say,
okay,
great. We got Chris is going to take a truckload every week. Shannon. We've got 500. Just imagine.
Do you know, e-commerce returns are 20 to 30 percent and going up. Yeah. So just imagine. And I will tell you,
Amazon is not the greatest, for my type of business, it's not the best seller because they just take
everything back and it's just like, it's chaos. But they're like the opposite of Costco. The quality of
Costco is so much higher. But for that kind of business or a bin store business,
I think it's amazing.
If I own bin stores,
I would own those machines.
Because you see the line outside the bin store, right?
They start lining up because you open up on Thursdays or whatever.
There's hundreds of people waiting because it's a treasure hunt.
But if you,
in your line,
I would have 10 of those machines.
Oh.
Or go find a bin store and put machines out there.
Yep.
And it's symbiotic, right?
People will come just for the machines that end up walking into the bin store and vice versa.
Yep.
And you have,
make sure you have cameras.
out there so you can show it when the guy picks up the Xbox.
Yes.
And you're just like, boom, that's money, right?
And you have a TV showing it right above those, those devices.
Not just that, but it's probably a good idea to plant your own Xbox in there to ensure.
Oh, absolutely.
Of course.
You seed it.
You have to seed it because you want that excitement because that's going to drive people to it.
You want your kids, and you're driving down through town, the kids to their parents.
Dad, can we just go by the bin box machine, please?
last time so-and-so I knew a friend of a friend, my cousin's buddy, won an Xbox, and I want to win one.
So these people that own these bin stores, are they mostly just buying from Amazon?
Is that the strategy?
Oh, they, Target, Target.
Yeah, because on B-stock, you can buy contracts as well because B-stock has all these
relationships.
So if you go to like, you can buy contracts from just about every vendor, Target, Home Depot.
So if you level up, like you're buying pallets, pallets, pallets, then you start buying individual trucks
like we talked about truck loads.
The next level, if you're really doing massive volume,
is you can get contracts to say, yeah,
I'll take a truck a week or five trucks a week or whatever it is.
That's how you scale it.
Because they're going to give you better prices
because it's just repeatable for them.
And they just factor it in.
And their biggest problem they have
is there's 10 more truck,
100 more truck loads coming in behind them.
You are solving the problem.
Always great to get together.
If you want to learn more,
Channingein.com slash auctions,
you can download,
I have a free auction starter guide.
I'll give you every link to every auction we started we talked about today.
I have a $5 mastermind.
We've got about 1,800 people in there.
So come hang out.
It's only five bucks.
You can learn everything you want to know about being a reseller.
And then you can turn around and help other people that are changing their life too.
It's fun.
You have a great time.
Beautiful.
Awesome, man.
All right.
Thank you, Shannon.
Yeah.
Thank you, Chris.
Always fun.
