Your ultimate guide: How to trade successfully at a Sample Sale
Our top 10 tips (learnt over the past seven years!)
We host a Small Business Sample Sale twice a year in London: these are our only discount events of the year! They’ve become famous, often with huge queues out the door, because our gorgeous customers are so excited to shop your gorgeous handmade and vintage products with a discount they can’t normally find! They love bargain hunting!!
Because it’s a pop-up that’s specifically geared towards discounts, trading at our Sample Sale is actually very different to trading at our regular markets! So we wanted to give you the full low-down on what to expect when you’re trading at our Sample Sale, how best to organise your stall layout, what pricing structures we’d recommend to maximise sales, what to share on social media to attract customers, how to use signage to communicate your discounts clearly and loads more.
This is our full juicy and complete guide to trading at our Sample Sale: stuffed full of our expert advice and top tips, things we’ve learnt over the past seven years of running markets and sample sales. Let’s get cracking…
1. Keep your discounts simple
The aim of any Sample Sale is simple: You want to sell as much as possible, and the customers want to find the biggest discounts possible. The answer to making both of these things happen is to keep your discounts as simple as possible. This is one of the most important things about trading at a Sample Sale!
We often see traders with confusing offers: buy 2 get 1 half price, 35% off but extra deals if you buy more than one thing. When a customer is stood in front of your stall they want to easily and immediately see what kind of deals you have so they can work out the best bargain. If you’re discounts are confusing, they will become confused about how to get the best deal: and confused customers don’t spend money.
We would recommend offering one clear discount amount across your whole stall but if that doesn’t work, consider offering simple category-based discounts.
The best examples are:
One discount amount: 30% OFF EVERYTHING
Simple category discounts: 20% off bags, 30% off tops, 40% off shorts
Simple cash discounts: £10 off this, £20 off that, £30 off that
These are clear and easy to communicate, they are clear and easy for customers to understand, they are clear and easy to put on signage. This means customers can more quickly work out what they want to buy, and therefore new customers can more quickly get to the front of your stall. It keeps customers moving, rather than lingering around trying to work out what 35% off is and whether they should buy a third to get an extra 10% off.
Do steer clear of convoluted pricing structures, you will waste so much time on the day trying to work out what a customer needs to pay, and customers will waste so much time trying to work out how to get the best deal.
We’d also use this opportunity to do the biggest discounts you feel you can. Use this opportunity to offload stock while you have thousands of price-conscious customers in front of you.
2. Layout your table by discount
As this is a Sample Sale Market, our suggestions about how you display your table are different too. This is less of a beauty contest, and more about using your stall layout to communicate your discounts so customers can easily shop by price.
We’d recommend grouping your products by discount on your table, so for example, all products with 40% off on the left, all products with 30% off in the middle and all products with 20% off on the right. This simple layout will mean customers are able to instantly grasp what type of products have what type of discounts which will help them make their purchasing decisions more quickly. The more quickly you can get customers through your sales pipeline, the more quickly new customers can get to the front of your stall to buy things.
Lots of traders like to have a “bargain bucket” on their table with their bits and bobs that have major discounts. This is a great idea! It helps those extremely price-sensitive customers navigate to the best bargains as quickly as possible. This works especially well for ceramics where you may have samples that have small imperfections and therefore are being sold off really cheaply.
Group products together by discount
Organise products in descending amounts: highest on the left, lowest on the right
Put your absolute bargains into a little “bargain bucket” on your table
3. Try grouping products in crates or boxes
Further to what we said in point two, an easy way to group products neatly and clearly is to put them into separate crates or boxes. Lots of brands use the HAY crates because they’re cheap, durable, come in a variety or sizes and colours and also fold flat so are easy to transport. I think this idea is especially useful if you sell ceramics, art prints and accessories as those type of products can easily sit in boxes on a table allowing customers to rummage through the (customers really like to rummage!)
Using crates or boxes also means you have areas that you can fix signs to! Each box can have its own price or discount amount clearly clipped to the front.
4. Communicate your discounts in large signage
Because you want to keep customers moving through your stall: approaching, shopping, then paying and leaving, it’s super important to have large clear signage that communicate your discount amounts. It just helps them see immediately what to expect when shopping your stall and therefore make their purchase more quickly so new customers can start to shop with you.
Your sale signage doesn’t need to be fancy or even particularly on-brand, the most important thing is that your signage is large, easy to read, and easy to understand. And that it is placed around your table so that all customers can see it.
Use “Sale” coded colours for your signs to communicate discounts, the colour red is particularly associated with sale. Neon colours are also associated with sale, particularly those bright neon pricing stars which you can write on with a thick black marker pen. They are cheap and can be blue-tacked to products.
