Comic Shop Talk Running a Big Sale on Comics
[Music] welcome to comic shop talk yeah tonight we’re going to talk about for today it could be good morning I don’t know wherever you’re at whenever you’re watching this uh we’re going to talk about running sales um when you should do them how you should do them uh most people do them during holidays the different holidays you know around Christmas um some back to school people do Christmas in July there’s a lot of different times that you can run sales we just had a very very very successful sale um some good news for the shop so I’ve had all this stuff from before covid that I’ve just been buying big Collections and even small Collections and then you know pulling a few of the hot books that are going to sell right away then I don’t do like I’ve talked about before I don’t do a lot of comics on eBay but some things that I could have ebayed I take out and then the rest just didn’t fit on the floor I had a full stock out on my floor so this was just getting stacked it was our in our second bathroom stacked all the way to the ceiling all the way to the back so I only got down to one bathroom but that’s a different kind of issue so what we did was we did a 50 off all the comics in the store except for our wall books our wall books were 25 off I kept it at 50 for all back issues that’s the new back issues um and all the stuff this was the star of the show though all the stuff that hadn’t been searched wasn’t in order it’s not alphabetized it was just a total dig from moment we opened at noon until the moment we closed at six somebody was back here digging I was hoping to sell about a thousand comics and we did about 2 000 comics so very happy with that super super happy I used uh Facebook and Instagram as my advertising we didn’t even put up any steins in the store we did do word of mouth when somebody came in and bought a comic for two weeks leading up to this we you know mentioned hey we’re gonna have a big 50 off sale comics that most people haven’t seen before in the store they’re you know back in the back uh stocked away and basically I had everything from Golden Age all the way up to Modern books there was no hold backs and nothing almost nothing was priced there was some stuff priced I noticed I think from a show I did many years ago I had some stuff priced um some secret War stuff priced I would say less than I would say less than a thousand books were priced and about 8 000 but we had about 8 000 books out so I was pricing them as we went and you know how people don’t like I didn’t have time to sit down at the computer and look at eBay did I probably did somebody get a key book for two dollars that was a thirty or forty dollar book yeah possible but listen I wasn’t selling it anyway because it was stocked away and I didn’t have I don’t have time to get to it sometimes you just have to move stuff also it creates a lot of interest in your store and a lot of interest in your sales when people can get those kind of deals uh once in a while if I didn’t know it and pull it out earlier it to me it wasn’t a key issue back when I got the collection so you know shame on me I get better all the time and I learn more books all the time in the meantime I still made money on it I made profit we had a really really good weekend and put a lot of money into the bank and a lot of money into the cash to buy more comics so that’s the thing you got to think about is you know I know stores that turn collections away listen I got enough I have to you never have enough you never have enough I don’t believe in cherry picking I don’t believe in somebody bringing in a collection you go well I need these three books for my wall and I’ll pay you this much and guys will pay up they’ll do you know if it’s a really high-end book like let’s say Amazing Spider-Man 300 they might they might pay 60 or 70 percent because they have a customer that wants it and they’re going to make that 30 40 percent like right away and with doing that one the person who’s trying to sell the collection is then left with stuff that’s not that they’re going to get only 15 or 20 cents a book for maybe even less like I’ve told you guys in the past I pay eight eight cents a book if they’re not bagged and bored 15 to 25 cents a piece if they’re bagged and boarded well I mean you’ve seen some bags and boards from the 90s uh they’ve been 30 years in these bags and boards and bags and Boards if you didn’t know only lasts five to seven years if you get the better quality like the my lights and the mylars um they last 10 to 15 I don’t know if I’ve seen one advertise at 20.
