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Kui üksi ei saa mänguga hakkama, siis tuleb abi otsida perelt, sõpradelt või internetist. Arutleme, kas Nintendo uued patendid olid sihitud Palworldi vastu, Miyamoto seisukohta AI ja konsoolisõdade teemal ning kuidas PS5 Pro 30. aastapäeva eriversioonid on juba eBays väärt tuhandeid. Lisaks tuletame meelde PlayStation State of Play ja Xbox Tokyo Game Show üritused ning […]

In this episode we sit down with Thom to get a better understanding of what goes into being the #1 CD seller on eBay in Australia! His next level thinking and business processes along with the drive to be the best makes this one of the best episodes to date!

The Sennheiser 416 has become an industry-standard tool. Being a  “shotgun” mic (or in tech terms a super-cardioid) the microphone is extremely sensitive in a very narrow field. For this reason, it is often used on film sets where the mic needs to be a little farther away from the actor's mouth (so it's not in the frame), and the production team wants to capture the actor's voice without capturing background noise in the room. These qualities also make it extremely versatile for use in home voiceover studios!  But who first decided a Shotgun would be great for Voice Over, and why is it now an industry standard?  A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite   George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson Summary In this episode of the Pro Audio Suite, hosts George Wittam, Robert Marshall, Darren Robbo Robertson, and Andrew Peters take a deep dive into all things related to professional audio equipment. The discussion covers the technicalities of the legendary 41 six microphone, its proximity effect, and how its placement profoundly influences the output. Renowned rock and roll voiceover artist Steve Britton's microphone technique is highlighted, including how he utilizes the aggressive nature of the mic to enhance his voice. The hosts also discuss other microphones such as the eight one eight, the SM Seven, and the 4116, comparing their various characteristics and potential uses. Additionally, they touch upon potential changes in the industry due to the advent of AI voices. The podcast concludes with advice for individuals dealing with their own audio issues, encouraging listeners to explore and make the most out of their equipment like iPhone mic, acknowledging how surprisingly good it can sound when used correctly. Check out theproaudiosuite.com for more information and use the code Trip a P 200 for $200 off your tribooth. #ProAudioSuite #VoiceoverTechTips #TriboothDiscounts   Timestamps [00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Pro Audio Suite [00:00:30] Exploring the Proximity Effect of 41 Six [00:03:33] Voiceover Pioneer: Ernie Anderson's 41 Six Influence [00:07:44] Microphone Showdown: 416 Vs. SM Seven [00:12:16] Unraveling the Versatility of Eight One Eight [00:17:56] Mic Recommendation: Small Diaphragm Shep [00:23:19] Debunking the Myth: Foam on 41 Six [00:25:32] The History of Headset Mics [00:30:25] AI Voice Realm: A Threat or a Boon?   Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready be history. Speaker B: Get started. Speaker C: Welcome. Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone, to the Pro Audio Suite. Speaker C: These guys are professional and motivated with tech. To the Vo stars George Wittam, founder of Source Elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, Austrian audio making passion heard. Source elements. George the tech. Wittam and robbo and AP. International demo. To find out more about us, check thepro audiosuite.com line up learner. Speaker B: Here we go. Speaker C: And don't forget the code. Trip a P 200 that will give you $200 off your tribooth. Now, I've been playing around with the proximity effect of the 41 six, the legendary 41 six, and I've never really set it up to shoot straight down the barrel. Speaker B: So what's your default placement? Speaker C: Usually slightly off to the side. Speaker B: Okay. So still relatively level, but just coming pointing at you a little bit off to the side. Speaker C: Yeah. And pointing down. So pointing down but slightly side. Speaker B: Got it. Speaker C: This way is still pointing down, targeting the mouth, but going full it straight at it. And I did one read like that, then I followed it up with one slightly to the side, and then I followed that up with an eight. One eight. But I know we've talked about the proximity effects of the 41 six, but I actually couldn't believe the difference. It shocked me that it was so bright and it's how I remember the 41 six sounding. Speaker B: So what you're saying is like, you've kind of detuned the mic, you've detuned it to calm down. What makes the mic so aggressive? By using that placement and then when. Speaker C: I put it back holy crap. Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's what that mic? Speaker A: Well, it's interesting because there's a guy who AP and I know and have both worked with a guy called Steve Britton, who's sort of the big know, rock and roll voiceover guy, and he actually uses it to his advantage because he's not so hyped. His natural voice is not so sort of steeped in those sort of high mids and highs. So he actually gets right up on it. The best way I can describe it is he pretty much swallows the thing when he does a voiceover and uses it to his advantage because it sort of obviously accentuates that part of his voice that isn't really there naturally. The only deficit is that from an engineer's point of view, that as soon as you touch anything in the highs, it just blows up. You've got to be so careful around up there with him when you're sort of mixing him. Speaker C: Well, the strange thing about his voice is you think you're going to have to play with all the lows because it's such a big, deep voice, but as soon as you touch anything, the highs just go mental. Speaker A: Well, yeah, and that's the way you've got to work with Steve's voice, is rather than sort of additive EQ, it's subtractive you've really just got to sort of balance it by taking away some of that deeper stuff that's there in bucket loads. And just leave the top alone, otherwise it will just destroy itself. I've seen people with three DS's on a track trying to get rid of it once they've started sort of trying to get that typical radio cut through, which is the biggest mistake. And as soon as you say start again, but don't touch the highs, just cut some lows, they go, yeah. : Okay. Speaker C: So my question is with the 41 Six, it was the guy who was the voice of The Love Boat. Was he the first guy to use the 41 Six for Ernie Anderson? Speaker B: I don't know if he was the first, but he was certainly the most well known for it. : I thought Don LaFontaine made it really popular. Speaker B: Well, Ernie is the one who's caught on camera using that mic on video and other things, where he's in the studio at ABC and he's literally doing know. : And I got to imagine someone just did it because, like, here's a mic. It's the one that the freaking news guy uses. But here you go. Say the word. Speaker C: The story I heard was not like I think he was a bit paranoid and he didn't like being in the booth because he thought people were talking about him. Speaker B: Right. Speaker C: And so he wanted to sit out in the control area. Speaker B: That's right. Speaker C: And he couldn't use a normal large diaphragm, couldn't use a U eight seven. Speaker B: Out there, every damn thing. Speaker C: So one of the guys on the floor came up with the idea of using the 41 Six. That's what I heard. : Why don't you use this razor blade to record your voice? Speaker B: Yeah, it's probably a 415 or whatever they had at the time. : Yeah, probably a T powered 415 at the time. Yeah, I got a couple of those. Those sound a little bit different than the four. Speaker B: Little bit less distorted. Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Speaker B: That sound, for whatever reason, better, for worse, it's become the character of what a voiceover sound sounds like. Like when you listen to a voice recorded with a close up mic, I think we've gotten incredibly tuned what that sound is. It's become what was the word you used? Robo? Standard, but something else. Speaker A: Yeah, I did, didn't I? I used a big word printed benchmarked. It's a benchmark. Speaker B: Benchmark, yeah. Kind of a benchmark, yes. So I've been hearing that mic with my clients and promo people for so long. So when I hear another mic, right, upside of it, if it's an accurate mic with very little color, such as the OC 8118, it sounds well, it sounds like this here. Here's a 41 six of Andrew and then the eight one eight. So this is what a non accurate mic and then an accurate mic sounds like side by side. And then you did it in two different placements, right? Speaker C: Yeah. I did that was because of our discussion a couple of weeks back, where we were talking about placement with the 41 Six, which I'd never I thought, yeah, well, whatever. : Andrew, where do you like the 416? Speaker C: You'd be surprised where'd you like that. He's got a dark brown voice. No, he hasn't. Speaker A: Well, if they say that your voice is chocolatey, you can tell them why. Speaker C: Yes. Getting a bit messy now, is it? Speaker A: Yes, indeed. Speaker C: I always had the 40 116, sort of like facing down, but to the slightly to the side. So I'm sort of almost not quite side addressing, but you know what I mean? That's how I had it and I got used to that sound. And then after our discussion, I thought, I wonder if the proximity, I wonder what it really is like. So I moved the mic and went basically pointing straight at me, but slightly downwards towards my mouth, and I couldn't believe the difference. It was just like two different mic. It was two different mics and it was the old get a toothpick and stick it in your eardrum kind of sound that you get with the 41 Six. : Yeah, which is the other reason why I think engineers like it, because you get a voice recorded on that and it's just going to cut through everything and you don't have to do a lot more to it. It just sort of has this pre processing that works for a lot of that in your face advertising. Speaker B: The Hamburger Helper of microphones. : Yeah, it's just like in your face advertising. Right there, done. Speaker B: Here's what it sounded like. Here's the samples. I got them right here. Speaker C: The MercedesBenz GLE SUV is the complete package. The MercedesBenz GLE SUV is the complete package. The MercedesBenz GLE SUV is the complete package. So that's first one was straight down the barrel, second one to the side, and the third one was the eight one eight. : And you can hear it, it just gets less and less edgy, less and less. It does. Speaker A: The interesting thing about the 4116, and I guess its impact on the industry, is it's been copied a few times, probably, or tried to be copied. But I'm on an NTG five right now and it's probably the closest, I reckon, that I've heard. : I don't know. The NTG five has got more bass. I'm on an NTG five, too. I think the NTG five is a warmer mic. Yes, it does have that shotgunny in your face thing, but it's a little bit actually bigger sounding, but it's not necessarily more cuddy. I think this the eight one eight. You could take it and EQ it to do what the 416 does. Speaker B: Oh, yeah. : Pick up more room. But the 416 is just sort of like there it is, it's going to. Speaker A: Put done for you. : It's a cut. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: I'm so used to the way that bright cut condenser mic sounds that I add EQ to my own mic because I want it to sound more like that bright, condenser mic sound. Right. Now I'm talking into the Earthworks Ethos, which is a very flat mic. And if I cut my what is it, ten khz? Six DB shelf, basically. It's not a shelf, but it looks like one. Then it sounds like this. Right, and it still sounds good. It just doesn't have that top end, that bright sizzle. : I think the extreme difference would be go from a 416 to an SM Seven. Speaker B: Yeah, well, the SM Seven has like this kind of this mid range thing that I've never been a big fan of the way that sounds. Speaker A: For voiceover. Speaker B: Yeah, for voiceover. : Do you like the PL 20? The Re 20 better than the SM seven. Speaker B: Yeah. Personally, radio voice, the PL 20 is the Re 20 without that big basket on it, the front, right. : No, I cannot tell you the difference between them, actually. I believe they are the exact same, just years difference. Speaker B: Oh, got you. : For this year to this year. They made the Re 20 and then they I think the PL 20 was before the Re 20 got you. Yeah. No, I think that as powerful and big of a mic. And no matter how much Rush Limbo wanted to gold plate his, I think the SM Seven beat the PL 20 in overall installations since the Pandemic, at least. It's like, holy cow. Did they get the SM Seven out there on podcast? Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker B: I don't know who they have to thank for it, but Joe Rogan is probably high up on the list because he's been YouTubing his podcast for quite a few years now. : I mean, there's an ad campaign that I've never seen an ad for an SM Seven. That's marketing. Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. : Yeah, you need it. And I didn't even tell you. Speaker B: I mean, I just installed a podcast studio and the mic was not chosen because that's the best mic. It was chosen because that mic was seen on another podcast. Yes, exactly. Because the owner is and the 416. : Has got that, too. And so it's like, yeah, the SM Seven, you can abuse it. And it's going to be pretty consistent and whatever dark and warm. And it has that thing for radio where it's not going to pick up. It's just going to seem to pick up the voice and not the other stuff. Right. Like the 416 has got the cut. Speaker C: Yeah, the SM seven. SM Seven b basically eat the things anyway, and they're built like a tank, which is perfect. : Yeah. You can abuse the whole mic and you won't hear. I mean, I don't know how Howard Stern gets away with abusing his Neumann condenser the way he does and you never hear it. Speaker C: Can you explain that one's? Speaker B: Still a mystery. : It's like it should just be like. Speaker B: This kind of shit all over the. Speaker A: Place because it's not connected, I'm sure of it. Speaker C: I don't think it's connected. It's a fucking prop, isn't it? : It's a prop, yeah. Speaker B: Now this sounds more like an SM seven B, doesn't it? This is that it does a little. : Darker fatter, a little bit less top. Speaker B: End, a little bit more mid bump around one k, couple of DB. Now it's like an SM seven. I could go to the low frequency and boost up the bottom end. Now, they would sound even maybe a little bit more. : So in the spirit of don't send us a processed voice. Stop using 416s because they sound too processed already. Speaker B: Yeah, stop using them altogether. Speaker C: But it's kind of weird, isn't it? We're like, we get a large diaphragm mic or something and then we try and EQ it up to sound like a four one six. Just use the 41 six and be done with it. Speaker B: Really? I've caught myself doing that where somebody's like, okay, here's a sample of my 41 six, here's a sample of my TLM 103, can you make me a stack for each of these two mics? And over the time I'm just like, okay, I'm not going to touch the EQ at all on the 41 six. : Yeah. And then you're going to make their tail on 103 sound like a 41 six. Speaker B: What, did you resist the urge? I used to, I used to, but I resist the urge and now what I'm doing is I'm mostly just going to do corrective EQ. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: When there's like a harshness, a nasal, some resonance in the booth, then that's it. : I think with the TLM you could give it a little bit more of a glassy sound and not so much of an upper mid, but a way airy high frequency kind of airy boost and make it nice and it'll still have some sort of I wouldn't call it cut, but presence, literally. But it'll be different than the 416, which has that frequency that every speaker has. It's like four k, eight k all packed in there. It's like your worst speaker on earth plays back those frequencies, for sure. Speaker A: Yeah, no doubt, yeah. Well, and the eight one eight, well, it's the polar opposite, isn't it? : I think eight one eight is like the TLM. You could just give it like a glassy airy sound, you're not cornered into the sound of the four six. I think the eight one eight could be more of a chameleon than the 416. The 416 does its thing and that is it. Speaker C: Yeah. It's a one trick pony, that's for sure. Speaker B: It's a one trick pony, but the way you manipulate it is by placement. Speaker C: Yeah, well, that became obvious. Yeah, absolutely. It did sound like two different microphones just by moving it. Speaker B: I mean, the first time I saw. : A 42 different voice actors sometimes, yeah. Speaker B: The first time I saw a 40 116 in an audiobook production facility, I. Speaker A: Was like, yeah, that seems like for. : A long term thing, it's like that's a harsh mic to be listening to 8 hours of the same person. You'd want nice pillowy mic? Speaker B: Yeah. So I don't know what post they were doing on the audio. I'm sure they were doing some EQ. : It's like listening to classical music on NS Ten s? Yes. Speaker A: I was going to say you'd be pulling the earbuds out halfway through mowing the lawn. You'd be going, Jesus, my ears are bleeding. Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. : Well, maybe it's good for the lawnmower. You're mowing the lawn. It's like I can hear 4K. Speaker A: I've got Ebays in to stop going deaf, but I'm going deaf anyway. : Yeah. Speaker B: Here's a little test. Tell me what this is. Speaker C: The MercedesBenz GLE SUV is the complete package. : That is either the 416 straight on, I think, or maybe to the side. Speaker B: All that was was the eight one eight with a shelf high shelf on it. It was an eight DB shelf starting at seven. : Wow, that's a shitload. That's a lot of DB. Speaker B: It's so funny. I opened up the Au filter plugin, which is like a really simple four band EQ. And the setting I had last loaded, wasn't that's what it was? It was just like an ATP shelf at seven k. Wow. I was like, all right, let's see what that sounds like. That's what that sounds like. : Sounds like so the 416 is boost at. Boost at. Speaker B: But if you ran that EQ on the 416, well, you would get this. Speaker C: The MercedesBenz GLE make it stop. : D 416. Speaker A: Try selling a MercedesBenz with that sound. Yeah, exactly. Oh, my goodness. Speaker B: Off brand, for sure. Yeah, but it's weird, there's a lot of commercial work getting booked, especially female voice stuff. That is really bright. : Yeah, it is. I used to say a lot of the times, depending on the 414, some females didn't work as well with a 414 because their voices were already kind of airy and then you get that really top end mic on it. Yeah. And it's like they overcompensate and sometimes like a U 87 worked better because just sort of try to pick up some of those lower mids. Speaker B: I used to recommend the Rode NTG three all the time for women because it was a very dark, flat and warm mic and so it worked really to their advantage a lot of times, in fact. Speaker C: That's funny you say that, because that's the mic I got for Somerset for Interg three, because it just did not sharp and nasty. Speaker B: So, yeah, it's funny, when you have a good mic that gets all the information with no distortion, you can really EQ it. And when you have a mic that is pre filtered, pre EQed and arguably has some degree of distortion, it's much. : Harder to correct it like anything with audio, it's easy to work with a blank slate compared to trying to uncompress. Speaker B: Oh, boy. : It's impossible or unds. Speaker B: Right? : Or UN crazy 416 EQ something. Because no matter what you do, the fix that you apply will create other harms, and you'll just end up with Swiss cheese in the end. So these broader, flatter, big diaphragm mics or what's interesting is, I think, to get a really accurate voice, I've not seen anybody try to record voice with, say, like a Km 184. And sometimes you see a lot of the opera singers what's an opera singer set up, like, a nice small diaphragm away from the singer? Speaker B: Yeah. Distant placement. : Distant, right. And then you get that just like that is what it is. There's no proximity. And I'll bet you for some people's voice, maybe something like a really pure small diaphragm condenser would be pretty interesting. That's why I was curious about those rode TF. Mics. Speaker B: Yeah, TFI. : Those look pretty high end small diaphragm condenser. And I bet you those would probably. Speaker B: Wait, didn't one of you guys get the small diaphragm Austrian audio? Speaker C: Yeah, robert's got them. : I got the OC eight. I got the OC eight. And those are good. I was going to say, I don't think they're sheps killers. They're closer to 184s. They're not sheps, but they're much closer to like honestly, they're much closer to, like, 450 ones. They're a little bit less full and very good for symbols, but not necessarily the whole I think a really good small diaphragm mic like a shep would be amazing on the right person's voice. But you'd have to have the right booth, right? There's no way, you know, you can. Speaker B: Get a chef's headset microphone. I actually demoed it once. $2,400 headset mic. It was an ultrasound headphone. $600 headphone with a chef. : And the microphone is like a pencil. It's like a pencil, yeah, it was pretty big, actually. Speaker B: It had a big windscreen. It was for sports casting. It had a big gooseneck on it. And it was like this ridiculous contraption that I was able to get a demo of one time, and I used it. It's on YouTube somewhere. $2,400 headset. Headset mic. : Chefs and BNKS. Man, not cheap mic. Speaker B: No compromises. : Yeah, they are good, though, definitely. I mean, Neumann's, too, but those are like, chefs. Doesn't even try to make a 103. They're like, you're going to make $1,000 microphone. Ha. We'll make a $7,000 microphone. Our cheapest mic is $2,000. Speaker C: I would love to, at some point, find out how the 41 six did become so prevalent. : Honestly, I always hurdles, don LaFontaine. I remember I was shocked when I found out, like, really? 416? Speaker B: Just for the record, it was not the mic that was in this booth when I met him. Like, I never saw him using that booth. : The 416 was not the mic that Don LaFontaine used, not when I met him. Speaker B: I mean, I worked with him in 2005, but he'd already been recording for 20 years by that point. : Andrew, when did the 416 become all the rage, because when I started in 1998, it was like, u, people are using shotguns, but I'm just an early engineer who's like, shotguns are colored. You only use them because you have to because you have mitigating circumstances. Why would you ever use a shotgun in a perfectly clean booth? And I start working on higher end commercials, and you start finding these voice talent who are using it. And actually, come to think of it, cutters. We had VIP 50s until, like, the early 2000s VIP, and then we got these Mylabs. Okay, very interesting mic. Rectangular diaphragm. So the skinny side of the rectangle is supposed to give you the best of a small diaphragm mic, and the long side of the rectangle is supposed to give you the best of a large diaphragm mic. Speaker B: Far out. : But they were good. We even had some voicemail go like, what's that mic? Like, I need your setup. And one guy bought one. But by the early 2000s, we put 416s in all the booths, and eventually that was just the mic. Like, the VIP 50s got pushed to the side, and everyone who walked in just got recorded on a 416 by default. And that's by 2005. I feel like we were just all 416. So Andrew, I don't know. When do you feel like the 416 took over? Speaker C: Because I was in radio until 97, so I didn't really see any commercial studios because everything was done in the radio station. So there was from memory, I don't remember seeing any shotguns in any radio stations. It was usually SM seven. : You still don't true. You still don't see shotguns in radio stations. Speaker C: Well, you do here now. You do see them in the production areas. Speaker B: Really? Speaker C: Absolutely. They're all 41 sixes in the production areas of radio stations. So the first time I saw a 41 Six would have been probably late ninety s ninety seven. Ninety eight, I guess. : So that's when it started taking over, in, like, late 90s, early 2000s. Speaker C: Yeah. And then they became everywhere. And a funny story, actually, because I had to do a job when I was in La. So I had to find a studio. So I went to La Sound. Speaker B: And. Speaker C: Of course, they had the 41 Six there. But I was talking to I won't mention the person's name because he's pretty high profile and might get the shits with me, but I was talking about the 40 116 with this person and about the foamy, and he said, no one in this country would ever have the foamy on their 41 six. It just doesn't happen here. I don't know why you guys do that. That's ridiculous. That's crazy. Never seen it before. : Well, usually you just put the normal you put the normal steadman screen windscreen in front of it. Speaker C: Yeah, I sent him a photograph. There's me in the booth, La Sound with the foamy on the 41 six. So they definitely had the foamy on. Speaker A: Well, there you go. I always use the foamy. I used to, because there's plenty of people who didn't know how to use the mic, used to get up all over it and just make it. : Here's a funny one. Even Harlan Hogan's vo one A was based on an older MSL. Model. Was it based on or was it just an older MXL model? Speaker B: No one will really know except him. But they say it's, I think, a 1006 or something. : It's a 1006. Speaker B: And I have two of those and they sound amazing. : I got several. Speaker B: A really fucking good cheap mic. It's a really good cheap mic. : It was the first $100 large diaphragm mic I bought for me, too. And then I won't say who in Australia modify one. Speaker C: Yes, I know who that is. Yeah, we'll leave that bit out. Speaker B: So the chef's headset is the HSC four VXP. It's the model number, if you want to look it up, and very unique mic. And the capsule on it is what probably you're more interested in. And they make different versions, so they have a strong proximity compensation model so you can get it, like, designed to actually compensate for proximity effect. Which is interesting because, again, Sports, they want the boom right up in front of their mouth to reject background. : Let's start let's start putting, like, parabolic mics in the booth. Speaker B: I know you talked about that. That would be crazy. Well, the capsule, which is funny, I'm looking at an ad for the mic and they don't mention the capsule, but I think I did in my video. I have a video on YouTube from years ago. If you just search for Widows World episode 90 Headset Mic Roundup, you'll find this video. And I actually try out a bunch. : Of the Kip Winger headset mic roundup. Speaker B: I mean, I was trying from really cheap crappy stuff all the way up to the ships and everything. : The stuff that you start out with the mics that only pick up S's. Speaker B: Right, or have no low end response period, they just roll off below 200 something. : If you des them, they go silent. Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Well, there's just been a tradition of bad sounding headset mics for so many years. : Sure has. I mean, do you remember that audio technica that I was playing around with? Is it the really cheap one headset mic? I think it might have been a dynamic and it didn't even have the headset. It's just a head warning mic. But it didn't even have headsets. Speaker B: I use those in many aerobics or fitness studios where budget was an issue because they could be destroyed and it wasn't a huge loss. But, yeah, those are classics. But audio Tending, it just came up with a headset mic. That where they graphed basically an at 2020 capsule onto a headset boom. And it's like a $200 headphone with a 2020 capsule. And it's pretty freaking bad. I mean, it's pretty good. Again, comparing it to what else is out there, it's pretty good, but it's. : Still well, that's the reality. Honestly, if someone gave me a voiceover recorder on a cell phone, I'd get it on the yeah, you find a way and I'd find a way, and I'd freaking bass synthesize some stuff and make it sound as good as it can go. And unfortunately, with a lot of clients, they're like, okay, sounds good. I understand the words. Sounds like a commercial to me. But we know there's a huge difference between all that stuff. I don't know. I still don't like it. But I've had a couple of voices. Now I've run into the tiny, basically rode video microphone, USB video mic. Speaker B: Go two. : Yeah, it's like your pinky. Speaker B: That's probably because I've recommended it to a bunch of people. : You can blame me for that one. Yeah, it's like it's okay. Speaker B: It's $100 mic. : Yeah. The flaws are exposed much quicker and the escape routes are smaller. Speaker B: It's probably marginally better than the phone mic in the iPhone. Just it's a shotgun, so it's a little bit more directional. Yeah. At the end of the day, I'm blown away with, when you use the iPhone mic correctly, how good it actually can sound. It's crazy. : Yeah. And especially if they start putting, like, arrays of microphones in there and doing. Speaker B: Beam forming, they're doing I don't know which vert well, they're already doing that. I mean, you don't realize it, but they are doing that. They use three capsules and it's a beam. : Oh, the microphone and the iPhone is a beam. Speaker B: They have been for quite a while. I even had an LG phone. It was like a V 40 or something. It was probably six years ago. And I could steer the microphone pickup pattern front to back, depending on who using the little slider on the screen. And I could say, make it pick up the guy in front of me and then make it pick me up, and I could go back and forth. So that's been around in cell phones for a while. But anyway, I had a lot of fun doing interviews with the new rode wireless kit with the wireless me, because the rode capture app on the phone will shoot both cameras. So I'm shooting a video of me and shooting a video of the guest. And they have a mic and I have a mic. So when I'm done, I have two videos and two audio tracks to manipulate and post. And it's amazing how good of a production you can make from that, really? : From your pocket. Speaker B: It's crazy. Yeah. I posted a couple interviews. Speaker C: Was that the one with the woman from Heil? Yeah, I saw that. : This is why we're all out of business. Speaker C: I thought you'd actually done some naughty shots, but I didn't realize you were actually live with your bits to camera as well. : What's going. On with the AI voice realm? Has that calmed down or are people still freaking out on AI taking over? Speaker C: I haven't seen much like it's less. : A little bit less discussed recently? Speaker C: I haven't seen much at all. Speaker A: What microphone do you use on an AI voice? : How many drummers does it take to change the light bulb? I'll tell you the same number of voiceovers it takes to read a book. Speaker A: None. : Because you just get an AI to do it. Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over? Speaker C: The Pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robbo Got your own audio issues? Just askrobo.com. Tech support from George thetech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say good day. Drop us a note at our website proaudiosuite.com.

