Transcription
Well guys, I'm officially done with whatnot. And in today's video, I'm going to talk about why I believe whatnot is not worth it for 95% of people. I'm also going to talk about my experience with whatnot, how I got ready for my first show, and all all the good things, which kind of turned up bad because I'm done with whatnot, and I'm kind of downtrodden and feeling very very sad.
So, I had heard from so many different people on Tik Tok, on YouTube, and Facebook talking about their whatnot experience and how they made really good money, how they loved doing it, right? They were able to make money quicker, and they just loved everything about it. And so, after hearing this for several months, I was like, you know what? I'm going to actually take Whatnot seriously. I made a whatnot account about a year ago and I'm not sure if there's still a vetting process, but when I signed up for whatnot in order to become a seller, you have to like be on this group Zoom call. I can't remember what platform it is, but it's like a group video call meeting and you have a presenter who goes through the basics of whatnot. And basically, they let everyone in to become a seller as long as you go through this orientation meeting. and I never had a show. I just loaded some things onto whatnot, some listings, and I've done a little bit of crosslisting to whatnot. But it wasn't until I watched and saw on so many different social media platforms, whatnot being successful for people that I wanted to do it.
So, in order to prepare for my first show, I watched a bunch of different YouTube videos, people talking about how they made money on whatnot, how they made whatnot work for them, right? What their process was. And it was actually kind of annoying because when I went and watched these videos of people talking about whatnot, I felt like they took forever to get to the point. I just wanted the information, right? I didn't want to hear about their lives or, you know, anything else. I just really wanted the what that information which kind of sounds mean but I was just really anxious to get started and I didn't want to spend several hours of watching YouTube videos and trying to learn how to do whatnot. But also, you know, all that time spent just with the people's intros to their videos. And so that was kind of frustrating.
But also to prepare for my first whatnot show, I went on to whatnot and I watched other sellers to see how they did it. I went on to mostly people who were selling women's clothes and I went onto their lives and I watched how they did their shows because I was curious and I actually bought something from someone and just, you know, saw how the process was for higher creators, you know, people that had a lot of followers and had a lot of success and then from people that also had success but had fewer buyers and stuff. So, I watched a bunch of different whatnot lives and bought a few things. Like I said, so for my first ever show, I scheduled it for 6:30 p.m. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but I preloaded 28 dresses onto that show. So, what I did was I went into my inventory and I pulled 28 dresses to run in my first ever whatnot show. Some of those dresses I'd got from the bins. Some of those dresses I'd had in my inventory forever. And I was probably going to lose money on running them in my whatnot show, but I didn't care cuz I've had them forever. And then some of those dresses were newer pieces that I was just going to start a little higher. So what I did was I crosslisted those items from I think Poshmark into Vendue. And then on from using Vendue I crosslist that cross them crosslisted them excuse me into whatnot. And I scheduled my first ever show. I titled it dress show all different sizes. I can't remember exactly what I titled it as, but then I loaded into that show those 28 dress listings. And I wasn't expecting to make any money. My first show, I wasn't expecting to make any sales. I started my show a little bit early at like 6:24 p.m. And I ran through all of the dresses twice. And I actually did make a sale. I sold this maxi American Eagle black floral dress that I've had in my inventory forever. I picked it up at the bins and so I paid like $2 for it and it sold for $10. And I was really excited about that because I wasn't expecting to make any money. Well, I didn't make any more sales from that first live. And then later in the day when I was just sitting on the couch after the show, I got a cancellation request. And I was just so sad because it was my first ever sale. But I did deny that cancellation request because the person didn't automatically cancel their request, which means they had thought about it for a while and were like, you know what, I don't want to buy this anymore. Which just isn't okay with me because that's not how like buying works and whatnot and Poshmark and places like that. And also because it was just such a low dollar amount, I'm like, I'm not going to accept this return request. It's a small amount of money, right? And it's my first ever sale. I don't want to refund the buyer and cancel the sale. So, I did end up shipping that dress out a few days later and that was that. I'll put up a p a picture of what that dress looks like. I've had it in my inventory forever. Got it from the bins. Thought it would sell on Poshmark, eBay, Merkari or Depot, and it didn't. So, glad that it sold on whatnot.
