Consigned to consignment

There was a very large consignment event this past weekend. I decided to do it to start getting some items out of the house, mainly clothes and toys. The one think I liked about this event was that it had web based where you entered your items and printed your tags. You could also track your sold items.

I worked on this for 2 weeks. I gathered baby clothes and accessories, maternity clothes and toys. I entered the items and printed tags. I bought toddler hangers to hang the clothes and attached the tags. I bagged smaller items in Ziploc bags. All this up until the night before I dropped the items off at the location. I ended up entering 177 items but made mistakes on 3 items so ended up not including them because entering items had been locked down by the time I noticed the error. Despite that, with 174 items, had high hopes of making buckets of money.

I checked the online inventory throughout the weekend and it showed no items sold. That couldn't be right. I certainly did not want to pick up all my stuff. The sale closed Saturday at 3. I got there at 2:45 and saw so many clothes still on the racks. Yikes! I would have to search through all the racks to find my stuff.

I spent 2 hours going through the racks and then marking them off the list. I did sell some items, or at least hoped that I did because I don't offer the 5 finger discount. I got checked out with my items to make sure I didn't grab anyone's stuff. I did some quick calculations and it looks like I sold a little over $200. After the fee and my percentage, I probably made $130. It's a good thing I didn't shop for anything.

Do I feel it was worth my time and effort? Not really. My mom's group also has their biannual Buy and Sell in September and I was hoping to get away from doing that. I may have to to get more stuff out of the house. At least my items are prepped so I won't be spending as much time getting things ready.

I took away some things from this experience.
*Prep way in advance if there are lots of clothing items to sell
*Don't price items too high
*Use special identification such as a brightly colored tag, special hangers or ribbon tied around hangers to easily spot my items
*Don't let the boys "help" or be in the same room while I am prepping and tagging. (Their idea of helping is to remove every single item out of all the baggies, hiding said items and trying to pull all the tape off the roll. I have crumpled up baggies and tape everywhere.)