In this episode we dive into the recent news of Ebays exclusive club "Top Star Program" all depending if you are invited in. From crazy deals on shoes, high value sneakers for retail, to even invitation to events such as ComplexCon. Are we going to continue to see companies roll out their very exclusive memberships more often? We move onto sneakers that have been announced and rolling out in the next couple weeks. Nike Dunk low Athletic Dept, NC to Chicago Jordan 1 low, to the What The Clot Dunks!

Guest: Ken Reid, Sportsnet Connected host. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us in today's episode as we discuss the our recent reselling experience and buying items locally and flipping items from garage sales and thrift stores. We also discuss eBay failures and the increasing cost of reselling. We also talk about items that flip for good money.  #GarageSales #Reselling #CommunityGarageSales #BuyAndSell #Thrifting #Flipping #SideHustle #Entrepreneurship #BusinessTips   Partner with us via Patreon:   https://www.patreon.com/purehustlepodcast   Sign Up with MY RESLLER GENIE with 15% off your first month for the best bookkeeping geared for resellers by using the link below and USE OUR CODE “PUREHUSTLE” all in caps:   https://www.myresellergenie.com/?ref=purehustle   Get a free $15 on Whatnot by using the link below:   https://whatnot.com/invite/purehustlepodcast   Get that Skullshaver using the link below and our code "Hustle":   https://skullshaver.com/discount/Hustle?rfsn=6980222.2cfe107&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=6980222.2cfe107   Purchase bubble wrap from the best deal available ANYWHERE:   https://www.americanbubbleboy.com?sca_ref=650095.KTEipe5MI4&sca_source=YouTube    Sign Up for listing services with Sellhound and receive 25% your first purchase or 25% off your first month of a Sellhound monthly subscription when using our affiliate link and promo code PUREHUSTLE25. By the way, everyone gets three free listings to try out before any purchases! Just go to Sellhound.com and subscribe using our promo code PUREHUSTLE25.    Sign Up for Crossposting with Vendoo and receive 25% off your first month when using our affiliate link. In order to receive the discount, subscription must be purchased  from the same device used to create the account:    https://vendoo.co/register?via=purehustlepodcast Purchase PHP Shirts: https://www.ebay.com/itm/392367249736  Donation link: https://www.paypal.me/purehustlepodcast?locale.x=en_US Below is a link to all the shipping supplies we buy through Amazon:   https://www.amazon.com/shop/purehustlepodcast    Bellow is a link to shipping supplies that we use:   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bR2h1PrrljhI5GKeQYWG6ubLOfkqSt0gLFmSxPm52nA/edit?usp=sharing Instagram - @purehustlepodcast    Twitter - @purehustlecast   Facebook - purehustlepodcast   Youtube - Pure Hustle Podcast - www.youtube.com/channel/UCuEJMAB8GdoaPK7eLkKmAiQ

In der heutigen Folge gibt es News zu Großbritanniens digitaler Finanzpolitik und der Coinbase NFT Plattform, die mit einem unerwarteten stopp für Diskussionen sorgt.Ihr erfahrt von Ebays neuester NFT Initiative und einem Solana Protokoll, das die lästige Creator Fee Debatte beenden soll. Und neben unserem täglichen Blick auf den Krypto Chart und den Floorpreisen auf Opensea, schauen wir auf FTX Updates, Mark Zuckerbergs Metaverse Optimismus und die künstliche Intelligenz, die der Blockchain Technologie den Rang abläuft.Also viel Spaß mit der heutigen Folge von ALL IN NFT.** weitere freiwillige Unterstützung:https://www.patreon.com/user?u=86396667Newsletter Barista Insights by Mic_Sebhttps://tab728b31.emailsys1a.net/247/735/e3ee874dc3/subscribe/form.html?_g=1695576545ALL IN NFT Homepage:https://www.allinnft.de/ALL IN NFT Merchandising Shop:https://all-in-nft.myshopify.com/Opensea Kollektion ALL IN NFT:https://opensea.io/assets/ETHEREUM/0x71608b3551895385637d59c3713e7369ecac2e97/0Linktree :https://linktr.ee/mic_sebDiscord: https://discord.gg/4js6Pg7FJkTwitter: @MicSeb91https://twitter.com/MicSeb91Twitch: https://twitch.tv/mic_sebYouTube: All in NFThttps://www.youtube.com/@Mic_Seb**Blockpit Code für deine einfache Steuererklärung mit Krypto und NFT Wallets:https://blockpit.cello.so/v7peWE3ssIIKontakt:Sebastian@allinnft.deGM Coffee Handy:+491733544148Bei den oben genannten Themen handelt es sich um keine Anlageberatungen. Der Podcast dient lediglich der Unterhaltung.Die mit ** gekennzeichneten Links sind sogenannte Affiliate-/ oder Unterstützungs-Links. Kommt über einen solchen Link ein Einkauf zustande, werde ich mit einer Provision beteiligt. Für Dich entstehen dabei keine Mehrkosten. Wo, wann und wie Du ein Produkt kaufst, bleibt natürlich Dir überlassen. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sebastian-michels7/message

Hello, hello and welcome to Greedy Bitch a podcast where groomers stop apologizing for charging their worth. I'm your host River Lee, founder of the Savvy Groomer. This episode is sponsored by Personal Finance on a leash, a 12 module masterclass where we teach you all about your personal finances. Let's go ahead and talk about today's topic, how to use the debt snowball method. This week's topic is all about how to use a debt snowball to pay off debt. You're in over your head in debt and it doesn't feel good. You need the money to start your business and eventually to cover your daily living expenses. It was the only way to get by. Now you're faced with this ridiculous debt. What do you do? Ignoring it doesn't work. It's not going anywhere. Making minimum payments doesn't help. Your credit score doesn't suffer because you made the minimum payments, but your pocketbook suffers interest, charges accumulate at crazy rates and before you know it, you feel buried. So now what? Try the debt snowball method. It's an organized and proven way to get yourself out of debt. It offers quick wins that create motivation and it will eventually get you out of debt. Here is how it works. So you might be asking, what is the debt snowball method? The debt snowball method is a strategy to reduce your debt in an organized manner. If you're tired of trying to figure out which bill to payoff first, this is a great way to figure it out. This method focuses on all of your debts in order of balance, but not interest rates. Arrange your debts from the smallest to the largest balance. Focusing on the bill with the smallest balance first. This method focuses on intention. You pay all your bills, but you focus on the first bill in line. After you pay off the first debt, celebrate your victory, you paid your debt off and you showed your money how to work. It's the first step to financial freedom. Alright, but how does the debt snowball method work? Start by grabbing your statements of all your credit cards and bills and use the following steps. Order your bills from smalls to largest balance and don't look at your interest rate. You may have bills with high APRs first, last, or somewhere in the middle. It doesn't matter. Budget the minimum payment for each bill into your fixed expenses. Make these payments on time every month. Figure out how much extra money you have each month. If you don't have a budget, now is a great time to start. I personally love zero based budgets because they give every dollar a job. Take the extra money and pay it towards the first bill in line. This is in addition to the minimum required payment. Keep paying extra money to the first debt in line until it's paid off in full. Then celebrate your victory. But mindfully, take the full amount you paid to the first debt, including the minimum payment, and add it to the minimum payment of the next debt in line. Keep going until you've paid off all your debt. All right, how to find extra money. Here's where many people struggle. They assume they don't have any extra money, so the debt snowball method won't work for them, but everyone has extra money. You just have to know where to find it. Here are a few ways. Host a garage sale or sell some items you no longer need. Facebook market, Craigslist, Poshmark, eBays are all great. We all have like 30 pairs of scissors in our drawer that we haven't touched ever. Put them up on Facebook marketplace. Have another groomer who wants them. Start a side hustle if you can. If you have a spare few minutes you could even if it's just answering market research surveys or use the cashback apps to save on your purchases.You can earn extra money that way. Switch insurance providers or negotiate lower rates with your current company. I know that I had been with a company that I really loved for about five years, but I'd never really shopped around and what I found out was that I was paying like triple the average rate in the area. Now, I still loved my insurance company, so I went to that company with these quotes and they actually cut my bill in half, so I got to stay with them. I was still paying more than I would've gotten the other companies, but it was a great compromise. Cut the cord already. If you haven't, I mean really. Who needs cable? When we have Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus. Go ahead and switch bank accounts so you stop paying bank fees. I'm always shocked at how many of you guys have like $12 fees on your bank statement. It's not a lot of money, but when you look at it over the year, or if you have multiple accounts, it can get really pricey. Think about your current spending, where you can cut and how you can bring in those few extra dollars and put every dollar you earned towards your debt. An example of the debt snowball method, right? So let's look at the debt snowball method like it was real life. You've created your budget and you've pulled in your statements here, right here, your following bills. So imagine a $300 credit card with a minimum payment of $20, $1,000 medical bill with an agreed minimum of $50, $2,200 credit card with a minimum payment of 75 $5,000 car loan with a minimum of two $57,000. Student loan, minimum $150. All right? You budget the minimum payments, which is a total of $545, plus your other required expenses like mortgage, utilities, insurance, gas, food. After looking at your budget and realize you have an extra $220 each month, you could put towards your debt. Okay? So what's gonna happen there is you're gonna, the first month is you're gonna pay that $220 on the credit card with a $300 balance. That means it's gonna take you two months to pay that bidt in full, then celebrate. Next, you take the $220 and you add it to the $50 agreed upon minimum payment of your medical bill for a total of $270 per month. So then it's gonna take you four months to pay that debt in full. You've knocked out two debts. Yay. Good job. Now we can move on to the $2,200 credit card. Paying the $345, which is the $270 plus $75 minimum payment each month. You keep doing this until you've paid all your debts in full. Since you've now aware of how to spend your money and the effort it takes to get outta debt, you may be able to stay out of debt. Is the debt snowball a good idea? Different methods work for different people, but the debt snowball method, it is a tried and true method for millions of people. If you can't organize your finances or figure out which debt to focus on, like which one to pay off first, this is a great way to get organized. You know you exactly where your money should go and how to get out of debt. The method is great for people who thrive on quick wins. Paying off debt usually isn't quick fixes, which is why many people fall off the wagon, so to speak. They don't see progress and they hate sacrificing in other areas, so they go back to making minimum payments and staying in debt. But the debt snowball method, organizing your debts rather in order of balance though, is a great way to see that you can pay off your debt. The goal is to keep the momentum going so you can pay off your larger debts too. Why the debt snowball method works, if you look at it realistically, the debt snowball method is just a way of organizing your money. It's nothing extraordinary financially speaking, but it does create behavioral modification. If we are all creatures of habit and it sometimes works, you're likely to keep going, right? When you're just making minimum payments or making payment haphazardly, you don't see the method in the madness and you're likely to give up with the debt snowball method. It's a proven method and it becomes habit, almost like muscle memory. You see what you're capable of and you want more of it, almost like you're trying to lose weight. When you lose the first few pounds, you feel empowered, excited, and ready to lose more. This is the same as a, as this debt payoff strategy. All right? If that's not gonna work for you, here is another debt payoff strategy. The debt snowball isn't the only method. The debt avalanche is another method, but it requires a significant more willpower. It doesn't provide the same quick win because you order your debts by interest rate from highest to lowest, not balance. The debt avalanche method is for people who wanna save more money on interest rather than pay off debts fast. Then when you focus on that card debt with the highest interest rate, you decrease the amount of interest you'll pay. Overall, it uses the same idea, making minimum payments on each debt and focusing on the extra money of the first debt in line. When that first debt may have the largest balance, the smallest, or somewhere in between, you may pay the principle balance of that debt down. You'll pay less interest over the debt lifetime, putting more money in your pocket. This method isn't for everyone. It takes a while, sometimes even more than a year to see progress. If you need motivation, you may not like this method because it takes more dedication in patients to see it through to the end. So I want you guys to get out of debt today. It doesn't matter what, which debt and payoff methods you choose. The key is to get outta debt once and for all you. As you pay off your debt, stay mindful of your spending. Lock up your credit cards so you don't use them anymore. Only buy what you can afford in cash. Don't close your credit cards though. That hurts your credit score. Keep them open and let the balances drop. The lower balances decrease your credit utilization ratio, which improves your credit score. If you keep up these habits, stick to the budget and don't get yourself in debt again. The debt snowball method could be the last time you have to deal with overwhelming debt again. If you guys are interested in learning more about Personal Finance on a Leash, be sure to visit me at savvygroomer.com/enroll. This is a 12 module masterclass where we teach you how to get on a personal budget, learn how to work with your money, and change your relationship with money. Thank you all so much for listening to this podcast, How to use the debt snowball method. Be sure to visit me at savvygroomer.com to see my current opportunities to work with me growing your pet grooming business, plus more free resources for you to learn. See you at our community on Facebook Savvy Pet Professionals. As always guys, happy grooming!

Sasha and Peewee talk about flipping thrift store, retail and garage sale items and all the bumps they experience along the way.  Whether you're brand new to reselling or just looking to gain some additional knowledge, listen to Flips and Bumps and lets help each other make some money!This week:  -Peewee is back!-Listing strategies, adding inventory & 30 day returns-Haggling with goodwill?-Ebays definition of a top seller-What is goodwill finds?-Garage Sale Talk-Flip or Bump of the Week-And Much More!New episodes every Monday at FlipsAndBumps.com or wherever you get your podcasts from@FlipsAndBumps on Twitter and InstagramEmail us any questions or comments you have at FlipsAndBumpsPodcast@Gmail.com#goodwill , #goodwillfinds , #resellercommunity , #resell , #reseller , #flip , #thrift , #pawn , #pawnshop , #garagesale , #garagesales , #estatesale , #fleamarket ,  #auctions, #bolo , #ebay , #ebaysales , #ebayseller , #ebayreseller, #videogames, #ebayresellercommunity, #podcast , #toys , #vintagetoys

