How to Sell More Used Guns: Full Webinar, Transcript, and Chapters

Webinar Introduction0:05

Rachel: Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Rachel. I'm the Director of Marketing here at Bravo, and with me I've got Christy, our Chief of Staff, and Taylor, our head sales engineer and FFL expert.

Rachel: We wanted to walk through with you all today how to crush used gun sales as an FFL and how to dominate the used gun market with Bravo.

Rachel: We have over a decade of experience helping FFLs succeed in the firearms industry and a proven track record of customers achieving high profit margins in the used gun market, up to 54%. We have a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities that FFLs face. Regulated industries are our area of expertise, and FFLs are definitely leading that charge.

Rachel: Throw questions in the chat or Q&A. We'll keep an eye on that, and then we'll send out a follow up email with the recording and everything in case you miss anything today or have to leave a little early.

Used Gun Sales Challenges1:33

Christy: There are a lot of challenges beyond what's happening in the general landscape. The challenges that really face you as FFLs are bringing in the right profitable mix. Selling firearms has notoriously slim margins, especially on new firearms, and the secret's out, used is where it's at, with 54% margins on reselling used guns.

Christy: I was at SHOT Show in January, and the majority of folks out there buying and reselling guns had no idea that a used gun had that much margin in it. They were actually overpaying for used firearms. Once you recognize that there's so much more profit in the used gun, it's like, okay, product mix, I want more used guns. How do you get them in?

Christy: Every gun guy is out there buying used guns too. While you can call up a distributor and get more new guns in your shop, how do you get more used guns that have that higher profit margin? It is definitely a challenge, especially if you're not a pawnbroker.

Christy: Another challenge is pricing for success. With new firearms, it's easy. You've got your MSRP and usually MAP pricing, and there is not very far off you can go from that. With used guns, how do you figure it out? Do you go to used marketplaces? Do you go to UsedGuns.com, GunBroker, Guns.com, AuctionArms? How do you take all of this data from used firearms and put it into practice?

Christy: Finally, turning inventory fast can be a real challenge. If you're a company that wants to turn inventory, especially with categories that have notoriously low margins like new guns, eCommerce is awesome because you can't possibly find that many people local to you to serve up that many new items. Of course, it depends on where you're located.

Building Profitable Used Inventory5:14

Christy: The good news is Bravo has answers for those challenges. You have to stand out and offer something different than the store down the street. You need pricing confidence, everybody on your team needs to be on the same page with how you are repricing those used guns, and fast sales and visibility are important.

Christy: If you're already buying guns, how do you attract new people and new services? Sometimes when we talk about offering consignments or trades to people, they're like, I'd just rather outright buy the item. But the beautiful thing about consignment is you're not putting any money down. You're getting inventory for free and making a margin off of that inventory.

Christy: When we're talking about 15% margins with guns anyway, you could actually get more margin out of a used gun on consignment than a new one. The way to attract those consignment sellers is they want the most amount of money for their firearm. You can say, yeah, we can sell it for that dollar amount online, but you're going to give me 15% or 20%, or whatever that consignment amount is.

Christy: Trades are the best, in my opinion, because it's a win win. Not only are we selling a firearm, but now we're getting a used one, which is going to have more profit margin than maybe the new one we just sold. A lot of customers who do trades do not have the cash to buy a higher valued item, so it allows them to get into a product they otherwise probably would not be able to afford.

Christy: Bring firearms in the right way. Make sure all employees are on the same page as to the condition and the items that go with it. Does the firearm have an optic on it? Does it have a holster? Does it have something special done to it that makes it more valuable? Everybody needs to be looking at the same set of criteria from the start so that when you sell it, you can be highly profitable on it.

Pricing Used Firearms9:15

Christy: Now you've got it in, you've bought it for the right price, and now we have to sell it for the right price. AI is the big topic right now. In the next couple of years, people are predicting that retailers will be able to put in their ZIP code, spend, and industry, and AI will be able to pick out their entire product mix and quantities.