I had another show. My next show, I was like, I'm going to start a few things at a dollar because for my first show, I either ran my dresses at $10 or $15. I would run them at $15 if they were newer pieces or I paid more for them and then $10 if they were bins pickups and they were older piece or they were older pieces in my inventory. So for this show I had a bunch of stuff that I I think I had tried to take to consignment and so they were already like pulled out from my bins and so I ran a few things for a dollar. I ended up selling a pair of Victoria's Secret leggings for a dollar, an LLBAN shirt for a dollar. I also sold this Apartment 9 dress for $5. I sold this the North Face green jacket for $5. And both of those those two things I did start at $5 because I did pay more for them and I just don't want to sell them for a dollar. But I was okay selling the LLBAN shirt and the Victoria Secret pants leggings, excuse me, for a dollar. And then I sold one more thing. I can't remember how much I paid for it or how much it sold for, but then the last thing that I sold was this woman's Patagonia dress that I'd gotten from Uptown CheapKate in my big haul. And I ran that for $15 and it did sell, which is kind of exciting. Um, so turns out that the six things that sold sold between two buyers. So those two buyers bought three things each. And what I did for that second whatnot show compared to my first whatnot show was in my first whatnot show I had pre-loaded items into my show. I had crosslisted listings into whatnot and then I chosen those listings to run in my whatnot show. Well for this second whatnot show I wanted to do the numbers method which essentially is assigning a number to something that sells. So, say you run an item and it doesn't sell. So, you run another item and it doesn't sell. And then you run another item and it sells. You don't automatically have it preloaded in your whatnot listings for that show. But what you do have is random polls. So, you can when you're wanting to click a listing to run in your whatnot show, you can go add inventory and then you can click I think it's a plus button and you can either click create quality listing or create temporary listing. What I did was I clicked create temporary listing and then I did random poll and then you can click how many listings are there of this and you can you know select one to 100 to a thousand and then you swipe the little lever thing that changes it to list these items individually. And so that's what I did. I think I created 100 list items individually. So when an item sold and it was random poll number one, I would assign a number one. So I would grab the item that had just sold, lay that clothing down, and then I had a piece of paper with a one on it and put it on top. And I did that same thing with item two, item three, item four. I would put the number on top of it. So when I went to package up my sales, I could see that so and so bought one, two, and three. And they were they the the title of the listing that had sold just said random pull, but I knew what the clothing item was that sold because I'd assigned a number to it, if that makes sense. So, one person bought one, two, and three, so I knew what 1, two, three was, so I packaged that up for them and put the label on. And then the other person bought 3, four, and five, and I packaged that up, put the label on for them, and that was that. It gave me an unrealistic expectation for what not would be like because I thought I would keep growing on whatnot because my first show I made one sale. My second show I made six sales and so I thought I would keep growing. Well, that was not the case.
Um, so my third and fourth shows I was really wanting to get more followers because I saw that on whatnot the people that were successful had a lot of followers, which makes sense, right? Cuz if you have a lot of followers, people are going to get notifications that have their notifications on that you were going live. If there are a lot of followers, more people are going to join their live and they're going to make more sales and more money. And I had heard that a way to make followers on Whatnot is to run giveaways. So, for my third Whatnot show, pretty soon in the beginning, I ran a $10 Starbucks gift card giveaway. And the caveat was that you had to be following me. So, when you run a giveaway and whatnot, you can either select run giveaway and the giveaway is for everyone or run giveaway. And the giveaway is only for followers. So people have to follow you to enter the giveaway. Or there's a third option for giveaway for anyone who buys something. So like it's a buyer's gy. They call them giveies in whatnot, which I don't necessarily like. It's a niche thing to whatnot. But I'm going to keep calling in giveaways. So four people entered that giveaway. Got four new subscribers or four new followers on whatnot. And I ended up not being able to find $10 Starbucks gift cards. So, I shipped out a $10 Sonic gift card, and I made sure that the state that my gift card was being sent to had Sonics, the Sonic restaurant at this certain state, because I looked it up, and Sonic isn't in all 50 states. And then I just wrote a note saying, "I'm so sorry I couldn't find a $10 Starbucks gift card." And I didn't want to send out like more than $10 in gift card money because I was trying to save as much money as possible. And that show where I ran the giveaway, I only ran it for 15 minutes because there was like no watchers. Compared to my first and second shows, I had like a couple watchers. And then my third show, I only had a few watchers when I was running my giveaway. And as soon as soon as it was over, I had like zero zero watchers. So then I ran a fourth show. And in my fourth show, I did a another giveaway, but I didn't want to do something I had to pay for. I just wanted to pay for shipping. So, I ran a Vera Bradley purse wallet thing that I've had in my inventory forever that has had no interest. And I ran that and someone I think I gained like three new followers from that. But that one sold and then I ended up ending that video or that live pretty soon after because again there were no people on my live and I'm just like this is a waste of my time.
