How to sell replicas on ebay
how I got caught selling counterfeit products on ebay | EP 2
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hey guys welcome to daddicated this is vlog episode two and in this video
i wanna tell you how i got caught selling counterfeit cell phone cases on ebay
if you stick around i'll have that story at the end but first i want to start with a book
recommendation so for the past couple years i've been setting goals to read
an x amount of number of books so like this year i'm trying to read 12 books one book per month
anyway and i recently finished a book called work energy it's a self-improvement
productivity type of book uh based on basically the work energy that drives us to complete our
goals and the author uh that writes this book he's a he started off as a internet entrepreneur
he started with a blog and he kind of grew his business and right now he
has a business called income school and that's kind of how i found him
where he they teach people how to do niche websites blog websites and make money with them
anyway long story short he's got a lot of stories in there about their beginnings and and just in
general it's very interesting to listen to i definitely enjoyed it i'll have the links to
the book in the description below if you guys are interested in reading it i used audible
so if you want to check out audible too it's great i drive a lot so i get to listen to books if
i have the time anyway the other thing i recently watched was called a social dilemma
it's a documentary about social media platforms it's basically a bunch of executives that
used to work some of them helped develop some of these platforms and it talks about how
how a lot of these social media apps affect us and what was interesting that i didn't know is that a
lot of these programmers that work for these platforms they actually have to go through um
a psychology class psychology yeah i think it's psychology anyway where they learn about
how our human mind works you know which something your general public probably
is not aware of and they basically use that to program their algorithms and machine learning
to where it almost sounds like that you know these platforms know more about us
than we know about ourselves which is kind of scary if you think about
and as a result why a lot of us are addicted to a certain level
with these platforms so anyway especially if you have kids uh that are getting a little bit older
i recommend you watching that it's called social dilemma i believe it's on netflix
but i'm sure you can find it somewhere else anyway if you made it this far here goes my ebay story
about six seven years ago i think it was still iphone 5 or 4 or 6. i had this idea of buying
cell phone cases and this is before it was a common thing where people bought stuff from
alibaba and sold online not like ebay or amazon before it became really popular but anyway i had
this idea of buying cell phone cases and selling them but for like two three years i kind of didn't
pull the trigger and just kind of i guess i was scared to lose my money because it's some chinese
company that i would be dealing with and anyway so i think it was early 2017 i decided to pull
finally pull the trigger and i spent about 500 of my money and bought some cell phone cases
but what i ended up doing was the company i was working with or the company that i found
um they were branded there were brand cases and without realizing i guess i didn't really think
about what i was doing um but i knew that this this brand sells really well on ebay
ice i think it was like for twenty dollars a case at a store this brand sold at like forty dollars
a case so i was like hey and here i can buy these cases for like i think it was like anywhere from
three to five dollars if i remember correctly anyway i bought about 100 cases three three or
four different sizes and colors or two different sizes and like four different colors so like i
think i had eight eight or ten variations of these cell phone cases and so i got them uh with that
brand and i started selling them without thinking that you know what i'm doing is illegal or it's
wrong or whatever you know it just didn't occur to me that i can get in trouble for this um anyway so
they started selling pretty well i would sell you know one two three sometimes five in a day
um and i was getting excited and i was telling my wife about it i was like hey look this is such a
such a cool thing um and she actually was upset with me because i didn't tell her that i bought
these cases when i first spent the 500 and then i told her after i did it so she kind of got
upset that you know i kept the secret at first but anyway um she got over it long story short i told
her i was telling her that they were selling it she was like well what's so special about
these well i was like well what's so special about michael kors purses um like it's a brand i guess
she's like well are they real like i doubt it because it's some chinese company i found online
um so i i highly doubt that they're authentic or real and she's like well you know that's illegal
and i was like no i didn't i guess i was like well all these other people are doing
it um anyway so i was like oh great um so the next day i'm like thinking man what am i gonna do
i wanna get at least my money back before i stop so i decided all right i'm just going
to sell whatever i have and then i won't buy anymore and and part my ways and the next day
sure enough i think it was like 11 o'clock at night i am checking my i'm on the computer i
don't know what i was doing um and all of a sudden my phone goes off and i get like
the eight sales that i have or ten sales whatever how many cases i had
they get all sold and i was like well this is weird one person bought all my cases one of each
it's very suspicious so right away i got started freaking out a little bit so i'm like okay
so i'm like let me see who bought it so i google the person's name people bought it
and sure enough his linkedin profile comes up and this person works at this brand as their like
trade compliance like uh you know fraud detection type of i don't remember exactly his title but
basically right away i knew what he was up to and i knew what was going to happen next kind of
uh which i start freaking out i'm like man do i delete my ebay do i shut everything
down but then i was like well ebay has all my information so if they really want to go after me
they can it's not it's got everything so i can't just like disappear
so i was like all right well at this point you know especially the day before we talked about
it and i realized what i was doing was wrong at this point i'm like well what am i gonna do and
so i decided to confess i basically found the guy's email and emailed him like hey my name is
such and such uh you just purchased all these cases um and i basically told them the store
the conversation me my wife had the night before and told them that i didn't realize
what i was doing was wrong and blah blah blah i don't remember exactly what else i said but
so he responds to me i think the next day or something and basically sends me a list uh where
where as long as i'm willing to comply with their requirements um
they're not going to press charges they're not going to prosecute me or anything like that
so at that point you know i was a little relieved
because i was like sure i'll i'll do whatever you guys need me to do so they basically sent
me like a list of five or six items i had to sign a cease and desist letter i had to
i had to basically give them all my correspondence with the supplier that i worked with that got me
these cases i had to give them a list of all the people i sold the cases to
um i basically cancelled all my order active orders that i didn't ship out yet including his
i basically emailed most of the people that i've sold the case
told them what was happening offered a refund um if they were still interested
and basically told the guy oh and i had to ship all my current inventory to to them so at this
point i was like you know what i'll cut my losses um i think i was still like 300 in the hole um
but a beats means going to you know getting in much more trouble than
over 300 but it definitely uh freaked me out and um honestly i think it was just by
grace of god that you know something the holy spirit prompted me to to look this guy up and
and i right away sensed that something was wrong so it was definitely quite an experience i know
my wife she was freaking out when i told her which didn't help my own freaking out so yeah it was uh
quite an experience i would say um definitely learned a thing or two in that process but anyway
if you stuck this far um thanks for watching let me know what you think of uh my story or
um or if you have any other book recommendations if you like to listen or read books feel free to
leave me a recommendation in the comments um and i'll see you guys next time thanks
