Can you make money with Specialty Merchandise Corporation (SMC) products?

SMC is a service that more or less is like any other drop shipper service except unlike places such as Doba.com where they simply provide you a system that connects you to the manufacturer or company who has the product and charge you a fee for it SMC actually buys and warehouses thousands of products and mass orders catalogs and supplies you can use to sell their products.

SMC buys products from many manufacturers in the home and garden decor industry however they pick up various items that are shown on tv or maybe they find a way to bargain for good prices on closing out products.

It is important that before you jump into something like this that you understand what you are getting into. I will go into more details on how SMC works and how you can make money using SMC as your drop shipping provider.

I want to give you just a little background history for myself to help you understand my experience level prior to my signing up for SMC. I have actually been selling online for about six years starting out on eBay and expanding to my own sites for extra cash on the side. That being said I have had some experience with the get rich schemes out there and "its so easy that it sells its self" type of programs so I didn't go into SMC expecting to get rich. Since I had been "scammed" before I thought I should check it out in detail before I tried it and of course I called my mother who had been a member in the past to get some well needed advice. I am glad I did before I signed up so I knew what to expect.

SMC is as the name would imply a specialty merchandise provider that gives you the option of buying from them and having the item "drop shipped" directly to the person you are selling to or ordering in bulk directly to you for you to resale either in a "brick and mortar" business, door to door, or kiosk and similar to Tupperware or Avon you can get catalogs and host parties or go to the distribution center and make large purchases and not have a shipping expense.

SMC has many options for purchasing as I said you can actually drive there to pick up your order, order online, mail in an order, phone in an order or fax your order. They do not charge a "drop ship" fee while I can assure you there are lots of wholesaler drop shippers who charge anywhere from $1.00 per order to $8.00 per order to simply ship the item for you or broker the deal between you and the manufacturer plus you still pay for shipping.

There is however a catch that might make you feel like you are being charged and another reason you should plan before you buy this membership. Until you sell $2500 in products not including shipping or any taxes (we will get to that later) you do have to pay a fee on orders under $30.00 of $2.50 per order but don't let this alone send you running down the isle screaming "scam". The standard shipping rate has been pretty consistent around the $7.95 mark as of today, March 1, 2010, this was still the amount being charged by SMC for base shipping meaning most items under 1-2 pounds which covers most small dollar items. I am pointing this out because if you use UPS as your shipping method to calculate the shipping you charge to your clients a 1 pound product rate is typically about $9.05 now using the UPS calculator. That is a difference of $1.10 that you can reasonably expect to recoop.

The idea here is that it is expensive for them to pay someone to package that 1 little item and they are basically not making a profit from you selling just one $.95 cent product. You may think this doesn't happen but it does. Often I get orders online for one very small item and they will gladly pay $9.05 shipping to get a $1.00 clearance item. Bizarre but common! When this happens you have to honor the sale or you will ruin your reputation so unfortunately unless you either set your online store up to only accept a minimum order of $30.00 or more and chance losing those little customers or find a way to shift little buyers into big buyers through special offers or strategically designed website design that places related items all around the cart for example to boost sales.

Now if you are selling at a party or door to door this may not be an issue if you order all items at once and deliver them personally and of course this is not likely to be a problem if you sell in a brick and mortar store. Simply put try to keep your orders over $30.00 and trust me when I say if you want to make any real money you need to have more over $30 sales than tons of smaller $5 sales.

When you sign up you will get access to the smcorp.com website that is searchable like any other website, has a nice menu with links and the front page is full of links taking you to resourceful areas of the site and to the lowest cost products. They have specialty merchandise kits that group together specific items that you can order in bulk for example recently they offered a Valentine's Day kit that had over 40 items and it was priced 21% lower than what it would cost you to buy all of those same items individually from them. These kits are great for having a party, setting up at flea markets, or selling in a brick and mortar location. I sometimes buy them and focus my eBay listings or my advertising on those items for my local area ads where I could deliver and not have to charge shipping since this increases sales.

The costs involved if you purchase the membership online or if you are going to call in be sure to find out what they are offering currently. Right now you can either pay a full annual payment of $314.95 ($299.95 plus s&h of $15) or you can do a monthly plan that is $24.95 to start and $39.95 for the following 11 months plus the s&h of $15 for a total of $494.40 that is a difference of $194.45. Please don't take me wrong on this because I know how desperate you can feel when you are down and out financially but if you can't produce the $314.95 all at once to do this program it is very likely not going to benefit you unless you are a highly motivated sales person who isn't afraid to go up and ask someone for a sale face to face. There are many reasons that is true but the biggest one is the massive costs involved in operating an online store and/or getting it set up if you do not have website design skills or a lot of time on your hands to learn it. I will cover more of that when I do the segment "How can I sell SMC online?".