Raising finance for new real estate projects is difficult. Property development firms face interest rates as high as 29% when working with banking institutions as single source loan providers. They also face challenges with multiple loan sources as crowd financing can be difficult to administer. Blockchain simplifies access to alternative financing models by facilitating investor management for developers and ensuring investment transparency and continuous ROI tracking for investors. In today's episode Goeffrey Thompson, Chief Blockchain Officer of Roofstock, and Sanjay Raghavan, Head of Structured Securities and Co-head of Digital Securities Initiative, walk us through what blockchain technology is and how they are tokenizing properties in a revolutionary way to buy and sell property.   Episode Links: https://onchain.roofstock.com/ https://twitter.com/rsonchain --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Geoffrey Thompson, who's the chief blockchain Officer here at Roofstock and Sanjay Raghavan, who's the head of web three initiatives here at Roofstock and we're gonna be talking today about what blockchain is, and how it applies to us as real estate investors. So let's get into it.   Goeff, and Sanjay, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I am super excited to chat with you both.   Sanjay: Likewise.   Goeff: Thank you for having us, thank you.   Michael: No, absolutely, absolutely. So I know a little bit, obviously, who you guys are because we work together. But for anyone who isn't familiar with you. Give us a quick and dirty description who you are, and what is it that you're doing at Roofstock? Goeff, I'll kick it over to you first.   Goeff: Sure. So I'm Goeffrey Thompson. I currently have the title of Chief blockchain Officer at Roofstock. Previously, I was General Counsel and I've been a lawyer for by training for a long time and now heading up the blockchain initiative at rootstock together with Sanjay.   Michael: Awesome, great.   Sanjay: I'm Sanjay, head of web three initiatives. Previously, I was leading securities initiatives at roof stock coming up on actually three years this week. So super exciting tomorrow, I think.   Michael: Right on, so really quick follow up questions for you both. Jeff. Were you just like a crypto guy in your everyday life? I mean, how does a real out as a lawyer turn into a blockchain official at a company at the C suite level? I mean, that's incredible.   Goeff: Yeah, I kind of backed into it. That wasn't a plan but I had been advising friends. Since 2017, during the ICO boom, the initial coin offering boom, and I started hearing people in my network, talk about it and say things like, oh, well, it's not a security because it's a coin. So you don't have to follow the securities laws, you know, and I thought, I don't get a lot of the technical stuff that talking about, but I know I can help them with the legal stuff. So then I just I was acting as legal advisor for a couple of years and, and then Gary, our CEO knew that and last year, maybe 12 months ago or a little bit more, our board came to our CEO and said, you guys, Roofstock, you need to get smart on blockchain. We're not saying you have to do it. But you know, we want you to have an idea of whether there's something there and so he asked me and Sanjay, because he knew I had some crypto background and there's a lot of legal and obviously, the financial structure is critical as well, so we kind of got into it together.   Michael: Awesome and Sanjay, at the risk of sounding like a total rookie, what the hell is web three man, I hear so much about it. Break it down for us.   Sanjay: All right. So I know it's so web low. So let's take a step back, right. So web one, which was kind of the first incarnation of the internet, right? There were sites that had static information, you could like type a URL, URL and go and, like, consume that information. But that's all you could do is just a read only type of a platform and then a few years later, the internet evolved to kind of web two, which widely is known as the read write version of the internet. So not only could you consume information, but you could go and, you know, provide information and content to the internet as well as a consumer and what happened with web two was it you know, that ability to read and write created all kinds of new interactions, and that allowed a lot of kind of the internet economy to bloom around it, where the Googles and the apples and eBays and other large companies were able to curate a lot of the content and manage a lot of the traffic. But you know, with social media and stuff, you are providing content as well, and you are consuming content, there was ecommerce, so a lot of these things came about, but the power resided with a very few large corporations that kind of controlled all of these transactions and the when, when web one started, the kind of original vision behind it was a more collaborative environment, where the consumers and the creators and consumers could actually work with each other and use a token economy and share you know, revenue and monetization. So that idea of you know, read, write and then adding on to it at the end. So it's a read write own type of economy that's decentralized. permissionless trustless has its own native payment rails, where the content creators and con Then consumers are all working together and you know, there's no power resting with large corporations, but it's, you know, giving power back to the people. So that's how that's how I would sort of succinctly describe, three and it's so it's a sort of a new way of thinking about things and it's super exciting.   Michael: Yeah it does sound super exciting and so give us all like a background again, treat me like a third grader, because that's probably my IQ level when it comes to the crypto and blockchain world. Give us all an idea of like, what is blockchain and what is cryptocurrency and then we'll get in maybe on how to be thinking about it. With regard to the real estate space and why it even belongs here you don't think this…   Goeff: Yep, sure, so the core concept for blockchain is that it's a network that can be validated the data that's recorded onto the network, which is the chain can be validated by an a limitless number of third parties who aren't organized or connected in any other way. So these are called validators I could have when you could have when they just computers that read the information that's coming in from the blockchain, they perform some mathematical calculations, and then they verify that the data that's been submitted is, is what it says it is and then at that point, it's formalized and recorded to the block and then, so these blocks are really just pieces of data, data that had been put together and then as you form one block after another, that becomes the chain. So it's really just a chain of data that's been validated by third parties that are completely decentralized. So why is that important because it means that there's no third party, a corporation or government, whoever it might be, that can intervene in the functioning of the blockchain, once it's up and running, and you have enough people who are validating and writing to the to the system, it goes infinitely, and it can't be shut down and so the first use case that really grabbed a lot of attention was payments, right? That's what Sanjay was alluding to, in the early you know, the current web two universe, you don't have an easy way to send value to another person without going through a bank or a financial services company, Blockchain, Bitcoin allows you to do that, it's just simply on the on the chain, if you have value in the in the form of Bitcoin, you can send it to any other address anywhere in the world, instantaneously and no one can stop you from doing that. So this really arose from kind of an idealistic perception, like, we have to be able to have to guarantee our own freedom, you know, the government can't intervene and prevent me from sending money to you and that's where, you know, it came from, like the sophisticated cryptographers mathematicians who had an idealistic view, and that's where Bitcoin came from and then since then, it's expanded to a lot more utility, where you can do much, many more things other than just send payments. You can, you know, NFT, you can have lending platforms, you can have social media companies that are effectively on a blockchain and can't be shut down or controlled by third party. So that's, you know, that's the overview of kind of where it came from and why it's important today. Sanjay, anything to add?   Sanjay: Yeah, no, taking a step from there right and that's exactly right, Geoffrey, the original idea was, you know, this all came about during the great financial crisis of 2008 2000, you know, 10 or so, where people thought that these, you know, financial intermediaries are, you know, in control of our lives and so Bitcoin kind of, you know, that was the reason why it came about as a peer to peer system where you can exchange value without involving these intermediaries. But then over the years, we've kind of seen that world expand rapidly and there's other cryptocurrencies now and one of the notable ones is Ethereum and on the Ethereum network, there's actually the ability to create what's known as a smart contract and a smart contract is essentially a piece of computer code that will execute based on a certain event occurring and why that is important is if you think about it from a disintermediation perspective, you know, in a transaction where two parties are involved, and party A needs to provide a good or service and party B needs to make a payment for that. You need a way to make sure that both parties are adhering to their portion of the agreement, or contract, right and so oftentimes, what happens in the financial services world is, in order to make sure that both parties are compliant with their aspects of the contract. You create an intermediary in the middle that takes that position of collecting information or payment from both parties and sending it across and a very common example of this in real estate. Michael, you as a, an owner of, you know, dozens of properties, you've gone through this process many, many times. But you there's an escrow agent involved exactly what I was thinking sure that, you know, right, the property title moves over to, you know, the buyer and the money goes to the seller, right. But imagine you had a piece of computer software that executed on a sale, and it made sure that the two parties were both appropriately receiving what they were expected to receive and there was no intermediary involved in this process. So this, this all executed, basically on the click of a button, right? Like that would be game changing in the real estate world and that's what we're trying to do now with through stock on chain.   Michael: Holy crap. For anybody who's not watching this video, I just didn't pick up my jaw up off the floor, because that was totally a game. So I have so many questions, I want to take just a step back and so Goeff, you were talking about this, these validations that can be done by any number of people. So I'm thinking about like a real world example. So if I go to the store, and I buy something with my credit card, I put down my credit card, they give me the goods and then in this case, would the validator be like the credit card company that says, look, this is the charge that like how do I think about that from like a traditional example.   Goeff: That's exactly right, the validator or usually there are multiple, but they'll they play the function of the credit card company. But instead of sending your data and the transaction data to the credit card company, where the credit, you know, the data goes to the credit card company, the credit card company says okay, this person has credit and the transaction is now going to be posted on their account, and then they send the okay back to the merchant. Instead, the merchant would send the data to a blockchain, the blockchain validators would pick up that transaction, they would validate that, you know, all of the details are the same. Usually, it's a small number of validators that have to agree on the transaction details to make sure that there aren't, you know, nothing's been missed and then once they've reached that consensus, whether that's five or 10, validators, or whatever it may be at that point, then it goes back to the merchant and as it says, The Merton now the blockchain has been updated to show that this transaction occurred, Goeff, or you or whoever was spending the money now no longer has that money. So I had that money in Bitcoin. I gave it to the merchant, the merchant side of the blockchain and said, hey, guys, can you verify that you're debiting Goeff's account and you're adding it to my account? Everyone said, okay, verified, validated, coming back. Now, I can't spend that money, I don't have it anymore and it's in your account. So that's, you know, a high level how that would work.   Michael: Okay   Sanjay: And a couple of more things there, right. Like, if you, you know, credit card transactions for small dollar values is one example. But if you look at larger dollar values, and there's ACH transactions that take three or four days to get validated through the banking system, a wire transaction, if you're trying to buy a house, and you need to make a wire payment, you're rushing to the nearest retail brand, scheduling an appointment to go into the wire, right?   Michael: It's such a pain.     Sanjay: It is all such a pain and like, imagine you had a way 24/7, right, like, you're looking at, you're browsing a site today, you find a property you really like, you want to buy that property, it's Sunday night at 10pm. You just click the button, and you know, your wallet says you have enough money and the smart contract validates that you have the money transfer property over to you, right, like imagine a world that's like that, where you don't have to worry about waiting three or four days for an ACH or running to your bank and getting an appointment waiting in line to get a wire done and it's all literally you're doing all this from your computer, click of a button 24/7 AMS and payments do anywhere in the world.   Goeff: And the cost is in most cases, negligible. You know, the wire fee is whatever 35 $50 It takes a day, you know, some amount of time to process ACH could be clawed back. The claw back concept that exists with ACH that doesn't happen in blockchain that doesn't exist. Like once it's final, it's validated, it's done and you could, you know, a simple payment transaction might cost from a few cents to a few bucks, but it's not going to be anywhere near the cost of a wire transfer.   Sanjay: And the transaction is immutably recorded on the blockchain, nobody can contest it, because you can go and open up that transaction on the blockchain and say, these two parties agreed to this transaction and it's hot, you know, it was hashed on the blockchain and there's this unique hash that represents this transaction, right. So there's no disputing later on. The parties agree that transaction gets done, it's instantaneously recorded and so that that makes this platform as a technology choice. You have innumerable number of possibilities because once you have those types of payment rails, you can build all kinds of applications around it.   Michael: This is insane, you guys. So like, we were talking about the validators and Goeff, you were saying, whatever, four or five or 10 validation points and people are doing it. So is it literally like people on their computer going, like watching their screen for these payments going back and forth or is this happening automatically?   Goeff: No, it can happen. It happens, it's automatic. Yeah, you set up a server that has the right hardware, there are different hardware and software requirements for different blockchains. But it runs silently in the background, or in some cases, it's, it's loud, because there are a lot of fans this morning.   Michael: I heard that, yeah…   Goeff: Yeah, but it's happening 24/7 In the background, and, and in most cases, it's just set or forget, set and forget, you don't have to be online all the time, doing anything manually.   Sanjay: And one other thing I wanted to point out was, you know, obviously, with banks, you can go there on weekends, after hours bank holidays and such, but even a MasterCard or Visa, if they're having a problem with their servers or something, you can have outages where you know, for a couple of hours, you're not able to do any credit card transactions, right? Whereas on the blockchain, that doesn't happen, right because there's blocks can be like, even if my computer was one of the validators, but for whatever reason, it's not working right now there are hundreds of other computers that are doing the same thing that are waiting to pick up the next block and compute it and solve the puzzle and so, you know, as Goeff was saying earlier, once the blockchain is up and running, and there's, you know, enough infrastructure in terms of validators that support that blockchain, you know, it's then it's permanently out there, and it's you can shut it down.   Michael: So that kind of brings to my next question and so you both are talking about this decentralization aspect and I think I've heard so much about the crypto world, it's like getting away from big banks and government and that sort of thing. But if this information is, I mean, it's public at this point, right? When I, Goeff, when I send you money or buy a service from you, it's now public information.   Sanjay: Just to just to clarify on that, right, the part of the information that's public is that this wallet address transacted with this other wallet address. But it's not necessarily public that, you know, Michael transacted with Goeff, right. So what's publicly stored is just the, you know, so, you know, when we talk about privacy, oftentimes, people use the words privacy and anonymity interchangeably, but they're two different things, right? You know, in one example, where there's just two wallets transacting with each other, you both still have full anonymity but the privacy concerning the fact that the transaction occurred between two wallets, that may be public information, but that's the kind of subtle.   Michael: Got it, yeah okay. Okay, that makes total sense, because, well, I was going with the question is, if I send Jeff money for a service, I mean, that could be a taxable event on the traditional world, like, if you were a credit card company, or you were a merchant, I send you that you have sales tax to pay. So I'm imagining government's point to the me sending you money and say, well, now we're going to tax it. But Sanjay, what you're saying is that the actual dollar amount, or what it was for, might not be available to them, all they could see was, someone sent money to someone else, end of story…   Sanjay: We use you the amount of money that went from a to b, but you don't like people don't automatically know who a and who B where the US are going as far as…   Michael: Or what it's for…   Sanjay: Right, in the US people are required, basically to report their own earnings and that's, you know, whether it's on the in the crypto side or non-crypto side, but, you know, you're required to report your earnings and in other countries and jurisdictions, they've passed laws where crypto transactions are not necessarily taxable. So, like, if you bought Bitcoin for, you know, $5,000 and sold it for $20,000, you may not have capital gains taxes in other jurisdictions in the US we do and that's, you know, self-reported, for the most part,   Michael: This is so nuts. Okay, so, taking one more step forward, we're talking about these coins. We talked about Bitcoin, and we mentioned Ethereum, as well, what gives these things of value? Is it just that we have generally I mean, the same thing can be said for the dollar, it's enough people have accepted or any currency have enough people have bought into this idea that this piece of paper that has an old president's face on it is worth what we've decided it's worth, same thing for Bitcoin and Ethereum.   Goeff: Exactly the same. All right, yeah. Nothing else. There's nothing else to we, you know, we all agree today that Bitcoin is worth 20,000. If it goes up, then you know, that's literally the market price. It's set by the people in the market who are transacting on a you know, every second and so it's a very clear pricing mechanism.   Sanjay: In a way you know, it's pure demand and supply that drive pricing for the these types of alternative currencies or crypto currencies, the dollar, for example, you know, we price $1 bill to be worth $1, right and so you will always be able to redeem $1 for $1. But, you know, inflation and other characteristics might make it less valuable to you, right like if a loaf of bread was 50 cents, and now it's $1, you know, you're paying more money to get it, but you know, you're not paying more bills necessarily, you know, like, the dollar bill is always $1 Bill, right? Whereas, one, one Bitcoin or one Ethereum, its value can go up over time, almost like the stock market, right? If you're looking at a share of Microsoft, it's $100 today, but because we all think Microsoft is very valuable, or Apple is very valuable, and the next iPhone is the most sexiest thing that's come out, and therefore, you know, we think we should, you know, put more value to the Apple stock, right? So the concept is similar with Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's simply people that are there are people who are, you know, buyers, and then there's their long on Bitcoin and then there are people who are short on Bitcoin and if there are more people long than short, then the price is going to go up. If there are more people short at a particular point in time price will come down. There's fewer demand.   Michael: Cool and so we mentioned, I think you both mentioned a couple of different use cases for the blockchain and for crypto. What, like, where do you see this going and for Roofstock, specifically, maybe you could talk about what we're doing as a company with regards to blockchain and where do you see it evolving from here?   Goeff: Sure, so, the, you know, the easiest use case for the blockchain technology is for something that is entirely on chain right payment is a perfect example, right? The you know, I give you send you something of value, call it Bitcoin, you accept that, and that's all on the blockchain and that's pretty easy. What we're doing is, we think taking the next step forward for blockchain and we're not the only ones. But we think that we do have something to add here, which is to bridge blockchain to real world assets and that's where things start to get a little bit tricky because let's say that you have a home, you call it a home on chain, a tokenized, home, whatever it is, and you have a token, a blockchain representation of a home, but it's a real world home and so you know, you say, oh, I go to my blockchain wallet, my crypto wallet, and I see I have this home token. That's great but let's say it's not the home that I live in and in fact, it's a home somewhere else in the country and I haven't been there for a while. How do I even know that there's still a home there, right and if I want to sell it to you, you know, you like the idea of using a smart contract to buy and sell this home? You like the idea of having a one click transaction of having certainty that you're going to get what you know, the home token in exchange for your money. That's all great. But how do you know that you're actually buying a real home and not just something that is called a home on a blockchain, whatever that even means, right.   And so that's where we've spent all of the last nine months and the better part of the last 12 months, diving into the nitty gritty legal details to understand and practical implications to understand how we can put this together in a system that works and the answer is, you have to have some type of validation from the real world as well, obviously, you know, the scenarios that I just mentioned, we can't allow that to happen where someone purchases a home token, and finds out that the home burned down three months ago. So you know, you just got nothing and so the way that I think what Roofstock can bring to this equation is the deep, detailed knowledge about how real estate transactions work, plus the blockchain, the blockchain, structuring the legal implementation and that's the value add that we have. I think there are a lot of others in the space and we encourage everyone to get out there and try, you know, try to build, but we do see others who don't have the real estate experience and even though they have a beautiful blockchain strategy, they don't know how to connect that and that you end up with something that's not useful. So what we're doing is designing a system that ensures that before any home is transacted, it's gone through all of the usual checks and balances that are necessary for real estate transaction and inspection has been done recently. We've done you know, made sure that taxes are paid, made sure that insurance is in place, make sure that the title is you know, unencumbered. We do all of that, because you have to do all of that no one's gonna buy it, if you doubt, but we do that behind the scenes, and so went by the time that you as the buyer come to see our site and you see the home, the home tokens that are listed there, you know that you have a data room that shows all of the documents that I just mentioned and more. So your diligence is already done for you. You don't need an inspection contingency, because you have an inspection report sitting right there, you know, you don't need on the on the on the flip side, you know, you don't need an escrow agent, because the smart contract simply it won't execute, it won't perform its function unless the buyer has the funds that it says it has. So you know, this smart contract at the time that you as the buyer purchase, you click, I want to buy this home, the smart contract checks, do you have money, the right amount of funds in your wallet? You know, they check the other side. Does the seller have a home, which is already been approved by Roofstock to be sold? Yes, yes, the transaction happens, and it's not and if one of those isn't true, then it fails and you know, we have to go back to the drawing board and fix whatever was wrong.   Sanjay: Right and then to add to that, right, the kind of the first version of smart contracts and NF T's and all these things that came about on web three, you know, a lot of those assets themselves had the value in it, right. So you might have heard about projects like board a, or crypto punks, these are well known NFT projects where people are spending Saturday 98 to buy, you know, a JPEG image of you know, this popcorn ape. But in those cases, that image itself has that value embedded in it and when people get that image when they buy that they've already exchanged value, right. But the example Goeff is giving us with a real life, real world asset, the NFT is a representation of that real world asset, but it's that real world asset that has the value in it and so when people are transacting these NF t's on the marketplace, Roofstock has to make sure that you know what they're buying and selling corresponds to that real world asset that has that value and we've gone through the inspection and other diligence process to make sure that is still true, right. So that's the sort of the next leap in the web three world where you go beyond just the you know, cryptocurrencies and crypto Native Assets getting traded and now you start looking at real world applications.   Michael: Goeff, I'm thinking about is like, so if I'm trying to understand this, I'm I buy this token, which the underlying asset kind of backing the token up, if you will, is the home, right? So I then own the home as well. How does that work for like, insurance purposes? If I gotta go get insurance on his home? Am I Michael, like going out to my traditional insurance people and saying, okay, well, I own this home, or like, who's on title of the home? How does that all work, is the token on the title?   Goeff: All the right questions. So the way that we're setting this up, each home is titled in its own LLC. So we have a limited liability company where the home is titled and so that really facilitates the transfer between different parties, because you don't have to record title, every time that home token is sold. The title obviously has to be recorded the traditional way at the county recorder's office, the first time that it's transferred into the LLC and then from that moment on, it doesn't need to be retitled because the only thing that's changing hands is the LLC, the ownership of the LLC, the membership interest, it's called like the share of the LLC. So that's, that's how we unlock that. So that when I sell you my home token, I'm selling you an LLC that owns the home and you as the owner of the LLC, you have full control of the LLC, and thereby full control of the underlying home. So you can do whatever you want with the home. If you want to rent it, you can rent it, if you want it to be a long term rental, a short term rental, you get to decide all of that you get to decide when you put a new roof on or if you want to repair the roof instead of replace it. You make all those decisions. As far as the insurance question that you asked, we do have an agreement with an existing insurance company that's tech forward, and they're interested in working on this project. So we've already set that up. The first time you buy a home from us, it will come with one year of property insurance, it's prepaid. If you want to change that you can you can change it if you want to cancel it and replace it with a different insurer. You can what we found is that a lot of intermediates in the space are not necessarily comfortable and dealing with this type of transaction. So we've spent a fair amount of time diligence seen a lot of, you know, providers in the market and we think the ones that we have are very good, but it's up to you as the owner, if you want to have a specific insurer, or a specific title company, you can do that. But otherwise, it's already in place and it's really as easy as just paying your annual premiums you can, you don't have to think about it, if you don't want to.   Michael: Okay, so the follow up what popped in my mind immediately, and then we're going to get you guys out of here, but we live in California. So Roofstock obviously doesn't have a very big footprint here, because there's not a lot of cash flow potential, or it's much more difficult to make the numbers work as compared to a lot of other parts of the country. So, Sanjay, if you buy a home for a million bucks, tokenize it and now you your property taxes in California are based on your purchase price. So if five years down the road, you sell it to me for 2 million bucks. Traditionally, my new property tax value is going based on that 2 million bucks. But are you saying that because this trent this sale isn't getting recorded, as it would traditionally that my property taxes are still gonna be based on your original sale price of a million bucks.   Sanjay: In many state that's, that would be true. But in California, unfortunately, prop 13 would pick that sale up. That's it's a state by state analysis and in most of the states, you know, the transaction would be fine. You individually report any capital gain on your taxes, of course. But in California, the transfer does get picked up.   Michael: Damn it. They always get you somehow but maybe in some states, it sounds like that might not get picked up, right. There's less of an issue…   Sanjay: That's right, in many cases…Yeah.   Michael: Interesting. Okay, man, I thought I had this huge unlock but clearly you guys have already thought of, of all this. So this is this is super exciting, guys. We definitely need to continue the conversation, got a lot more questions, a lot more information. I would love to disseminate to our listeners. But thank you both so much for joining me. If people want to learn more about web three and blockchain and crypto in general, is there are there good resources out there that we can point people to?   Sanjay: Yeah, I mean, definitely come to our website to learn about real estate tokenization. That's https://onchain.roofstock.com/ and also, you know, follow us on crypto Twitter. It's at @rsonchain and then individually, like Goeff and I do contribute in Twitter and LinkedIn and other areas as well. So, you know, look us up and follow us as well, on those platforms.   Goeff: And don't feel don't hesitate to reach out. Like you know, we're happy to talk we're here. We're you know, we're doing something new. We know a lot of people have a lot of questions, and we're happy to answer the questions and then he conversation. So ping us, we're happy to chat.   Michael: Amazing, amazing. Well, thank you both again, for coming on and super looking forward to doing this again soon.   Sanjay: Thank you. Thanks for having us.   Goeff: Likewise. Thanks.   Michael: Alright, anyway, that was our episode. A huge thank you to Goeff and Sanjay for coming on. We're gonna definitely be having them back on again soon. So if you have additional questions about things you just heard, or blockchain things in general, we'd love for you to see those in the comment section. Wherever it is, you get your podcasts, and we will try to get to them on the next episode with Goeff and Sanjay. As always, if you liked the episode, feel free to leave us just traditional rating or review. We love those as well and we look forward to see you in the next one. Happy investing…

