Making money through Garage Sales and Flea Markets

Here’s another article written exclusively for pinklighthouse.com by bizymoms.com

There are many of us who have a keen knack for trading, and we simply know a good bargain when we see one. This natural skill can be turned into one of the most successful home business ideas by engaging in buying and selling activities at garage sales and flea markets. Most of us do not have the financial capacity or the risk appetite to indulge in a large volume trading business. So garage sales and flea markets offer an attractive opportunity to conduct the same business at a small scale, with very low investment and risk, and such a business can be run from the home itself.

In fact, you can start your home business in this field with absolutely no investment. You can simply clean out your closets, attics and garage for old stuff that you do not need. Simply load all the stuff in your vehicle and sell it at a garage sale, a flea market or a swap meet. You will be able to earn an amount of cash from this sale that you can use as capital for your flea market home business.

If you have a sharp knack to judge good products that are available at throwaway prices, you can start buying a few such items that you are sure have a strong demand in the market. Therefore, apart from good buying sense, you also need to have a pulse of the market and be aware of what the trends are as well as the hot selling items that are in demand. Accordingly, you can buy a few surefire items from the flea market and refurbish and clean them up for sale at another place.

With your initial buying and selling efforts and your experience in flea markets, you may then consider starting your own garage sale or a flea market out of your home. All of the items that you have purchased from a variety of places can now be put up for sale at your home. Sometimes a flea market may also specialize in a particular product such as furniture, while some other flea markets may deal in all kinds of merchandise under a single roof.

In fact, it is not necessary to deal only in used merchandise for your flea market or garage sale business. You could even make a tie-up with a wholesaler, a general merchandise liquidator or a surplus trader who keeps a large stock of items that are production overruns, order cancellations, or leftover items from stores. All these are basically A-grade quality products but available at much lower prices due to odd lots. You could create a successful business if you can buy the right products at the right price, which will always have assured demand from customers.

BIO: Bizymoms has been helping women <a href=”http://www.bizymoms.com” target=”_blank”>work at home</a> for over a decade and now helps those who are looking to start a home business with a variety of <a href=”http://www.bizymoms.com/ideas.html” target=”_blank”>home business ideas</a> to choose from. Visit today to get your business started!

With or Without Inventory, Filling Mary Kay Orders is Tricky

Mary and Jane are two women who caught the Mary Kay fever and decided to become consultants. (While Mary and Jane are fictictious, their experiences are based on those of hundreds of other women.)

Mary doesn’t want to start her Mary Kay “business” with that “empty wagon” Mary Kay Ash mentioned, so she orders $2400 (wholesale) of inventory. Now she’s set and ready to start selling.

She holds her first “class” and is happy to have a few orders. But as she proceeds to fill those orders, Mary is suddenly dismayed. Two of her customers ordered several of the same lipsticks (or eye shadow, eyeliner, blush, moisturizer…) and Mary only has enough of those shades to fill part of the order. Now what?

Mary has a few options:

1. Order additional inventory from the company: But this means that Mary will have to pay the flat shipping amount just to receive a few additional items. That shipping charge makes the cost of those few items much higher.

2. Trade with another consultant: Although not talked about much, this is a very common practice among consultants. If you’re out of a moisturizer that you need, you swap products of equal value with another consultant.

3. Call your director and buy it from her: This is strongly discouraged by the company, but it’s done all the time anyway. If you’ve ever seen the endless shelves of inventory that a director has, you know why they’re more than happy to sell product to consultants. Many discount it slightly less than what you’d pay if you ordered from the company.

4. Have your customer wait for weeks until you’ve sold enough to have at least a $200 wholesale order to justify the shipping cost: Not the best option.

Meanwhile, Jane decided that she wasn’t going to buy any inventory when she became a consultant. She held classes and took orders, promising delivery within two weeks.

Jane holds a few classes but doesn’t sell $400 retail. She needs to order at least $400 retail ($200 wholesale) to get her 50% discount, so she orders a few extra things to get the order total up. Her order arrives in a week and her customers aren’t bothered by waiting for their product.

Over the next few months, Jane doesn’t hold any classes and has a few individual appointments. But the orders from those appointments aren’t very large. Still, Jane orders the product from the company and pays the flat shipping charge. She realizes that she can’t keep doing small orders every few weeks or that shipping charge will eat into her profit.

