This is why no one is helping you:

I am starting an _____ store in ______. I wanted to know what type of brands you could supply me and how can you help?

I’m not helping you and I’m not even replying to help you. When I sold on ebay, there were sellers who would say something like this in thier ads:

If you don’t read what I write in my description, it’s not likely that you’ll read what I write when I answer the question you send me because you don’t respect my time.

When people send me an email, and they clearly don’t get that I don’t actually sell clothing, I don’t respond.

And I’m sure others don’t either. In fact, many of my industry colleagues echo this sentiment. The ones who don’t get what they do tend to be the biggest time wasters.

Now, here’s the other part where you’re wrong: Nobody credible is going to chase you for your business, even if you are well funded (or claim to be). The fact that you’re not reading and you don’t understand how to contact manufacturers is an indicator that you’re unlikely to succeed. Why bother? There’s not enough quality discount designer merchandise on the market. Good jobbers barely have enough merchandise to go around, they don’t really need to hand hold newbies. A scammer will chase you for your business relentlessly because it’s a one shot deal, they need a steady flow of newbies.

With a marketplace-based e-commerce store, you can also run into the issue of you not being viewed as truly legitimate because you’re not willing to invest the money into securing your own separate website, your own separate domain and your own separate e-commerce identity. There are exceptions to this, for example Etsy, because they are in the handmade and craft market; under those circumstances people like buying from really small sellers and artisans. However, it’s a tough market when you’re selling off-price clothing and you need to do all that you can to ensure that you are:

1. Building a brand for your website or store as being the place to shop.
2. Projecting a professional image so that people don’t think you’re a fly-by-night merchant.

When it comes to selecting which shopping cart is right for you, I don’t really have a preference. I think Magento is great, Volusion is great, Shopify is great; I think all of these solutions are great. The market is so competitive that they have all caught up with each other in terms of features. It is a matter of preference and individual need.

I was asked if there are better search engine optimization features with eBay compared with the shopping cart services. Search engine optimization has two basic methods: on page and off site. On-page SEO consists of the structure and content of your page and how well that page is optimized to rank in search engines. Off-site SEO basically consists of inbound links to your site. They both must be present. You cannot get to the top of the rankings solely with on page SEO unless you are going after very, very low volume search terms. That’s not likely the case if you’re selling apparel. Most ecommerce software programs have comparable features when it comes to on page SEO. There may be some areas in which one performs better than the other, but most of your work with search engine optimization will end up being off-site, so it’s not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. What you want to look for is a clean structure on a code level, the ability to customize such things as the URL, the meta description, the title tags, any heading tags, h1 tags and the ability to generate SEO friendly on-site features such as a site map or a feed for Google products or other product-based websites that use a data feed. Most e-commerce packages have this as a built-in feature or as a plug-in.

Lastly, when it comes to choosing e-commerce software, I recommend that you set up trial accounts and actually try to use them for the duration of 30-day free trial. That part is difficult because it’s hard to want to get into something that you’re not actually using in “real life”, but each company has its own needs and its own work-flow and often, you don’t find out the little things that matter until you’re already using the software. You don’t want a situation where you’re knee-deep in using software and then you find out it won’t work for you. The only way to avoid that is to try the software first, there’s no other way around it. The problem is that it becomes difficult to get in to using the software when you’re just playing around with it to test it out. But moving a site from one platform to another, when you’ve already established a search engine presence, is a complex procedure and often can create so many problems that, a store doesn’t switch when they should and they end up trapped in the e-commerce program that they don’t like. So it’s better to go through all of these programs upfront, to pick the right one, and then move forward, than to get into something just because it was great, or it was cheap or easy and find out down the road that it’s not really sufficient. Another thing, you don’t want to start piece-mealing an e-commerce package so you really need to make sure that whatever you pick is flexible enough so you won’t end up with five or six different software programs just to manage your e-commerce store.

