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We are going to journey today into the category of Wholesale “Shelf Pull” apparel. This is a very popular category of liquidation merchandise sought after by ebay sellers, flea market vendors and exporters. I want you to fully understand what Shelf Pulls are and what to expect when buying this category of wholesale merchandise to resell.

The following are actual photos from a recently purchased shelf pull apparel pallet received from a liquidator. This pallet of merchandise was described as, “A Nice Mix Of Casual Dresses, Formal Dresses and Special Occasion Dresses With Some Suits And Separates. Brands Can Include Jones New York, Liz Claiborne, Kasper, XOXO Dresses, Elie Tahari, Rampage Nine West, Donna Morgan, Calvin Klein, Adrianna Papell, Jessica Howard, City Triangles, Donna Ricco, Maggy London International, and More”

Wholesale Shelf Pull merchandise simply refers to items that have been removed from a retail store usually after a series of pricing markdowns. The rationale is simple…If an item does not sell… liquidate it to a wholesale distributor and thereby increase cash flow. Shelf pull merchandise is a big mixture of items that did not sell for various reasons, maybe due to “end of season” or just “too many” of one style.

Shelf Pull merchandise can be considered new merchandise, but remember items will have been handled by several individuals before you purchase them. Keep in mind that some apparel items may have been tried on in the store by shoppers. Once “deemed” shelf pull by the original retail store, items are usually placed into a large cardboard box called a Gaylord. The Gaylords are then placed onto pallets and shipped to a reclamation center or a wholesale liquidation distributor who will then sell in smaller quantities to ebay sellers, small retail stores etc.

I cannot stress enough that Shelf pull apparel is a big assortment of sizes and brands. It is possible to receive duplicates styles. Most liquidators who advertise this category of merchandise will advertise brand names you might see in your purchase. Do not be led into believing that the name brands listed will necessarily be included in your purchase. Again, expect an assortment of all brands sold thought the department store they originally came from.

Each article of clothing will have a department store and/or manufactures sales tag unless it fell off in handling. In the ebay world of name brand apparel this is where we get the acronym, “NWTS” or “New with Tags”.

The first photo above shows an actual retail tag from this clothing pallet. All tags will have the manufacturers suggested retail price and then a series of markdowns in ink. This particular clothing item started out at $320 followed by $199, $160 and then down to $99.99

Once you receive your shelf pull apparel pallet you will need to do some additional work to make the clothing presentable or “retail ready”. This may include minor spot treating (from handling) and wrinkle removal.

Unless you are buying 200-500 pieces of clothing at any one time, small orders of 50-200 pieces can usually ship to your door by UPS or FedEx. The average weight for 100 pieces of adult apparel is approximately 130-150 pounds depending on the apparel season. Winter apparel weighs far more than Summer. Coast to Coast shipping via UPS or Fedex will average $50-$70 per 100 pieces.

Questions to ask when buying Shelf Pull apparel from a Liquidator:

• What store is this apparel originally from?
• Will this pallet contain any accessories such as socks, belts, jewelry and other items other than clothing?
• Will this Shelf pull apparel pallet contain any customer returns
• Are you shipping this apparel from your warehouse or is this a brokered purchase?
• What is my cost per piece?
• What season is the apparel from?
• Do you offer a quantity discount for larger orders?
• How much damage should I expect with this purchase?

How To Find Buyers For Your Imported  Products

The standard way to run a business is to select a product, find the market you can sell to and adapt as necessary to that buying population’s needs. But, you can escape the competition if you disrupt that process and work a better, less exploited angle. Why not go the opposite direction, find buyers, get their product needs and then get a product that meets their needs.

I am lucky in that I am easily interested in the details of other people’s occupations. If I’m at a party or a wedding, I am likely to engage the person next to me in a discussion about what they do. For me this is fun, but it is also away to investigate and find underserved markets. Toward this application,ask these people what kind of products they need, or that are popular that are imported,or difficult to find. A good friend of mine overseas, was talking about the popularity and low quality of the health pamphlets in local pharmacies. That kind of marketing intelligence is pure gold. He was actively looking for people that could produce pamphlets on a wide range of health topics, that he could bundle with simple displays and offer to local pharmacies.That’sexactly the kind of vacancy that you could never find out about without talking to your contacts and if you were in a position to move on it,could make you a killing,

If you meet a service provider or advisor like a banker or accountant, ask them what kinds of needs their customersare frequently seeking.My accountant has recently gotten into the insurance business, why did he do that? Because,he recognized that many of his customers had the need, but who wants to go out actively seeking insurance quotes? Nobody unless they absolutely have to. That’s why the TV is full of advertisements touting how incredibly easy it is to get a good quote.  Because they know you will probably go without insurance rather than seek out the unfamiliar market and try to navigate it on your own. An insurance product that meshed with small business needs and could be competently sold by a CPA means you have a powerful influencer advisor working for you.

