6 Practical Tips and Tricks for a Successful Yard Sale

With spring right around the corner, it’s time to start planning your next yard sale. A yard sale or garage sale is a fantastic way to get rid of things you no longer need and still make a little money off of them. If you make or sell crafts, you can also sell them at your yard sale. Check out these six practical tips and tricks for a successful yard sale.

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The key to a successful garage or yard sale is getting the word out. One way to do that is by posting on your local Facebook or Nextdoor group. If you have a lot of items in a desirable category (like children’s clothes), make sure to highlight that information in the ad.

For your roadside signs, you’ll need several large sheets of white or neon posterboard. Write the essential information on the sign, including “Yard Sale” and your address. It also helps to draw an arrow pointing to the correct road leading to your house. Make sure to use a thick permanent marker so that your letters are easy to see from the road.

The best tool to put your signs in the ground is a wooden stake. You can either tape your sign to the stake or make it double-sided with the stake in the center. Make sure you securely attach it to your stake so it doesn’t blow away in the wind.

Pro-Tip: Reusing Signs

If you plan on having another garage sale in the future, it helps to leave off the dates of the sale. If the sign is out, people will assume the sale is happening. If you leave off the dates, you can collect your signs after the sale ends and reuse them next time.

An attractive yard sale should look full of interesting things from a distance. If you don’t have enough items to fill both your driveway and the garage, move things out onto the driveway. You want the majority of your items to be visible from the road. Anything that is particularly attractive, like big pieces of furniture, needs to be out in front where it can catch people’s attention.

If you plan on holding a garage sale on a regular basis, it helps to invest in some quality display racks. These include metal clothing racks and large folding tables. You can often find used clothing racks for cheap when stores in the area close out. You might also look online to see what’s available.

As you set out your wares for sale, it helps to group things by category so people can find what they’re looking for. Some categories you might use include:

Children’s toys

Children’s clothes

Adult clothing

Dishes and kitchenware

Accessories (shoes, purses, etc.)

Electronics

Jewelry

Home decorations

Media (books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and music)

There are two main ways that people keep track of sales: tags and stickers. If you use tags, you’ll need to remember to save each one so you can count them up later and make sure your totals match. If multiple family members have items at your sale, it’s even more important that you keep track of whose sales are whose. If you’re keeping tags, you’ll need to find something to store them in.

For speed, we recommend using stickers instead of tags. First of all, stickers can go on all kinds of items, while you have to tie on tags. Untying or clipping tags also takes more time than peeling off a sticker. We recommend keeping a notebook handy where you can re-stick the stickers for easy bookkeeping. And if you have different family members’ sales to account for, it’s easy to give each of them their own page of stickers.

Pro-Tip: Easy Sticker Removal

Permanent stickers usually come off clothes and fabric items pretty easily, but they can be hard to remove from other items. In order to make sticker removal easier, put the sticker on the back of your hand before applying it to an item. The oil on your skin will help it peel up later.

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If you’re going to have a yard sale, you need to be careful about how you store your money. We recommend using a cash box with a lock instead of an envelope or another container. If you have to go inside for any reason, make sure to take the cash box with you so no one steals it. Never leave kids in charge of the cash box while you step inside.