I was extremely fortunate to make really good connections and learn from people who had ten, fifteen, twenty years of experience in the off-price industry and I was able to avoid a lot of mistakes. There are also times when I made mistakes and part of it was because I fell into the trap of having the gut feeling that something was wrong, not really having a good feeling about a particular buy, but moving forward anyway because I wanted to get a great deal. After all of this time in the off-price industry, I was encouraged by a really good friend to write the book. My motivation was a combination of helping people, but also taking the knowledge that I had gained, and that I was repeating to multiple people, and packaging it into a product that people could read and use as a starting point for success in the off-price industry.

The guide is not intended to be a specific blueprint or have all the answers or every single source. It is a tremendous help to people who have the initiative, talent, skill and the work ethic to succeed. But there are some people who are looking for everything to be simplistic and for them, it probably won’t be of much assistance.

When you create an information product, there are several ways to market it. Typically, what you commonly see is something that is very strong on the sales pitch, has bonus offers, or has an auto-responder. It’s a very typical squeeze page and it’s a way of marketing an informational product. I decided early on that that wasn’t how I wanted to go about it. I was just going to be straightforward – either you wanted it or you didn’t and if you didn’t, it was no big deal. As a result, I don’t offer reprint rights, I don’t offer this as a private level resale program, and the guide is not sold anywhere else except theclothingbroker.com. That means when you see another site that looks eerily like mine, they copied.

This site, the clothing broker; it’s been around for a long time and a lot of people have copied parts of the content and parts of the guide in an attempt to create their own product. I wrote everything myself, didn’t copy anyone, just completely and totally straightforward. I also don’t offer this product under another brand or another identity or another twist on the concept. It’s here. It is what it is, and I wrote it. If you saw someone with it somewhere else, let me know since I actually have this website, the guide and all the content protected under registered federal copyright because of all of the people who’ve the copied my content over the years.

A liquidator typically is recovering money for merchandise, regardless of the condition of that merchandise. In other words, a liquidator could sell first-quality merchandise or never been sold, they could sell customer returns, or they could sell salvaged goods. Salvaged goods are usually goods that are damaged in some way. We don’t deal with those types of companies. Most of the people who come to the Clothing Broker are looking for branded apparel and they are looking for that apparel at such a price that enables them to sell it at a significant discount from the retail price and still make a decent profit margin. Those are the kinds of customers that come to our site looking for merchandise.

The off-price apparel industry is vast. It ranges from everything from what you see in a ninety-nine-cent store up on to something like Suzie’s Dealers, which are your five-dollar clothing stores, all the way up into something like Saks outfit. It’s a very broad industry. And the majority of apparel that is available is of the type that you would find at your less expensive stores and it’s typically genuinely branded. I mean there is a brand name on the label but just not the kind that most people would recognize. Some of it isn’t even really, really off-price. It’s just first run product manufactured overseas. It is just made for such a low price that they can be sold in the off-price market. Most of the clients that come to us are looking for the types of clothing that you find in your better department stores such as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, the North Shore, Neiman Marcus and so on. Sometimes the client looking for that type of merchandise belongs in the off-price industry and sometimes, they don’t. What I mean by ‘belong’ is that sometimes people have misconceptions about what it is really like to be in this industry, what the profit margins would be like and what type of success they can expect.

Getting back on topic, the difference between what we do and what you may find at a lot of other places in the internet is that our focus really is on quality merchandise that is suitable for retail sale. We don’t really typically deal with jobbers who specialize in merchandise that has been damaged, is in some way not suitable for retail sale, or needs to be repaired for retail sale. And all that can be what you will find a lot of in the liquidation market. I hope that explains the difference between a liquidator and a jobber.

If you are able to have a brick-and-mortar retail store, and that will need the factors of both location and financial resources, it can be a really great thing especially if you live in a community that can sustain the type of product mix that you would like to bring in and may not have as many shopping options as a major metro area with a very large mall or significant shopping resources. The big difference between brick-and-mortar and online retail is their acquisition of customers is completely different. Online is active but yet it’s passive. When you’re asleep, people place orders. You wake up in the morning and you can see what people have bought. In a brick-and-mortar setting, it is much more of an active endeavor because you need live bodies present in the store in order to complete a transaction. You can’t have a transaction when no one is there. In a perfect world, you would blend the two together.