Visiting flea markets is one of my favorite ways to get ideas. You can see a lot of shoppers quickly and really get an understanding about what they will plunk down hard cash for, at a wide range of price points.

Take a look at the attendance figures for trade shows to find an expanding market. According tothei Trade Show Week article about 2007 trade show attendance, the consumer trade shows are hurting but motorcycle shows, specialty recreation shows (like snowboard shows) and pet industry shows grew like crazy.

Get to know your local retailers and find out who they are buying from. That’s the 2nd best ways to find a wholesaler (the best way is linked).

I saw a nice post about buying wholesale lists on one of the few wholesale blogs that isn’t just junk, and I think its a good topic for this blog to address.

Wholesale lists, I’m pretty sure, predate the internet, and they would have really been high-value publications back then — because how else would you find the locations and details of USA wholesalers prior to the web. You could go to the library and pore through 100 phone books I guess, but would you? Or you could find a trade magazine, but that’s even pretty difficult to find, they aren’t distributed widely. My former employer, distributed trade magazines at flea markets and swap meets, which is a good way to target your readership to the best available customers, but if you weren’t reselling through that venue, and you wanted to get the best possible deals (meaning get around working with a local or regional distributor) how would you have done it? Well, if you have the money that you can cut out a middleman that breaks bulk, you could probably afford to fly to a trade show, but, holy cow, isn’t there an easier way?

And thus we have the oft-rumored seldom seen wholesale lists. You give someone $40 and they sent you a neatly typed list of Company Names, Phone Numbers and Descriptions of Items Sold. That was a deal back then because if you were serious, you were likely to save more than that on the first order.

But, it really is a different ballgame now. The lists, like Salehoo and Worldwide Brands, are still what I consider a “hidden” competitor to my efforts over the years to get wholesalers’ products in front of the audience that really needs to use them. And they have responded to the competition that Top Ten Wholesale provides, with their (paid) membership areas, where they can offer updates, but really what they are going to do is try to sell you other products from their line. In truth they can’t compete with a web site like Top Ten or any of the other worthy wholesale search and directory web sites out there, because their model is to take money from the small reseller. Top Ten’s business model is older than the term “Web 2.0″ but taking information people normally charge for, making it free, and earning revenue through advertising opportunities for businesses that want to reach this newly-empowered audience is Web 2.0 all the way baby, much more so than rounded corners and blogs.

That doesn’t stop the listmakers, of course, it just makes them market against us. What kind of validates my theory that they ore the old school and we are the new school is that the practice the marketing technique known as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that was made famous by IBM. See, IBM revolutionized the world of information processing, from typewriters to supercomputers and pioneered a LOT of new markets. When the competition eventually came, IBM was already there, but they were a huge company and could easily lose market share to a better idea, more aggressive pricing, etc. So the IBM sales force (which was one of the most admired organizations in the world, many years ago) used a tactic that was described by a former employee turned competitor as “spreading FUD.”

The old quote is “Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM” which really means “You could get fired if you recommend some fly-by-night company who will abandon you when its the middle of the night and your orders can’t be processed. Oh, did I mention that we can have a 6 person team there to fix it the next day?”

And that’s always the model. If you have competition, you find yourself saying eventually “you can’t trust those guys…” It happens. I just hope you are telling the truth when you say it.

Chris Malta, the CEO behind Worldwide Brands, will try to tell you that

“Real Product Sourcing Wholesalers are NOT in the Search Engines”

Hee Hee. I beg to differ, Mr Malta In fact, its not just this web site. I watch all the search engine competition and Google which used to really have a bunch of junk in their listings, now has seen the light and has pretty much indexed our customers too. They still leave junk all around them which makes it hard to use them to source products efficiently. Basically, Malta’s argument is that all the huge wholesalers don’t advertise on the Internet because they don’t want to be bothered with small retail customers. I could name about 20 huge wholesalers who’ve been around for 20, 30, 50 years who advertise on Top Ten. Malta says these people want to work with you, but you have to find them.