Christy: That is cool, but that's not here yet. What we do have, and what Bravo has been doing, which is really the predecessor of artificial intelligence, is business intelligence, or BI. BI takes hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of transactions, compiles them every night, and delivers back the median results.

Christy: That's what we do for you in these price guide reports. We are predicting the price of an item, and that happens with firearms, handbags, and a bunch of different items. It helps you get your pricing right from the beginning by knowing what has been happening with an item and what is going to happen with it.

Christy: People ask often, is this data from all of the customers on Bravo? You probably know your local pricing better than any AI or BI could. We do global pricing. We are looking for the price that an item is selling for globally, and that is for eCommerce customers. If an item is selling for $8 locally, but you can get $100 online, are you going to price it for $80 or are you going to price it for $100?

Omnichannel Listings and Marketing12:31

Christy: One of the awesome benefits of Bravo is you can have your stuff on multiple channels, which is the omni part of it. Instead of just one selling channel, Bravo is giving you multiple. The more eyeballs you can get on any of your items, the more likely you are to sell that item.

Christy: From the beginning, Bravo saw the future as being able to have an item for sale in store, on your own company branded website, on Buya, and on eBay if it's not a gun. If it is a firearm, then we're putting it on UsedGuns.com and your company branded website. The idea is to get it on as many places at once. If it sells on one channel, we take it down off the rest.

Christy: If you want to sell something on GunBroker or throw it up on an auction, we do have listing templates. You can remove the item from your back floor, take it off any other eCommerce channel, and list it to that single auction site quickly.

Rachel: You can use all the data that you have in Bravo about your customers to build lists and market to their past purchase history, the last time they were in with you, and what they purchased before. You can send push notifications or text messages to alert them to specials, inventory they might be interested in, or a certain type of ammo on sale.

Rachel: Text messaging is getting harder and harder, especially in the firearms space. If you encourage your customers to download the Buya app and shop your inventory on the Buya app, you can send them push notifications through that app that are not content restricted. If you're a pawnbroker, that would be MobilePawn. If you're a retailer, it is the Buya app.

Bravo Firearm Estimator Demo17:22

Taylor: Let's go ahead and dive in. From our smart search bar, I'm going to type in a Glock 19, Gen 5, and it's going to bring us to our estimator. Instantly, on the right hand side, whether you're doing a pawn, buy, consignment, or a trade, you're going to have amounts shown to you. Those are going to be based on market data and your store's payout percentages.

Taylor: Those amounts are going to fluctuate based on our condition questions. We can put in details for our eCommerce listing here. If I make our condition very good, you'll notice on the right hand side the buy amount is going to change. You can make the buy and pawn amounts independent of each other as well.

Taylor: It is going to change the value for the firearm itself and its condition, but if we add an optic and a holster, that amount is going to change again. When you enter this information, it is adding this into inventory and automatically adding that into our A&D book.

Taylor: We have a marketplace for UsedGuns.com that is going to give us pricing for this firearm. It gives us dates the firearm sold, the condition it was in, and the price it sold at, which is great for grabbing market data.

Price Guide and Predictive Pricing Demo19:46

Taylor: In Bravo, we've got our price guide summary. This data comes from all of the stores on the Bravo network, and it is going to give us a transaction quantity from the last 12 months. We have a transaction quantity of over 5,000 Glock 19s, giving us an average buy amount, an average loan amount, and a median sales price.

Taylor: Our Price Guide report is going to house a loan, buy, and sales price guide. You can see all of the data about active inventory and conditions. You are going to have average loan amounts based on the condition of the firearm, and our buy and sale price guide will have similar values based on condition and what stores are buying it at across the nation.

Taylor: We also have predictive AI pricing. You can see minimum, maximum, median, and average sale amounts. At the bottom, we have our predictive trend line, so you can see not only what this firearm has been worth over the past couple of years and how it is trending, but over the next couple of months what that firearm is going to be worth.

