The first Monday of October is National Consignment Day.
The day celebrates sustainable shopping as well as earning money with your own items.
Consignment Shopping
When shopping, purchasing consignment is the same as “shopping secondhand”.
This is a way to add to our wardrobes without purchasing new.
We can shop at an estate sale or in a secondhand store in the local area.
This might be a fun day out with a friend hunting for the perfect treasure.
Consignment Selling – Offline
Selling via consignment can be a great way to get clutter of unworn clothes out of our closet.
Here the differences in selling options become important.
Non-consignment selling would be a tag/garage sale.
We market, price, and sell the item keeping 100% of the profit.
Consignment sales remove the hassle of selling, but we receive a smaller percentage of the sales.
Take the items to a store in the area and they will either pay as they receive the items or provide a percentage after the item sells. The percentage taken will vary based on the store, so it is good to shop around.
Consignment Selling – Online
The online version of the garage sale would be to sell on Facebook Marketplace. While there can be small fees for shipping and processing, those aren’t there if you sell live/local.
There are two levels of consignment selling online: Seller Posting and Company Posting.
Seller Posting: In this model, we determine what to sell, take the photos, and create the listing. This enables us to list anything we want, price at what we think the product is worth, ship each sale, and collect a larger percentage of profit. We also have the burden of time these things take. Several alternatives with the fees at time of this posting are also listed:
- Etsy – 6.5% of the sale price + $0.20 per item listing fee.
- eBay – The fees for eBay listings are 13.25% of sales + $0.30/order
- Poshmark – This is the simplest alternative with a flat 20% per sale. The other advantage is that the focus of the site is clothing. So, we know shoppers are looking for apparel items.
Company Posting: In this model, the brands are taking the responsibility of sales off our plate. We send in a box of clothes, they determine what will sell on their site, take photos, and create the listing. The downside is that we receive a smaller percentage of the sales price. Below are two options to the company posting model:
- ThredUp – The profits are on a price of item scale $20 = 15%, $50=30%, $100=60%
- TheRealReal – This consignment works on total sales and the percentage grows with more sales on the site. With over $1000, we receive 80%.
Your Turn
Do you have clothing items you want to sell?
Which of the models above would work best for you?
Could you take one step today to list an item on a seller site or send a box to a company site?