Raising finance for new real estate projects is difficult. Property development firms face interest rates as high as 29% when working with banking institutions as single-source loan providers. They also face challenges with multiple loan sources as crowd financing can be difficult to administer. Blockchain simplifies access to alternative financing models by facilitating investor management for developers and ensuring investment transparency and continuous ROI tracking for investors. In today's episode Goeffrey Thompson, Chief Blockchain Officer of Roofstock, and Sanjay Raghavan, Head of Structured Securities and Co-head of Digital Securities Initiative, walk us through what blockchain technology is and how they are tokenizing properties in a revolutionary way to buy and sell property.     Episode Link: https://onchain.roofstock.com/ https://twitter.com/rsonchain --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Geoffrey Thompson, who's the chief blockchain Officer here at Roofstock and Sanjay Raghavan, who's the head of web three initiatives here at Roofstock and we're gonna be talking today about what blockchain is, and how it applies to us as real estate investors. So let's get into it.   Goeff, and Sanjay, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I am super excited to chat with you both.   Sanjay: Likewise.   Goeff: Thank you for having us, thank you.   Michael: No, absolutely, absolutely. So I know a little bit, obviously, who you guys are because we work together. But for anyone who isn't familiar with you. Give us a quick and dirty description who you are, and what is it that you're doing at Roofstock? Goeff, I'll kick it over to you first.   Goeff: Sure. So I'm Goeffrey Thompson. I currently have the title of Chief blockchain Officer at Roofstock. Previously, I was General Counsel and I've been a lawyer for by training for a long time and now heading up the blockchain initiative at rootstock together with Sanjay.   Michael: Awesome, great.   Sanjay: I'm Sanjay, head of web three initiatives. Previously, I was leading securities initiatives at roof stock coming up on actually three years this week. So super exciting tomorrow, I think.   Michael: Right on, so really quick follow up questions for you both. Jeff. Were you just like a crypto guy in your everyday life? I mean, how does a real out as a lawyer turn into a blockchain official at a company at the C suite level? I mean, that's incredible.   Goeff: Yeah, I kind of backed into it. That wasn't a plan but I had been advising friends. Since 2017, during the ICO boom, the initial coin offering boom, and I started hearing people in my network, talk about it and say things like, oh, well, it's not a security because it's a coin. So you don't have to follow the securities laws, you know, and I thought, I don't get a lot of the technical stuff that talking about, but I know I can help them with the legal stuff. So then I just I was acting as legal advisor for a couple of years and, and then Gary, our CEO knew that and last year, maybe 12 months ago or a little bit more, our board came to our CEO and said, you guys, Roofstock, you need to get smart on blockchain. We're not saying you have to do it. But you know, we want you to have an idea of whether there's something there and so he asked me and Sanjay, because he knew I had some crypto background and there's a lot of legal and obviously, the financial structure is critical as well, so we kind of got into it together.   Michael: Awesome and Sanjay, at the risk of sounding like a total rookie, what the hell is web three man, I hear so much about it. Break it down for us.   Sanjay: All right. So I know it's so web low. So let's take a step back, right. So web one, which was kind of the first incarnation of the internet, right? There were sites that had static information, you could like type a URL, URL and go and, like, consume that information. But that's all you could do is just a read only type of a platform and then a few years later, the internet evolved to kind of web two, which widely is known as the read write version of the internet. So not only could you consume information, but you could go and, you know, provide information and content to the internet as well as a consumer and what happened with web two was it you know, that ability to read and write created all kinds of new interactions, and that allowed a lot of kind of the internet economy to bloom around it, where the Googles and the apples and eBays and other large companies were able to curate a lot of the content and manage a lot of the traffic. But you know, with social media and stuff, you are providing content as well, and you are consuming content, there was ecommerce, so a lot of these things came about, but the power resided with a very few large corporations that kind of controlled all of these transactions and the when, when web one started, the kind of original vision behind it was a more collaborative environment, where the consumers and the creators and consumers could actually work with each other and use a token economy and share you know, revenue and monetization. So that idea of you know, read, write and then adding on to it at the end. So it's a read write own type of economy that's decentralized. permissionless trustless has its own native payment rails, where the content creators and con Then consumers are all working together and you know, there's no power resting with large corporations, but it's, you know, giving power back to the people. So that's how that's how I would sort of succinctly describe, three and it's so it's a sort of a new way of thinking about things and it's super exciting.   Michael: Yeah it does sound super exciting and so give us all like a background again, treat me like a third grader, because that's probably my IQ level when it comes to the crypto and blockchain world. Give us all an idea of like, what is blockchain and what is cryptocurrency and then we'll get in maybe on how to be thinking about it. With regard to the real estate space and why it even belongs here you don't think this…   Goeff: Yep, sure, so the core concept for blockchain is that it's a network that can be validated the data that's recorded onto the network, which is the chain can be validated by an a limitless number of third parties who aren't organized or connected in any other way. So these are called validators I could have when you could have when they just computers that read the information that's coming in from the blockchain, they perform some mathematical calculations, and then they verify that the data that's been submitted is, is what it says it is and then at that point, it's formalized and recorded to the block and then, so these blocks are really just pieces of data, data that had been put together and then as you form one block after another, that becomes the chain. So it's really just a chain of data that's been validated by third parties that are completely decentralized. So why is that important because it means that there's no third party, a corporation or government, whoever it might be, that can intervene in the functioning of the blockchain, once it's up and running, and you have enough people who are validating and writing to the to the system, it goes infinitely, and it can't be shut down and so the first use case that really grabbed a lot of attention was payments, right? That's what Sanjay was alluding to, in the early you know, the current web two universe, you don't have an easy way to send value to another person without going through a bank or a financial services company, Blockchain, Bitcoin allows you to do that, it's just simply on the on the chain, if you have value in the in the form of Bitcoin, you can send it to any other address anywhere in the world, instantaneously and no one can stop you from doing that. So this really arose from kind of an idealistic perception, like, we have to be able to have to guarantee our own freedom, you know, the government can't intervene and prevent me from sending money to you and that's where, you know, it came from, like the sophisticated cryptographers mathematicians who had an idealistic view, and that's where Bitcoin came from and then since then, it's expanded to a lot more utility, where you can do much, many more things other than just send payments. You can, you know, NFT, you can have lending platforms, you can have social media companies that are effectively on a blockchain and can't be shut down or controlled by third party. So that's, you know, that's the overview of kind of where it came from and why it's important today. Sanjay, anything to add?   Sanjay: Yeah, no, taking a step from there right and that's exactly right, Geoffrey, the original idea was, you know, this all came about during the great financial crisis of 2008 2000, you know, 10 or so, where people thought that these, you know, financial intermediaries are, you know, in control of our lives and so Bitcoin kind of, you know, that was the reason why it came about as a peer to peer system where you can exchange value without involving these intermediaries. But then over the years, we've kind of seen that world expand rapidly and there's other cryptocurrencies now and one of the notable ones is Ethereum and on the Ethereum network, there's actually the ability to create what's known as a smart contract and a smart contract is essentially a piece of computer code that will execute based on a certain event occurring and why that is important is if you think about it from a disintermediation perspective, you know, in a transaction where two parties are involved, and party A needs to provide a good or service and party B needs to make a payment for that. You need a way to make sure that both parties are adhering to their portion of the agreement, or contract, right and so oftentimes, what happens in the financial services world is, in order to make sure that both parties are compliant with their aspects of the contract. You create an intermediary in the middle that takes that position of collecting information or payment from both parties and sending it across and a very common example of this in real estate. Michael, you as a, an owner of, you know, dozens of properties, you've gone through this process many, many times. But you there's an escrow agent involved exactly what I was thinking sure that, you know, right, the property title moves over to, you know, the buyer and the money goes to the seller, right. But imagine you had a piece of computer software that executed on a sale, and it made sure that the two parties were both appropriately receiving what they were expected to receive and there was no intermediary involved in this process. So this, this all executed, basically on the click of a button, right? Like that would be game changing in the real estate world and that's what we're trying to do now with through stock on chain.   Michael: Holy crap. For anybody who's not watching this video, I just didn't pick up my jaw up off the floor, because that was totally a game. So I have so many questions, I want to take just a step back and so Goeff, you were talking about this, these validations that can be done by any number of people. So I'm thinking about like a real world example. So if I go to the store, and I buy something with my credit card, I put down my credit card, they give me the goods and then in this case, would the validator be like the credit card company that says, look, this is the charge that like how do I think about that from like a traditional example.   Goeff: That's exactly right, the validator or usually there are multiple, but they'll they play the function of the credit card company. But instead of sending your data and the transaction data to the credit card company, where the credit, you know, the data goes to the credit card company, the credit card company says okay, this person has credit and the transaction is now going to be posted on their account, and then they send the okay back to the merchant. Instead, the merchant would send the data to a blockchain, the blockchain validators would pick up that transaction, they would validate that, you know, all of the details are the same. Usually, it's a small number of validators that have to agree on the transaction details to make sure that there aren't, you know, nothing's been missed and then once they've reached that consensus, whether that's five or 10, validators, or whatever it may be at that point, then it goes back to the merchant and as it says, The Merton now the blockchain has been updated to show that this transaction occurred, Goeff, or you or whoever was spending the money now no longer has that money. So I had that money in Bitcoin. I gave it to the merchant, the merchant side of the blockchain and said, hey, guys, can you verify that you're debiting Goeff's account and you're adding it to my account? Everyone said, okay, verified, validated, coming back. Now, I can't spend that money, I don't have it anymore and it's in your account. So that's, you know, a high level how that would work.   Michael: Okay   Sanjay: And a couple of more things there, right. Like, if you, you know, credit card transactions for small dollar values is one example. But if you look at larger dollar values, and there's ACH transactions that take three or four days to get validated through the banking system, a wire transaction, if you're trying to buy a house, and you need to make a wire payment, you're rushing to the nearest retail brand, scheduling an appointment to go into the wire, right?   Michael: It's such a pain.     Sanjay: It is all such a pain and like, imagine you had a way 24/7, right, like, you're looking at, you're browsing a site today, you find a property you really like, you want to buy that property, it's Sunday night at 10pm. You just click the button, and you know, your wallet says you have enough money and the smart contract validates that you have the money transfer property over to you, right, like imagine a world that's like that, where you don't have to worry about waiting three or four days for an ACH or running to your bank and getting an appointment waiting in line to get a wire done and it's all literally you're doing all this from your computer, click of a button 24/7 AMS and payments do anywhere in the world.   Goeff: And the cost is in most cases, negligible. You know, the wire fee is whatever 35 $50 It takes a day, you know, some amount of time to process ACH could be clawed back. The claw back concept that exists with ACH that doesn't happen in blockchain that doesn't exist. Like once it's final, it's validated, it's done and you could, you know, a simple payment transaction might cost from a few cents to a few bucks, but it's not going to be anywhere near the cost of a wire transfer.   Sanjay: And the transaction is immutably recorded on the blockchain, nobody can contest it, because you can go and open up that transaction on the blockchain and say, these two parties agreed to this transaction and it's hot, you know, it was hashed on the blockchain and there's this unique hash that represents this transaction, right. So there's no disputing later on. The parties agree that transaction gets done, it's instantaneously recorded and so that that makes this platform as a technology choice. You have innumerable number of possibilities because once you have those types of payment rails, you can build all kinds of applications around it.   Michael: This is insane, you guys. So like, we were talking about the validators and Goeff, you were saying, whatever, four or five or 10 validation points and people are doing it. So is it literally like people on their computer going, like watching their screen for these payments going back and forth or is this happening automatically?   Goeff: No, it can happen. It happens, it's automatic. Yeah, you set up a server that has the right hardware, there are different hardware and software requirements for different blockchains. But it runs silently in the background, or in some cases, it's, it's loud, because there are a lot of fans this morning.   Michael: I heard that, yeah…   Goeff: Yeah, but it's happening 24/7 In the background, and, and in most cases, it's just set or forget, set and forget, you don't have to be online all the time, doing anything manually.   Sanjay: And one other thing I wanted to point out was, you know, obviously, with banks, you can go there on weekends, after hours bank holidays and such, but even a MasterCard or Visa, if they're having a problem with their servers or something, you can have outages where you know, for a couple of hours, you're not able to do any credit card transactions, right? Whereas on the blockchain, that doesn't happen, right because there's blocks can be like, even if my computer was one of the validators, but for whatever reason, it's not working right now there are hundreds of other computers that are doing the same thing that are waiting to pick up the next block and compute it and solve the puzzle and so, you know, as Goeff was saying earlier, once the blockchain is up and running, and there's, you know, enough infrastructure in terms of validators that support that blockchain, you know, it's then it's permanently out there, and it's you can shut it down.   Michael: So that kind of brings to my next question and so you both are talking about this decentralization aspect and I think I've heard so much about the crypto world, it's like getting away from big banks and government and that sort of thing. But if this information is, I mean, it's public at this point, right? When I, Goeff, when I send you money or buy a service from you, it's now public information.   Sanjay: Just to just to clarify on that, right, the part of the information that's public is that this wallet address transacted with this other wallet address. But it's not necessarily public that, you know, Michael transacted with Goeff, right. So what's publicly stored is just the, you know, so, you know, when we talk about privacy, oftentimes, people use the words privacy and anonymity interchangeably, but they're two different things, right? You know, in one example, where there's just two wallets transacting with each other, you both still have full anonymity but the privacy concerning the fact that the transaction occurred between two wallets, that may be public information, but that's the kind of subtle.   Michael: Got it, yeah okay. Okay, that makes total sense, because, well, I was going with the question is, if I send Jeff money for a service, I mean, that could be a taxable event on the traditional world, like, if you were a credit card company, or you were a merchant, I send you that you have sales tax to pay. So I'm imagining government's point to the me sending you money and say, well, now we're going to tax it. But Sanjay, what you're saying is that the actual dollar amount, or what it was for, might not be available to them, all they could see was, someone sent money to someone else, end of story…   Sanjay: We use you the amount of money that went from a to b, but you don't like people don't automatically know who a and who B where the US are going as far as…   Michael: Or what it's for…   Sanjay: Right, in the US people are required, basically to report their own earnings and that's, you know, whether it's on the in the crypto side or non-crypto side, but, you know, you're required to report your earnings and in other countries and jurisdictions, they've passed laws where crypto transactions are not necessarily taxable. So, like, if you bought Bitcoin for, you know, $5,000 and sold it for $20,000, you may not have capital gains taxes in other jurisdictions in the US we do and that's, you know, self-reported, for the most part,   Michael: This is so nuts. Okay, so, taking one more step forward, we're talking about these coins. We talked about Bitcoin, and we mentioned Ethereum, as well, what gives these things of value? Is it just that we have generally I mean, the same thing can be said for the dollar, it's enough people have accepted or any currency have enough people have bought into this idea that this piece of paper that has an old president's face on it is worth what we've decided it's worth, same thing for Bitcoin and Ethereum.   Goeff: Exactly the same. All right, yeah. Nothing else. There's nothing else to we, you know, we all agree today that Bitcoin is worth 20,000. If it goes up, then you know, that's literally the market price. It's set by the people in the market who are transacting on a you know, every second and so it's a very clear pricing mechanism.   Sanjay: In a way you know, it's pure demand and supply that drive pricing for the these types of alternative currencies or crypto currencies, the dollar, for example, you know, we price $1 bill to be worth $1, right and so you will always be able to redeem $1 for $1. But, you know, inflation and other characteristics might make it less valuable to you, right like if a loaf of bread was 50 cents, and now it's $1, you know, you're paying more money to get it, but you know, you're not paying more bills necessarily, you know, like, the dollar bill is always $1 Bill, right? Whereas, one, one Bitcoin or one Ethereum, its value can go up over time, almost like the stock market, right? If you're looking at a share of Microsoft, it's $100 today, but because we all think Microsoft is very valuable, or Apple is very valuable, and the next iPhone is the most sexiest thing that's come out, and therefore, you know, we think we should, you know, put more value to the Apple stock, right? So the concept is similar with Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's simply people that are there are people who are, you know, buyers, and then there's their long on Bitcoin and then there are people who are short on Bitcoin and if there are more people long than short, then the price is going to go up. If there are more people short at a particular point in time price will come down. There's fewer demand.   Michael: Cool and so we mentioned, I think you both mentioned a couple of different use cases for the blockchain and for crypto. What, like, where do you see this going and for Roofstock, specifically, maybe you could talk about what we're doing as a company with regards to blockchain and where do you see it evolving from here?   Goeff: Sure, so, the, you know, the easiest use case for the blockchain technology is for something that is entirely on chain right payment is a perfect example, right? The you know, I give you send you something of value, call it Bitcoin, you accept that, and that's all on the blockchain and that's pretty easy. What we're doing is, we think taking the next step forward for blockchain and we're not the only ones. But we think that we do have something to add here, which is to bridge blockchain to real world assets and that's where things start to get a little bit tricky because let's say that you have a home, you call it a home on chain, a tokenized, home, whatever it is, and you have a token, a blockchain representation of a home, but it's a real world home and so you know, you say, oh, I go to my blockchain wallet, my crypto wallet, and I see I have this home token. That's great but let's say it's not the home that I live in and in fact, it's a home somewhere else in the country and I haven't been there for a while. How do I even know that there's still a home there, right and if I want to sell it to you, you know, you like the idea of using a smart contract to buy and sell this home? You like the idea of having a one click transaction of having certainty that you're going to get what you know, the home token in exchange for your money. That's all great. But how do you know that you're actually buying a real home and not just something that is called a home on a blockchain, whatever that even means, right.   And so that's where we've spent all of the last nine months and the better part of the last 12 months, diving into the nitty gritty legal details to understand and practical implications to understand how we can put this together in a system that works and the answer is, you have to have some type of validation from the real world as well, obviously, you know, the scenarios that I just mentioned, we can't allow that to happen where someone purchases a home token, and finds out that the home burned down three months ago. So you know, you just got nothing and so the way that I think what Roofstock can bring to this equation is the deep, detailed knowledge about how real estate transactions work, plus the blockchain, the blockchain, structuring the legal implementation and that's the value add that we have. I think there are a lot of others in the space and we encourage everyone to get out there and try, you know, try to build, but we do see others who don't have the real estate experience and even though they have a beautiful blockchain strategy, they don't know how to connect that and that you end up with something that's not useful. So what we're doing is designing a system that ensures that before any home is transacted, it's gone through all of the usual checks and balances that are necessary for real estate transaction and inspection has been done recently. We've done you know, made sure that taxes are paid, made sure that insurance is in place, make sure that the title is you know, unencumbered. We do all of that, because you have to do all of that no one's gonna buy it, if you doubt, but we do that behind the scenes, and so went by the time that you as the buyer come to see our site and you see the home, the home tokens that are listed there, you know that you have a data room that shows all of the documents that I just mentioned and more. So your diligence is already done for you. You don't need an inspection contingency, because you have an inspection report sitting right there, you know, you don't need on the on the on the flip side, you know, you don't need an escrow agent, because the smart contract simply it won't execute, it won't perform its function unless the buyer has the funds that it says it has. So you know, this smart contract at the time that you as the buyer purchase, you click, I want to buy this home, the smart contract checks, do you have money, the right amount of funds in your wallet? You know, they check the other side. Does the seller have a home, which is already been approved by Roofstock to be sold? Yes, yes, the transaction happens, and it's not and if one of those isn't true, then it fails and you know, we have to go back to the drawing board and fix whatever was wrong.   Sanjay: Right and then to add to that, right, the kind of the first version of smart contracts and NF T's and all these things that came about on web three, you know, a lot of those assets themselves had the value in it, right. So you might have heard about projects like board a, or crypto punks, these are well known NFT projects where people are spending Saturday 98 to buy, you know, a JPEG image of you know, this popcorn ape. But in those cases, that image itself has that value embedded in it and when people get that image when they buy that they've already exchanged value, right. But the example Goeff is giving us with a real life, real world asset, the NFT is a representation of that real world asset, but it's that real world asset that has the value in it and so when people are transacting these NF t's on the marketplace, Roofstock has to make sure that you know what they're buying and selling corresponds to that real world asset that has that value and we've gone through the inspection and other diligence process to make sure that is still true, right. So that's the sort of the next leap in the web three world where you go beyond just the you know, cryptocurrencies and crypto Native Assets getting traded and now you start looking at real world applications.   Michael: Goeff, I'm thinking about is like, so if I'm trying to understand this, I'm I buy this token, which the underlying asset kind of backing the token up, if you will, is the home, right? So I then own the home as well. How does that work for like, insurance purposes? If I gotta go get insurance on his home? Am I Michael, like going out to my traditional insurance people and saying, okay, well, I own this home, or like, who's on title of the home? How does that all work, is the token on the title?   Goeff: All the right questions. So the way that we're setting this up, each home is titled in its own LLC. So we have a limited liability company where the home is titled and so that really facilitates the transfer between different parties, because you don't have to record title, every time that home token is sold. The title obviously has to be recorded the traditional way at the county recorder's office, the first time that it's transferred into the LLC and then from that moment on, it doesn't need to be retitled because the only thing that's changing hands is the LLC, the ownership of the LLC, the membership interest, it's called like the share of the LLC. So that's, that's how we unlock that. So that when I sell you my home token, I'm selling you an LLC that owns the home and you as the owner of the LLC, you have full control of the LLC, and thereby full control of the underlying home. So you can do whatever you want with the home. If you want to rent it, you can rent it, if you want it to be a long term rental, a short term rental, you get to decide all of that you get to decide when you put a new roof on or if you want to repair the roof instead of replace it. You make all those decisions. As far as the insurance question that you asked, we do have an agreement with an existing insurance company that's tech forward, and they're interested in working on this project. So we've already set that up. The first time you buy a home from us, it will come with one year of property insurance, it's prepaid. If you want to change that you can you can change it if you want to cancel it and replace it with a different insurer. You can what we found is that a lot of intermediates in the space are not necessarily comfortable and dealing with this type of transaction. So we've spent a fair amount of time diligence seen a lot of, you know, providers in the market and we think the ones that we have are very good, but it's up to you as the owner, if you want to have a specific insurer, or a specific title company, you can do that. But otherwise, it's already in place and it's really as easy as just paying your annual premiums you can, you don't have to think about it, if you don't want to.   Michael: Okay, so the follow up what popped in my mind immediately, and then we're going to get you guys out of here, but we live in California. So Roofstock obviously doesn't have a very big footprint here, because there's not a lot of cash flow potential, or it's much more difficult to make the numbers work as compared to a lot of other parts of the country. So, Sanjay, if you buy a home for a million bucks, tokenize it and now you your property taxes in California are based on your purchase price. So if five years down the road, you sell it to me for 2 million bucks. Traditionally, my new property tax value is going based on that 2 million bucks. But are you saying that because this trent this sale isn't getting recorded, as it would traditionally that my property taxes are still gonna be based on your original sale price of a million bucks.   Sanjay: In many state that's, that would be true. But in California, unfortunately, prop 13 would pick that sale up. That's it's a state by state analysis and in most of the states, you know, the transaction would be fine. You individually report any capital gain on your taxes, of course. But in California, the transfer does get picked up.   Michael: Damn it. They always get you somehow but maybe in some states, it sounds like that might not get picked up, right. There's less of an issue…   Sanjay: That's right, in many cases…Yeah.   Michael: Interesting. Okay, man, I thought I had this huge unlock but clearly you guys have already thought of, of all this. So this is this is super exciting, guys. We definitely need to continue the conversation, got a lot more questions, a lot more information. I would love to disseminate to our listeners. But thank you both so much for joining me. If people want to learn more about web three and blockchain and crypto in general, is there are there good resources out there that we can point people to?   Sanjay: Yeah, I mean, definitely come to our website to learn about real estate tokenization. That's https://onchain.roofstock.com/ and also, you know, follow us on crypto Twitter. It's at @rsonchain and then individually, like Goeff and I do contribute in Twitter and LinkedIn and other areas as well. So, you know, look us up and follow us as well, on those platforms.   Goeff: And don't feel don't hesitate to reach out. Like you know, we're happy to talk we're here. We're you know, we're doing something new. We know a lot of people have a lot of questions, and we're happy to answer the questions and then he conversation. So ping us, we're happy to chat.   Michael: Amazing, amazing. Well, thank you both again, for coming on and super looking forward to doing this again soon.   Sanjay: Thank you. Thanks for having us.   Goeff: Likewise. Thanks.   Michael: Alright, anyway, that was our episode. A huge thank you to Goeff and Sanjay for coming on. We're gonna definitely be having them back on again soon. So if you have additional questions about things you just heard, or blockchain things in general, we'd love for you to see those in the comment section. Wherever it is, you get your podcasts, and we will try to get to them on the next episode with Goeff and Sanjay. As always, if you liked the episode, feel free to leave us just traditional rating or review. We love those as well and we look forward to see you in the next one. Happy investing…

Voyager Digital has taken a loan from Sam Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research, the Bank of England Deputy Governor believes crypto crash survivors could become tomorrow's 'Amazons and eBays' and Celsius is up 50% thanks to the efforts of its community. Jason & Eddie explain why as they dissect the days crypto news. CREDITSHosts: Jason Pizzino and Edwina StottExecutive Producer/Editor: Edwina StottManaging Producer: Andrew Brentnall LINKS.Find the tweet Jason was talking about here.You can find Jason's Youtube Channel HERENova Podcast's Instagram @novapodcastsofficialEd Stott's Instagram @EdwinaStott Find more great podcasts like this at novapodcasts.com.au Find more great podcasts like this at novapodcasts.com.auSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode we dive right into the opening of eBays new shoe store where there is incentive to encourage peeps to wear their kicks right out of the store as well as get folks to wear their sneakers in general! We also share our excitement about the Jordan Brand signing of Howard University in regards to providing kicks for all the athletic programs there and also the first of what we hope are many HBCU signings and lastly what kicks we envision our favorite comic book characters like to rock or what we would like to see them in, you don't wanna miss this one. TAP IN! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/3kingzsneakerheadtalk/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/3kingzsneakerheadtalk/support

In this episode we discuss some very interesting things that sell for a lot of money on eBay, changes in the reselling world, eBays future, and the WhatNot App. Partner with us via Patreon:   https://www.patreon.com/purehustlepodcast   Purchase bubble wrap from the best deal available ANYWHERE:   https://www.americanbubbleboy.com?sca_ref=650095.KTEipe5MI4&sca_source=YouTube    Sign Up for listing services with Sellhound and receive 25% your first purchase or 25% off your first month of a Sellhound monthly subscription when using our affiliate link and promo code PUREHUSTLE25. By the way, everyone gets three free listings to try out before any purchases! Just go to Sellhound.com and subscribe using our promo code PUREHUSTLE25.    Sign Up for Crossposting with Vendoo and receive 25% off your first month when using our affiliate link. In order to receive the discount, subscription must be purchased  from the same device used to create the account:    https://vendoo.co/register?via=purehustlepodcast Purchase PHP Shirts: https://www.ebay.com/itm/392367249736  Donation link: https://www.paypal.me/purehustlepodcast?locale.x=en_US Below is a link to all the shipping supplies we buy through Amazon:   https://www.amazon.com/shop/purehustlepodcast    Bellow is a link to shipping supplies that we use:   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bR2h1PrrljhI5GKeQYWG6ubLOfkqSt0gLFmSxPm52nA/edit?usp=sharing Instagram - @purehustlepodcast    Twitter - @purehustlecast   Facebook - purehustlepodcast   Youtube - Pure Hustle Podcast - www.youtube.com/channel/UCuEJMAB8GdoaPK7eLkKmAiQ

This episode we discuss many different things. eBays newest idea, getting users to post videos of their items instead of photos. Do you think the Superbowl has any trend setting capabilities? What will be the newest trends of the summer of 2022? What should you be buying and listing to make the greatest sales of 2022! Stay tuned for all of that and more to come on the Sevier Thrifters Podcast! We will talk to you all on Wednesday, thank you all for listening and hitting that download button! If you have any comments, questions, concerns, or just want to say hi you can reach us on Instagram at Sevierthrifters and Sevier_thrifters. You can also email us at sevierthrifters@gmail.com. Check us out on YouTube at Sevier Thrifters, where we post videos of the content we discuss. Check out the eBay store at Sevier_Thrifters to see what we sell and list and how we do it! Thank you all again! Have a Great Monday.

