To think that charging £20 for a stall at a Nearly New Sale is OTT?

[BimbaBirba]

Would you pay £20 for a stall, go through the hassle of selling your stuff yourself but then keep 100% of the proceeds immediately...OR... or would you rather dump all your stuff at the local NCT sale, keep 70% of the proceeds and wait a month or more to have your money?...OR...would you rather sell at a garage sale?
I'm thinking of starting a business of organising NNS and selling stalls but I would need to charge at least £20 per stall to pay for the venue and marketing the sales. Would that be too much?
TIA

well it costs about £6 for a stall at a car boot near me with a huge footfall.....20 is alot

I wouldn't pay that much, I have been to a number of NNS with some lovely stuff, its ideal for the larger items, but many people don't bother trawling through clothes, especially when there is a room full of people selling their baby girls clothes.

I spent an age labelling up all my dds beautiful clothes, all excellent condition, all JoJo, gap, boden, verbaudet etc, and had hardly any interest purely because people cant be bothered to look through things, I did sell baby walkers, play mats, baby swing etc.

Good luck with it though.

way too much!
we charge £12 for stalls at our PTA fair for outside cup cake businesses etc, and they are going to do a roaring trade - at £20 a stall you may have loads of people not making a penny to take home

most people do this through ebay thesedays - fits so conveniently in with their lifestyle, no outlay, no childcare worries, and millions of potential customers to browse through your items if you word things correctly

I think you might find that you are limiting the pople who want to sell. Our NCT sale locally charges 4 quid per 20 items I think, so to compete you would need people to be selling at least 80 itme, once you take into account the fact that you wouldn't be charging commission. Some people would be up for that but my limited experience is that quite a lot of people put forward considerably fewer items than that.

Seem OTT to me.
Most car boots / table top sales here seem to charge about £6, so that's a massive jump.
Of course a lot of people sell tuff on e-bay.
The 'someone else selling it for me' option sounds appealling. Are you just talking about baby stuff, or all kinds of saleable things ? and what happens if nothing much sells ?

eBay is such a pain though. It takes ages to list, answer questions, pack and post, etc. If you have lots of £1 items, would you not rather sell them all in one go?
I take the point that selling at car boot sales is cheaper but it's a less targeted audience so in theory sellers wouldn't do as well.
Oh well, thanks for your comments anyway!

you can sell a job lot on ebay to one buyer though - my friend is always doing this - some people keep coming back to buy her DDs next stage up clothes because they were pleased with quality/honesty of descriptions of the baby items they had bought from her previously

ideal for buyers too - no faffing around trawling through stalls at a sale, look from the comfort of your sofa!

am not talking about the deluded idiots folk who list every individual stained babygrow starting at £2 + a fiver postage!

I'm surprised by other responses. I've never looked into costs of this stuff but if someone said it cost £20 for a pitch I'd be quite happy, so long as the facilities were decent. I don't do ebay any more, it's not worth the hassle.

Have you heard of Jack and Jill markets? www.jackandjillmarket.co.uk/

They charge £23 per stall and seem to be beating folk off with shitty sticks!

I do car boots all the time, and the most I ever paid was £20 for a proper market stall at the weekend with a footfall of hundreds of people. I just unbooked a stall at a NNS, after reading their T&Cs. £6 per stall (great) but the organisers come round just before the end and take 20% of your takings off you 'for the church funds'. Cheeky feckers.

No way Laguardia! That's outrageous!

Thanks for the link Strawberrie. It sounds like a large enterprise and probably a profitable one looking at the waiting lists for selling! It's encouraging at least!

NCT sales give so much profit back because they would be completely unprofitable without hundreds of volunteer hours. The model is the best for buyers and sellers so people like it.

I did a Jack and Jill market - it was £23, but I made over £150. My view is that its worth paying to get a stall in an event where people are looking for exactly what you have to sell. I tried a car boot sale previously and sold virtually nothing and what I did sell went for pennies. eBay is too much of a hassle these days and folk just take the piss on Gumtree.

Out of curiosity where are you based?
NCT sales local to me in SW London charge £30 per table and seem to have no problem aquiring both sellers and buyers.
I appreciate this may not be the same in other areas

Cambs. No way as rich as SW London so I think £20 would be to absolute most I could charge.
Would you spend money advertising in Council magazines and local village gazettes or would you go for leaflet dropping? Personally I hate leaflets when they arrive on my doorstep. I just put them in the green bin without even looking at them. There's also the local hospital magazine (which has a maternity ward) but it costs £250 for a tiny ad so not sure it'd be worth it! They print 15,000 copies and also goes to GP surgeries and children's centres.
Arghh, I wish I was just a bit braver and less risk adverse!

If you are going to do it, do it fast because I have seen two 'copycat' sales spring up in our region in the last couple of months so it is obviously seen as a viable business.

The sales near me have 1/2 to 1/3 nearly new stalls, and the rest trade (eg Usborne books, fingerprint jewellers, crafters, etc).