Making Money Fast

Advantages and Disadvantages of selling at Flea Markets to make money

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–Chapter 4 Insert– Kindle ebook

Disadvantages of selling at Flea Markets to make money

First I’ll talk about the disadvantages of using Flea markets. Note there are a few but don’t be deterred by this, just know there are downsides to everything. You just need to weigh up for yourself whether the upsides outweigh the downsides.

Takes up your weekends. This is something I struggled with at first. I guess it can annoy you more sometimes when you spend all day out there and don’t make any money. There will be occasions where you sell nothing all day. That just comes with the territory. Then there are days where you kill it and sell everything. You have to take the good with the bad and in the end it all evens out. This is more or a moral boosting factor that questions whether doing flea markets is the best use of your time especially when it takes up your weekends. You have to really love what your selling and doing and you’ll take the dips easier. One thing I must say that it really annoys you more if your working a full time job and then selling at flea markets on the weekends because you don’t have free time to spend with your family and Sundays is traditionally reserved for that. In that case bring them along for the day or find flea markers that operate on the Saturday. If you only do flea markets and don’t have a full time job than doing flea markets on weekends is like the money day. You want to go because it’s your day to make money for the week.

You need to show up every week without fail. If you fail to attend just one week you’ll lose your spot in the proverbial line of hierarchy and newbies will pass you. What I mean by that is flea markets usually have permanents and casual spots. Permanents have been there longer and they get allocated the best locations which is more trafficked naturally. This is where you want to end up because you will make more sales period. The casual spots are the last spots left over usually reserved for casual vendors and this is allocated on a first come first serve basis. Which brings me to my next downer number #3.

You need to get up early to get a spot in the beginning. When you first starting off you will tango to earn your right to a permanent stall location in your name. Unfortunately this can not be bribed with paper (but it’s worth a try) and the only way it’s earned is by showing up on time every time for as long as it takes until market organisers see you face on a regular basis. As other stall vendors drop off for whatever reason this speeds up the process and put you next inline for a permanent stall location. This took us about 12 weeks. Yes, so for 12 weeks every Sunday morning we would get up at 3am in the morning to get to the market, line up nose to tail to be let in the gate at 5am so we could set-up out stall to begin at 6am when people start arriving for the bargains. If you a permanent stall vendor you don’t have to turn up at 3am you can turn up any time before start time because you don’t need to be allocated a spot. In the beginning your just going to tough it out if you choose to establish yourself at one particular market. If you travel to different markets each week then you will have to get up early every time. It’s not so bad because if flea markets is all you do you work 1 or 2 days and have 5 days off.

The Weather can make a flea market a ghost town. If the flea market is not undercover than your susceptible to mother nature. We always went to open air flea markets because on a fantastic sunny day you can have thousands of people coming to the market ready to spend cash. Most people actually are lookie loos but if you have the product then need at the right price they will gladly fork over there cash. On the flip side this can work against you. If it rains and your market is a open air market you won’t sell much. Unless you sell food or consumables your trading will be effected. There is a way to combat this and that’s to have leads set-up to meet you prior to knowing it’s going to be wet. We use to get people calling our business cards and flyers we’d hand out, sometimes 4-6 weeks from when we handed them out. You’ll get a lot of call backs out of the blue especially if your products are seasonal people will call you when the time is right for them like there son or daughter’s birthday. We would arrange them to meet us on the day. Of course we didn’t know it was going to rain but at least we have possible sales regardless of the weather. If it rains you pretty much guarantee your sales will suck for the day. There were a couple of occasions where it rained so hard it was unsafe to actually set-up so for safety reasons we aborted. Depending on your geographical location for us it was 85% clear skies but and 15% rain. For you it will be different. There is nothing you can do about it that’s part and parcel of flea markets.

You get a lot of Lookie loos that waste your time. This is not really a bad thing so much because you get lookie loos (someone who looks at something with no intention of buying) in retail sales too but with flea markets that percentage tends to be a little higher. You just have to identify these people as fast as possible and not pay as much attention to them. It can be very deceptive at times because the flea markets attract some of the dodgiest people you have ever seen and sometimes you pre judge. When you do that you can kill a sale. Some of the most dodgiest dressed people I’ve en-counted ended up being my biggest buyers. One gentlemen bought over 7,000 worth of stuff in one hit and it was all $100 bills. Trust me when I say 7K in $100 bills all nicely folded looks sexy. That was a good day. You need to acquire the skills to spotting lookie loos fast then cutting them at the jugular (not literally), so they don’t waste your time. The way you spot a buyer from a lookie loo is, if they come back for a second time you know there are interested then treat them differently. I don’t want to sound fascist here, but I’m talking in the context of selling. You don’t want to spend all your time with a time waster, you want to spend your time with a buyer. You here to make money not socialise. We have made hundreds of thousands of dollars at flea markets. If we thought flea markets were a place broke people hangout we never would have made the money we did. There is a lot of money to be made in flea markets just not to pre judge people.