Wholesalers are advertising, wholesalers don’t just want your business, they need it. Are there giant wholesalers who don’t advertise very much beyond to the trade, because they have contractual understandings with their dealer network so they don’t accidentally steal customers from their bread and butter network. You bet. But, what happens when you get all Sherlock Holmes up in heah and find them and send them an email. “Hey What’s Up Mr Double Secret Wholesaler?” What happens is they refer you to their network of dealers So I guess Mr. Malta isn’t technically wrong. But, why don’t you just skip all that nonsense and search for the product you want

Whats my rule? If somebody ever tells you “Don’t bother doing that, it will never work” - They are trying to keep you away from doing it because they fear it will work. Hmm, fear, hey look “fear” is the first component of the FUD strategy.

Malta also says

Most of the wholesalers who do show up in the search engines are actually middlemen and scammers who are trying to cheat you out of your profit margin.

See, I can’t stand this kind of stuff. What if I came up to you and said “Don’t use the phone book. Most of the advertisers in there are scammers.” You would think I was crazy and you might also think “What else I am supposed to do if not use the phone book?’ That’s when I tell you that I have typed up a list of some of the best things I found in the phone book and you can have it for $79.99. Well, hey, maybe there’s a reason I don’t like the phone book, because I stand to make 80 bucks every time I can convince someone else not to like it, too. Chris Malta is the same way, he doesn’t like wholesalers in the search engines because they cost him money.

So here he is saying “You can’t trust something that’s free! Use my paid service” Here I am saying “Use my free service” Who has more credibility?

This is the most successful flea market promotion in history. 2 million people have played this clip on Youtube. It’s the #1 result in google for “minimall”
and as of this writing, it’s on the first page of google for flea market.

People stop on their vacations at this place to film the owner, and learn how to dance like him.

Do you have any marketing piece as powerful as this?

There’s no way to know what’s going to be viral. I sat for years bemoaning the fact that it was impossible to have fun or be funny about the wholesale industry. Wholesale industry websites exist at the pleasure of their advertisers, so it’s hard to suggest to your customer that they make a fool out of themselves. But, look at the above video. Sammy Stephens is no fool, and even if you started watching and thought he was, you don’t think that now, do you? The only place he is laughing is to the bank.

The name of his business and his slogan have been driven into millions of people’s heads. What would that be worth to you? This is what I learned from Sammy Stephens and the Montgomery Flea Market Video.

• Be Fearless - It’s your business, are you ashamed to be out in front of it? Way too many web guys, this web guy included, enjoy the anonymity that comes from making web sites and selling without having to talk to anyone. It’s a great thing but if you don’t want to be out front promoting it along with yourself, you are going to miss some big benefits. Meeting people for instance, its not just finding customers, but if you want to meet talented people that can help you, whether its Ellen DeGeneres or a blogger or just a talented web designer you can hire.those people need to have a face to connect with. When you build links, send a newsletter or go to a trade show, you will gain more if you also have a personal presence. Sammy Stephens can get a meeting with a lot of people, just because he made a commercial where he dances and sings. If you’re ashamed to dance and sing about your company, maybe you should sell it.

• There’s no real good way to start out and “Be Viral” - I’ve seen some pretty heinous corporate video. You can see plenty of it on YouTube. What you can do is try to be original and funny to the best of your ability. It’s not that hard, here’s a company that works hard on its internet marketing with great success, and they have made a viral video.

When I show you what your Competition is doing, I’m trying to move you towards action. There’s a lot more to the new style of internet marketing than just “going viral” but what going viral ultimately means is that your message is picked up and carried forward by others. Other people, other sites have to not just drop you some links, they have to host your message as art of their content. Once they are hosting your content, they are investing with you and your goal. Honor that investment by giving them good stuff to chew on. You’re going to hear a lot more about this over the coming weeks.

Related Posts on Other Blogs:

The Secret Strategies of Behind Viral Videos

Seven Deadly Sins of Viral Video Advertising

Why Everyone Wants a Viral Video