Well, I kind of wasn't doing a whatnot show for like a week and then I saw on social media again people talking about whatnot and how it was successful for them. So, I thought I'm going to do this. I got to do this. I want to do this. I want to succeed at whatnot. So, what I did was I pulled all of my men's stuff from my inventory cuz I mostly sell women's clothes, but I do have around I think like 100 men's items. There were a few men's clothing pieces that I missed, but I basically pulled all of my men's items and I preloaded, actually, no, I didn't preload them into that show, but I organized them all. And what I did for this one was I organized them by weight. So, like I was talking about for my second whatnot show, I did random polls. But for this one, the men's show I was going to do, I did random polls, but I assigned the random polls by weight. So I would title my listings 4 to 7 oz random pull and then I would click make 50 separate listings. And so I would have 50 listings named 4 to 7 oz random pull 1 through 50. And then I did that the same for 8 to 11 oz, 12 to 15, 1 lb, 1 to 2 lb, and 2 to 3 lb. And so when I had an item sell, I had I think I had three items sell in the 8 to 11 oz category. And I just assigned them I ended up buying these from Amazon. I just assigned them with 1, 2, and three, stacking the clothing on top of each other and then having a number. And then I think I had two items sell in the one pound. And so I just made a separate pile doing one and two. And then I think I had another item sell in a different weight category and I just labeled that one with one. What I didn't realize at the time in that men's show was that one person had bought six things from me. So all of the things that I separated out bought from the same were bought from the same person, but say they hadn't been from the same person. I would have known when I went to ship the things that sold. Okay, looks like I had three 8 to 11 oz pieces sell. So, I'd go over to my 8 to 11 oz pile and I would pull the number that the title said. So, it would say 8 to 11 oz random number two. And then I could pull that clothing item that has the number two assigned to it. And how I could tell the difference was, you know, when something weighs one pound. So even though I had multiple number ones, I knew if it was number one assigned to the one pound item or the 8 to 11 oz item because you can obviously tell that a sweater is more heavy than just a shirt. So that's how I was able to separate it, but it didn't really matter in the end, like I said, because the same person bought all six items from me. And for that men's whatnot show, I ran through all the pieces I had pulled from my inventory, I think one and a half times. So, I ran through all of it and then I ran through half of it and that was that. I was feeling pretty happy because I think I sold a total of $50 worth in that men's show.
Well, from there it gets so much worse. Okay, I was kind of riding a high from that. I'm like, okay, I had two really sucky shows, but that's because they were short. I only ran them for like 15 minutes. And then I did this men's show and it was great. So then I ran a few other whatnot shows and for these shows I did a few ones where I preloaded the items, a few items where I did the number system and it was a complete failure. I got like no watchers at all. Um, and it was just so discouraging because in my free time I would go on to whatnot and I would see other people's live streams that had like 50 viewers and the camera quality was terrible. The person doing the live wasn't engaging at all. And I was just so confused. And I would even go onto the person who was running the live who had like 50 people watching the live and their sub their follower count on whatnot was so small. So it made no sense to me.
