Used Shoes: Shoe Business Opportunity in the Philippines Part 1

Photo courtesy of Will Forster from Flickr

My export business in the REDS Global Marketing side in the Philippines is still young and honestly needs some assistance in terms of sound accounting practices. I have given my aunt the authority over the retail business in the Philippines but it seems that business is not taking off. I am taking care of system for sound accounting so I could take note of the overall business's worth, considering the rental, electricity expenses, and the overhead. Anyway...

Good thing about the Philippines is that you have a market for almost everything, and used goodies is nonexempt! In our retail business where we retail majority of used clothing, shoes, accessories, kitchen utensils, appliances and etcetera, we have discovered that among all of these merchandise, we have a good market for men's shoes. Our Filipino market in Davao City is actually on the lookout for branded shoes mostly athletic shoes preferably Nike, but whatever brand name that they recognize is fine too like Adidas or Reebok. Initially what we did in the beginning (just last year) was to buy the used shoes from the Salvation Army. There are also times where we pick free stuff listed in Craigslist, so there is actually a good margin for us, especially when its all free. An idea came to mind: since this commodity is a hit and we actually generate good profit from used shoes, why not look for bulk suppliers for discount shoes online. There are actually a lot of sellers that sell by the pallets or by vans, depending on your capacity to buy.

I first came to the site called Liquidation.Com, it is an online sellers' portal for everything where the buyer have to bid for the items. I later weighed the pros and cons of bidding, and I found that its not worth it. There are bidders line up for good quality items on auction of course, but as to my cost versus profit computation, what I could afford to place a bid on are items that I am not sure of the assortments. Liquidation.Com do not provide a Contact Seller option, and I find it kind of a hassle to contact the main office to request for a manifest from the seller. I want to save time as I am an exceptionally busy person even in my sleep (go ask my wife).

So I did more research for suppliers of used shoes online. I also considered buying brand new clearance shoes from big department stores, but later on I will write on that one and for now would like to keep my focus on the used ones for this post's sake. Buying the shoes in bulk entails additional cost for the shipment and the sales tax, so I focused on looking for a supplier with a fixed price per pallet with the possibility of no sales tax that also offers free shipping across US mainland for free. Guess what? I actually found a lot of these sellers in Closeout Central.

I am currently in the process of setting up an efficient accounting system for my retail business in the Philippines and when I'm ready, I will proceed on buying used shoes in bulk. For now, I bet there is a sufficient inventory of items to sell in there and I have 5 more boxes to send this month. By the way, I send the items via a Balikbayan Box service, $65 per 22x22x22 box, 1.5 month lead time, door to door delivery.