In this episode we'll look at the proposed USPS holiday rate surcharge, eBays suspension of trading card seller PWCC and their realigned customer focus, some new programs at Etsy, another retailer entering the resale market and more in the reselling news. I'll also recap some pretty nice sales from the last week here at the Galaxy! USPS Holiday Rate Hike eBay Suspends Biggest Trading Card Seller Etsy 1st Class with tracking eBay Media Mail issues eBay Open has 7000+ attendees eBay focused on High Value buyers ThredUp Growth plans H&M Joins resale biz Amazon insurance changes PayPal suspensions Etsy $500 promo Mercari and JoJo Fletcher Fake Vaccination Card seller looking at 120 years I've created a series of Reselling Logs, and Personal Journals, which you can see on Amazon! Watch My YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/GCRocksYT Try List Perfectly! I recently signed up and am in the process of moving over 6000 listings from eBay to Mercari, watch for future updates! Use this referral link, be sure to input referral code 634 and save 30% off your first month, please and thank you! https://listperfectly.com?ref=634 Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/galaxycdsrocks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/galaxycdsrocks/support

The Weebs share Mid Season thoughts on Slime S2, Dr. Stone S2, eBays new restrictions and Sentencing in the Mangamura case With New Announcements and dates as always!

Maailma kalleim kananagits müüdi reedel eBays 99 997 dollari eest. Kes võiks olla küll see salapärane ostja, kes oli nõus sellist summat maksma McDonald’si kananagitsa eest, mis meenutab tegelast populaarsest videomängust “Among Us”. Samal ajal on sotsiaalmeedia täis pahaseid PlayStation 5 omanikke, kes süüdistavad Sony kasutajate petmises, sest uued mängud ilmuvad siiski ka PS4 konsoolile. […]

Mini malls, shopping centers, and large department stores all still exist and remain popular despite their digital counterparts But online marketplaces are where more and more brands are gathering to not just sell goods, but to get a better 360 view of their customers, and gain access to sell products from other big name brands that fit their marketplace niche. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I explored that idea a bit more with Jason Wyatt, the Executive Chairman at Marketplacer, a business dedicated to creating marketplaces. We dove into the various ways that Jason has seen marketplaces evolve, especially in recent years. Plus, Jason talked about some of the incredible innovation that he’s seen take place  thanks to marketplaces — including the birth of Providoor, an Australian marketplace for restaurants that was built as a reaction to COVID-19 and reached a $100 million run rate within 12 weeks. We talked about how the marketplace connections made that possible, and also how the B2B landscape can be revolutionized thanks to marketplaces. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Getting The Bigger Picture: By creating a marketplace, businesses can get a much deeper picture into the attributes of their customers, while also gaining access to inventory and products to sell from big name brands. The key to success? Curation.We Have A Connection: One of the greatest advantages of a marketplace are the connections that can be formed within them. Especially from a B2B perspective, because for so long those buyers have been left out of the ecommerce equation. They desire the same level of connection and ease that those in B2C have come to expect though, and marketplaces have provided a way to create community and engagement that has made B2B selling and buying much easier.Long Live Loyalty: Big brands have long tapped into loyalty programs as a way to earn customer trust and keep them coming back. By expanding point systems to usage within a marketplace, brands are now becoming even more trustworthy and respected in the eyes of consumers, who can all of a sudden get more bang for their buck. Additionally, the rise of wide-ranging marketplace loyalty strategies will likely become a new way for retailers to attract customers to newer marketplaces.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, I'm Stephanie Postles CEO at mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show, we have Jason Wyatt, who currently serves as the executive chairman of Marketplacer. Jason, welcome.Jason:Hi Stephanie, thanks so much for having me on the show today.Stephanie:Thanks for hopping on at 7:00 am. I think you're one of the earliest guests I've talked to over in Australia, so I appreciate you coming on and joining me for a fun chat.Jason:No worries at all. It's just a pleasure to be on the show and talk to your community.Stephanie:I was hoping we could start back in your... way back in the early days when you were 13, because I saw a fun story about what you were doing back then and a little entrepreneurial spirit that was going on, and I was hoping you can kind of share what you're doing back then so people can get to know you a bit before we dive into Marketplacer. This is all around a loan that you got from your dad if you know what I'm talking about.Jason:Well, I might, I was actually... I was a mad sports fan, as the majority of Australians are in this country. And I was playing tennis at the time, if I'm on the right track with this story. And we used to play a lot and pretty competitive. But my brother was a lot better than me, but I used to sort of grab onto his heels, but we constantly used to break racket strings. And we didn't come from this massive affluent family. We come from a family of just, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But dad, what he did do is he loaned us the money to buy our own stringing racket. He just said, "If you keep breaking these strings, well you got to fix them yourself."Jason:My brother and I took advantage of that situation. We figured we had an unfair advantage versus the other tennis players within the group. And then what we actually did is we turned that into a little tennis racket stringing business. So at the age of sort of 13 or 14, we were making a hundred bucks a racket, stringing out sort of four rackets a night and we had a little good business going on. I suppose the entrepreneurial spirit sort of started at a very, very young age where we had a problem to solve and then we solved it for other people.Stephanie:I love that. It definitely rang close to home because I was out in my neighbor's yard, raking, weeding doing anything I could just to earn $5 here and there. And I love hearing about how other people had that itch early on too, and seeing what it turned into later on in life.Stephanie:I'd love to jump into Marketplacer a bit and hear what is it? When did you create it? And what are you guys up to today?Jason:Marketplacer is probably the most fascinating business that I've ever been associated with, because it enabled so much global connection and enables people and businesses all over the world to sell things they don't own and to really supercharge commerce. And the story started back when my co-founder and I, Sam Salter, we just had a simple idea 13 years ago to make it easier for people to buy and sell bicycles. And we created a business called BikeExchange. Think of cars.com for bikes. You're buying a new bike and you want to see everything in one single destination or you're selling your bike and you want to sell it to a community that's a trusted community, has a sense of belonging behind it. And we created BikeExchange. But in doing that we had some really, really big, tough entrepreneurial problems to solve.Jason:We had to come up with a sales and marketing plan. We had to come up with a customer success program, but most importantly, the technology never existed. So, we not only have to be great salespeople, not only a great customer focused, but we had to become technologists at the same time. And we just thought, in everything, in creating a business, in creating a marketplace on a global scale it's a problem that we could help other entrepreneurs or other businesses now actually start to use a platform to enable them to be able to create it. So the story was born out of solving our own problem, out of eating our own dog food in a technology term. But now we help people all over the world in 10 countries solve that marketplace journey, of really just making it easy to connect a customer and community to make it easier for them to sell things they don't own and to supercharge commerce. And I'm sure we're going to unpick what that means in a lot more depth over the next hour or so.Stephanie:That's awesome. What's wild to me is that building a marketplace is notoriously like the hardest thing you can do in commerce. Everyone struggles with supply side, demand side, how to build which one first, and you're not only doing it once. You're replicating it, using your software and doing it with multiple industries. How do you even go about approaching it, especially if it's a new marketplace?Stephanie:You had your bike one, I know earlier you were talking about meal delivery from restaurants, how do you even think about building a new marketplace and solving for both sides of the market?Jason:It's a really good question because we always identify what we consider to be an unfair advantage when we help our clients and customers really figure out whether it's a worthwhile strategic project for them. Because it's a strategic project to go through, that marketplace journey. And the unfair advantage has really been always anchored around two core elements. The first being an existing community or audience or customer base that you know they want to buy more things from you. Or you know you can connect them up in a single destination to improve that customer experience. And the second is more often not the ability to have an in-depth knowledge of the supply base, a connectivity into that supply base and product base. You can actually really exploit the now and explore the future around connecting those two sides of those marketplace journeys.Jason:The evolution and the story of a marketplace has really evolved over time too, from the humble beginnings of a BikeExchange when we first started. It's now in 10 countries, and now we're out around the world and listed on the Australian stock exchange in January of this year.Jason:Thank you, awesome team effort by the team. To really large retailers and brands and, and all types of traditional types of business saying, "Hey, I've actually got one or probably two of those unfair advantages and how can I make it easier for me to grow and drive growth within my existing customer base, without the limits of capital and without the limits of actually producing all of the products, but enhancing my customer experience along the way?"Stephanie:How do you figure out, I mean, how I'm envisioning is that you would probably have like a lead brand who's for the bike one or for the meal delivery one you'd have to have kind a lead person who's owning that marketplace and then they're onboarding other brands as well. And other customers, is that how I'm thinking about it? Because I can't imagine having 20 BikeExchanges where every bike company is, "Well, I want my own marketplace. And I want mine." It seems once you have one, it's probably good enough and you have to be a part of that one.Jason:It's a really, really good question.Jason:There's different types of marketplaces, but the evolution that is really happening at the moment is, take SurfStitch for example. SurfStitch is actually a commerce cloud customer. They're a pure play surf wear brand. They sell hard goods, soft goods and clothing and bus fashion around it. But they've got this community, this tribal community of surfers and they're really a successful business, great growth really, really well leveraged on the commerce cloud stack. But when they looked at their business and they looked at their strategic path, they're constrained by warehouses, they're constrained by the capital, but they had in the back of their mind that they thought that, if we could have the full range of surfboards, instead of only taking 20% of the range of surfboards in all sizes, by connecting up to the wholesaler warehouses.Jason:And then to unpick that to the next layer, when you think about it, a surfer is quite a soulful person. They love the outdoors and are they only surfing? Or are they going hiking on the weekend? Are they exploring the outdoors as well? But I don't want to put a hiking gear in my warehouse. That's too risky, but I could go and connect up to Patagonia to take a full range extension from Patagonia without owning the inventory. So by taking a marketplace strategy or really a growth strategy, what they were really able to do is make it easy for them to connect that to a supplier base, to improve their customer experience and really enhance that 360 view of what that customer is trying to do. Not only from a data perspective, but a product and an experience perspective.Stephanie:Got it. That makes a lot more sense now. And it also just seems the role of curation is so important and whoever's curating the best products and not just throwing a thousand things into one marketplace, really thinking, like you said of, okay, you might be hiking, but you're probably not cooking too. Like I'm not going to put cookware in my marketplace with Patagonia stuff and surf boards. It seems like curation is huge when it comes to that. And also knowing what's trending and what their customers will like is a big part.Jason:Yeah, but it also enables this strategy, the ability to fail fast within there as well. If you put it a camping stove on there or a shower after you go for a surf, to clean yourself off, you haven't bought it. You've had a go at growing in there. It didn't work customers didn't like it. So just turn it off.Jason:With Marketplacer what we really focus on as well, is a really strong vetting engine for the sales force customer and any of our customer community so that they... it's just not a free for all, for all of the products flowing through. It's that ease of connectivity into the supplier base. And then it's the strict controls and measures that you can put in place to enable your customer experience within the marketplace strategy, not just "the everything for everyone" experience. If that makes sense?Stephanie:Yeah, it makes sense. I was going to ask when it comes to marketplaces, how do you guys think about marketplace or versus the Amazons and the eBays and Etsy's of the world that seem like they are kind of creating custom curated collections in a way too. But not as much of a niche level where I would say "Okay, we're going to be doing bikes and here's your community and your people." How do you think about the landscape of marketplaces right now?Jason:It's a very interesting landscape, because it's kind of a bit of a cross matrix at the moment, Stephanie. In that there's B to B, B to C and B to B to C plays within what we're trying to do. And then if you take the types of marketplaces the other way, so all three of those really go across all three gamuts. And then if you take the types of marketplaces, you've got the niche and the tribal based marketplaces, and we put media organizations into that bucket. If you imagine all of the great magazines, like we power lots of magazine marketplaces, where Time+Tide is a good example of a watch marketplace, where they have the beautiful content, they have the trust within the industry. They had a community of people looking to buy watches, but they didn't have that connectivity into the supply. But now they've got it. Another really great example is FishBrain, which is the world's largest fishing marketplace.Stephanie:Didn't know that existed. That's awesome.Jason:I'm not a big fishing person, but think of Strava fishing. Think of a really, really large... I think they've got over 13 million users within the United States now. They wanted that into a commerce play, but they didn't want to own inventory. They didn't have a buyership, they didn't have product developers. It was too difficult to do it. So what they did is they partnered and they connected into the world's best fishing suppliers to create a marketplace. Now that has over 60,000 products to sell that you can just buy.Stephanie:Is there ever a chance of them getting lost. When I hear 60,000 products within a fishing marketplace, how do you get found in that big marketplace?Jason:That's an interesting one. So fishing is probably the best industry to do it because what I have learned about fishing is there's lots of micro products for the local areas. So there's lots of little lures and lots of little different tackles setups, the different communities and different areas. There's lots of niche products within the niche. That one makes a ton of sense to have a really big, broad breadth of inventory within that.Jason:So if you think of the tribe, the addressable market behind people trying to take that convergence of content into commerce and contextual commerce, that space is born for a marketplace. Isn't it? It's an affiliate 4.0 where it can connect into the supply banks. Then you look at brands and retailers and franchise groups and cooperatives. If you actually look at the structure of all of those businesses... Co-operatives and franchise by default are marketplaces. They're a masthead brand their third-party inventory is owned by their franchisees groups. What we're finding in this space is we're just increasing the offering that they can have.Jason:We connect up their franchisees group into a single destination. For example, actually within Australia, we run the largest tire business called Bob Jane T-Marts and Bob Jane T-Marts are a really large franchise group. They're a $600 million business. And tires are a complicated product. They seem simple, but they're incredibly complicated because you've got to match every tire to every car to every wheel ever made, ever sold.Jason:But by creating a marketplace strategy within that, they're really famous for solving one problem. We connected up all the franchise groups via our marketplace technology. But if you think about it, what they really have is car data and car ownership data. What else could they sell a person at the BMW, other than tires and wheels that could enhance their car driving experience? You'll start to see lots of these franchise groups, not only connected in unifying their customer experience, but actually starting to think about how can they enhance their customer experience without the cost of capital burden placed that amongst their franchisees group or cooperative structures and buying groups are in the same bucket.Jason:Then if you just think of traditional retailers, whether they're a pure play or a bricks and mortar or a blend of both. Which the world has a blend of both now, right? There's no real, just pure play or bricks and mortar retailers anymore. So the problem they're trying to solve is exactly that problem we talked through with SurfStitch. How do they enhance their customer experience in store or online. Where they can range extend or category extend, to supercharge their commerce journey within that.Jason:And that last sort of bucket within that is that brand or wholesaler journey. And the brand and wholesaler journey is a really interesting one because it does really touch on those three sort of core verticals that I said at the start being B2C, B2B and B2B2C within that.Jason:The first one's pretty obvious from a B2C perspective, if you're a brand and you can see a perfectly complimentary product, why would you want them to leave your platform to buy it from another platform? Why wouldn't you just connect it up to enhance your customer experience?Jason:If you sell shoes for example, I'm going to dumb it down, but if you sold shoes, how could you connect up with a sock company that had the best brand to associate the shoes with socks without actually owning all of those imagery behind it? And we've seen lots of great examples of that. We actually power the Nokia marketplace. If you're thinking of buying the phone, what other connected product and you put in within that connected ecosystem and Google are a partner of Nokia phones globally now, and all of the Google products is going to be available on the Nokia marketplace.Jason:You can start to see this connectivity piece really, really drive home within that. And then from a B2B2C perspective is how do you not cut out your stockists? How do you find a way as a brand or a distributor in a modern world not to cut them out. Whether it's a marketplace, a unified experience, but what our marketplace platform can do is connect it all up. You can cut your retailer into these third party product sales, but without, without actually going against your traditional business model. And we're seeing a fair bit of that momentum behind it as well. Then the growth space and it's going to be really interesting, because I think that the world is saying how, from a B2B perspective, from a traditional brand, when you're selling to retailers when you're consolidating in a B2B industry, how does a marketplace make sense?Jason:There's Alibaba and then there's not much. The interesting play within there is the unfair advantages to businesses is pretty similar then than it is to a B2C perspective. Their unfair advantage is really anchored around their existing stockists or retailer base that they sell into. They've got a great community of sales representatives or sellers on the floor, who are going around and servicing them. How can they then connect up to other suppliers in other industries that could actually self to that community and we make it easier to do that. And there's a really sort of large demand at the moment behind B2B marketplaces as well. It's an interesting thing to call these things marketplaces. They're not all marketplaces, but what we're doing is we're connecting the world to enable supercharged commerce.Stephanie:I love that. I want to hear a little bit about the revenue numbers. When brands embark on this marketplace journey, what are some stories when a new company starts revising your guys' tech?Jason:It's a really interesting story and journey behind it. I'll give you one example during, during COVID, the world's a different place and we all know that, and there's not much point in delving into what's next after COVID. I think everybody's thinking about what's next after COVID but what we fundamentally know today. It's just a different world. It's a different world than it was in the past. And the power of connection during COVID in a digital sense, drove some of the greatest innovation stories that I've seen for some time. And I'll share the story of Providoor. In Australia, this is a case study we rolled out.Jason:It's nearly exactly this week, last year to the day and a great friend of mine, but a celebrity chef Shane Delia. He owns some of the best restaurants in Melbourne and he's got cooking shows on TV and big personality, vibrant, enthusiastic. Had 150 staff behind his restaurant business at four restaurants, one at the airport. The institution restaurants you know, think of Mamasita in New York. These are like famous restaurants within this country. And he emailed me and he just said, "Jason, I'm stuffed. I've got all of these people, I've got food, I'm just throwing into the bin. I've got leases that I've got to pay, but I've got this one glimmer of hope."Jason:"I've just done a trial where yeah, I'm doing ready, sort of made precut food where the customer just has to finish it off at home. So it's like they're getting the magic of a restaurant quality experience in their home."Jason:And he said, "I've done it for a couple of weeks and I'm selling like $5 to 6,000 a day." And I said, "Well, talk me through the problems that you've sold." And he said, "Well we've solved this packaging, we've figured out how to I get it to the customers with the boxes." He did this in a week, like extraordinary innovation. He's, he's sourced the products, the lined boxes, he's got the dry ice, he's fixed the packaging for this. So the tumor is sort of doing, you know, that those types of volumes in a small way. And I said, "How are you delivering them?"Jason:He said, "Well I've got no choice. My chefs are preparing it, My chef's are driving at 35K around Melbourne, to drop it off at people's doorsteps at 4:00 am in the morning." And I said, "Well, you've probably got to solve your logistics problem in a real quick way. But there's something in this, because there's a demand." You're not doing any marketing, your unfair advantage is you're... I call him a B grade celebrity, he probably thinks he's an A grader. But he's got this celebrity audience that he can tap into. He's got trust within the community. The other chefs will trust him. He's never gonna do anything wrong by that industry or community and customers just loved it. If we could solve a couple of problems, i.e, how do we make it easy for all restaurants to sell in the same way and create a marketplace around it.Jason:And then how can we make it easy for people to get the delivery experience behind it? I think you've got the bones of a really good business. Shane's a pretty good hustler. And five weeks later, we'd pulled every string in the world to get Providoor live. Where the best restaurants within the Melbourne CBD was selling to a 35 kilometer radius of the Melbourne CBD, get it delivered in two delivery slots AM and PM. They would cross stock. The trucks would drive around Melbourne pick up every box. Cross stock it into a single parcel. So you would only get a single parcel. You could order from all the restaurants in one. If you were entertaining in your home or just wanted to release from COVID, or you had a birthday party, or mum and dad couldn't get to the restaurant, then you could actually experience it. And after a 12 week period he was on a $100 million rate. Solving those capital problems.Stephanie:And this was from other restaurants as well that he onboarded onto essentially the marketplace that he created. It started with his restaurant. He brought on others as well. What does the cut look like for him versus the restaurants that are also selling on the marketplace that he essentially established?Jason:Yeah, it was again, really interesting. Shane took, I think it was a 15% slice of the pie. So he actually...Stephanie:Who decides, or you decide when you create the marketplace how much you...?Jason:Yeah.Stephanie:Nice, okay.Jason:It's part of the marketplace platform, when you create a marketplace. We solve all of those commission calculations and you choose, as running that marketplace, what each seller gets, and you can change it by product or category. Now you can do really complex commission calculations, but we also manage all of the seller payouts. You imagine that volume in that period of time, if you're cutting checks, so you're doing individual payments it's un-scalable. So that's why he had to... besides the fact that's why you needed a marketplace platform to, to scale at that rate, but it just shows you if you can leverage those couple of unfair advantages and pull it together in a really neat way and solve a problem, how big you can get quickly.Stephanie:That's crazy. It sounds like you kind of want to make sure you have an audience first or partner with someone who does already have, like you said, that tribe, who's kind of waiting that you can tap into that. How do you go about even convincing customers to come and buy on a marketplace? Are you doing anything around exclusivity where it's if you're selling your bikes or your box meals or whatever on Marketplacer, you can't also sell, I don't know, on DoorDash, do you have DoorDash in Australia? Or something similar.Stephanie:How do you think about creating that moat around the market places that are building up?Jason:I think any business, whether it's a marketplace or not a market place, you create moat. And if you could get the number one selling product of the world and get it exclusive to your business, whether you own it and send it yourself, or whether it comes direct from the supplier. I would a hundred percent recommend that every single day of the week.Jason:In Shane's situation and in Providoor's situation he solved some pretty big problems. No one else in the world, in my opinion, in a five week period could have created this marketplace. And then secondly he partnered exclusively with the logistics company that was an under utilized fruit. You imagined it was a fruit delivery business where they were delivering to corporates, their fruit boxes. And they went from a hundred percent capacity to 0% capacity, but then Shane took them back to a hundred percent capacity. So you've got to, you have to find very innovatively, underutilized, cold, refrigerated delivery network in a really short space of time. He created a couple of really, really solid moats that enabled it, nearly impossible for somebody else to do it in that period. But they were just extraordinary. But the short answer to your question, I'd always promote a moat.Stephanie:So try and make things exclusive, if possible. How do you bring... what are some of these brands methods of bringing their customers onto a new platform? Because that does kind of feel like it could be an experience that might cause a bit of friction of like, "Oh, I'm always used to either just buying directly from your website or just buying from Amazon." What kind of tactics should a brand use if they're trying to convince someone to come and buy on a new platform that maybe they haven't heard of before.Jason:You're talking from the end consumer experience when they're buying from you. It's all around trust in the process. It's in that front end customer experience or any communication around it, it's about building trust and rapport around building a marketplace community. And there's many techniques you can use around that.Jason:Some companies choose not to even say who the seller is on the marketplace. They take a really hard supplier agreement and they say, here's your SLA supplies. If you don't supply under these terms and conditions in these ways, then we're going to exclude you from our community, moving forward. Other marketplaces take the opinion of, "I'll let you rate my supply. I'll let you rate your seller." So it's going to be a customer led trust build up around it.Jason:Other marketplaces over time have put their own sort of ratings and experience... the one thing I'll say around the customer journey when you don't physically own the product is you've got to be really clever and your communicative style. The items might not appear in one parcel, items maybe sent at different times. And if you can bring your customer and community along that journey, they're very attuned to it in this world that you don't get one single parcel from one single vendor every single time and boxes can appear on different days, just as long as the communication strategy around when they're turning up. I mean, the timelines as a customer's experience is really well handled. I think it's a problem that's that's well solved in market.Stephanie:Always good to make sure you're doing it in a trustworthy way where your customers are like, of course I'll go where something's being sold and there's good curated products there. What are some best practices around developing that community and keeping your community engaged and making them want to come to your marketplace that you built up. What kind of tactics do you see happening behind the scenes that are working?Jason:We're seeing at a little bit of scale at the moment, the loyalty programs being attached back into the marketplace strategy. And I think it's a space that's going to be really interesting moving forward, whether it's loyalty or membership economies or subscription economies around it, it's something that's definitely an interesting space.Jason:Take Myer's another example within our region, but Myer's a really large department store. It's the Macy's of Australia. It's the number one department store. They've had some really challenging times, pre COVID and obviously during COVID. Big box department stores, lots of inventory, really expensive leases. And they've kind of been kicked off from every corner. Right. But what they did have is they had an incredibly loyal customer base that actually had a brand affiliation with Meyer, but most importantly had a really strong brand affiliation with the Meyer loyalty program, because it was such a good rewards program.Jason:When they launched their marketplace, they actually gave the customer base the same points that they would earn on Meyer across all third party marketplace products. And you could use your points to buy from all of the third party products.Stephanie:That's imposing.Jason:Exactly. And we won a, I can't say who, but we've won a major global airline at the moment where instead of just being able to book airfares using your airline points, now you can buy 40,000 products using your points, promote burn perspective from your airline miles. So I think what you're going to find is this community of traditional loyalty programs or earn and burn points systems, being able to tap into really broaden their range to become really big, meaningful marketplace strategy, loyalty program.Stephanie:That's super smart. The one thing that's coming to mind is thinking about data privacy and how does the sharing work, especially if you're onboarding other brands onto your platform, I'm guessing I would want access to that customer data. I'd want to be able to talk to them, especially if I'm shipping something to them, or even someone's viewing me as a person that's shipping it to them, even if I'm not really in the backend. What does the sharing of the, maybe customer information look like, in a way that's probably protected and keeps everyone safe.Jason:Say for example, we're talking to the commerce cloud community. If you're a commerce cloud customer, you're the merchant of record in that instance, aren't you? You're always controlling the customer record. You're controlling, you're receiving the funds yourself. But you do have to share the customer address and you do have to share some details of that customer because they've got to receive the items. You've really got to make sure your supplier agreements are quite stringent around data privacy. And then within the marketplace platform, there's a couple of configuration points where you can mask email address and not mask email address. So there's configuration around customer privacy settings that gets forwarded through to that end seller within there as well. But what we actually find is that the broader supplier or seller community is unbelievably respectful of the end customer because they're attuned to selling in this methodology now, and they know if they break or breach those privacy laws or those privacy policies that you set up as a marketplace operator, is that they're going to be cut off and, and they're going to lose that whole channel.Jason:We've had basically no problems of that over the journey of Marketplacer. It's something that's a very small, minimal risk.Stephanie:Amazing. Let's talk a little bit about ads. And I'm thinking about you're this big marketplace. Maybe if you're the fishing one, you've got 60,000 products, I could see you guys having an entire ad unit or the person who maybe is owning the marketplace, starting to create a demand side platform when it comes to delivering ads. And how are you guys approaching that right now with all the brands that you're onboarding?Jason:The world of relevant display and sponsored contents and contextual commerce, back in to market places is a real interesting space. Because if you can not only just send your products to a third party marketplace, but then you can buy specific media around it and launch products within it. It's super exciting. We're actually integrated into Google DMP, and all of those great ad serving systems within that. And what you'll find especially as the world moves into a headless commerce situation, is that the brands can put whatever DMP they want into the commerce cloud headless stack. They can be really quite innovative around, not only just creating traditional revenue streams for the product they own. Not only creating modern revenue streams in the fact that they can sell things they don't own, but now they can actually turn their traditional retail businesses into a media business as well, which obviously comes at a much higher gross margin than physically owning the inventory.Stephanie:Any innovative stories that you see happening around the advertising space within Marketplacer? That brands are maybe trying just new and different things because of the operating model of this new business they didn't have access to before?Jason:The obvious one that just comes to mind is actually BikeExchange. BikeExchange does exactly that every single day of the week. It connects live into all of the retailers. As part of the Marketplacer platform... because some of the problem in the marketplace scenario is how do you make it easy for your sellers to connect? How do you make sure that the inventory is accurate and live? How do you make it so that when a retailer of stock list receives the order, that they can just seamlessly process it, without having, necessarily a billion spreadsheets rolling every direction for everything they sell. We sold that in a really nice, elegant way where if you're on... and if you've got an existing POS system, so point of sale system or an existing e-commerce engine, we built pre-built connectors for the majority of them in the world.Jason:If you're a bike seller selling on BikeExchange and you're on Lightspeed and you wanna send your inventory into the BikeExchange marketplace, it takes minutes. What would typically take hours? Why is this important from a media perspective? It's because then the brands on BikeExchange or Specialized or Trek, or any of the big brands when they're launching a new product, they can actually drive the leads into stores that have stock available today. You can get very clever around your display and media allocation and where you drive the sales to. And a physical stockists level within that marketplace strategy, which is pretty cool.Stephanie:That's huge. I think about the times I try and order stuff Home Depot. And it takes me 15 minutes trying to find what store you can go to pick it up. I'm like, why is this so hard? Just don't show it to me if it's not within 20 miles of where I'm at.Jason:Exactly. And that sort of relevance posts, zip code, allocation and inventory allocation is something that comes out of that marketplace assistant, but it's all structured around live connectivity back into the source seller system. Obviously if a seller wants to connect manually and they've got a few products or they've got a CSV uploader, or they've got a great API, but it's this pre-built connector platform that's enabling our marketplace at the scale at a rapid rate.Stephanie:That's awesome, so where do you all want to be in the next two to three years? What are you planning and prepping for and building for right now, other than scaling and IPO'ing and doing all the fun, things like that.Jason:I think what really drives us at Marketplacer is we just want our customers to grow and to grow in a really sustainable way. Where they can, they can enhance their customer experience. So we've really launched hard within the United States today. We've announced that Salesforce ventures has actually bought a stake in Marketplacer and that enables us... yeah, we're so humbled by it. It's such a great experience to deal with that Salesforce community, but what that enables is any commerce cloud customer globally to now really look at Marketplacer as the way to significantly grow your business and grow your customer experience within that.Jason:It gives us deep access to the Salesforce product team. Gives us deep access to the implementation partner community. It gives us deep access to the actual Salesforce customer success team. What that really enables us to do is to help that Salesforce commerce cloud community grow and connect up to all of these great suppliers, make it easy for you to supercharge that business. And it's a core focus of ours over the next sort of 12 to 18 months, for sure.Stephanie:That's awesome. After hearing all this I'm like, why wouldn't you try this out? Why wouldn't you want to be a part of a marketplace, start a marketplace, so many opportunities and easy ways to scale that maybe it would be hard for single brands to do on their own. That's amazing. Congratulations. That's huge.Jason:No thank you so much and it's a big shout out to how the commerce cloud Salesforce, commerce cloud leadership are thinking at the moment. They're really putting that customer lens first and, and you're trying to grab those trends and you build it back within their community as well.Jason:It takes a little while for you to get your head around it. But when you dumb it down, we make it easy for you to sell products that you don't own. So you can supercharge commerce and grow. That sort of one line, and that sentence can start to really resonate with you. And maybe out of today you're not thinking this is my path, but it might just get those thought bubbles going to say, Hey, what about this supplier? What about this supplier? And if I only had those products, I'd love to try that one, but I don't want to buy it. It starts to connect it all up.Stephanie:Really good way to explain it. All right let's jump over to the lightning round. The lightning round is of course, brought to you by our friends at Salesforce commerce cloud, which they got many shout outs well-deserved throughout this interview. So that is great. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Jason?Jason:I'm ready.Stephanie:We'll do the hard one first. What, one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Jason:I'd like to say the evolution of Marketplacer.Stephanie:That's okay. You do you. You can say whatever you want.Stephanie:What's one thing from 2020 that you hope sticks around throughout 2021?Jason:The ability to put the customer first and solve problems from a customer lens, when there was no other way to do it. And I think that transformative thinking of traditional businesses in that lens is going to put them in a really good light moving forward. We saw the acceleration of five or six years of thinking and thought, and decision-making in the space of six weeks. And just, don't let that go. Don't let that go. Let that stick with you forever. Because I think it's a unique opportunity.Stephanie:What's one thing you don't understand today, that you wish you did?Jason:French. No, I actually don't personally know how to program. I've never been a programmer and it's been to my advantage because I've never got sucked into it, but one day in life, I'd love to actually learn how it all stitches together and works.Stephanie:There you go. Well, that's a good skill to have these days. Let me know if it's hard, I'm guessing it is. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Jason:It would probably be about surfing to be honest. And it would have to be Kelly Slater.Stephanie:There you go. That's a good one. And then the last one what's up next on your reading list?Jason:It's actually interesting, because I bought it yesterday. I'm actually reading about gut health at the moment and the benefits of gut health. So I bought the CSIRO gut health book to understand how that can have benefits right throughout your life, from sleeping patterns to energy, to that holistic sort of view that the power of food and what it can do for you or, or can't do for you.Stephanie:Good, you can send me a TLDR of what I should be doing and I'll just listen to you.Jason:It doesn't mean I'm going to do it though Stephanie, this is the problem with reading. You don't always do what you should.Stephanie:We will do it. We will manifest it into our life. We will do it. All right Jason, this interview has been so fun, really a good time hearing about Marketplacer and where you guys are headed. Thank you for coming on, where can people find out more about you and Marketplacer?Jason:Traditional channels marketplacer.com and Jason White on LinkedIn and Marketplacer on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Jason:Thanks so much Stephanie, appreciate your time.