After you sign up you will receive a welcome kit and 8 weeks of a personal coach access via phone and internet. If you do not have a phone or internet this will be a hard business to do but not impossible because you can mail orders in but that would limit the type of sales you could perform to brick and mortar or flea market type sales I would imagine.

Catalogs are fairly reasonably priced ranging from $.58 to $3.00 each depending on which catalog and lower during clearance times/end of the season or when you order in bulk. You will receive one of each catalog available when you get your kit along with a white price list book which is your prices and a yellow price list which is a price list you would use to sale wholesale to a sub-wholesalers under you or maybe to a school or business who is making a really large purchase or businesses who want to resale the products.

It is very important unless you are already know everything there is to know about selling these products to work closely with your personal coach during that first 8 weeks. Do not make the mistakes many others have of letting this time lapse while you sit on your hands and waiting for the money to magically roll in because it just doesn't work that way. There are some very useful tools that I will add more about throughout the page to help you get an idea of what is available to help you succeed or maybe you have been trying to sell smc but aren't doing as well as you hoped. This page can help you make the decision to use SMC or not use SMC without pushing onto you some other product. I remember looking for just plain English advice and reading thousands of posts and comments that nearly all ended with "I found something better go to such and such site" type remarks. I do sell SMC but I am just passing along some useful information that I think is important in making that final decision.

The biggest questions I have heard about selling SMC online:
1. How can I sell SMC products online?
2. How hard is it to succeed selling SMC online?
3. What do I need to sell online?

These are hard questions to answer because it all depends on what your investment levels are in money, skills, time, and motivation. Personally I love working one on one with people however I didn't have the funds to just open a store and quit working so I opted for something I was familiar with and sold on eBay. I still do some but I have moved away from that into using ProStores and I have taken some courses and learned how to write php and some javascript coding so I can build my own websites specializing in specific areas. This is taking time and effort and is still a work in progress.

What I hope to achieve in doing this is eventually being able to divide the duties into special niche areas where one can learn a great deal about a particular area such as planters and plant stands and focus on those items only on a smaller website because the one I have currently has thousands of items that can make it hard for customers to find just what they are looking for.

I am speaking purely from experience here and you can take the advice anyway you want to but if you do choose to sell online then you should pick a category that is abundant in products that you can relate to in some way. If you like to work in the garden then focus on that but if you are really good at maybe flowers and styling flower decor then you might want to focus on their flowers and their vases. The more written content you can give a website without paying for it the better off you will be. If this is sounding a bit greek to you already then you may want to watch for another page I will be doing later on SEO and website traffic building in general.

SMC has a partnership with a place called emerchantclub.com and you can get a fully functional website up and going with them for a nice hefty price tag. I contacted them and a little over a year ago it was around $1500 for the complete setup of a deluxe package so I passed and decided to do it on my own. I knew some web design from my past and I thought how hard can it be. Well let me tell you it can be pretty darn rough. This particular partnership that SMC and eMerchant Club is pretty rock solid because they only allow you to get live access to their inventory on the backend through this one place. This means that if you go any other method you will be doing more manual work on the website and processing the orders. The bright side with this is that they do all of the heavy lifting for you and keep things up to date every day all year. It isn't quite set it and forget it but it is as close you will get in a place selling thousands of products.

On a sort of related note the more you sell the more you can make because of their "Super Seller Program" which I will talk about in a different segment however I have heard that once you reach a level high enough to get your own personal account manager you have some potential to getting some help with this area at a much lower cost or possibly for free. Anyone with personal knowledge of how this works when you sell over $25,000 a year would be welcomed to chime in their experience.

Now you will see advertised that you can get ecatalog sites for free however I missed mine when there was a goof up on my part during my sign up period. I signed up online but then I called because I noticed the free offer of $100 in products if you make your purchase via phone. Sure enough I got billed twice even though the gentleman thought he could cancel the first payment process since I had just submitted the form. Long story short I ended up with 2 account numbers and paid twice but it took them about 30 minutes to call me back with a possible solution that I was ok with and we worked it out and I got my goodies however I didn't make any use of the personal coach until I only had a week of it left which was a learning experience that I hope you will avoid if you become a member. When all was said and done I then canceled the ecatalog subscription that I would have gotten free by mistake. I never bothered with getting it fixed thinking it isn't that big of a deal. It was and is because when you have to make your own pdf catalogs that are fully functionable and allows you to click through to the purchase page it takes some know how or paying someone else.