Having a brick-and-mortar store with a significant online component will enable your customers shop easier when they’re not in your store. Even though the numbers, like the sales figures for online shopping and apparel are tremendous, the key thing to keep in mind is that the overwhelming majority of apparel that is sold is still sold through physical retail stores. At this point in time, online and catalog sales do not drastically reduce the people that shop for apparel in physical outlet stores. The reason is that shopping is a little bit social, especially for a female. It’s a little bit of looking at this, looking at that, picking this up, seeing how it looks with that, trying it on, going to the fitting room, having crisis under the fluorescent lighting where you can see all of your flaws and then putting things back and starting all over again. Some people really kind of need that experience – that touchy feeling that we call the ‘tactile’ experience of being able to touch the clothes. These are certain things you can’t really communicate online. For example, you can have two pairs of jeans and they can look identical in a photograph, even in a close-up, but one of them can have a much higher quality–fabric, wash, construction– all these are things that you can describe online but it becomes difficult to get the customer to have that ‘Aha!’ moment because they’re not there looking at and touching the merchandise.

The other thing about having a brick-and-mortar retail store is you don’t really have an offline equivalent of the market places like E-bay that can bring you customers. In a brick-and-mortar environment, you have a mall, or shopping mall or shopping center but the down side is that there is a finite amount of space. Ten thousand sellers could go and register at E-bay tomorrow and they would all be allowed to sell but ten retailers can’t even go open up shops in a desirable high traffic area because they won’t be enough vacancies to sustain them. The chances that you have of getting into a place that will bring customers to you on its own are just very slim because there aren’t that many opportunities for something like that.

But on the up side, there is a certain experience involved offline that can’t be replicated on the internet. And we can try with customer service agents, with live chat, with all of these tools but there’s a certain element that you can’t replicate online no matter how hard you try even if you have an online personal shopper service. That element of being able to consultatively sell to someone is something you really cannot duplicate outside of a face-to-face experience.

In summary, the best scenarios combine some of the technological advantages of selling online such as the ability to capture customer information, e-mail marketing, targeted marketing and merchandising, communication, adding in benefits of being able to shop online or re-order online or preview a new merchandise online but come and try it out on the store. Combining this with the brick-and-mortar experience is also an amazing opportunity.

Most of our online consumers are very, very focused about what they want. They’re actively looking for it and they’re going online to buy it. For a lot of them, however whatever it was they wanted, they saw it offline – like they saw it in a magazine or in a retail store or someone told them about it and then they go online and look for it and buy it because the technology.

A woman shopping on a mission can make her way through an entire store in less than twenty minutes and she can literally see everything that’s in that store. Going through a website is a very tedious and slow, time-consuming process and so when I said earlier that shopping can be social, it is because it’s a bit of an activity when you’re just shopping versus going through something specific or browsing and taking a look, maybe discussing it with someone who is shopping with you or the sales clerk, then it can be a leisurely activity.

Clicking and looking around on a website, it doesn’t have the same impact on people. It can be frustrating because the pages can take a while to load and the time that elapses, one rack of clothing in a store can have ten different styles and in two minutes, you can look at each and every last one of them but online, trying to look at ten different styles probably will take you somewhere between five to ten minutes. It’s just too slow a process and that’s why customers who were shopping online tend to be a lot more focused about what it is that they’re looking for. They’ll browse and casually come across new things but for the most part, they tend to be more focused as opposed to offline shoppers. Sometimes you just, you know, go and hang out, you shop at Bloomingdale’s, and you go grab lunch, catch up with your girl friends. It’s a different thing and there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both. For each person that is going into this, you have to make the choice about what makes sense for your business. I will say though, if you don’t have the retail experience, it’s better to start online because then you can learn certain retail and customer service aspects, also the nuances of dealing with off-price jobbers while not having to have the overhead and staffing burden of a retail store constantly, constantly gnawing at you.