Die Integration von eBays neuer Zahlungsabwicklung, die seit 2019 auf dem Marktplatz eingeführt wird, steht in Deutschland kurz vor dem Abschluss. Im ersten Quartal 2021 wurde bereits mehr als die Hälfte der gewerblichen Umsätze über die neue Zahlungsabwicklung abgedeckt. Bis zum Frühsommer 2021 sollen die letzten Händler auf den neuen Zahlungsprozess umgestellt sein. eBay verwaltet dann für alle teilnehmenden Händler den gesamten Zahlungsprozess, ein Drittanbieter wird nicht mehr gebraucht - auch PayPal nicht. Dennoch trifft eBays Mammutprojekt auch zwei Jahre nach dem Start auf Kritik aus der Händlerschaft. Zu kompliziert, zu teuer und zu retourenanfällig soll der neue Zahlungsprozess aus Händlersicht sein, lauten die Klagen in den Händlerforen. In der neuen Episode von "Touchpoint", dem Podcast-Format der INTERNET WORLD, stellt sich Fabian Schumacher, Seller Lead EU Payments bei eBay Deutschland, den typischen Händlerfragen rund um die neue Zahlungsabwicklung. Der Gegenwind gegen das Projekt sei "im erwartbaren Rahmen" gewesen, sagt Schumacher - und erklärt, welche Probleme und Schmerzpunkte vieler Händler bereits geklärt wurden. Dennoch sind auch 2021 noch Baustellen offen - zum Beispiel die Einführung der Zahlungsmöglichkeit "Kauf auf Rechnung". Hier gibt Schumacher Einblick in den aktuellen Entwicklungsstand. Mit vorm Mikrofon: Christian Zitterbart, Geschäftsführer des eBay-Sellers Retourenwelt. Er gehörte zu den ersten Händlern, die die neue Zahlungsabwicklung eingeführt haben und berichtet aus seinem neuen Payment-Alltag.

Als eBay im März dieses Jahres, kaum eine Woche nach Beginn des ersten Lockdowns, sein Soforthilfe-Programm für stationäre Händler vorlegte, staunte die Branche - und griff zu. Die Resonanz auf das Angebot, das Stationär-Händlern den Start auf eBay mit vergünstigten Tarifen und Beratungsleistungen erleichtern soll, war entsprechend groß. "Da war auch etwas Glück dabei", erinnert sich Oliver Klinck, der vor knapp 3 Monaten den Chefsessel von eBay Deutschland bezog, im Podcast-Interview mit INTERNET WORLD. "Wir hatten die Pläne für das Soforthilfe-Programm bereits vor Corona fix und fertig in der Schublade, so dass wir lediglich die Veröffentlichung vorziehen mussten." Das Glück blieb eBay hold im schwierigen Corona-Jahr; nicht nur die Händler nutzten die Plattform intensiver, auch auf Kundenseite gewann der Online-Marktplatz einiges vom früheren Glanz zurück. "2019 konnten wir 18 Millionen Neukunden gewinnen", so Klinck. "In diesem Jahr konnten wir diese Zahl schon nach 6 Monaten erreichen. Zudem sind unsere Kunden in diesem Jahr deutlich jünger geworden." Den Rückenwind aus der Corona-Krise will der frisch gebackene eBay-Chef nutzen, um seinen Marktplatz weiter zu professionalisieren. "Managed Marketplace" heißt das Prinzip, nach dem mit einer einheitlichen Zahlungsabwicklung, mit strukturierten Produktdaten und vereinheitlichten Logistik-Standards ein verbessertes, durchgängiges Einkaufserlebnis auf der Plattform geschaffen werden soll. Darüber hinaus soll sich eBay "auf alte Stärken besinnen", so Klinck. Dazu gehört ein neuer Fokus auf gebrauchte und wieder aufbereitete Ware (der auch bereits in der aktuellen Weihnachtskampagne mit Joko Winterscheidt zu spüren ist), sowie eine besondere Ansprache der Kunden, die auf eBay nicht nur kaufen, sondern auch verkaufen. "Das sind unsere wertvollsten Kunden, die mehr Zeit auf unserer Plattform verbringen und auch mehr Umsatz generieren", sagt Klinck - quasi eBays Prime-Mitglieder. Diese Kunden will der Marktplatz in Zukunft noch besser monetarisieren.