Your time. It’s no different to a day job. You need to put in the time to earn the dime. Best part is your doing it on you terms. It’s your small business and the moolah goes in your back pocket not your bosses. If you have the right product like we did you can make double even triple to what you make in your day job but in only 1 or 2 days work. So the pay-off is worth it if your prepared to do the time to earn the dime.

See flea markets aren’t that bad. There could be worse things in life like going to a day job (haha). Now I want to outline some of the Advantages flea markets have to offer. Advantages of selling at Flea Markets to make money

Advantages of selling at Flea Markets to make money

Low start up costs. I mentioned this one before but to dig a little deeper the ongoing costs are minimal versus the return you will get. Expenses like petrol $20, stall vendor fees $20, table $50 (one time), folder-able chairs $30 (one time), marquee $150 (one time), banners (one time), flyers, business cards, food $10 and drinks $5. You definitely need fordable table and chairs at the least. The marquee, business cards and flyers can wait until you start making more money but if you look professional you’ll actually get more sales because in the eyes of a buyer you have more credibility. I like to have a marquee tent because it keeps the sun off my back and you remain cool all day. Best place to buy one if off eBay, just search “folding gazebo tent” on eBay and get the 3m x 3m, cost about $120-$150 depending on the seller. They take about 15 seconds to fold out and look great. They are one piece unit so everything folds out no assembly required. This keeps the sun off your face so you don’t go home looking like a shrivelled up prune. The marquee also keeps your products out of the sun so they won’t fade. Customers are buying these products off you. It’s amazing how picky people are get and little things like this determine a sale based on our experience. ‘The devil is in the detail’ so they say, invest a little in your business to give you the edge over your rookie competitors.

1-2 day work week. This is my favourite thing about flea markets. If you set-up right you can rely on flea markets as your sole income. What I mean by that is you can make what you make in 1-2 days at the markets what most people make at a regular 5 day full time job. Now I am not trying to make out that flea markets will make you rich overnight because they won’t. But if you play your cards right and position yourself in a niche market where you can dominate that area you can make bloody good money for only working 1 or 2 weekends per week. Again it comes down to careful research and selling the right product to a hungry crowd, have the right position, customer base and these are the things I’ll cover in this book. We loved the weekends because every time we turned up we would sell between $1,500-$5000 worth of goods because we had cornered the market. Our products were high ticket items but because had the right area and the right product we sold product by the bucket load. I actually reveal the products we sold at flea markets in our ‘Importing Riches video ecourse’ which I’ll put a link at the end of this book if your interested.

No Overheads. When I first started out I worked with a business coach and one thing he use to say to me was “It’s not how much you make but what you get to keep that counts”. And this is so true. At the end of the day you will have so much money left for you after expenses are paid like taxes, petrol, stall vendor fees, employee wages if any, spotter fees if any, food, drinks, cost of products etc. What kills retail businesses is overheads. Overheads don’t go away they are constant every week/month. So you need to make sales or sink. Fortunately you don’t have big overheads with flea markets. The amount of buyer traffic you get from renting a stall location versus the expense of renting a shop, hiring employees, insurances, equipment, electricity, advertising etc. are minuscule compared. Over heads bleed any good business. You won’t have that much of a problem when operating out of flea markets because your overheads will be small. Your products can be stored in your basement or at a storage facility which is rented month by month. You are left with more money in your pocket at the end of the day which means more profits because it’s not what you make but what you get to keep that makes you rich.

Leads and exposure if you own a retail shop. This one is a big one if you are a retail shop owner that wants more business. We started just doing the flea markets but as we grew bigger flea markets were not our main revenue source. It was like a backup source to get leads, additional sales and keep the sales funnel stocked. If you live in a tight small community then flea markets are a great way to grow your business on a shoe string budget. For $20 and a little bit of your time, you can get your products out in the public. People only buy from people they know, like and trust and if your out there hustling for business people appreciate it. They prefer to support local businesses than the Wal Mart’s of this world. Leads are gold and you’ll be surprised on how many people keep your pamphlets and business cards to venue in a few weeks later to your retail shop knowing that that lead came from the flea market. If you use flea markets as a leads funnel you will see your foot traffic increase overnight. We did this and it works big time. Pound for pound flea markets are a great advertising tool, it just requires your time, and when you got more time than money then you need to utilise flea markets in the beginning.

There are actually many other benefits to doing flea markets but these are the main advantages I wanted to cover because everything other benefit is some how related to these points. One thing we did do was travel to other markets to scope out the competition and see if we could move into that territory also. You won’t be able to do this unless the market is on a different day but because we had other staff members we could spread out our reach and set-up at multiple markets at once. This obviously requires some capital and inventory and you paying someone to go to other locations for the day so it eats into your profits but we only did this when there were season peaks like Christmas and Easter. The outlay was worth the investment because people are looking for Christmas presents and will spend there money one way or another to get Christmas presents sorted. Out biggest sales months of the year were November and December and this would make up for the shortfalls we had during the year.