I think I’ve seen them advertise at like 10 to 15. so even if they were in those they would have had to have been changed at least twice for these 30 or 40 year old books so they get pretty grimy after 30 or 40 years depending on where they keep them yeah that’s another thing is that books in all different conditions are in here there there’s all from 0.5s all the way up to 9.8 so everybody was able to dig the way they like to dig and look for what they want to for the most part believe it or not there was some people that were digging for money but for the most people we’re filling their Collections and that was a that was a joy too is like real long runs of uh I’ve seen a lot of DC books selling um Nightwing flash uh Batman a lot of the Batman stuff that I had that’s like in the 2014’s 2016s full like 20 issues of it so that was great to see that people weren’t just digging for money they were actually filling their collections that that warmed my heart and gave me a little uh optimism for the for the the hobby because they print these books every month the new books and if you don’t have people that are trying to collect the whole thing and they’re just trying to buy just the issues when they’re there’s something going on at a new first appearance I don’t have a first appearance every week every month so you know you want you want people to be reading the whole collection and so it was really exciting to see people buying like that and then you know I had a lot of old timers that were looking for books that they remembered reading guys my age they were in here buying a lot of the Bronze Age stuff out of the boxes but running a sail get in touch with your community try to build we have a we used to have a Discord but we’ve moved it to a Facebook friends group a chat group The Discord it became at least on Facebook it didn’t devolve into madness right Discord became a little hard to handle and control so we moved it over to Facebook and you can contact your community that way and so all your regular customers know what’s going on and they they’re going to get first invitation let’s say and then put that out for your for your Community First then put it out in your Instagram and your Facebook probably like maybe on a Wednesday you send it out to all your your customers Friday you put it out for the following week in Instagram if you put stuff out too early people forget life is very busy uh and people forget so what I do is I usually I wait for a week beforehand or maybe 10 days and I start it and then I uh I will boost it and on the Monday I’ll boost it and then I’ll actually repo not boost but repost a new post on the Friday before the sale we had our sale on Sunday a lot of people do Saturdays but we run a lot of card events on Saturdays and it’s a longer day so we did it on Sunday uh we can only do it on Sundays when we don’t have our art class because our class is usually on Sundays so we don’t have art class for two weeks so I’m doing Comics this week and gonna do um this coming Sunday we’re gonna do toys I’m not gonna do 50 off toys I’m gonna do 25 off toys but you guys have seen my basement uh in earlier videos if you haven’t go back and check it out uh it is filled with toys and I need to move some of that out to make room for more stuff so that’ll all be out some really high-end cool toys you also want to gear what your downtown is doing like if there’s some kind of event going down on downtown a parade sometimes you have festivals in town they have all kinds of things in your town is running get involved I’ve talked to this everybody about this before get involved with your community and your and your local government be tied into that know what’s going on because when they have an event if you can run a sale you’re going to generate more income that way and the holidays are always good all the different holidays throughout the year and do them annually you know get used to it set up a calendar this is the day you know this is going to be the third week just like free comic book day it people then start to remember year after year the longer you’re there oh such and such date is coming up back do one for your anniversary every year that you’re you’re open throw an anniversary sale it’s a great way to get people to remember you’re here and it’s a great way to actually give something back to the community for keeping you open for the year and you might make some new customers out of it you don’t want to keep your community as small as possible you want to make your community as big as possible everybody knows that to me it’s I just I would rather have a thousand people spend ten dollars a week than 200 people spending 500 each a week so work on building that up because you’re going to have your whales and then it’s then it’s really nice the sad thing is is that a lot of times it comes to like you have a great day like we had that great sale on a week week and it’s like oh thank God we had that great sale and that will help you out and that’s a good thing to do sometimes you pull it out too when the week is not going that well you go hey on Friday we’re gonna decide to have a sale on Sunday and it’s going to be a blockbuster sale because we need to infuse some cash we were lucky this was a great week for us it was going really well it was my our opportunity and then again you know sales a lot of times about opportunity we had the opportunity because the art class wasn’t on on a Sunday and I have been trying to get rid of these books and we got rid of a lot of them and the opportunity was there we took it and it was successful in a week we had a successful week so bonus you know then you can put some money away for when you need a big purchase when something’s coming out Lord Canada is coming out in a couple of weeks and we needed the money for that it just happened to work out and I didn’t have to take it out of my pocket and as a business owner uh that’s going to happen sometimes so make sure you are saving money for you from your household too um if you’re looking to the different things you can be an LLC as a sole proprietor and then it’s all your money anyway uh whether it’s in your bank account or in the business’s bank account it’s all the One bank account pretty much you may keep them separate but it’s all your money if you’re the per you’re the business uh in an S corp there’s ways to loan the business money and then have the business pay you back on a weekly or a monthly you can collect interest you can take it all back at one point at any point when the business has it it also if you sell the business or sell out the inventory if you’re going out of business uh you’re in first position for any money that you had lent the business so if you have creditors you get paid out the money you had lent first and then the creditors get the money after that and then anything left over after that then you get to take all the rest of that so borrowing money from yourself can be advantageous if there’s something you really are afraid is going to get bought at a very cheap don’t put it out uh you get a lot of uh sellers remorse from ah you know I wanted to put something really good in there to excite people and then it sells and then you’re just you’re sad about it all the time it kind of makes you angry there’s a lot of books that I gave away from for a little money this weekend and you know made that customer very very happy um but it’s not going to happen all the time those are the customers that come back all the time uh they they’re probably going to be looking for a