So today you guys, I had my last ever whatnot show. Behind me you can see the hangers are a disaster, but that's because I didn't have any skirt hangers and so I just folded the skirts over the shirt hangers. But for this show, you guys, I pulled out all the skirts from my inventory. I preloaded them onto my show and I scheduled the show for 2. I ended up moving it back to 3:30, but honestly, you guys, I don't think it matters um necessarily if you have a scheduled show or if you do shows at random times. I've tried both. I've tried doing spontaneous shows and I've tried doing scheduled shows and it hasn't made much of a difference for me. But like I've said, I've just failed at whatnot. I ran through all of these you guys one and a half times. My puke my peak viewer count was like three watchers, which actually was only two because it counts you as one of the watchers. And so technically it was only two peak viewer count two people. And then I would get like one viewer for like 5 minutes before they would switch off. Guys, I went for an hour. I was even going to go for an hour and a half because I was like I heard that after an hour you start getting watchers. You start getting more people watching your live. But I was just like I've been at this for an hour and I've had no viewers and I could be doing so many other things during this time. And before this show that I just ran today, I had already been feeling really discouraged. I'd ran a few shows. They were fails. I felt like crying. I've talked to my husband about it, telling him I just want to give up, but I'm officially giving up, you guys. I've even pulled out different inventory for different shows because I also heard that like in order to make sales, you can do very like niche whatnot shows. So, for this one, I did all skirts and I was going to do an all plus-siz tops show and then I was going to do an all sweater show and an all pants show. But after this specific niche show and it didn't matter, I'm just like, I'm done. I'm I'm done. I'm not doing this anymore because it is affecting my sanity for real. One big insecurity of mine is being a failure, feeling like a failure, and I feel like a failure. I feel so downtrodden. And I wanted to tell you guys this real quick, too, that I really wanted to gain a ton of followers. And I made a Tik Tok talking about how much of a failure I felt like. I made this like a week ago after I had a really bad Whatnot show with no watchers basically and no sales. And someone commented that a way to make or get a lot of followers on whatnot is to just follow everyone within your specific niche. And so I just followed a ton of people that were selling women's clothes and men's clothes and baby clothes and accessories. And then I would also just go on to one person's account and whatnot and I would go onto their following and I would just follow literally everyone in their following list. And at this point I'm following 9200 people and I have about 850ish followers which is a good amount I feel like for whatnot if you're just starting out. But alas it hasn't made a difference for my sales. I have almost a thousand followers on whatnot and it did the method of following a bunch of people did work for getting followers but evidently having a big follower account or even like a semidecent follower account doesn't equate to making sales. So I'm done. I'm officially done with whatnot. I still have actually a pile of all the men's clothes I ran in that men's whatnot show because I I did run another men's whatnot show after that men's whatnot show I talked about to you guys and I just haven't put it away yet cuz I was planning on maybe doing another whatnot show. But after this fail of an experience, I'm done. I'm going to put away everything that I pulled out from my inventory, list the things that I never listed because I was planning on selling them and whatnot. And I'm just going to focus on what I know works, which is listing on Poshmark, eBay, Merkari, and Debop because I have been slacking with that to try to make whatnot work. But I don't know what it is. I can't even continue. I can't even try to like work or make, you know, grow my following, become one of those people that has constant biders and success on whatnot because it is so slow in the beginning. I honestly do not see it getting better. Um, I just feel like crying, honestly. Like, the tears are going to come if I make this video for too long because I tried. I really did try try to make whatnot work, but I I just I failed. I I completely and utterly failed. Uh, and it's just so depressing because I just I see other people succeed on whatnot and doing whatnot and I just don't understand because I was super bubbly and I've been losing my voice. I've been doing whatnot shows every day trying to do them at the same time. You know, I've looked up so much advice. I've been on Reddit. I've been on Facebook groups and yeah, I'm just done. So, that's my little rant. Um, and my opinion, whatnot is not worth it. I think it's only for a select few. I think you have to get lucky. Maybe it's too late in the game. I know that people say all the time it's not too late in the game, but it really does feel too late in the game. So, that's it for this video. um kind of little short video here, but I just had to make it because I've tried making this video and I in my past videos that I made for my YouTube trying to make a video talking about whatnot, they were still a little bit more positive. I was still thinking maybe I could do this and I'm here to say no, I cannot do this. It's it's affecting my mental health. I feel like an absolute failure. it's affecting my my main reseller duties and I'm done.