Live Sale Recap

     Saturday was my second ever Field of Dolls Studio live sale on Facebook. I have been prepping for this since January. Making things and buying things for prizes. This week I decided I would offer some things for sale that I tried to sell at the swap meet that was at some point at the end of last year and seems like a lifetime ago. I figured I had the potential to have more traffic than at the swap meet since people are bored being in quarantine. So I pulled out sales stuff that I had collected and sales stuff I had made and got everything organized. 

     I had paper lunch bags to write everyone's name on who claimed items, which would keep everything organized and, hopefully, save me an incredible amount of time and stress when it came time to invoice, pack and ship. My original goal was to have Elecktra come and help me. She could have been writing names on bags and organizing them while I kept the sale moving. But stay-at-home orders (just a strong suggestion in our state. Which we are following) prevented that. Still, the bags were incredibly good helpers!

     I thought about what makeup I wanted for awhile. I settled on rainbow to match my Unicorns are Real T-shirt. I also had rainbow earrings. I end up looking down a lot during a live, so people had plenty of opportunity to see my rainbow shadow. 

And plenty of opportunity to see me move my hair out of my way. 

And make silly faces while running around.

And squint a bit to try to read all the comments on my phone. 

Plenty of chances to see me pull off the sharpie cap with my teeth

and a lot of shots of my empty closet doors as I went out to frame to organize sold items. 

     At the end of the sale almost all of the items I offered were gone and I was left with, what I called, organized chaos. The paper lunch bags for everyone's claimed items was a HUGE help after the sale. I didn't need to go back through the live and see what people had claimed, everything was already separate. I has asked everyone to pm me their email address so I could start invoicing when I got a chance, and I made a list with everyone's name and email. Then I had supper, which Ethan had made (awsome) and I grabbed my list and got to work. Things went very smoothly, and fairly quickly considering how many invoices I needed to make. 

    With my list in hand I would grab 4-5 bags and bring them out to the kitchen where I would start the invoice and immediately packed the person's items for shipping. So not only did I get invoicing done, I also got packing done. I didn't do any of the shipping labels yet, but I got an excellent start on things! I ended up with a biggish box, 2 paper grocery bags and a big Breyer bag full of packages! Things went really well and I feel that the new way of doing things was a huge time saver and I love it. I wish I could remember who recommended bags (or was it baskets? I don't have enough baskets so bags totally worked!) this was an incredible idea. 

      So to sum up, and add to, useful tips for hosting a live sale, be organized. Have your inventory sorted and laid out before your sale starts. If you can, make backwards numbers to help people claim (they need to be backwards to read correctly on camera). I have used Paint and Publisher to make backwards numbers. In Paint you just flip the image horizontally. In Publisher make the number in word art and you can grab the side of the image and flip it (super easy). Use paper bags to organize sold items. You can write the person's name directly on it, which makes things easier. Try to keep them in alphabetical order during the sale. That also makes it easier to find everyone's bag, which is a time saver. Have everyone who purchases items send you their email so you can invoice after the sale. Invoicing is actually far easier than having people just send you paypal payments. With the invoicing you will have a list of everything the person bought (as long as you type in each item, lol) and they can also see what they bought, plus you have their address once they pay. No worry about some people sending the payments in the wrong format or forgetting to send an address. Easy. 
     If you have everyone on a list you can run down it as you invoice. I marked each one as "sent" when I sent their invoice. I also immediately packed up their items so they would not get lost and the packaging is done. Really, the bags with everyone's name on them has been the biggest time saver this time around.
     I am sort of having a vague idea of doing a live sale for just small items, especially mini food since it seems to be so popular. Would there be interest in that? I want to say a huge thank you to everyone that came and watched my live sale, whether or not you purchased anything. Thank you to everyone who shared the video or any of my ads ahead of time. I had a wonderful time at my socially distant birthday live sale!