Question about keeping good public relation

[NotFexelcraft]

So, recently I have started a small side hustle of selling a certain secondhand item, I bought that item from a person (let's name him A) who is a good friend of mine. A has a massive supply of the item due to his father and he gets it practically for free. What I have been doing is buying the item from A and selling it to other people, though it's a relatively non-scalable side hustle it has a 10-20% margin. When someone requests the item I buy it from A and sell it (with no chance of loss from my part). For a few months, it's been going great!

But A realized that even though his item was selling, he was losing due to my margins (keep in mind that he gets it mostly for free, even if it costs him sometimes it will be like a 50% margin) so he has started giving out the item for a very low margin and telling people that I used to buy from him. This has hurt my sales and it is ruining my reputation. What should I do to keep both my margins and my reputation? He doesn't really have a good reputation so people don't trust him as much as me. But his reputation is growing too. I need both him and the public to be happy to keep my hustle alive. I have really been stuck in this problem for a week and every day i am losing customers.

Looking for suggestions.

 

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[Spenny]

So, recently I have started a small side hustle of selling a certain secondhand item, I bought that item from a person (let's name him A) who is a good friend of mine. A has a massive supply of the item due to his father and he gets it practically for free. What I have been doing is buying the item from A and selling it to other people, though it's a relatively non-scalable side hustle it has a 10-20% margin. When someone requests the item I buy it from A and sell it (with no chance of loss from my part). For a few months, it's been going great!

But A realized that even though his item was selling, he was losing due to my margins (keep in mind that he gets it mostly for free, even if it costs him sometimes it will be like a 50% margin) so he has started giving out the item for a very low margin and telling people that I used to buy from him. This has hurt my sales and it is ruining my reputation. What should I do to keep both my margins and my reputation? He doesn't really have a good reputation so people don't trust him as much as me. But his reputation is growing too. I need both him and the public to be happy to keep my hustle alive. I have really been stuck in this problem for a week and every day i am losing customers.

Looking for suggestions.

Sounds like you're the middleman being cut out of the equation. There isn't much you can do if you have no value to provide compared to your friend.

What value can you give that he cannot provide? More 'safeness'? Better processing? Faster Processing? Better deals? Buy the excess product elsewhere for a better price?

It may also be wise not to tell your customers or him about one another. That's trade secrets.

 

[NotFexelcraft]

Sounds like you're the middleman being cut out of the equation. There isn't much you can do if you have no value to provide compared to your friend.

What value can you give that he cannot provide? More 'safeness'? Better processing? Faster Processing? Better deals? Buy the excess product elsewhere for a better price?

It may also be wise not to tell your customers or him about one another. That's trade secrets.

I have a much better system than he will most likely ever have ( He has a very bad reputation ), I have customers coming in but he is trying to lure them away and slowly stop selling to me. The product is from a very small field and he has a lot of strings to pull for stocks. Most people would charge almost double than him ( That's why my hustle was working so well too )

From my understanding, I need a way to convince him to sell to me instead of the public but due to my reputation, I don't have much work to do because people come to me now. As a friend, he won't mind (In my opinion) if I become a middleman but he's not convinced that i produce value.

P.S. He found out because he investigated my hustle, It was quite abnormal for someone to buy large quantities of such a product