Tips for selling at garage sales
February 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment
The two essential ingredients for a successful garage sale are some decent items that people will want to buy and, of course, customers.
- Advertising your garage sale can take place in local shops, putting up posters, leafleting the neighbourhood etc. Make sure you include date, time and location. I know it sounds obvious but its amazing how often one of those key items of information get missed off publicity material!
- Another thought is to list the date, time and address in Craigslist under the Garage Sales heading. It’s free to do and effective. It is also worth listing the types of item that you will be selling so that people looking for specific items may come looking.
As far as selling individual items is concerned there are a few more useful tips:
- Instead of people rifling through loads of books for 25c each, why not divide them up into bundles of, say 10 – 15 books in a similar category and charge $2 – $3 dollars per bundle? They will be ready to carry away and neater to store.
- If you have loads of low value items you could advertise your sale as everything for “50c unless marked”. That should attract interest on your publicity and save you the time of marking up individual prices.
- Alternatively, you can use boxes that store items all of the same price to save labelling. Watch out for things getting mixed up as people browse though!
All of these steps will make your garage sale appear more professional….making it more likely that customers will keep coming back to future events.
Garage sales advice
February 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment
In these cash strapped times, a garage sale can be a great way to get rid of all of that unwanted household clutter and make money whilst doing so.
What deters a lot of people from holding a garage sale is a fear of a poor outcome. What if nobody comes? What if I hardly earn any money for all that effort? Today we will look at some of the steps that you can take to ensure a successful garage sale.
- Getting the kids involved in a garage sale can teach them some valuable lessons that they will retain into adulthood. They learn: how important it is to de-clutter, the value of second hand goods compared to new goods (which may influence them not to impulse buy as much); and how to organise a display, price up items, add up totals to charge for several items and how to do good customer service. Who knows….you may be training up the entrepreneurs of tomorrow!
- It is worth keeping several boxes in the garage all the time with the intention of holding a future garage sale. One for toys, one for books, one for clothes etc. When cleaning the house you can price up and store the items you want to sell at the time. This means that when you need to raise some cash you are ready to roll straight away without a huge clear out and pricing activity beforehand.
- Save even more time by purchasing colour dot stickers for your items. Each colour dot then has a known price value. You can then display the colour code prices to your customers and save hours of writing out individual price tags.
- You may also be able to pick up some bargains from other people’s garage sales to include in your own. Visiting a few garage sales will help you to get any idea of realistic prices that you can charge for your own items.
