This is the presentation that Kim Lohrberg (aka the Liquidation Lady) gave at the WHSL conference in Louisville, Kentucky. 

I originally started my company, Key Internet Marketing, Inc. (acronym KIM) by making websites and monetizing them with affiliate marketing, and my first website was about coupons and saving people time and money. Then I made one about my preemie twins, my love for shoes and even one for my favorite team, the Nebraska Cornhuskers! These websites were my main source of income for over twenty years. I had the luxury of working at home (before it was the norm) and being there for my children when they were little.

My children are now grown (and require less of my time), so in 2016, I started dabbling into retail arbitrage, which led to online arbitrage and the world of liquidation. In 2020, I sold my websites which gave me more time (and money) to invest in the liquidation aspect of my business. 

Side Note: To create your own action figure, type the following prompt with your changes into ChatGPT: 

“Create an image of an action figure in packaging labeled ‘[Your Label]’. Use the attached photo as a reference for the face. [He/She] is dressed in [Outfit Description], and holding [Item, e.g., Coffee Mug]. The cardboard section should be [Color]. Include an ‘Accessories’ section with items like [List Accessories]. Make the design visually appealing and reflective of a [Describe Industry]. Do not include the character image on packaging.”

We now buy truckloads of liquidation from Target, Macy’s, Dollar General, Walmart and more and resell items online. We are in the top 5% of third-party sellers on Amazon FBA and are rising on Walmart Marketplace.

When we started to become overwhelmed with inventory that we couldn’t sell online, whether it be damaged product, returns or just something we can’t sell, I came up with the idea of a $5 Liquidation Popup sale where we sold all our extra inventory – everything was $5 – we were basically a bin store before bin stores were a thing!

We started selling at flea markets and vendor shows.

Then we rented a building just for popup sales.

And now we have our own warehouse where we host sales. 

We have Liquidation Popup sales about once a month, usually on Sunday afternoon from 1-3 pm, and the theme varies every month. It may be “everything is $5” or “everything is $25” or it may be a big appliance, furniture and/or mattress sale. We tested being open more hours and days even, but it turned out everyone wanted to be there right when we opened. Now people line up hours in advance for our sales. It’s like Black Friday at every sale. Woman’s World even did a story about our Liquidation Popup sales!

One thing we noticed with our $5 sales is that no one took the time to look at the clothing, and we get nice clothing. So in 2021, we opened up what we call a “liquidation boutique” called Bend The Trend. Those same clothes that we couldn’t sell for $5, we now sell for $12 a piece – go figure?! We just raised our prices from $10 earlier this year due to inflation.

Our liquidation boutique is only open Thursdays 12-6 and Saturdays 10-2. We were originally open 6 days a week, all day long, but realized Thursdays and Saturdays were the busiest. And now, much like our popup sales, the shorter hours gives a sense of urgency, and we have lines at the door when we open Thursdays and Saturdays. And our staff overhead is less, so it’s a win-win.

Actually, all of my paid staff are retired women. I’m telling you retired women are the best reliable and honest workers. We also have about a dozen friends and family help with the popup sales, but they all work for free lunch and free stuff. 

Social Media

So how do we get traffic to our store and our popup sales? It’s all through social media. We’ve tried newspaper ads and radio ads, but our real sales came through social media. So, I’m going to share the exact methods that I use to be successful.

Facebook

Facebook is by far the most popular social media network that we utilize so we are going to focus on that. 

Facebook Page 

Do you have a Facebook business page? You need a Facebook business page! The “Intro” on the page allows you to include a physical address, a link to your website, a link to your Instagram profile (because Meta who owns Facebook also owns Instagram), your open hours, your price range ($) and a link to your Reviews. 

Update your cover photo periodically as every time you edit that, it shows up as a post.  

Facebook Groups

Do you have a Facebook group? If you don’t have a Facebook group, start one today. Yes, you need a business page and a group. Groups get more interaction than pages, and lets people ask questions that give you more exposure. You may get sick of someone always asking “when are you open” or “what’s your address” but that’s more eyes every time you reply and pushes your posts up in the algorithm.

Plus Facebook has been really touchy lately, and if you lose your page or your group, you’ll still have the other. A couple of years ago, I posted about some “designer inspired” perfume that we had for sale at the boutique, and Facebook shut down my page claiming that meant “counterfeit”. Never use the words “knockoff” or “replica” – I’m even leery of using the word “dupe” nowadays. 

Business Suite

I highly suggest that if you don’t use the Meta Business Suite – business.facebook.com – start immediately. It’s totally free and actually has a ton of features. 

It integrates with your Facebook page, Instagram and Facebook groups, and you can see and respond to comments and messages in the interface. You can also toggle easily between accounts, for instance I have pages and groups for all of my different businesses. And I can post quickly to pages and groups at the same time.

The above is a post for the sale we had this past weekend. 