The first part we will tackle is what it’s like to sell online. The market conditions for E-bay may be drastically different than they are at the moment you read this article. But E-bay is a very, very competitive market place and one of the things that I really need to make my customers realize is that sometimes they have no idea what type of company they are looking at.

When you’re doing research or when you’re looking at other options, sometimes you’re looking at someone that has a company just like this. They may be buying from a jobber, and selling on E-bay. And then sometimes you’re looking at a very large company with significant resources that is just using E-bay as a sales outlet.

Having said that, there are still specific categories of merchandise that do extremely well for the independent seller on E-bay. What they are, I couldn’t tell you because they vary from time to time. They may vary depending on what’s currently trending in fashion or accessories. They have so many different variables involved that it’s hard to give an answer that stays consistently true. But the truth of the matter is that you have to do your research. E-bay and other types of online marketplaces are great because they bring in their own traffic and give you a chance to get your feet wet. They also help you understand buying and selling before you have to tackle the beast of bringing in your own customers.

We have quite a few buyers that have their own websites. This is the other option but that landscape is also becoming increasingly crowded. However, there is always room for specialized sites with focused merchandise. There will always be room for that. And we have clients that also, they either completely off-price or they buy off-price just to fill in their merchandise and they do very well.

Selling online is a wonderful option for a lot of people. Some of you have lifestyles that don’t really allow you the flexibility of anything else and some of you just live in a geographic area where selling online is pretty much your only choice because you don’t live in an area that can sustain a retail store. It’s really a great opportunity for some people but to be successful at it, you really either have to invest the time to learn and understand internet marketing.

I won’t just throw out terms like search engine optimization, because the truth of the matter is we’re evolving into that kind of internet but also away from that. You’ll see a lot of focus paid on social media and on social shopping. Whatever the phrase of the moment is will change over time but basically, you will just have to have an incredible understanding of what it takes to market to customers online–how do you reach them, how do you get them on to your site, and how do you get them to buy. However all that is being done, at the point in time that you’re undertaking it you need to understand what to do or you need to be able to hire someone to do it or you need to find a company that can do the work for you. But the bottom line is truly, truly, truly, you should know how to do it. A great example of this is how Zappos markets themselves as a customer service company that just happens to sell a whole bunch of merchandise.

Actually, the more successful independent retailers online are those that are marketers who understand how to market online. They know exactly what to do even if they just pick a product that fits into their level of expertise or needs a lot of other criteria for the optimum type product to sell online. That’s the kind of thing that you will need to know if you plan on having your own website.

We’ve also seen people really do some interesting things like focus on certain internet communities and sell to them. We’ve seen people do Facebook. For e-commerce it’s not what I recommend but I have seen it as well as a bunch of different methods. It all comes down to how much you have to get it going and how large a scale you want it. The great thing about this is that the level of infrastructure that it requires to sell online is such a small fraction of what is required to sell offline. When you have a brick-and-mortar store, you need more of everything to have more space to sell your merchandise. You pay more rates, utilities and electricity, you need more staff. Online, you don’t have those same considerations so you can scale pretty significantly without requiring as much in resources.

Read Part 2: Brick-and-Mortar Retail

First, let me explain a little bit about the difference between those types of websites and typical off-price retailers. Most of these sites that are very popular have invested heavily in advertising and marketing to build a very large base of subscribing members. Whether the memberships are free or paid, most of them boast that they have hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions, of registered members. This creates a built-in audience for any type of product that they’re trying to sell. For the most part, these companies are not buying merchandise from the off-price market and selling it. Many are actually acquiring the merchandise on consignment or they are purchasing the merchandise but they negotiate payment terms so they do not have to pay for the merchandise until after the sale has concluded.

Typically, they will have the merchandise in their warehouse getting prepared for the sale, and thirty to sixty days after the sale has concluded, whether that was a one day sale, a one week sale or a one month sale, they pay the vendor. Also typically, they’re returning any unsold merchandise. This is very different than someone who is going to a jobber, looking to buy a handful of brands, or a specific brand. The main difference is with this large base of members or subscribers, these companies can buy or consign very large quantities of a single brand. Typically most jobbers do not have very large quantities of a single brand. Sometimes that happens, but a lot of times it does not.

