Specialty Merchandise Corporation (SMC)

Specialty Merchandise Corporation has been around for years.

SMC basically allows you to sell their products. You buy them low and sell them high, at least in theory. But I talk to hundreds of people that work from home each month and I've yet to talk to a single person who can support themselves off their SMC income. Specialty Merchandise Corporation has run ads in the back of small business magazines for years. They've also run quite a few infomercials. Part of the genius of SMC was who they chose to be their spokesman for the company. They chose Tom Bosley, the dad from the old sit com Happy Days. Tom is the perfect spokesman because he just looks like someone you can trust. After all, this guy played a strict dad on T.V. so it just makes sense that America trusts this guy.

They mostly specialize in Giftware, jewelery, collectables and other general merchandise. They offer a lot of cute things for women to use and display around the house.

There are several reasons why this type of home business is one of the most difficult to make a living with. The number one thing that bothers me about this type of business is the amount of competition. The second problem I have with this type of business is the lack of mark-up or low margins. It seems to me like you'd literally need to be the size of Wal-Mart to actually get wealthy using the SMC system.

SMC has recruited thousands of SMC vendors over the years and now there's copy-cat type companies that do drop shipping that you'll also have to compete with.

The self-replicating websites that SMC gives you are nice and easy, but the problem is from my experience, search engines don't like replicated websites and usually don't give them much page ranking if any. Search engines seem to strongly dislike duplicate websites. If you built your own SMC website from scratch, you'd probably do a lot better. But most big companies don't like vendors building custom websites from scratch. Maybe SMC is different. I'll have to ask them about it.

I think Specialty Merchandise Corporation is a very strong company that will be around for many years to come, but I still don't think it's an easy way to make money.