Every shopping experience is unique, and every shopper has specific wants and needs. That is one of the biggest struggles brands face in the world of ecommerce. How do you create a customer experience that resonates with and meets the needs of drastically different customers?This problem is magnified further when you run a marketplace that sells literally millions of different products to tens of millions of different users. eBay has 180 million active users, which, according to Bradford Shellhammer, means that there needs to be 180 million different eBays to meet each of those users’ exact needs. Bradford is the Vice President of Buyer Experience at eBay, and part of his job is to make every eBay user fall in love with their eBay experience.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Bradford explains what that looks like in practical terms, including how they approached a home page redesign, the importance of testing and experimentation, and the methods they have used to build trust among users.  Main Takeaways:Do You Trust Me?: Trust is an essential part of the buying experience, and these days, companies are finding more innovative ways to establish trust with users. In marketplaces, typical product reviews might not be the best way to build trust with shoppers, instead, you have to find alternative ways to connect with customers and intervene if something goes wrong. Please Rate And Review: Gathering feedback and information from users is a critical method companies use to improve their customer experience. Typically, brands will send out surveys or ask for feedback in an email, but there are better, more strategic and enticing ways to get the feedback you need. And sometimes that means utilizing channels you may not have traditionally relied on or creating brand new customer feedback channels yourself.Test, Test, Test Again: Nothing should be added to your website or brand experience unless it has been thoroughly tested. Both internal and external experimentation is necessary to ensure that when you make a change, or add something to your site, you already know that it is what your customers want and it works the way it was designed to work.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Joining us today is Bradford Shellhammer, the Vice President of the Buyer Experience at eBay. Bradford, welcome.Bradford:Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. eBay, such an awesome name brand. I'm excited to dive into all things eBay. I've been a long time buyer there. But first, I want to go into your background of what brought you to eBay? I see that you founded a couple companies, a couple ecommerce companies and I was hoping you can touch on that before we jump into eBay.Bradford:Yeah. I think it's super cool to talk about because it's actually super personal. For me, it's a pretty interesting story. So, it's a love affair, essentially, between myself and eBay. I've been a buyer on the platform since 1999 because we can trace back and see in our internal database how long we've been shopping and when we created our account.Bradford:So, I've been a customer of eBay for over 20 years. And the companies that I started, two of the three were marketplaces. And they were marketplaces that were really founded on two principles, both of them, one was for buyers, helping them find treasure, awesome stuff, unique things, feeling some passion or interest and for seller is propping up the little guy.Bradford:Both of the companies that I found at Fab and Bezar were both heavily in the design space, in the modern design space, so that's furniture, graphic arts, posters, lighting, jewelry, handbags, accessories and things so fashion design, but my personal love affair with collecting.Bradford:I have over 400 pairs of shoes. I have a massive art collection. I have probably more chairs than most people. Most of these purchases over the last 25 years have been made on eBay. And so, for me, I've inspired by the hunt on eBay what we call internally the eBay a power user, a power customer.Bradford:And now, I have this awesome responsibility to help other people fall in love with and use eBay the way that I do. So, I was hired four and a half years ago. I met the chief product officer who had some interest in one of my companies, Bezar.Bradford:Turns out I sold that to another company, an Australian company, and I became a free market... was on the market and I was a free agent. And I'd never really worked at a real company before, a big company, the previous 12 years is doing my own thing.Bradford:And so, they said, "Well, come join eBay." And my first role was the chief curator of eBay. And frankly, it was a made up role. And everyone thought I had great taste. And when I got to eBay, I really thought my job was going to be curating through eBay and surfacing that up to consumers.Bradford:And what I quickly realized is that eBay scale is so much bigger than one person's taste. And that some people are curating parts for a vintage Mercedes on eBay. And some people like myself are collecting design, and maybe other people are just using eBay because they have six kids, and money's tight and buying them all new iPhones is just not possible, so they're looking for great deals.Bradford:And so, I really quickly just became very empathetic to the eBay customer's journey and it said, "Wow. Bradford, this is not about you. Can you help build tools to help other people find the things that they love rather than forcing your point of view or something that you love on people?"Bradford:And then, I moved into our product org, my second year and the first project I took on was our homepage. We redesigned it. We built a lot of new algorithms and it became a science powered hub for you. And the goal was that there's 180 million active buyers on eBay.Bradford:There should be 180 million different eBays because everybody's eBay is different. It's not like other big box retailers or other mass market ecommerce players where we're buying commodity products or everybody's buying the same thing.Bradford:And my team really builds the experience that should adapt and respond to customer's interest and helping them find what they're looking for.Stephanie:That's great. So, taking on the homepage design seems like a lot of responsibility. Tell me a bit about what that looked like. I mean, what are the customer buying behavior look like before and what do they look like now and how did you get there?Bradford:Yeah. That's a good question. So, I inherited an experience that was about five years old and it was called the Feed and that was the homepage. And it was a Pinterest-esque experience. And so, when customers would save things, we have this concept called saving, there's a little heart, you click on it and it saves.Bradford:You can save a search. You can save a seller. You can watch a single individual item. It would populate a visual grid of like products that are related to that. The problem with that is that it required customers to groom their own experience. And so, for power customers, the feed was awesome.Bradford:Because like myself, I have 150 saved searches and it's just this beautiful grid of new products populating every day of hitting all the either brands that I'm following or the sellers that I love what they're selling. But for the normal shopper, not your power customer, they were really missing out on personalized content because we literally required them to do work to curate it themselves.Bradford:So, the project that we decided to do is, was there a hybrid of that? Could you still have some of that content for the power user be front and center on the homepage?Bradford:But could you have machine learning and science pick up behaviors patterns of just what people are clicking on or searching for or which emails they're opening and have that be enough to curate a homepage experience without them having to do the explicit work of saying show me more of this on clicking on a heart or saying I want to save this.Bradford:And so, what happened was more people with as a result of that first product we launched, more people ended up having personalized content which was a win. Because previously, it was personalized content mostly just for power customers. Now, a more casual customer still gets that benefit.Stephanie:Got it, that's great. So, when it comes to projects like that, internally, I'm sure there was a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people had a lot of different ideas. How did you rally everyone around getting a homepage launch without taking, I mean, I could see that project taking maybe like a year at other companies [crosstalk 00:07:10].Bradford:Yeah. Well, first of all, I don't want to give away too much of the sausage making, but eBay is surprisingly entrepreneurial. We move pretty fast. And we don't, I think, have a lot of the bureaucracy that probably a lot of companies of our scale have.Bradford:So, first of all, I almost felt like, "Wow, they gave me the keys to the car." And for the most part, we have a very strong test and learn culture. So, we don't just flip the switch on something and see how it works. We test and learn and we do lots of hundreds and hundreds of AB tests and we're constantly testing everything.Bradford:So, we would never launch anything that didn't resonate with our customers. So, there were safety, I think, baked into all of our hypotheses knowing that you have to actually prove that something that an idea you had is worthy of launch. But I think that that's where I think my entrepreneurial background and my non tech background.Bradford:I've started companies, but I don't have a formal technology education at all. I have a fashion design degree and a communications degree. So, this is where I think just the hitting the pavement and telling a story and crafting a vision and getting people to march along with you whether they're marketers or engineers, or designers, or whatever I think suited me in this role in the early days.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really cool. See, when you were talking about the AB testing, how you guys test everything, were there any surprises of something that you thought was really going to work and it actually failed?Bradford:Oh, that's a good question. I'm trying to think of, you know what, I have to be honest, I don't want to say this because my team is super smart. But I think that the best product managers and the best designers and the best experiences out there are ones that are really rooted in want something super simple, just listening to your customer.Bradford:And so, if you're literally baking all your hypothesis and lit really listening like combing through feedback, we have myriad of surveys on different pages. We do lots of focus groups. We do tons of research, user research. We do tons of dogfooding internally.Bradford:You weed out the things that aren't going to work way before you even start to build them usually. And so, for us, it's like if you have that real commitment to just listening to your customer through the process rather than having someone come in and just say, "I want to do this thing."Bradford:Because when you listen to your actual customers, there's a real great respect for them and you actually don't want to break their current experience, you just want to make it better. And I think a lot of times where I've seen products fail, and I'm not going to go into the details of what they were.Bradford:But I have seen maybe not so much in my team, but I have seen this happen both in and outside of eBay is usually when someone that doesn't really have the customer's voice in their head is just like either taking something that's their personal preference or looking at a competitor that may look like a competitor from the outside, so a lot of companies are compared to eBay because they sell things online.Bradford:But if you really look at eBay and why people shop at eBay, it's a very different customer than a lot of the big players. So, constantly comparing ourselves to, I think, other competitors who aren't really competitors other than they compete for wallets share not with the heart and soul of our customers.Bradford:I think sometimes is where I've seen product managers go off and usually go somewhere that's at the end of the day, it just wasn't what our customers were asking for and that's our job.Bradford:Our job is to literally listen to our customers and build experiences for them, and take the things they love, make it better, and take the things they hate and change it. And I really think that if you ground yourself and your whole organization in that just like real deep customer empathy, you don't make too many mistakes.Stephanie:Yeah. I'm thinking about surveying customers right now. How do you frame questions in a way that will actually get you what you need when it comes to like how to shape an experience? Because I could see framing in a way that actually gives you maybe the wrong [crosstalk] customers tell you something that leads you down the wrong path.Stephanie:Or, it's like, "Oh, someone says they want that." But actually, no one's going to really use that or we see that no one uses it. How do you think about framing questions in a way that will actually be successful [crosstalk 00:12:11].Bradford:It's a great question. We have teams of people that focus on that at eBay. So, the feedback we get is that we actually have feedback forms on specific pages of the site. So, I'll give you example, there's this thing called My eBay. It's like your profile hub thing. But because eBay, you could be a buyer or seller, so you have a place where all the things that you've bought live but also all the things that you're selling or sold live.Bradford:It's like the hub of the eBay customer. If you just sent an email with a survey of how do you feel about eBay or like an NPS survey, you're not going to get the detail feedback they'll make that product better. And so, here are some of the things that we get like very specific feedback like purchase history.Bradford:There are people that literally because they're business buyers or let's just say they're resellers. People that are buying thousands of records a year and then reselling them and we don't have the functionality to let them search through their purchase history.Bradford:So, they can't literally search David Bowie and find the things. And this is a number one complaint of our customers and you only would find that out because then we're literally asking very specific, what would you do differently to this exact experience or page?Bradford:I think that's where you get awesome feedback. You can get that through just general feedback collecting too if you're able to actually come through and pick up the patterns and scour through them. Because you're right, you might get one or two people that are really vocal about something that a lot of people don't want.Bradford:But the things that are like really, really asked for they rise to the top very quickly on eBay. There's also a myriad of forums out there, seller forums, Reddit boards, where people are talking about both pain and opportunities for eBay to be better.Bradford:And oftentimes, those are through the lens of a vertical lens. So, you have these sneaker enthusiasts or watch enthusiasts, or who are literally talking about where eBay fails them. And it might not be something that we'd see if we're looking at eBay just really generally.Bradford:But for very specific customers, there are some things that matter more than others. And so, one of the big changes in our philosophy this year has been to start thinking about what are those enthusiast groups. And oftentimes, they're aligned with verticals or categories, so watch lovers, sneaker lovers, streetwear lovers, stamp collectors, comic book collectors.Bradford:And really understanding like are there unique needs that are outside of just the normal shopping experience that we have to either fix or introduce for those customers too. But it's nonstop, just taking in feedback like we actually need more.Bradford:But I would say probably 10% of my team's job is to literally spend 10% of their week is just combing through that stuff to gleam any insight into what we should be working on or what we need to focus on.Stephanie:Yeah, that's a really good point about going to different sites like the Reddits of the world and looking at what different niche audiences are talking about. Because I've always wondered when I see or I have an issue and I see a lot of people having that issue, I'm like, "Oh, why isn't this company just looking on this Reddit forum and seeing that there's thousands of people all trying to figure out the same thing that's probably like an easy product fix."Bradford:It's an easy product fix. And I'll tell you what else is really super cool about that is that it also makes your competitive analysis because you can see the customers that are buying... your customers talking about you and you also see the customer, the other companies that they reference as competitors, so you really get to see.Bradford:And for eBay, as I said, it's super verticalized. There are people that buy hundreds of thousand dollar watches on eBay there. There are literally people that spend thousands of dollars for watches left and right on eBay. And guess what, they're not going to, I'm not going to say their names, but the big marketplaces to buy that they're more verticalized player.Bradford:So, we also have hundreds of competitors. When you slice it vertically, it's also a great place to just hear them talk about either the good or the bad of our competitors through a lens too, so you can stack, you can see the sentiment of how they feel about you versus them. And they can also see where are we winning and where do we have to be better very clearly in those forums, too.Stephanie:Yeah, that's such a good point. When you're talking about these vertical players and how to think about that, it reminds me of... I read an article about the unbundling of a lot of platforms whether it's Reddit, or Nextdoor, Craigslist, how turning it into separate products.Stephanie:I don't know if you've heard about this, but how do you think about that at eBay right now? Because it sounds like you're doing that with these different niche audiences in a way like pulling them apart to give them a more personal experience.Stephanie:For example, like with Reddit, maybe there's thousands of different conversations going on around different topics. And then, there's a picture that shows, okay, this topic here is all around neighbors and things like that. Oh, what do you know, Nextdoor popped up and pulled that off the platform in a way.Stephanie:And then, oh, they're talking about like gaming here. Oh, here's a gaming platform that popped up. So, actually pulling apart a platform to give it unique experiences for the people.Bradford:Yeah. So, I mean, you can look and see there's I think a lot of... we're the original. We were [crosstalk 00:19:25]. Yeah, we really are, seriously. Before we were the gig economy. We were the niche marketplace. We were the vertical marketplace. We still are like we literally invented or we're one of the originals.Bradford:And so, you can look around. And you can see even fab.com, it was a marketplace for design like some of them come some of them go. Some of them have really great staying power and a few of them have been super successful. Here's why I think we're uniquely positioned and why I think going back to building verticalized experiences.Bradford:And when I say that I want to make sure that it's not niche. It is building horizontal capabilities that can flex and you might need the ability to have high ASP or high payments. Sometimes, you're buying things that are $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, that's our high-end art, that's high-end collectibles, that's high-end watches.Bradford:That's also like business and industrial equipment. Tractors, we sell a lot of this. So, although those like shopping experiences wouldn't be the same beginning to end, there might be a piece of that, like a payment, the ability to have some payment support for large purchases as part of your strategy.Bradford:So, for us, it's about I think building horizontal capabilities that can benefit multiple verticals then you slice up, we're calling them platforms, a vertical platform. You slice up a piece of that and a piece of this one, a piece of that one and suddenly you're basically stacking, it's like a menu.Bradford:For this shopper, you need these five things. And for this one, you need these six things. And so, it's not separate branding. It's not like suddenly, you're in an experience that doesn't feel or work like eBay, but it's just building different kinds of capability into the shopping experience and that's our strategy right now and it's super cool.Bradford:And I think that the great thing about eBay is the scale. So, for small upstarts and small vertical players, they got to spend a ton of money to get people to come onto their platform. I mean, a ton, they have to bleed millions, hundreds of millions of dollars like eBay has an audience. We have traffic.Bradford:We have global reach. We have hubs of really major or an iconic brand in Germany, in Australia, in Israel, in Canada, in the UK. So, there are all these benefits to being this large platform that are mostly traffic I think and just like a giant active enthusiast customer base.Bradford:I think it's on us to just crack what is the end to end product experience. And maybe there's other things that have to change, policy, how we rate our sellers, how we rate our buyers. There's probably other things where we're thinking right now too that's more than just experience. But I don't think it's the reinvention of eBay. I think it is the morphing of eBay for certain types of customers. Yep.Stephanie:Yeah, that makes sense. Have you seen over the past couple years buyer behavior is changing? Are you pretty preparing for something new over the next couple years or adjusting strategy a bit after seeing changes with COVID? I think I read that eBay did pretty well. Is there anything new that you're preparing for now?Bradford:Yeah. I mean, the COVID is a horrible thing. And but what was like got a lot of us through it in the early days at eBay as supply chain was shutting down, warehouses were shutting down, it was hard to get things.Bradford:The one thing that was working was just how distributed the inventory of eBay was and how this sector of the country or the world may have shut down but there's all these parts over here that can ship things around. And it was super cool to witness that eBay worked.Bradford:And it allowed like some people who are home to make some money, come in and sell for the first time. They allowed businesses that maybe struggled during the time, they might have closed physical retail down or something like that, it gave them another channel.Bradford:We have a new CEO. His name is Jamie Iannone. He was an eBay veteran that went and worked for Walmart for many years and he's come back with such a forceBradford:And so, the great news about our new CEO is he is really setting a strategy that honors eBay's past meaning going back and valuing our sellers who without, we literally don't have a company and literally saying publicly that he's focused on eBay being the seller's platform of choice.Bradford:And on the buying side, it's about going back and listening to our enthusiast customers. We're like strategically positioning ourselves to be there for those buyers and sellers more than ever.Bradford:And so, I said in terms of this like what we're seeing right now, we're seeing a lot of people looking at eBay for the first time. We're seeing a lot of people reconsidering eBay, and we're seeing our best customers continue to shop with eBay.Bradford:And it's on us right now to take advantage of this time and I think go back and really listen to our customers, as I said at the beginning of the podcast was not just like... yeah, I was talking about like listening to very specific feature feedback or page feedback in our experience or app feedback.Bradford:But like we as a company are just listening to our buyers and sellers in a way that we haven't during my time and much of our strategy is just emerging from that. And it's super cool to have new leadership that is all about customer, customer, customer.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really great. When it comes to the new customers who maybe still have an old perception of what eBay is like, "Oh, it's an auction site." Maybe haven't visited in a while. How are you appealing to these new people who are starting to think about you?Stephanie:I'm sure you have very different messaging to someone who is new versus your current customers who are sticky. And once they start buying or selling, they're probably going to stay there for a while.Bradford:Yeah. I think that this is a part of what brought me to eBay. I love eBay and I feel a lot of people don't know enough about our goodness. And I think a lot of that is because I think previous years before Jamie came on board, I think we were not really owning what we really were.Bradford:eBay is really an awesome place to buy non new and seasoned merchandise and that means refurbished products that means outlet products, that means used products, that means new and not in box. And so, I think that there was a lot of confusion probably for especially young consumers because I think that there wasn't a clarity of message around what eBay was just externally, it wasn't necessarily clear internally.Bradford:And so, I'm very optimistic that this clarity around where we're going to compete and the buyers and sellers that we value. I think you will see we have to earn it. We have to earn it with every single sale. We have to earn it with every single seller that comes back onto the platform. We have to earn it with a first time buyer.Bradford:But I think that it's less about how we're going to talk to our existing customers versus our new customers, I think in my eyes, because I actually think we need to say the same thing which is there's a lot of magic into eBay and it's not your typical shopping experience and that's okay. That's cool.Bradford:I think about eBay when I'm thinking about comparing Airbnb to hotel chains. It's like Airbnb, there's a little something for everyone there. You can rent a mansion. You can rent a cot in a yurt and everything in between and it's high and low and it's all around the world.Bradford:And there's something that's like I think of eBay in the same way that it's super inclusive and there's something here for everyone. What I don't think people realize is that eBay is full of, I say to the two things, also for buyers, awesome deals and really great treasure which is unique, hard to find or are super interesting stuff.Bradford:And I think that those two things probably appeal to really broad set. It's on us to tell that story. It's on us to tell that story vocally in the press. It's on us to tell that story in our branding, in our marketing. And it's on us to tell our story in our product and I don't know if we've done that well enough up until recently where we're starting to pivot towards that listening to our best customers and buyers and sellers and building things for them.Stephanie:Yeah. So, with marketplaces, there's always a question around trust. How are you guys going about showcasing that and convincing especially maybe new buyers that this can be trusted and our sellers can be trusted. Because I think at least back in the day, that was something, I mean, even on Amazon, people are still worried like, "Is this a good seller?" So, what are you guys doing behind the scenes?Bradford:Yeah. I think that trust is probably one of the biggest things we have to work on and have worked on. I'll just speak a little generally and then I'll tell you about a very specific thing that we're doing for trust, but I think will be super exciting to talk about.Bradford:So, one and it's just loans. So, for trust, I think we're aware that when the scale of eBay and just the diversity of seller of inventory of even condition that we probably have, it's even more compounded, the trust issues at eBay, there's just so many variables here.Bradford:And so, we are taking it very seriously right now through planning for next year especially and talking about all the things that we're going to do to combat trust. So, it's everything from doubling down on some of our policies that protects buyers.Bradford:So, we have money back guarantee. We essentially for most products on the site guarantee that customers are going to get what they want, get what they're expecting. And so, I don't think a lot of people realize that most of the things you buy on eBay are we have this baked in protection.Bradford:But I don't think that's enough. And so, I'll give you an example of why I don't think that's enough. Here, I'll give you example. I'd mentioned it earlier and it's launched and is live now as of a couple weeks ago. If you're buying a watch that's over $2,000 which is a high-end luxury watch, these are like the Rolexes, the Omegas, they can go way higher than that.Bradford:eBay is one of the biggest places to buy these watches, it's massive. It's a business within a business. The biggest concern that our buyers tell us is that they're afraid that like, "Am I really getting a Rolex? Am I getting the real thing?" Authenticity really matters.Stephanie:Yeah. For $3,000, we've got to be real.Bradford:$3,000, I mean, I've seen some of the sales $30,000, $60,000. You don't want to take a chance of, "Am I not going to get it? Is it going to be fake? Is it going to be scratched?" So, we decided to tackle trust through a vertical lens. And it's not just a category because it's not all watches but watches over $2,000.Bradford:We have launched a new program that's called authenticity guaranteed where eBay is guaranteeing that any watch sold on its platform domestically. So, in the United States we have plans to expand. But currently in the United States that's over $2,000 that we will guarantee its authenticity.Bradford:So, what we've done is we've partnered with amazing partners who vet it that can verify and authenticate high-end luxury watches. We force an intermediate shipping. So, the buyer, when they make the purchase, they see very clearly badging program details say this watch is covered under our authenticity guarantee and you have nothing to worry about, it's going to be authentic.Bradford:We have the seller ship the watch to the third party verification service. They look at it. They compare it. If it's not in its original boxing because a lot of these watches are sold with the original boxes. If it's not on its original visual boxing, we repackage it in eBay box and then we express ship it out to the buyer.Bradford:And we catch any problem with counterfeits or other kinds of issues before it gets into the hands of the buyer. And so, it's really meant to stop buyers getting fake products or damaged products. For the seller, it's also a really awesome thing too because oftentimes people will buy a watch and we have buyers that have scammed our sellers.Bradford:So, us being in the middle of both the buying and the return process, it basically is our way of just ensuring that both buyers and sellers are protected and it's third party authentication of luxury goods.Bradford:And so, we rolled it out and we're going to be expanding the program even more. And like that is very real and very different eBay, us literally getting in the middle of a transaction and protecting both our best buyers and our best sellers. And we're going to do more of that next year.Bradford:And when I say more of them, I'm not just talking about more things to authenticate, but I'm also talking about just more picking apart like a very important customer base and their buying behavior and where they have concerns with eBay and a lot of it goes back to trust, frankly.Bradford:It's like, I don't trust eBay as a buyer. I don't trust eBay as a seller because you don't offer these protections. And we're literally going to be bringing those protections through a vertical lens more often.Stephanie:Wow, that's great. I mean, that seems really smart and strategic because, I mean, I trust eBay as a brand and I would trust whatever you guys say, but I might not trust the buyer or the sellers.Stephanie:So, what recommendations would you give to other ecommerce companies around developing trust? What do you think is most important? Is it reviews? Are there things that other companies right now maybe are missing out on that they should be doing?Bradford:Yeah, it's interesting. You bring up reviews and I think that that is also a unique eBay opportunity too. Our catalog, we have so many listings like in every condition. From every year, from all over the globe.Bradford:It's really hard to comb through it all. Reviews I think are interesting.Bradford:But I really love the review of the seller. So, where a lot of ecommerce companies are reviewing an individual product, like an actual item like this cooler or this microphone, or these pairs of shoes. I think that eBay has that opportunity where we have the right catalog and I think that we're leaning in there in certain categories.Bradford:But I think a more interesting eBay opportunity is to really celebrate the seller and to talk about, are they trusted? Because a lot of the stuff that eBay sells, a lot of stuff on our site, you can't actually get a review. Much of it is not that product.Bradford:A good example like comic books like I know I want this spider man whatever it is. The thing that I care about is, do I trust this seller that the condition that they're saying it is as is. And so, I think a concept of reviewing a seller and trusting them, I think is super interesting to lean into. I think it's super interesting to lean into especially where a lot of our... and eBay is a little different all over the world, so I don't know how much you know about that too.Bradford:So, in the US, the business is very different than the way it looks in UK. It's very different than in Australia. So, for some of those places in Australia like I'll give you example. We have a lot of brands and the top brands and top retailers selling direct on eBay.Bradford:So, it's like we are a channel for them. So, there, the trust opportunity is about like is this one of these iconic brands that I trust, I know their inventory. But in other parts of the country, there's a lot of small businesses, a lot of people who have built cult followings on Instagram.Bradford:A lot of people that literally have brick and mortar stores and small towns and main streets. And they have been able to survive in a world of big box retailers and mega malls because they've had this outlet to sell things from their physical location on eBay globally.Bradford:And so, I think we should show that off more. I think if someone knew they were buying a record or a bunch of records from a record dealer who's had a shop since the early '80s in Downtown Buffalo and I'm making that up but it probably does exist. Like that would be a level of trust, right? You know that this person is the real deal.Bradford:And there's something about that that I get excited about, thinking about when you say reviews is leaning in and it's less about reviews, but more about like, "Can I trust this seller? Who are they? Where do they exist?" Like, "What is their point of view? What do they specialize in? What are they experts in? How can I communicate with them?" I get excited about that.Stephanie:Yup. I love that. Because I mean, even from a human perspective, it's like what do you remember? Are you going to remember like you said the product? Or you remember the person, the face like the story behind it and then that would come top of my next, I'm like, "Oh, I want to go to Bob's record store and get another record from him because he did a great job last time versus-"Bradford:[crosstalk 00:42:38]. And that's difference between like us. I talked about Jamie and our new pivot, our new strategy like what you just said is super important. I don't know if you're buying diapers, or if you're buying toilet paper, or you're buying replacement batteries that that person to person connection matters that much.Bradford:It's about price right? Is this the thing I'm looking for and who has it at the cheapest and sometimes it's the cheapest bust the quickest. And I think a lot of times eBay just because of this, like the diversity of our inventory sources, we get to compete there too.Bradford:Because we have all these different sources of inventory and oftentimes, we're the best price. But when you talk about things like collectible sneakers or vintage handbags, or coins, or antiques, or vintage camera equipment, or car parts, suddenly, who you're buying it from matters. It not only matters from the feel of good I'm like helping the little guy community aspect of eBay, but it also matters from the trust.Bradford:And part of people that do have passions whether they're collecting or enthusiasts, part of the joy of that whole thing is not just the accumulation of things, it's the connections to people that come with the process of accumulating those things.Bradford:And that is where eBay, that happens just naturally because it's our DNA, but we need to tap into that way more than we do currently, and we will. And that's the stuff that we're talking about internally right now.Stephanie:Yeah, I love that. I think that's also just such a good point for any new like do they see companies coming out right now that like the story behind it. I mean, I know a lot of people sometimes are like, "Oh, I don't want to talk about myself." But I remember going to certain websites and looking at that page and seeing like, "Oh, it's like a certain family member is behind and here's how it was inspired. "I think like Charles Webb comes to mind and a couple other ones.Stephanie:But you remember that story of why they're doing what they're doing and that's way more of a spot to connect on than maybe just the product. Like you start to have a good product, but I think [crosstalk] some of that story is important.Bradford:Yeah. You're absolutely right. It's not one or the other, it's both. And when it's both it's like, pow, that's where the magic happens. And again, we're coming back to that more than we have probably in the recent history of the company.Stephanie:Yeah. Very cool. So, you were just mentioning earlier about international audiences, like you guys have a global presence. How do you think about developing your website and your offerings and telling the story behind different, maybe like catalogs and things like that, how do you think about approaching that from a global perspective?Bradford:Prior to COVID, I spent I would say a half of my time not in New York City. So, I have a global role and obviously worked for a company that's headquartered in California. But I really, really spent a lot of the last four years on the road and really listening to customers.Bradford:And when I say customers, I mean, also. So, eBay is like we have global functions. So, product and technology is one of the things that are global. It's based mostly although we have people that work on and distributed across the world, it's headquartered in California and that's the epicenter.Bradford:But we also have markets, regional teams. So, because of the scale of our business they're like big companies within a really big company. We have an Australian headquarters. We have an Asian headquarters. We have an Israeli headquarters.Bradford:We have our Russian headquarters. We have German headquarters. We have an UK. And a lot of the business, merchandise, marketing like just operations, the people that are closest to the customers and market are in those countries. And you do see nuance of differences of how people use products like it's super interesting.Bradford:I'll give you an example. We launched the ability to create an account on eBay with Google, Facebook and now Apple. This is nothing revolutionary. It's been around since 10 years, but we launched it finally in eBay a couple years ago. And we've seen a lot of adoption because that's just the normal way a lot of people create accounts.Bradford:They don't have to think about a username and a password remembered for individual websites. They just click a button they link to Google and it's one click sign in. Germans don't want to do that. And you realize that like suddenly, this product that there are parts all over the world, and then you realize that there are very real differences.Bradford:There are very real differences in how people want to pay for things. Germans again don't use credit cards the way that a lot of the west does. There are very specific payments forms in China that we just don't have in the US. And see nuance in the categories they shop globally, country to country often.Bradford:You see nuance and payment choices. You see nuance in privacy. Some countries care a lot less than other countries about it. It is really interesting to see the outliers where something just doesn't make sense or doesn't work somewhere. We test things and sometimes like something is a runaway hit in one country and it's just the... sometimes negative and others.Bradford:And really a fascinating part of our job is how do you launch global product by respecting local nuance. And what we have done is we have actually a team of... it's a pretty decent sized team. But we have a team that actually takes our global product tech platform and sometimes builds newer experiences that are market specific on top of the example is you can buy groceries in Australia on eBay.Stephanie:Oh, interesting.Bradford:Yeah, anywhere else. But because of just the size of the country and the epicenters of where people actually live and partnerships with the top grocery companies there. We actually built like a grocery shopping experience on eBay which no one would ever think of that.Bradford:So, we do sometimes build different things in different markets depending, but by and large, I would say 95% of what we do is global audience is shopping view eBay at the same way, so it's not too much.Stephanie:That's pretty great. I mean, are there any international trends or shifts that you see happening right now that you guys are preparing for or leaning into?Bradford:No. I mean, I think that the shifts that we see are, again, I think this vertical approach, looking at different verticals and really understand that customer's journey end to end, how they landed on eBay. How they browse and shop and search for eBay.Bradford:How they consider what they expect in terms of protections and trust us and how they want to pay for it and what to expect, what returns and guarantees. We're doing that everywhere. What's different is that there may be some verticals that matter here and don't matter there and that's what we're working on right now as like I mentioned the watch business in the United States and that's definitely a global one.Bradford:But there might be some that are more US focused. There might be some that are more European focused. There might be some more that are more APAC focused. But other than that, I think it's just applying the same playbook. It just might be a different vertical or a different category focus in certain countries or regions.Stephanie:Yeah, that is great. All right. So, we have not too much time left, but I want to jump into the lightning round unless there's anything else you want to talk about.Bradford:Yeah, this was great. Thank you. I mean, it's so funny. Like I said, I like really drink the juice of eBay and like just talking about eBay gets me excited. So, thanks for letting me just riff on how awesome place I work is.Stephanie:Yup. Yeah, I like that excitement. That's what I love to talk about and have people come on the show, be passionate about where they work and what they're excited about. So, it's been perfect. All right. Lightning round brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I'm going to throw a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Bradford?Bradford:Yeah, okay.Stephanie:All right. So, this one I think you'll have a great answer to, what is the either best or most memorable purchase you've ever made on eBay?Bradford:Oh, my God. Well, I'll tell you what, I just found out what my first purchase was and it's really embarrassing, it was an MC Lyte who you don't even know who that is, I'm sure.Stephanie:Nope.Bradford:An MC Lyte cd.Stephanie:All right. Okay. So, what is this? Tell me a little bit more because I do not know.Bradford:MC Lyte is like one of the earliest female hip hop artists and was very famous in the late '80s, early '90s, did some rap like Queen Latifah. And that was my first purchase on eBay. But I-Stephanie:Well, do you still have it? I hope so.Bradford:I don't still have it. [crosstalk] anymore. I have a Warhol collection and I have bought probably five or six of them on eBay. So, I'm someone that actually buys high-end art on eBay. And those are oftentimes steals.Bradford:I mean, they're not inexpensive, but in terms of just the actual cost that would be out in the market of the art market through dealers and door and at auction and I got great, great, great deals.Stephanie:That's awesome. Yeah, very cool. Well, I have to see some pictures of some of your art.Bradford:I can send [crosstalk 00:54:04].Stephanie:That would be cool. I'd love to see it. So, once we can travel again, what's up next in your travel destinations?Bradford:It's so funny. Right before we're grounded, I just gotten back from a wedding of one of my best friends in South Africa. And then, I went to Rwanda and Zanzibar. And I flew 300,000 miles last year, so this is really hurting that I'm not traveling. My favorite two cities in the world are Berlin and Rio de Janeiro and I am dying to get back to both of them probably especially Rio.Stephanie:Okay, cool. We need to follow you on Instagram or Twitter wherever you are to keep up with where you are at in the world.Bradford:It used to be more interesting. I was at a beach every weekend and not anymore. [crosstalk] and I got to travel to really cool places for work. You get to go to Sydney. You get to go to Tel Aviv. You get to go to Berlin. You get to go to London, it was a really luxury. I don't know, I'm sleeping better now, so maybe it's not all bad.Stephanie:Yeah, there you go less jetlag. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Bradford:Oh, my God, it would totally be like completely not about the covers. It would probably be about music and drag queens and gave up culture. And my first guest I think it would have to be RuPaul.Stephanie:That sounds awesome. Hey, I mean, not all podcasts have to be about ecommerce. I mean, we have the best one. So, [crosstalk] anymore. There you go. You don't want to compete with us. You don't want this. All right. And last, harder question. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Bradford:Obviously, the answer is COVID. I think it's completely changed a lot of consumer behavior. I think it's really changed a lot of the industry. I think a lot of people that didn't sell or buy a line are now doing that. And I think I'm curious as we hopefully pull ourselves out of this globally.Bradford:And I hope get to a place sooner than later some normalcy in the world that I think that for ecommerce, just the playing field has shifted, it's going to be a different game. And I think we have some signs, early signs of what we think that looks like for eBay.Bradford:And I think a lot of podcasts and article I read are pontificating on it, but I don't think we have the answers yet. And that's probably the answer for this life to not just ecommerce life, but definitely COVID.Stephanie:Yup. Yeah, completely agree. All right. Bradford, it's been a blast talking. Where can people find out more about you and your work?Bradford:They can shop on eBay and see it live and flesh most of the things that a buyer touches. And you can follow me on Instagram, youngbradford, if you want. I'm boring on Twitter, I'm a more visual person.Stephanie:All righty. We will try and find you there then thanks so much.Bradford:All right. Thank you. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jeden Montagmorgen berichten wir über fünf Dinge, die zum Wochenstart wichtig sind. Diesmal geht es unter anderem um die neuen iPhone-Modelle, Ebays neuen Deutschland-Chef und dem Start von Starlink. 1. iPhone 12 Mini bis 12 Max Pro im Vergleich – das steckt drin, das sind die Unterschiede https://t3n.de/news/iphone-12-mini-12-max-pro-offiziell-1328208/ 2. Ebay: So will der neue Deutschland-Chef Oliver Klinck den Marktplatz führen https://t3n.de/news/ebay-deutschland-chef-oliver-klinck-1327046/ 3. Tech-Plattformen vs. USA und EU: Wer bricht hier wen auf? https://t3n.de/news/tech-plattformen-vs-usa-eu-wer-loest-hier-wen-auf-1328466/ 4. Starlink startet bald: Alle Infos zu Elon Musks Satelliten-Internet https://t3n.de/news/starlink-satelliten-internet-spacex-musk-1272753/ 5. Praxis-Tipp der Woche: Keine Meetings vor 13 Uhr https://t3n.de/news/keine-meetings-13-uhr-gruender-1328362/ Sponsor-Hinweis (Anzeige): Der heutige Podcast wird präsentiert von t3n Pro, der neuen Membership für alle, die digital arbeiten und leben. Ob digitale Magazin-Ausgabe, Guide-Flatrate oder Pro-Talks mit Digital-Expert*innen: Check jetzt alle Features von t3n Pro unter t3n.de/pro-entdecken