The most used tabs I used in the Business Suite include: 

• Notifications – This lets you see all comments you’ve received and if you need to respond. You should try to respond even if they didn’t ask a question.
• Planner – Here is a calendar of past and upcoming posts. I create posts from this page so I can see what time slots are available.
• Content – This shows you the distribution of you content. Review this to see which posts got the most views, likes, comments, etc.
• Insights – Overview of your performance – look at this monthly
• Inbox – Under Inbox, you can set up Automations. Look for the Automations symbol at the top of the Inbox page.  I recommend setting up “Frequently asked questions”, “Location”, “Hours” if you have set hours and “Comment to message”. I used this last week. If people wanted to know what mattresses we had available, they simply had to comment with the hashtag #mattress, and they’d get a link to the spreadsheet of mattresses with descriptions and prices. 
• Monetization – Did you know that Facebook will actually pay you for your content? Depending on how big and interactive your audience is, it can add up especially if you do a lot of videos. I would say my videos are lacking, but I still made over $100 last month from my Facebook content. 
• Ads – the only ads I recommend are Events – do not boost your posts. If you do, Facebook will only show boosted posts and expect/hope you boost them all. I don’t boost any posts.
• Marketing Messages – this is in beta and is currently free. I’ve been playing around with it asking people who like and comment if they want to sign up for updates. 

I could probably do a whole talk just on Facebook Business Suite, but we need to move on. 

Other Facebook Groups

Let’s go back to groups for a minute. Join local exchange groups as your business (not all groups allow this). For example, I live in Pierce County, so I joined the “Pierce County Exchange” and all of the surrounding county exchanges.   

When you post via the Business Suite, you can post to your page, Instagram and up to 3 groups which one being your own. Also join exchange groups with your personal page, and you can share your business posts as your personal page. Be sure to include some content 

Events

Make events with your page as the host. We have events for our popup sales and our in-store liquidation boutique sales. Use as many keywords (otherwise known as keyword stuffing) as you can in your title (up to 100 characters) and description so when people are searching events, they can find your event (I always include the date and location as well as what we are selling and payment types. Let them know you take credit cards! And if you don’t take cards, I’d highly recommend it. We personally use Square.

Then when logged in as your Page, invite Page followers to the event (limited to 500). And when logged into your personal account, invite your local friends. After you do this once, it’s easy to invite the same friends that you invited to a previous event with one click. 

The only advertising that I pay for is Events. I pay $25 per event,  but be sure to change who the ad is shown to. You want to be shown in your local area (which will show up to a 50 mile radius). Since I live in a rural area, I manually input all of the surrounding zip codes. I’ve found this reaches more than just clicking “local area” but could be cumbersome if you live in an urban area. 

Make an announcement about your event and pin it as “Featured Post” so it’s at the top of your page/group. 

Best Times To Post

According to SproutSocial (who is more social media savvy than me), they did a study and the best times to post on weekdays in the morning. Personally, I try to post, once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening. I can schedule out a whole week in less than an hour usually on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.  

Post Ideas

I think several other liquidation businesses can attest that the content that does the best among readers is videos of forklifts unloading pallets. Even photos of pallets on the truck and lined up do well. While I do use and recommend Canva to create posts, Facebook prefers to show raw images with no editing. 

Facebook allows you to post live videos, which you can turn into reel. You can also post videos as a regular post and story, so post that same video as many ways as you can. 

You may have heard the marketing phrase “content is King” – so I’m going to talk about several post ideas which can be posted on all platforms, not just Facebook. 

If you can’t think of anything to post or don’t have anything good to sell at the moment, make a post and ask questions, like “what kinds of liquidation would you like us to get?”. I asked that recently, and the top response was sporting goods, so if someone out there has sporting goods, let’s make a deal!

Polls

You can also encourage interaction with polls. Facebook even has built-in poll options, but getting readers to comment their option is good, too. For example, we wanted to have a popup sale the weekend of the Superbowl, so asked our readers what day/time worked best for them. If you are thinking about what types of liquidation to buy next, ask your readers? What products would you like best to see in our store? Toys, Bedding, Appliances, Mattresses? 

Artificial Intelligence

If you’re still stumped, use AI – artificial intelligence – ask ChatGPT (there is a free version). You tell them an overview, and they will give you several options. For instance, I’ll type in that “Bend The Trend is having a summer sale with 50% off shorts. What are some good Facebook posts?” In less than a second, they will spit out easy to copy and paste content to post complete with hashtags and emojis.   

Giveaways

Giveaways are a great way to grow followers. You can give away products (which I know you have), but I personally give away store credit, and I’d rather have several small winners instead of one big winner. That way people have to come into the store to redeem the credit and usually end up buying more. 

When I do a giveaway, I make a page on my website for people to enter to win. I like to use “Giveaway Tools” (it’s free) that gives people more entries for completing more items, such as visiting your Facebook page.  Facebook does not allow users to incentivize people to like a page, so it will say “visit” instead of “like/follow” for Facebook, but chances are the people will like when they visit. It collects email addresses that I can then add to my mailing list. Giveaway tools will also randomly pick winners for you if you don’t want to pick them yourself. 

