Our COVID Story
At the end of March, a couple of things happened that forced us to re-imagine the way we could do business. We learned that the home for which we had an estate sale scheduled for mid-April had sold and was closing the end of May AND...COVID-19 struck which made an "in-person" sale impossible. We scrambled around and scratched our heads, then we finally bit the bullet and committed to doing an online sale using EstateSales.net -- typically a website we use only for advertising items we have for sale.
It took us a couple of weeks to figure out our process. Instead of photographing just the interesting items in the home, everything had to be photographed, titled and described, and priced, and finally posted to EstateSales.net. This was a LARGE 6,000 s.f. home with 6 bedrooms. We were still photographing and posting items on the last day of the sale! Then we had to figure out an inventory management system. Every item had to have a unique number and every item had to be identified in some way that told us the room in which it was located.
We divided tasks and duties among the 3 of us with Nell taking orders via text, email and phone; Debbie pulled items to fill the orders coming in, and I created invoices via our Square point of sale system and kept an Excel spreadsheet of sold items that had to be updated and printed out daily--one sorted numerically by inventory control number for Nell so she could see immediately what had sold and what had not sold, and one sorted by customer so Debbie could use that to help her fill orders each day. No one was allowed in the home. We had porch pick-ups only and tried to limit pick-ups to 3 days each week. When we weren't taking orders, filling orders or billing orders, we were constantly photographing items, pricing items and posting them to EstateSales.net. It was quite an experience! The sale lasted 2 months. We got such good comments from everyone who bought from us. It made us feel like all the work was worth it!
We miss everyone and look forward to the day that we can see our customers in person again. We still feel like in-person sales are risky and will be for some time to come. But now we feel like we are on-line sales experts! If you have a need, please call us. We have the means to do a safe and profitable online sale.