Taylor: You can plan depending on the item. You can say, okay, this item is going to be worth this in the next couple of months. I think I can safely buy this at this price or do a loan at this price. It helps you know if you need to be conservative or if the value on that firearm is going up.

Taylor: Any additional details we enter will carry over to the description of any online listing that you put up. If this is the amount we want to go with, we'll hit next and finish that transaction.

Fast Intake and Shelf Ready Inventory22:21

Christy: Pawnbrokers generally have to hold inventory purchased from a customer for a certain period of time, but not everybody is subject to that. In this transaction, while you are bringing it in and looking at the pricing, you can price it right now as well. That is why there is an MSRP, a price, and a tag description on this particular buy, because there is no hold period.

Christy: Taylor can buy this from a consumer right now, and then it is going to create a tag. As soon as that customer walks out the door, he is putting that tag on that firearm and putting it on the shelf for sale.

Taylor: When we brought those firearms in, it was such a quick process. We would go in, price it, a lot of times clean them, especially those used firearms, and have them out for sale in 10 minutes. You are not having to worry about pricing the item, printing out a tag, and putting in a description. All of that happens right at the beginning.

Listing Fees and Shipping Questions24:16

Christy: There is no cost to list on any of Bravo's platforms. On UsedGuns.com, list everything, it costs nothing. On Buya, list everything, it costs nothing to list.

Christy: You cannot list firearms on Buya, because PayPal is one of our payment gateways there, which is why we created UsedGuns.com. If you choose to list accessories, we geotarget online buyers who are near your store. We are going to put up a Google product listing ad with your store's information to drive them into your store. If nobody ever buys anything, you are getting all of this free marketing and advertising thanks to the Buya network.

Christy: You can make certain items in store pickup only. If you are not comfortable shipping a particular item, you can make that local. If you do not want to wrap, pack, and ship, no problem. Mark it as in store pickup only, and you will see a ton of local customers start coming into your store.

Christy: Bravo is not currently integrated with shippers, although it is on the roadmap. As of today, you will go to FedEx, UPS, USPS, or whoever you are going to ship with, enter the address and complete that on their site, then come back into Bravo and enter the shipping or tracking information.

Christy: Bravo handles the communication. When an item sells on UsedGuns.com, we immediately communicate with the customer that we got their order. Once you process the order and tell us it has shipped, we communicate that it is on its way and provide the tracking number. If you get a return, you scan the barcode when it comes in, hit next, and that item is back in your inventory.

Selling Fees and Ecommerce Results28:05

Taylor: UsedGuns.com is 4% as a success fee. There is no fee until that item is sold. If you sell on a company branded website, there is no fee to sell that item. The highest we are looking at currently for selling guns is 4%.

Taylor: If you sell something on Buya, I believe it is 8% of the final success fee, after everything is paid. On eBay, if you have your own company branded website, you sell on that, it is 2%. If you do not have a company website, it is 5%.

Christy: Growing a new eCommerce website that sells firearms is a little tricky. You cannot do SEO, you cannot do Google, but every day word gets out. Every month, we see month over month our sales increasing on UsedGuns.com.

Christy: In 2023, customers that used eCommerce sold 288 more firearms than customers who did not use eCommerce. We are seeing a lot of traction and movement in used and new firearms through eCommerce.

Taylor: When I worked in a store, not a week went by that I did not hear someone say, "Hey, I saw your XYZ on your website. Is it still here?" A lot of local people come in when you are putting your great stuff online for them to look at.

Webinar Closing31:06

Rachel: Thank you, Christy and Taylor, for your time today, and thank you to everyone for joining us. We hope you learned something. If you think of any questions after we wrap up today, please feel free to shoot them our way. Hello@BravoStoreSystems.com is the best way to reach us, and we'll get you in touch with the right people.