How to Organize Your Garage Sale to Generate more Sales

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By kllmomof2
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Organize Your Garage Sale to Generate more Sales

After doing garage sales for years, I would like to share some of my top secrets with you. I feel that the more organized you are, the more sales you make.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

plenty of signs
garment rack
multiple tables
starting bank with change
grocery bags for purchases

Step 1

First and most importantly, make your signs big and legible. If someone can't see your sign, they might skip your house. If you have to make a lot of turns to get to your home, make sure you put a sign at every turn with an arrow.
Step 2

You can put up fliers at your local grocery store advertising your sale as well. Most grocery stores have a bulletin board in the front of the store for advertisements. Secondly, word of mouth is often a good thing.
Step 3

To prepare for the sale, put a price on each individual thing. The general rule of thumb is to ask 1/4 of the price it was new. What I do is I use masking tape and put the price, size if it applies and my initials in case I am not the only one selling at the garage sale. I set up a notebook page with my name on a page. With each sale of mine, I take the piece of tape off of the item and put it on the page in order to keep track of how much I am making and how many items I have sold. That also keeps your earnings separate from someone else selling at your garage sale.
Step 4

For clothes, I have found that by hanging your clothes up on racks, people can go through them easily. This way, you don't have to continuously re straighten your clothes. I used to put them in a box and let people root through them but it is so much easier for them to look at them on a rack.
Step 5

Next, arrange your big items, such as furniture or exercise equipment, at the end of the driveway closest to the road. This way the people driving by may see from farther away and be ready to stop. I've noticed that there are a lot of people that decide if they are going to stop just by what they see driving past. A big item is always an attention getter. If you don't have anything big you want to sell, you could ask a neighbor. Or if worse comes to worse, put one of your furniture items from inside your house that you don't want to sell outside with a sold sign posted on it.........crazy isn't it?! But it works.
Step 6

Another trick is to sell cold beverages with your garage sale on a hot day. If you charge .50 a soda, you are making a profit because if you think about it. ...50 x 12 is 6.00. A 12 pack is usually around 3.00.
Step 7

Last but not least, at the end of your garage sale with an hour left to spare ...... Hang a sign saying make offer on anything or 1/2 off sale. If you are anything like me, you just want to get rid of the stuff and not have to haul it all back inside or to goodwill. This should all help to make a top notch garage sale. It has worked well for me and I have decided to share the knowledge.