deal and you know if you buy right you can give them a deal you don’t have to get eBay high or Heritage high price in your store if you have a book that’s worthy of a several thousand dollars you maybe don’t want to Discount that you might want to sell it through a different a different way and not sell it through your store um I leave a lot of stuff on my wall that probably not going to sell in the store but it’s eye candy it kind of gives you the Mystique of being a comic book collectible shop when you have several thousand dollar item on the wall it kind of brings legitimacy to your business in the Collectibles business um it’s sort of like when you go to a car dealership and they have that you know that very limited edition car from the company like a super special Ford Mustang or something and you have one in your showroom you know people are like oh this is this is a real dealership you know that Ford sees them as somebody to to give this to um so bolsters it up and it creates excitement when people come in and they’re you know they’re looking at the wall how much is that they get all excited and it it also can make turn people into collectors you know when they start looking at oh I used to read Comics oh I have that book and they go like it’s worth that much then they start getting well maybe I should get back into collecting one of the first things is though maybe I should the wife uh mostly usually says maybe I should sell my collection and then I get excited but um I actually prefer if they start collecting again so we talk about what Comics are out now their favorite what their favorite characters are doing and we just get to talk Comics that’s the other thing about the greats about the sale is um while they’re digging back here I’m just back here talking about hey what do you reading now and I get some insight to what’s going on so a sale can be not only profitable in money but also in data and information always be looking for information and data in how to run your store better are people into Marvel in DC or have they moved on to Independence uh are they mostly interested in comics that were made you know five to ten years ago or are they mostly interested in the most modern stuff in the last two or three years are they interested in just movie collecting do they just want to get the characters that have been in the movies or are they interested in runs full runs of books so they have the whole collection so information mining all the big businesses do it the only thing is they have big computers and algorithms to do it for a small comic shop it’s Word of Mouth keeping it upstairs but maybe take notes like I do I jot down a lot of stuff um very chaotically it’s I I know how how to find the stuff and nobody else would be able to but uh if you keep copious notes on stuff on your on your sales on your uh what day on how much you make each day then you also can see what your traffic’s like from day to day and when the people who are spending the largest amount of money are here you might want to put out certain things for them the higher dollar items Point them in that direction you should keep I don’t intrude on the lives of my customers I don’t email anybody anything we don’t do exclusives so I don’t got to do a blast that says hey you know uh look at the new thing we got coming out you’re all going to want to you want to pre-order and we don’t do I don’t intrude on my customers lives because I hate that I hate when people constantly email me uh I it usually reflects badly on my business with that company if they’re constantly contacting me and maybe that’s not most people uh but it’s me so I run my business that way I don’t call people unless like if they haven’t picked up comics in like three months I’ll I’ll call them personally I won’t email them and I’ll ask them if they still want to keep their books or if it’d be all right if we just stop pulling and if they wanted anything out of out of what was left that’s how I run the business if you run it differently um if you’re watching this give me some suggestions uh if you don’t use email and you don’t use and you don’t call your customers maybe there’s a different way you contact them maybe you’re friends with all your customers on Facebook through your business and you Facebook message them uh there’s so many ways to contact people now maybe you have some really good suggestions for us part of this show is showing how to run a comic shop but it’s probably not showing how to run the best comic shop and I’m trying to get better and run a better comic shop in a way I feel has ethical integrity and pushes the hobby for long term I’m an old man I probably won’t be at this 30 years but 10 15 20 more years probably and I’d like to see the hobby last Maybe I’m Wrong maybe maybe exclusives and these other things um are the what the hobby is going to be if so I probably won’t be in it because I’m not a big fan but I’ve gone off on a huge tangent back to talking about sales again we talked about many times about all the different skus the sale this week weekend that we did was just on Comics it wasn’t the whole store so people were focused I learned a lot from this sale that I’m maybe on a holiday we’ll do different percentages on different items throughout the store but I’m thinking that on future sales that they are going to be Niche Comics will be sold separately on days that video games are sold we have a big sale on video games they’ll have a they’ll have their own percentage and that’ll be the only thing on sale in the store the same with toys or any other item what that does is bring out that customer and that customer is going to be focused and looking to buy those items and have that one opportunity so they might spend a little bit more than they spend usually so I’ve kind of gone off on several tangents and we’ve talked about a lot of different types of sales and a lot of different types of ways to run them if you have any questions put them in the comments if you have suggestions make my store better man suggest give me suggestions what you need to get in your head is that every failure is just a learning and every success is also an opportunity to learn this weekend was a huge success and I learned a lot from it and the problems we went through before I we learned a lot from and we are on a really good trajectory since then and the store is getting phenomenally better we’re getting great reactions from our community a lot of people have stuck with us through thick and thin and we really appreciate our customers more than anything else because they’re the lifeblood right of the shop when you’re doing it don’t get so down on yourself that you think that there’s no return there’s always a way to get fix things and get better and we did it and I’m sure you can too please subscribe to this channel uh Tales from the flip side it’s been great to allow me to be on here if you want to hear some stuff that’s not about comic shops more about the industry you can check me out over on Haven for Heroes our Channel we’re getting close to 500 help us get there if you want to see a show about something you you you’re starting your store out and you have questions about something please send us a suggestion about that because it is difficult to come up with a show every week and it was great that we had the big Hiatus when we were having our troubles it allowed us to come up with some ideas about different shows the most important thing is read comics and open a comic shop
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