Don't do it my way

First day at the market

2008-01-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

Well we set up a booth at the local flea market and it took one and a half hours to get it up. All of our stuff was in boxes and had to be unpacked and displayed etc.
After 4 hours we called it quits. Having made a whopping $35 on the day. So $35 minus the $11 for the booth and $15 for the actual merchandise we sold we had a profit of $9. Divided by 7 hours of work including set up and take down is......well the per hour is not important.
WE MADE MONEY!!!!
The MAIN problem I saw was the set up and take down time.
I knew they had lockable storage units that could be used as store fronts so I inquired about those. They cost $30 a week as opposed to $11 a day for the tables, but we could spend more hours selling than seting up and it was only $8 more per week if we opened both weekend days.

Middleman

Here comes the merchandise

2008-01-15T15:45:00.000-08:00

Well after we got back from Vegas we settled back and waited for our stuff to arrive.
Turns out that when you order as much as we did the UPS man has a hard time lifting it. We were so excited when he pulled up and were looking out the window when out tumbled a box off the truck. It was all the poor guy could do to roll it up onto the cart to bring it up our drive way. It is not that we ordered so much of it, but it was very heavy. The jewelry was made of hematite and semiprecious stone.

Once we got it in the house the work began. We had to inventory and organize it into storage compartments so it would be easy to locate when an order came in. The next step was to get photographs of each piece to post it on eBay. (Here is a helpful tip for those that think eBay or online commerce might be easy.........Get merchandise that is EASY to take a picture of.)
It turns out that Hematite is very difficult to take a picture of. It is very pretty but does not photograph well.

I went on to eBay and found a BUNCH of people selling similar jewelry for less than we paid for it. (The second lesson to be learned from my mistakes is do your research BEFORE you buy something to sell.)

As I mentioned in my first post. We had gone to Vegas with no idea what to sell. We found the Jewelry and bought some thinking eBay and Flea market. We bought it without researching how much we could turn around and sell it for. Sounds good so far huh?

Well after seeing that eBay wasn't going to be as good of an options as we thought at the time, we turned to the local flea market.

It turns out our local flea market has a bunch of people that are selling GARBAGE and the crowds are small. On some days there are more vendors wondering around than customers.
About one third of the vendors are selling things that have been "salvaged" from some curbside trash heap. (sadly I am not making that up. One mans trash.....) Well we didn't have a lot of choice in the matter, the other flea market doesn't exist so this was what we had to work with.

Well we looked at our Jewelry and thought "what else should we sell?". Jewelry is okay but we needed other things out there as well. Since we had acquired a lot of cards at the trade show, I went through them and pulled out all the companies that had websites. We looked at make up, purses, toys, home decor items, electronics and even "As seen on TV" products.

We placed orders for more products and set up a table at the flea market.

(More Later)

Middleman
www.becksdistributing.com

Starting up

2008-01-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

I am new to blogging but thought I would share some of the pitfalls I ran into while starting up my ecomerce site as well as my flea market business.
The Idea seemed simple enough.
Start up a small business to try and make ends meet. I tried looking for wholesalers that I could buy from and sell on eBay, but they all seemed to have prices higher than those on eBay.
While looking around I found a reference to a wholesale show in Vegas. My wife and I booked a flight made reservations and off we went. (Let me just say that the hotel was booked on a coupon for free rooms and the flight was compliments of my sister.)
So off we went to the convention looking for things to sell on eBay, or flea markets, or an online store.
After we got to the show we realized we were WAY over our heads. We were looking around like deer in the headlights.
We started off by going to the jewelry show and quickly realized THAT was not going to happen. We continued on looking and looking stopping at booth after booth but buying nothing. Not knowing exactly what we were looking for in the first place didn't help. (first thing not to do my way is go into something like this without a plan) We did end up finding some fashion jewelry that we thought we might be able to sell on ebay or a flea market so we place an order.

(more later)

Middleman
http://www.becksdistributing.com/