As well as large signs, every individual item should be labelled with its before price, and after price. This is very compelling to customers and also means they don’t need to bother you asking you how much every single thing is, which means you can use your time more efficiently making sales.
5. Every item needs to be discounted by at least 20%
As we mentioned when we booked you in, all products sold at the Sample Sale need to be discounted by at least 20% each. This is so we are able to set a clear minimum expectation for customers. Customers know they can expect to find at least 20% off every single item: it helps us avoid complaints if customers know exactly what they’ll find. You control your discount amounts, but we’d recommend doing the biggest discounts you can: why not offload old and past season stock to a price-sensitive customer while your stall is in front of them!
6. Do social media content about your discounts
Just like our markets, our Sample Sale gets the highest traffic footfall when every trader takes an active role in doing marketing of the event! So definitely use your social media channels to their maximum, and share content on all of your channels about the fact you’re taking part and will be offering discounts for one day only.
Unlike a normal market, for a Sample Sale you’ll want to focus your content on the fact that this is a discount event, that you and all the other traders will be offering reduced prices they wouldn’t normally find. And of course that you might also be selling unique and one-off samples that won’t find again! A Sample Sale is a really exciting proposition for a customer, so use this to your advantage to create social media content that will perform really well and reach lots of lovely potential customers!
Content ideas:
Share the Sample Sale poster on all your channels, and use the caption to share the key info about the event including the exact location with postcode, times, nearest train and tube stations, the fact it’s free entry and dog friendly. Please do also mention it’s an 18+ venue so no children are allowed
Share a carousel post which shows a full catalogue of exactly what products you’ll have, and the price of each one, with the discount amount clearly shown
On the morning of the market share images of your stall (which should have clear signage on it!) and use the caption to go into more detail about what discounts you’ll be offering and exactly what customers can find if they come to shop with you
7. If you’re trading from a rail there’s a few things to do
If you’re trading from a rail, there are a few things we can suggest! First, it’ll be even more important to price all your individual items as you’ll have less room for signage. We recommend large swing tags attached to each piece of clothing, with a giant before and after price. You could do this with a red marker pen for added effect. We’d recommend getting a clip-on sign attachment to go on the top of your rail so you can organise your clothes by their discount amount. You may even want to follow this example and buy the red sale signs to go inside them too - we think they look really compelling and will catch your customer’s eye.
8. It isn’t about newness it’s about discounts
While normal markets are all about offering customers new and exclusive items to get them excited, a Sample sale is different because the customers are more price sensitive and want to be excited by big discount amounts instead. A Sample Sale isn’t necessarily the place to advertise “New” items but instead to offer the biggest discounts you can and really shout about them! If you have new products, great, but don’t feel compelled to create or source new things for this type of event. Save them to launch full price!
9. If a product is imperfect/damaged then communicate this to the customer
Part of the stock you bring to a Sample Sale may be imperfect products with small damages. If this is the case, that’s no problem at all! But we would recommend making this clear when the customer purchases it so you don’t get any complaints after. This is especially true for ceramics and artwork whose products are easily damaged and broken. Any product with a defect should be clearly labelled.
10. Remember, this is a Sample Sale!
Finally, it sounds silly, but it’s really important to remember the fact that this event is a Sample Sale and not a normal market! Get your Sample Sale head on: this is an event that is driven by bargain hunting and discounts. While you’ll still want to chat to customers about your process, skill and the provenance of the product, this definitely isn’t as important at a Sale. These customers are very much looking for the biggest discounts they can find!
Image examples below:
1: A dream layout example! Products all grouped by discount with clear large red signs
2: One simple discount with before and after prices
3: Neon signage is simple but effective
4: Signpost everything
5: Large signs + simple discounts are best! Please note you won’t be able to stick things to the walls
6: Products organised by discount amount left to right
7: Clear brand name, clear discount amounts
8: For rails, get a little clip-on so you can have a sign above your rail (would suggest a bolder font!)
9: One simple discount
10: Example of crates! Fix signage to the front with discount amount
11: Another example of crates, they look so neat lined up and mean you can easily organise product by discount amount and also can fix signage to them that explains what type of product they are for example “Seconds” or “Past season”
12: Another nice example of crates, you can fix signs to them. I would suggest bolder signs than this!
13: Each product should be individually labelled with the before and after price, use red to denote a discount
14: Individually priced products, again using red to hammer home the sale message
15: An example Instagram post but instead use the words “What I’m taking to Salad Days Sample Sale”
16: Another Instagram post example that performed really well, it was a gallery with images of all the products