This type of shopping has become a preferred way for a lot of these brands to get rid of past-season inventory. Many of the smaller companies are actually selling in-season inventory because they’re trying to build up their own customer base, because online sample sales have a higher cachet than having your merchandise on eBay or on a discount website, because you cannot view the merchandise without being a member so it’s not necessarily advertised to the public. The products do not show up in shopping feeds, and they do not show up in Google searches or Google products or any of those other comparison shopping sites that show the lowest retail price. Therefore, it may not be common knowledge to most customers that that brand is even sold at a discount during one of these sample sales online or from one of these member-only shopping sites. It gives the impression that you need to be in the know to even know how to get it at a discount, thus it helps these manufacturers protect their brand integrity.

Trying to emulate this model costs a lot of money and if you’re going that route or if you’re going to even attempt to go that route you typically cannot do it in the regular off-price market because you need to be able to go directly to those brands to negotiate those purchases.

Some even utilize fake shipping addresses and shipping duty-free to Mexico.

Because of these actions, customs agents have taken to zealously tracking and capturing fraudulent shipments.  The recent crackdowns are a result of a new program called “Knock and Talk”. They knock on your door and take you to task.

Customs has started detaining suspect goods at port as well. Unfortunately, with the delays possibly amounting to over a couple of weeks, the shipments lose value the longer they remain undelivered.  A number of apparel manufacturers have even decided to pay more to get their products through customs faster.

The retail market will definitely be affected by the recent developments.  If the manufacturers pay higher fees on their goods, it’s logical that the prices from both outlet stores and off-price retailers will rise.

For a more in-depth look into the matter, visit this article.

Nonetheless, the products that off-price retailers sell depend on discretionary income. Clothing, footwear, home products, and the other items that off-price retailers offer are not necessities, for the most part. So consumers must have some disposable income to spend on retail, even at an off-price store. Off-price retailers sell clothing and accessories from major-label brands at a significant discount. They purchase at below-wholesale prices and charge less than retail prices.

Imperfection in the retail industry is what makes the off-price model possible. When a major label like Polo Ralph Lauren (RL) miscalculates consumer preferences and over-produces a product, it will send the excess inventory to T.J. Maxx, one of the biggest off-price retailers at a huge discount. Companies such as T.J. Maxx, Ross Stores, Big Lots, Stein Mart, and others take advantage of overruns, canceled orders, and forecasting mistakes made by their counter-parts in the full-price retail sector. When a major designer produces more clothing than it can sell through specialty retailers or department stores, or a store can’t move all of the items in a particular line, the excess inventory is sold at a 20%-60% discount to an off-price retailer. The company passes these savings onto consumers, marking up goods by a lower percentage than full-price stores and instead building their operating margins by moving a high volume of inventory quickly, at rock-bottom prices.

Apparently, fashion is not the key variable in off-price retail since firms in this industry must make the right decisions about what products to buys and sell, because they operate at such small margins on each individual product. Inorder for the off-price sector to gain profit, these companies must keep in mind three key factors—scale, operational expertise, and vendor relationships. As opposed to the full-price fashion industry in which exclusivity and low supply high demand products are the norm, off-price companies should be able to purchase a huge amount of inventory and distribute it through its chain stores, selling in large volumes or wholesale. Also, companies in this sector must have strong business relationships with wholesalers and designers in order to guarantee continual flow of low-price inventory so designers and department stores would sell their excess inventory at prices low enough to fit the off-price model.

Decision-making and the ability to predict what products will sell quickly are essential parts of the off-price retail success. These companies cannot afford to take major losses on a product because of their lean costs structures. However, as long as buyers remain fickle and selective in their spending habits, off-price companies will continue to fill a need in the marketplace. As long as consumers have to spend more on basic commodities, they will look for cheaper alternatives when they buy non-essential goods like clothing and footwear, which could benefit the off-price sector. When the economy is bad there are a lot of reasons to look for cheap apparel. You want to make some additions to your wardrobe but pay the least amount of money. Finding these cheap clothes takes a little more time than shopping when money is no object but the rewards will be worth the effort. By spending less on individual items you will be able to purchase more with your apparel budget.