At the beginning of the next Mary Kay quarter, Jane’s “earned” 50% discount expires, which means she has to order at least $400 retail from the company initially during that quarter to get the 50% discount on her product. One of Jane’s customers calls her and needs a lipstick. But Jane hasn’t been selling much because she’s been busy at her “real” job and had some family issues to tend to. She doesn’t have the lipstick, since she doesn’t carry inventory, but she doesn’t need to, or want to, order $400 worth of product just to get one lipstick. And if she just orders the lipstick, she not only won’t get the discount but she’ll pay the flat shipping charge on that one item.

These dilemas are what women who’ve been in Mary Kay have faced.

The more you build your customer base, the more likely you are to run dry on certain items. So you order more inventory and keep more of each item. And still, with thousands and thousands of dollars on your shelves, you run out of something. Even if you decide to stock only what your previous customers have purchased and use regularly, it still happens.

It’s a tricky balancing act that’s nearly impossible to perfect.

Brenna Will Be Tearing Up That $100 Check She Wrote Yesterday

Your Name: Brenna

Date Joined MK : August 7, 2008

When Left MK or Still Active?: August 8, 2008

Initial Inventory Purchased: None

How were you recruited?:
I recently moved to a new area and a lady randomly called me and said she wanted to welcome me to the neighborhood by giving me a bunch of free MK products and a free facial. (The “free products” were actually just a bag of those stupid paper samples tied with a ribbon–Thanks for adding to my recycling bin lady) That facial took 3 hours. My husband was pretty annoyed since it was his day off.

Memorable experience you had in MK:
The hilarious “scripts.”

For an answering machine: “Hi Sue. This is Mary. You ARE coming to my Mary Kay Debut, AREN’T you? I REALLY need your support. You CAN come, CAN’T you? I KNOW you’ll be there. I’ll count on you as coming unless you call me. Can’t wait to see you!!!!!”

Can we say “shoot me now to redirect my agonizing pain?”

What did you learn from MK?:
That all of life revolves around winning a free watch.

What are you doing now? :
Full time parent, part time art instructor.

Additional Comments:
I was actually really excited about the idea at first. I am an artistic stay-at-home-mom, and the thought of doing makeovers for a living was attractive. So, I sent in my hundred dollar check with the lady who came by today. Not until after I signed everything, did she tell me that the minimum starting inventory was $600! Luckily, I had known someone who just ordered as they got orders, so I knew that it couldn’t be the “real” minimum. She finally admitted as much when I pressed her.

Now that I have been researching and thinking about it tonight, I came to realize that when it comes down to it, MK parties are just plain cheesy, as is all the literature that I’ve been given so far. I don’t want to be some kind of pink robot.

As far as “reinventing the wheel goes,” I’m a creative person, and if I were to do it, I would want to do it my own way. No pressuring, just girls having fun gettin pretty!

The recruiter wanted me to make a list of 50 friends/relatives for my debut party, and the script she gave was soooo whiny and pathetic. “I’m counting on you” blah blah. AND she was going to be the one giving facials at the party–some strange old lady no one knows? I was thinking of telling her no way on that humiliating party, but then I started having visions of going door to door in my neighborhood handing out flyers, inviting other full time moms to a block party to meet the neighbors. The tag line would be something like: “How excited would your husband be if you actually had makeup on when he came home from work Friday night?” (Since most moms of toddlers can look pretty haggard at the end of the day)

I did the math though, and I would need thousands of customers to make a living at all. So the question remained, even if that worked, where would the other thousand customers come from?

I already got suckered once with Cutco (selling knives-$215 starter pack-got my money back on that one too). The whole reason I was interested was to try to contribute financially to our family as a SAHM. But it definitely sounds like I would have to sacrifice a lot of family time to be successful at this.

And now, hearing that the product is not all it appears to me, especially that the mineral line could even be harmful… I called the MK lady and told her to hold the $100 check until I can “get more info” from her. She agreed, so I will go by tomorrow and tear it up. Also, I am going to exchange the Mineral foundation powder I bought for the Medium cover foundation. I prefer tumorless lungs, actually.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who was so helpful in sharing their opinions. You saved me lots of time and money!

Mary Kay Selling Tips

Lots of different ideas for increasing your sales.

Mary Kay Selling Tips

Overcoming Selling Objections

A pretty flow chart with suggested responses from the typical objections people express about Mary Kay. You know…like “It broke me out.”

Overcoming Selling Objections

Is Direct Sales Difficult?

The author of this piece is unknown, but the idea is to make you wake up and realize that you have no one to blame except yourself for your failure in direct sales.

Is Direct Sales Difficult?