SMC "Specialty Merchandise Corporation" has been around for a long time. I'm sure pretty much anyone who owns a TV has seen the infomercial. SMC is a catalog based sales system so the idea is that you show people your catalogs and they buy things. Pretty cut and dry really. There is no inventory to manage and all items are drop shipped directly to your customers. Sure, 99% of the products are useless junk but I don't know anyone that doesn't collect useless junk from time to time:)

As someone who has actually made some money with SMC, I can tell you that it is a legitimate income opportunity. Back in the late 90's, before I joined the military, my wife and I did manage to make several thousand dollars with SMC. We enlisted several sub-wholesalers and spread our catalogs over 3 counties. The only problem was making a consistent income. We decided to go with the ecommerce package but soon realized that the mass produced website we received was just a payment processor and never produced actual sales. Since SMC forbids ANY advertising online and all of the search engines HATE replicated websites you end up paying a couple grand for an online catalog.

One of the biggest problems you'll run into is all of the little novelty items. They're typically a pretty easy sell but let's say you sell a necklace for $3 and your profit is $1.50. You go to order the necklace and find that you have to order a minimum of 10.. and the shipping is always outrageous. Now all of a sudden you've spent $30 and only made $1.50. This is a constant problem for all SMC distributors. You end up with closets full of useless novelty items and always lose money on the little stuff.

Does SMC stack up as a viable home business? If your dream is to run a gift store, this is a great place to start. You WILL make back your initial investment from just friends and family orders (unless of course you decide to go with their ecommerce package). The products are reasonably priced so it's an easy sell (even though no one really needs any of this stuff), and your profit is usually  100%-300%. Don't bother paying for one of the SMC prebuilt websites. There are already thousands of them online and you'll never make enough money to make it worth your effort. The real opportunity is the sub wholesaler program. You can recruit other people to sell for "your company" and get a cut of their profits on every item. All you do is process the orders.

All in all SMC isn't a bad company. There's not much red tape and at the least, you're going to make your money back. The problem with this type of home business is the odds of you ever making the kind of income it takes to pay the bills and support a family are slim to none. 

Here is a system that's doing really well for me. Since it's only $1 to get started there's virtually no risk and it's very easy to be in profit right from the start. The main reason I like this system is that it shows you how to start small and grow big while always staying in the green. None of those high dollar startup costs and over priced mentoring programs that you see so often. Learn and grow at your own pace without all those upfront fees.

Click here to Check it! 

                                                                                                                                                              Chad E.

Small Business News