In evidence of these, off-price retails is said to be growing faster than its full price counterparts. The two largest firms in the off-price sector, TJX and Ross, have combined to grow sales at a Compounded annual growth rate – CAGR of greater than 10% over the past five years, which is well above the average annual growth rate in the apparel industry of 4%. The numbers indicate that more consumers are looking for value-shopping options, and off-price firms are predicting similar growth in the next five years and looking to expand into new markets.

But being fashionable nowadays can set you back big time. The rates of leading designer shoes can make a grown man cry. If you are a fan of exceptional fashion and designer brands, you would probably give an arm and leg for designer dresses as well as designer handbags though they cost much more than what you have in the bank.

Nevertheless, a smart and experienced shopper can always find great apparel at a lower price. You don’t have to break the bank just to dress yourself in designer clothing or shoes or handbags and other accessories. One can always find brand new designer merchandise for much less than what department stores offer, if they know exactly where to look.

Shoppers can now buy quality designer clothes at off-price retailers like Marshalls, Loehmann’s, TJ Maxx and Steinmart. No longer considered the place where damaged merchandise or last season’s designer clothes goes to die, off-price retailers now carry quality clothes and name brand fashion for all ages and style types.
If you need a few faithful strategies to leave more money in your pockets and less cash in the hands of Neimans, Saks and Bergdorfs, consider these strategies for buying quality clothes from off-price retailers.

Look online or in the phonebook for your local Goodwill, Salvation Army, or Unique Thrift store locations. Check when each store’s sale days are. Salvation Army and Unique Thrift stores have half off days weekly (Salvation Army on Wednesdays and Unique on Mondays), where all the items in the store are 50% off their original ticket prices, which average $3.99 to $9.99 per item! So, average half off day prices are $1.99 to $4.99 per item! Thrift stores get new inventory daily, so you will always find something new! And with designer brands like Ed Hardy, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Hollister, and many, many more, these prices are unbelievable compared to retail costs. Thrift store merchandise is almost always in Excellent to Brand New condition, so don’t believe the myth that thrift store item quality is low. Goodwill also has excellent deals on their clothing on Customer Appreciation Days, where they offer 35% off all merchandise in their stores.
Off-price shoppers only shop at Burlington Coat Factory, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Stein Mart, Ross, Tuesday Morning, Home Goods and Loehmann’s. These stores carry the same fabulous merchandise as the high-end retailers, but at 50 to 80 percent off of retail prices.

Moreover, internet shopping sites like SmartBargains.com, Zappos.com, StyleDrops.com and Bluefly.com are just a few of the many online stores selling discount designer shoes, handbags, accessories at lower prices. At Smart Bargains, footwear are up to 70% discount, you can save an extra 50% for fashion jewelry such as juicy couture, greenbeads and more; outerwear such as Andrew Marc and DKNY has a 40-75% discount off their price tags. At Style Drops, you can avail of designer handbags, clothing, shoes, and other accessories from Prada, Gucci, Hogan, Tod’s, Giorgo Armani, Dolce and Gabana and many more. Blue Fly is where you can shop with up to 70% off retail including Furla handbags; suits and dresses from Armani, Gucci, Hickey Freeman, Hugo Boss, Prada, Zegna and many more; footwear from Stuart Weitzman, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Prada, Jimmy Choo, Dolce Vita, and many more.

However, if you want to do away with the hassle of going through numerous searches yourself, you can look for those who will do the walking around for you. The people at theclothingbroker.com are such.

If you love to hunt for designer bargains, or creating a designer look for less, there’s nothing better than buying quality clothes from off price retailers. Because your wallet deserves a break from the shopping grinch, use these tips and keep your vow to never pay full price for name brand clothing, ever again.