Retail Profits By Creating Urgency and Impulse

I have just finished reading “Liquidations Exposed” for the second time. It was very informative and covered all aspects of the liquidation business. Book knowledge is great, but nothing beats actual experience which is my next step. In today’s economy people are looking for bargains more than ever and liquidation merchandise fits the bill. I have about $20,000.00 available as working capital and wish to invest it in this industry. My initial goal is to double or triple my investment in as short a period of time as possible and re-invest it in more merchandise. Would you agree that “Liquidation Spectacular” events are the way to go to achieve this goal? If well prepared and able to offer exceptional value financial rewards should follow!

The summer season is near and ladies apparel should sell well. My only concern is the ability to select the styles that will sell in my targeted market. Kentucky women have different needs and tastes than the ladies in California or Boston. Choosing the wrong fashions could prove to be costly financially and in time wasted. How do you resolve this challenge? Thank you for your help.

My Response

Hello, and thank you for your compliment regarding our guide. I can tell you that my wife and I have held retail liquidation sales and experienced a great deal of success. I am not familiar with your market, but our sales were held in a smaller bedroom community sandwiched between to cities with a combined population of about 170,000 people. Our liquidation sales were very fun and profitable as we created a true sense of excitement and a feeling of urgency that caused people to spend without much thought.

A liquidation Event Sale is simply a one day offering of merchandise that is merchandised for a preset period of time…and then the doors are closed! Any kind of inventory can be retailed in this manor, but apparel worked the best for our sales.

Now we come to your real question, “how to select styles that will sell in your target market”?

My answer? Are you ready for this…….You don’t. Honestly, if you are buying wholesale liquidation pallets of apparel, you have no choice as to styles/sizes or brands. If your intent is to chose styles you should open up a 6-7 day per week retail clothing store.

A liquidation sale works with a great assortment of styles and brands because your clientele will not be shopping [necessarily] for anything in particular – they will buy because of the great deals found. Again, this is where the impulse purchasing factors in.

Having stated the above, I will say that in our retail liquidation sales, I purchased some stock lots of apparel from traditional wholesalers. This stock was hard to sell as I had to price it based upon current retail pricing. This did not work as people who came to our sales wanted to buy clothing at 80-90% of retail.

We were highly successful sticking to one price point per sale, meaning everything was $5 or $8. This shadowed the concept similar to the dollar store we are all familiar with. There was no need for our customer base to worry about pricing, they simply would count the number of items in their arms or cart and then multiply by the price point we were using that particular day. When you take away a need to put much thought into how much customers are spending…you have just created what I call a buying frenzy. Cha Ching!

Our event sales caused panic and urgency; when our doors opened lines of people streamed into our warehouse with one thought in mind…buy and buy quickly before the doors closed again!

While you may not be able to order specific styles and sizes for your event sale, you can purchase liquidation pallets of clothing from specific department stores and most of the time you will be able to ascertain what season you are buying.

In the coming week I will post an audio commentary about retail “Event Sales” as there is much more to consider when trying to put one together. I truly believe this is one Niche area that can prove to be very successful no matter where you are located. You may decide to fill a store front with apparel or other merchandise for your own liquidation Event Sale, but remember… excitement and urgency is really what you will be selling!

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