Loss Leader

My mom used to work in a furniture store. She said the owner always had a “loss leader” meaning you have to take a loss on some items to get people in the door. Recently I had some snowblowers that I got on a Home Depot salvage load. It’s a good thing my husband is handsome because he’s not handy. My husband couldn’t get any of the snowblowers to start, so we decided to sell them “as is” for $25-$50 each. You can see the actual post on the screen. “Why are we offering them for so cheap? Because we don’t know if they work!”

I was honest in the post, and there was a lot of controversy in the comments. People saying we were a scam, that the snowblowers are junk. They say any publicity is good publicity. But we had several defend us saying we were indeed legitimate and even more people wanting to buy them now (even though we said no pre-sales). We actually had people camp out of the night before the sale wanting these snowblowers. And come to find out, most of the snowblowers worked just fine (it may have been user error on our end). 

Tote Bags

Do we have anyone here that uses the Ikea blue tote bags at your store? I don’t live near an Ikea, so when we originally started our popups, we told people to bring their own tote bags and boxes – some even brought trash bags. 

Then I looked into ordering our own tote bags from China through Alibaba. I was able to get non-woven laminated bags custom sized at 19″x19″x10″ with bottom base and customized side walls made for $1 a piece (I can not guarantee you can get them now for this price due to tariffs). I did have to order 2500 at a time – it was $1500 for the bags and $1000 for the freight making them $1 per bag. I also sold advertising spots on the bag for $50 an ad (which I set up as a product on Shopify) which helped offset the cost of the bags. I had local and online businesses both buy ads. 

We originally gave away the tote bags to people that didn’t bring totes, but no one brought them back because they wanted another free one. We wanted people to reuse them. So we now charge $5 per bag and give away a free mystery bag when they reuse their yellow tote. The mystery bags are a 10×13 colored polybag filled with 5 items – basically crap that we can’t sell or is low value (think Dollar General liquidation or Bullseye). I’m sure those of you with bin stores can easily fill up some mystery bags. 

P.S. I just saw someone post that you can get bags similar to Ikea’s blue bags at Harbor Freight for only 79 cents per bag. I have not confirmed this though. 

Partnerships

I love cookies as you can tell. I actually looked into a cookie franchise a few years ago but realized I have enough irons in the fire. So I was super excited when a couple of local moms recently started a cookie business. I asked them if they wanted to set up a table and sell cookies at our popup sales. They sold out and were ecstatic, so now we have a standing relationship with them. We post about them, and they post about us. We bring each other sales and offer more of a fun and tasty experience for our customers. 

Then I got a great idea from “Deals 4 Days Bin Store” who posted “Who wants donuts in the am?! If we can get 2 dozen shares we will bring 2 dozen donuts for the line!” They got 24 shares in an hour. So I decided to offer free cookies with purchase for shares! 

Influencers

Look for local content creators – not famous ones that will charge you an arm and a leg, but micro influencers that are willing to post about you in exchange for free stuff. We offer free outfits from our local boutique to fashion influencers. It gets us free publicity and free content that we can repost as our “outfit of the day”.

Now I suppose you’re wondering how you find influencers? One, you can post saying you’re looking for content creators and tell them to DM you links to their social media so you can see what they post about it and how many people follow them. 

You can also search location-based hashtags. For me, this would be #NortheastNebraska and #NorfolkNE Not a lot of people use hashtags on Facebook, so I would suggest searching Instagram and TikTok for hashtags. 

You can also google your location with the word influencers, but it mainly brings up companies wanting you to pay. If you do have a marketing budget, there are several websites out there that will connect you with local influencers. 

Email Marketing

If you don’t have an email list, you need one. I’m sure you all have a handful of customers that don’t use social media. Ask them for your email address. You own your email list. You don’t own any of your social media accounts, so if any of those go away, you still have your email list. Free services that I recommend are MailerLite and MailChimp (both are free for up to so many subscribers). 

Once a month, I’ll make a social media post about “be the first to know” about a sale and tell people to DM their email address to get on the list. There are paid tools to automate this process, but it doesn’t take me much time to copy and paste the email address into MailerLite. You could also set up an Automation like we talked about earlier saying comment #email with details on how to get notified of our next sale. Then set it to ask them respond with their email address or enter it here with a link. 

Then I email my list every time we have a popup sale, an in-store sale and/or an online sale. The average email open rate is 15%, but we have a 46% open rate!

I do recommend that if you do have a list to download periodically as even though you own it, if too many people flag you for spam, you could get your account shut down.

SMS / Text Marketing

If you use Square as your payment processor, you can also download the email addresses of your customers. I presume other processors, like Clover, allow the same. Square also offers email and SMS (text) campaigns in their interface, but I’ve been too cheap to test that out. Text open rates are way higher than email open rates!

Final Tips

I asked AI to help me come up with closing statement with the top takeaways from my presentation, and these were it:

• Don’t say “dupe,” “replica,” or “knockoff” on FB
• Always respond to comments (even “when are you open?”)
• Think urgency + interaction = sales
• Use loss leaders to drive traffic

In the actual presentation, I asked the audience for their top take aways and gave away free editions of the Influencers in the Wild Board Game to those that participated.