I used my $100 free products and sold them on eBay to get a feel for how they would sell and as my sort of learning curve. Since then eBay has become a real shark tank for the modest seller however if you don't want to host your own website and pay for advertising there are plenty of free sites like craigslist, kiiji, hoobly, usfreeads, facebook, myspace, and many more locations you can post listings for free or cheaper than eBay however I have yet to find one as reliable and easy to use as eBay plus they bring massive amounts of traffic to their site every day.

If you go with my suggestion to start with of picking one category it will narrow down significantly your manual work on checking inventory levels at SMC, cut setup time, time adding new products or removing old ones, and time downloading and uploading images. You can learn how it works and within your limited time and funds much easier and create a niche website that is more likely to succeed. Competition is fierce out there no matter what type of products you are selling online. The internet has become home for millions if not billions of individuals hoping to make it rich online.

Some things to think about if you plan to sell SMC products online if you decide to sign up. Remember I have done some of these things the hard way so this is all just personal advice to take as you wish.

1. Buy your domain name asap. Keep it short, creative and memorable or KISS (keep it short and simple). Do not wait for your kit buy the domain as soon as you decide.

2. Find a place to host your website. Either shell out the money for the emerchant club solution or find a cheap but reliable hosting service if you know how to set up and design your own product website or go to an eBay store, ProStores, Volusion, Zen Cart, or something similar depending on your knowledge and price range.

3. Put something on the site other than a parked page while you wait to get all you need to set it up. Even if it is a simple paragraph telling what the site will be when it is finished.

4. Submit the site to google, msn, alexo, yahoo, etc. The sooner they start indexing your site the better.

5. If you don't know what SEO is or how to use it then learn and learn fast or hire someone who does but be careful not to be ripped off.

6. Log into the smcorp.com site as soon as you get the login information. Browse it, read it, and learn from it everything that is available there to assist you.

7. Contact your personal coach the first day you have the contact information. Milk it for all it is worth and then some while you have it. No question is a stupid question at this point.

8. Get a paypal business account if you don't have one. Google Checkout too. Do not pay for a merchant account to accept credit cards until you have traffic coming into your site. If you already accept credit cards for a brick and mortar store or some other venture then just use it and put a note on the invoices if it is different that it will be processed with that name.

9. Buy the image CD they offer because downloading images takes forever!

10. Plan everything out so you know what you need to do to make the most of your time to get this up and running.

11. Order something for yourself so that you see how the shipments arrive and can answer questions for customers.

12. Get a different phone line unless you have a business line already. Basic to take calls is all you need. Make sure you have a voice mail box or someone that can answer 24 hours a day. No reason to pay for an answering service just yet. Wait until you have money coming in to pay someone to take calls.

13. Scope out the competitors and see what is working for them. Don't copy them just get an idea of what types of ads works, what their keywords are, how many products they are offering online, and what their prices are like. One of the weirdest things I have found is that some competitors try to undercut all others by selling below cost on some products and hiking prices on others while some just shell out tons of money in ads and hike all of their prices. It is hard to say what methods to use but try to put yourself in a customers shoes. Would you pay more for better service? Would you leave a site that is filled with ads? Would you leave a site if the images are huge?

14. Do not ever set it and forget it because it will come back to bite you in the rear. For example I bought a laptop because one time I went away for the weekend and I came back to several orders and two canceled because the system was down for maintenance and didn't send out the email confirmations. I lost over $500 in sales that weekend because I didn't check the site from Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.

15. Ask your closest friends and family to look through the catalogs and to write down the top 3 things they would order for the prices listed. Take from those and combine the list. Any repeats are true winners feature them on the front page of your site because it is probably a catchy item. Let your friends and family know you took their picks and posted them on the website and give them a card with the site on it.

16. When the money starts coming in reinvest at least 40% of it immediately before you can think about spending it anywhere else. Dozens of ways to reinvest it. You can buy products to sell door to door or on eBay auctions, give a gift to one of those friends or all of those friends within reason of course with a survey about the product and ask them for a qu