Episode 120, 1 of 3. Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann interviewed by Stephen Cummins, CEO & Founder of AppSelekt for 14 Minutes of SaaS. "I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also ... nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics ... that was it was actually true. And I didn't want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all my competitors were there. So I thought, why isn't there a way where I can gather my customers' opinions and show it in a credible way so that people trust my business"

Episode 120, 1 of 3. Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann interviewed by Stephen Cummins, CEO & Founder of AppSelekt for 14 Minutes of SaaS. "I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also ... nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics ... that was it was actually true. And I didn't want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all my competitors were there. So I thought, why isn't there a way where I can gather my customers' opinions and show it in a credible way so that people trust my business"

Can you imagine running a company that's so massive that you have a segment called “other” on your financial statements that will do more than $20 billion in revenue this year? For those wondering, that would make the “other company” aka Amazon's Advertising business segment around the 150th biggest American company. At that size, its bigger than all of Kohl's, two Ebays, or three Simon Property Groups (the biggest mall retailer). It also makes them the third biggest digital advertising company behind Alphabet's Google and Facebook. I don't know Jeff Bezos personally, but my assumption is he doesn't wake up each morning and congratulate myself on being the third most powerful digital advertiser, so as funny as it might seem to ask a $20 billion segment that is growing 45% YoY…what's could be next for Amazon's Advertising Segment?

The story of the internet may come in two parts: In one telling, it created giants—the Amazons, Googles, and eBays. But in the other telling, it enabled an ocean of small businesses to promote themselves and connect with customers in new ways. Unfortunately, for this latter group, fully utilizing the resources of the internet has always been a struggle. In this episode of UpTech Report, I talk with Christopher Marentis, the founder and CEO of Surefire Local, a company that's trying to bring the online marketing power yielded by large dot-coms into the hands of local dentists, contractors, and accountants.

5 Things to Know Before Selling on Etsy Etsy is an emerging online marketplace with strong year over year growth That said, the "good" absolutely comes with some bad. That may actually be an understatement... In this video, I cover 5 things, all of which are slanted to the NEGATIVE side, that you should know before expanding onto Etsy Etsy changed their image from a boutique marketplace to sharing more similarities with the Amazons & Ebays of the world when they allowed print on demand sellers onto the platform Since then, it's been a gold rush for people like myself who took advantage Before you open your Etsy Shop, I'd recommend checking out this video where I share 5 important things that I learned from my experience selling on Etsy

I’ve been buying and selling camera equipment for my entire adult life. Like most people, I’ve gone the eBay or Craigslist route. While I have had successful transactions on both I was starting to get really, really frustrated. On craigslist, I had several bad experiences. I remember selling a Nikon body once and a guy contacted me interested in the camera. He told me that he for sure wanted to buy the camera. He told me he wanted to meet about 30 minutes away from my house. I wasn’t getting a lot of interest on craigslist with this camera so I decided to go. When I met him and showed him the camera he was very excited, but then started looking for every little flaw on the camera body. He told me he couldn’t pay what I was asking because of the small scuff on the back of the body. I was irritated but I was already invested in this transaction. I had given up an hour of driving that day to meet this guy. Long story short he ended up getting me to go down significantly on my price in person and I sold him the camera. Afterward, I felt taken. It felt like I had been conned even though I agreed to the price. Maybe I’m not the best negotiator in person, but this guy definitely had a plan to get me in person and then lowball me. The problem I found with Craigslist is that you don’t have a lot of potential buyers since all your buyers have to live in the area. Photo and video gear is many times a niche product depending on what brand you are selling so Craigslist is not ideal. Some Canon gear can sell fine on Craigslist but when you are selling a more niche brand like Zeiss or Sigma it becomes much harder to have leverage as a seller. eBay is another way of selling gear. The great thing about eBay is the number of potential buyers go way up. Now your gear is available to everyone in the US and even more if you choose. You don’t have to drive to meet some unethical person to begin a negotiation behind a gas station. But there is a huge flaw in eBays business model. They allow people to purchase an item without paying for it first. Over the last five years, this has become a problem for me more and more. I’ve spent time listing a camera body or lens and then someone purchases it. Great! Well, not exactly. Many times, the “buyer” messages me after purchases my item encouraging me to ship the item before he pays. Anyone who does this on eBay is trying to scam you and get your camera without paying. They get away with it on eBay all the time. If you are new to selling on eBay you don’t realize sometimes that you need to wait before someone pays you before you ship the item. The irritating part is that you have to go through the process of relisting your item to try to find a legitimate buyer. I’ve had to relist the same item 3-4 times before a legitimate person buys it. About a year ago, I had the lightbulb moment of building my own marketplace just for us, the photographers and filmmakers of the world. A fresh and clean new pool of honest and ethical users where the prince of Nigeria isn’t trying to mug you online. So I made it happen. We created GearUp. It took me and my business partner Caleb a whole year to design and build the iPhone and Android app but we did it. This app has been built by photographers and filmmakers for photographers and filmmakers. In this episode I'm going to tell you about the app we've built and why we are so excited about it! Gearup for iPhone Gearup for Android --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/image-maker/message

In this week's episode, we discuss the Horology House controversy, the new Seiko King Turtle and a host of other stories. Sam's Ultimate Turtle: https://youtu.be/dit6n2XEscs Kris's watch obsession this week: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8DNUt4H6PU/ King Turtle https://wornandwound.com/all-hail-the-new-seiko-prospex-king-turtle-refs-srpe03-srpe05-and-srpe07/ Horology House https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/ewojle/warning_uhorologyhouse_has_been_caught_selling_a/fg3cot9/ https://www.rolexforums.com/showthread.php?t=722353 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28-aZJJNMkE (re-upload) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/casualwatchtalk/support

Keywebco has been selling on eBay for 10 years as an anchor store with close to 10,000 listings at one time! You will not find Us on eBay anymore! Now that said the reasons are many why we closed! But the biggest two I mention below. Understand that there are still opportunities on eBay just To cash in on those opportunities is almost impossible. If you find a product “not tied up” you still will have a small percentage chance you will even sell an item through eBay product search. Please note it is a normal thing for businesses to change If something has gone wrong with your purchase on eBay, for example, if your item hasn't arrived, or you need to return it, take a look at this article on returns, missing items, and refunds Usually, your purchases on eBay will go smoothly, but occasionally a problem might come up with your order. eBay's New abusive buyer protections and reporting feature update We're implementing stronger measures against buyers who don't follow eBay's abusive buyer policy. We're introducing new measures to proactively find abusive buyers, prevent them from filing return requests, and in some cases suspend them. When we find that a buyer violated the policy, we will remove any feedback and defects, including opened cases in service metrics. We've also made it easier for you to report buyers who violate eBay policies. Now when you report a buyer, you can more clearly describe what the buyer is doing to help us investigate potential policy violations and take actions to protect you. Reduced search visibility for sellers who use a retailer to ship directly to buyers Sellers who use retailers or marketplaces to ship directly to buyers are in violation of our dropshipping policy and will be lowered in search results, giving sellers who own their own inventory or drop ship from wholesalers greater search visibility. This is so they can use china themselves and eBays product catalog to "drop ship" for eBay without competition. We protect you in other ways, too Additional protections include: Removal of negative feedback and defects when you've done your part (e.g., tracking shows on-time delivery) or when things happen that are beyond your control, such as weather or carrier delays. Partial refunds in the returns flow for items returned opened or used when you offer free returns. Learn more about the many ways we protect you on eBay. Here Is The Reality Of eBay: 1. Search and Platform Changes eBay was founded to be a community to a community-based platform where everyone that is selling the same item would be ranked in order of their performance but visible to all of the buyers. This is the only type of business model that will work for a small business is a community to community-based search. Product catalog search is the way all of the big companies from China or even in the United States get all of the search results and nobody else shows. I had over a million dollars invested in products that only sell in competition with “China” if a buyer can see the listing. Fact: Before eBay changed from a community-based platform to a product-based platform, I was selling anywhere from 100 to 200 items a day every day. You can see the day that they flip the switch on my store and turned it into a product catalog instead of a community-based platform. I was in the car doing a Facebook live video complaining that I only sold 65 items on Friday. The next day you see me on Facebook live pale as a ghost saying I only had one sale something must be wrong with my eBay store. The next day you can see me on Facebook live very angry and upset because I realized nothing was wrong with my store something is wrong with eBay. In a few days, I managed to get a few sales working extremely hard manipulating every keyword I could possibly think of I've managed to get my average sales back to a whopping 10 to 25 sales a day. Realize some of this is due to my product line... see more at Keywebco.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/roger-keyserling/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/roger-keyserling/support

Ting: Mobile that makes senseOn Pocketnow Daily, we get some new predictions on what to expect for iPhones and iPads in 2019 and 2020. Some rumors point to the future Galaxy smartphones losing the iris scanner. We get the model numbers and some specs for the upcoming foldable Galaxy F. The iPhone 5 along with several Macs are no longer being supported by Apple, but there may be a new repair scheme on the way. We end today's show with eBays pre-Black Friday 'First Minute Deals' on iPhones.2019 iPhones to feature upgraded Face ID techSamsung to ditch Galaxy S10 iris scanner, stick to in-display fingerprint recognitionFoldable smartphone report details Samsung Galaxy F featuresApple stops supporting iPhone 5 for repairs, will begin vintageBlack Friday deals starting to show up on eBay for the iPhone Xs and Xr See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chip and Cern have their new equipment and are sounding better from an audio perspective, not content. There is nothing they can do about that. In high school Chip and Cern were eBay power users. Snagging sunglasses, baseball memorabilia and other goodies on the regular. Chip heard from a coworker that eBay has some good deals about some audio equipment. Chip went to get some stuff, but now he is banned from eBay. Hear that story and more on this episode of the Chip and Cern Show.   Chip and Cern’s mixer started to crap out, so it was time for a new one. Chip found a newer one on eBay that was a good deal, so threw some bids out. After some more research Chip found some better deals that were on “Or Best Offer” so he threw out a few more offers. The eBay marketplace    Chip found some guy on Facebook Marketplace that runs his own online radio station, http://www.allthebestoldies.com/, and wasn’t using this anymore, so Chip got a great deal on their new audio interface.    No sooner does Chip get back in the car from buying this new interface, then he gets a “you are the high bidder with 17mins left” notification. Chip knows his wife will murder him, so he tries to get out of this commitment. Chip was able to cancel the order, but at the price of getting banned from eBay because of his many canceled transactions in a few days.    Chip and Cern talk about how Facebook Marketplace has really taken over for the used selling stuff. Way less hassle than Craigslist and on Facebook you know whom you are dealing with.    Cern does a live price comparison for him Samsung Galaxy S7. eBay comes in at a cool $130 and on Facebook Marketplace they were going for well over $250. So there is your reason why ebay is on the down and out.    This brings Chip and Cern to check out eBays stock price and whatnot.    Chip has been killing the Facebook Marketplace game with his used stuff. Easy to sells, more trust for some reason.    Do you still play around on eBay? Let us know on Twitter at @chipandcernshow. Speaking of plugs, pick up your Chip and Cern Show swag (hats, shirts, and stickers) at www.chipandcernshow.com/shop. Be sure to spread the word around and tell your friends about the Chip and Cern Show. The radio is dying, and podcasts are coming, so be ready. You can plug your phone into your car and listen when driving around.   If you want a free sticker, shoot an email to chipandcernshow@gmail.com, and we will give you one.   As always we appreciate you spreading the word with your friends, coworkers, family and churchgoing community members. The Hits are great into to the Chip and Cern Show, so share those!

7-stelliger Umsatz mit Autoteilen? Welche Strategien und Marketingmaßnahmen muss ein Unternehmer treffen, um ein solches Unterehmen zu skalieren. Das erfährst du in der heutigen Episode! Timestamps: 00:00-03:00 Intro + Begrüßung 03:01-05:00 Simons Unternehmen in den Kinderschuhen 05:01-08:17 Inkrementeller Fortschritt 08:18-10:45 Strategien für mehr  Laufkundschaft 10:46-14:15 Onlinevertrieb 14:16-18:05 Die Besonderheiten von Ebay Kleinanzeigen 18:06-22:00 Die Probleme eines Amazonhändlers 22:01-30:40 Ebays zukünftige Entwicklungen 30:41-33:05 Logistik und Versand 33:06-35:40 Mitarbeiter 35:41-38:00 Softwaretools 38:01-41:30 Aktionen und Gutscheincodes 41:31-45:00 Wie Facebook dir in Zukunft mehr Umsatz einbringen wird Shownotes: https://unternehmerkanal.de/haendlerbund/ https://rsparts.online/ Facebook-Seite: https://www.facebook.com/rs.parts.info/   ⬇ ⬇ Darauf kann ich nicht verzichten⬇ ⬇ ►► Das beste Buchhaltungstool ►► http://sevde.sk/1uhqM 14 Tage kostenlos testen & exklusiv 50% Rabatt auf alle Tarife mit dem Code auf der Landingpage! ►► Der Steuerberater, der zu dir passt ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de/ageras/ ►► Der schnellste Webspace ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de/siteground/  ►► Die besten Geschäftskonten ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de/geschaeftskonto-vergleich/   Bist du auf der Suche nach einer Geschäftsidee? ►► Geld verdienen mit AirBnB ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de/airbnb-business/ ▼▼▼ Bleib in Kontakt ▼▼▼ ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de ►► https://Instagram.com/unternehmerkanal ►► https://facebook.com/unternehmerkanal ▼▼▼Unternehmer Community▼▼▼ ►► https://unternehmerkanal.de/fb/   Bei den Links im Video und in der Videobeschreibung handelt es sich teilweise um Affiliate-Links, die mir helfen diesen Kanal zu finanzieren. Wenn du über einen dieser Links ein Produkt oder Dienstleistung erwirbst, erhält der Kanal dadurch eine Provision. Für dich entstehen dadurch allerdings keinerlei Mehrkosten, in einigen Fällen wird es für dich durch exklusive Vereinbarungen sogar günstiger. Ich gehe mit Affiliate-Links sehr verantwortungsvoll um und empfehle nur Dienstleistungen und Produkte von deren Nutzen und Mehrwert ich überzeugt bin, und die ich selber nutze.

Tesla, Google Home, Amazon Echo, Amazon Prime Streaming, Netflix Marc's Buy of the week; Australia's Tesla Battery, Burnrate and Model 3 news; New Twitter Feature; Difference between Google Home and Amazon Echo; Amazon new series The Magnificent Mrs. Maisel; Coming to Netflix, Amazon; TV cliff hangers; Christmas movies

#BizTech Tuesday Coming Up... • #BizTech Tuesday with Bernie Goldbach we're talking about how to creative people can get their stuff online and begin building an income from creative works. We're coming into the festive period now and people are looking for special gifts, unique things that the Amazons and Ebays of this world don't have. That presents an opportunity for creatives like you to make your creations available and begin building a small business around your work. Check out today's episode to find out how to get started. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sunday-letters/message

Back from a short 2 week hiatus it is The Dealer Playbook episode 52 and we are super excited and pumped to be back at it. Today we are sitting down with Paul d Vries founder of Nieuweautokopen.nl located in Holland. Paul is one of the most influential automotive professionals in all of Holland and has an amazing story of amazing success as a auto dealer and later as the founder of Nieuweautokopen.nl, (New Car Buying) which just in the beginning of this year he sold to eBay. Here is a quick preview of the topics we discussed with Paul in this session. - Paul goes into his story about how he went from pumping gas to owning a dealership in only 5 years. - What Paul did to make his dealership one of the top producing dealerships in all of Europe and how he was able to stand out in a cluttered market.- The power of process when it comes to internet leads and the exact process Paul implements. - How he built the Nieuweautokopen.nl brand from scratch with zero marketing budget to getting on eBays radar enough for them to purchase the company from him. This was a really good time chatting with Paul and that is just a small taste of some of the awesome information he drops in this session for your listening pleasure. Connect with Paul d Vries for more powerful incite and information to help you sell more cars. Paul d Vries Twitter Nieuweautokopen.nl Here is the link to the book discussed in this session “Invisible Selling Machine” by online marketing guru Ryan Deiss. You Know The Drill, Now It's Your TurnThe whole team at DPB can not thank you enough for all the support and love you have been giving us.Whether you loved it, hated it, want more of it, or want something different , we want to hear your voice.Sound off below with your thoughts, opinions, suggestions, questions, etc. and lets keep this conversation going.See you next time ;)Connect With Team DPBConnect with The Dealer Playbook on Twitter here.Check out Michael Cirillo's blog here.Check out Robert Wiesman's blog here.Connect with Michael Cirillo on Twitter here.Connect with Robert Wiesman on Twitter here. 

Back from a short 2 week hiatus it is The Dealer Playbook episode 52 and we are super excited and pumped to be back at it.  Today we are sitting down with Paul d Vries founder of Nieuweautokopen.nl located in Holland. Paul is one of the most influential automotive professionals in all of Holland and has an amazing story of amazing success as a auto dealer and later as the founder of Nieuweautokopen.nl, (New Car Buying) which just in the beginning of this year he sold to eBay.  Here is a quick preview of the topics we discussed with Paul in this session.  - Paul goes into his story about how he went from pumping gas to owning a dealership in only 5 years.  - What Paul did to make his dealership one of the top producing dealerships in all of Europe and how he was able to stand out in a cluttered market. - The power of process when it comes to internet leads and the exact process Paul implements.  - How he built the Nieuweautokopen.nl brand from scratch with zero marketing budget to getting on eBays radar enough for them to purchase the company from him.  This was a really good time chatting with Paul and that is just a small taste of some of the awesome information he drops in this session for your listening pleasure.  Connect with Paul d Vries for more powerful incite and information to help you sell more cars.  Paul d Vries Twitter Nieuweautokopen.nl Here is the link to the book discussed in this session “Invisible Selling Machine” by online marketing guru Ryan Deiss.  You Know The Drill, Now It's Your Turn The whole team at DPB can not thank you enough for all the support and love you have been giving us. Whether you loved it, hated it, want more of it, or want something different , we want to hear your voice. Sound off below with your thoughts, opinions, suggestions, questions, etc. and lets keep this conversation going. See you next time ;) Connect With Team DPB Connect with The Dealer Playbook on Twitter here. Check out Michael Cirillo's blog here. Check out Robert Wiesman's blog here. Connect with Michael Cirillo on Twitter here. Connect with Robert Wiesman on Twitter here.  

Sydney has switched off Analog TV and Melbourne is next, TV will never be the same again, Foxtel planning to offer phone and broadband plans in 2014, eBay has a big weekend coming up as we get ready for Christmas, Aussies are pretty close to their mobiles - Tech 21 tells us just how close, Xbox One and PS4 sold out - good luck if you want one, the Kogan Selfie-Stick and Stephen's minute reviews

Sydney has switched off Analog TV and Melbourne is next, TV will never be the same again, Foxtel planning to offer phone and broadband plans in 2014, eBay has a big weekend coming up as we get ready for Christmas, Aussies are pretty close to their mobiles - Tech 21 tells us just how close, Xbox One and PS4 sold out - good luck if you want one, the Kogan Selfie-Stick and Stephen's minute reviews

cshel joins the cast as they discuss Search Engine Strategies and StumbleUpon.

Download the MP3. If you think the ringtone business is for kids, then Fabrice Grinda has a $130 million lesson to teach you. After starting the eBays of Europe and Latin America, Fabrice brought the ringtone business concept to America by starting Zingy. We caught up with Fabrice, now 31 and a millionaire several times over, just a couple of hours before he finished his last day at the helm of Zingy. While his possessions were in boxes, he put all of his cards on the table by telling us his net worth at every stage of the game. He’s risked all of his resources in the past for his ventures, but will he do it again? Listen to hear his plans. Update (4/16/08): Fabrice announced on the Venture Voice blog that he's launched a new online classified business called OLX that's been dubbed a Facebook killer. OLX recently raised $13.5 million in venture funding. Show notes:

If you think the ringtone business is for kids, then Fabrice Grinda has a $130 million lesson to teach you. After starting the eBays of Europe and Latin America, Fabrice brought the ringtone business concept to America by starting Zingy. We caught up with Fabrice, now 31 and a millionaire several times over, just a couple of hours before he finished his last day at the helm of Zingy.…