About Smart Living Company
Smart Living Company offers a dropship service as one of its options for selling products. It has one of the smallest product inventories of the services we reviewed, but it focuses on products for the home, including furniture, home décor and lighting. If you're interested in having products for the home be your selling niche, Smart Living Company may be a good option to use as your dropship service.
While this service has a good variety of products for the niche it serves, it doesn't rate well on the options it offers for managing your inventory on the back end. Smart Living doesn't offer you the ability the export products to your site or an online marketplace. It does offer a CD with the products and images, but we prefer dropship services to offer downloads of its products. Smart Living also doesn't offer any analytics, research tools or notifications when products in your inventory run low on stock.
Smart Living aggregates the suppliers it works with, but it doesn't process orders for you. When a customer orders a product from you, you'll need to log into Smart Living and order the products there. You can also place your orders by calling them in. Shipping speeds range from between five to seven days.
There are multiple plans to choose from, each with a different monthly cost. You are charged a restocking fee for non-defective merchandise your customers return. It's important to remember that even though the dropshipper is responsible for shipping and handling, you still have to take care of customer service. Smart Living Company doesn't offer a free trial, but you don't need an account to browse its products.
Smart Living Company has some of the best customer service of the dropshippers we reviewed. We contacted Smart Living through phone and email, and the representatives always answered our questions and provided valuable information. Smart Living also provides a one-on-one mentor to help you with your business
This dropship service is ideal if you are interested in selling home décor, furniture and other products for the home. It doesn't offer much to help you add products to the platform you plan on selling through, but it does have excellent account support, including a mentor to help your business.
How to make money from home with Smart Living Company?
Smart Living Company permits everyone to join them as Sellers. Once you’ve signed up and learned everything that is offered by the company to you, you can start making money.
Well, to be honest is not as easier as it sounds. Definitely, not free!
When you’re a member, you can choose from different ways of cooperation:
- Shopper (formerly known as Buyer’s Club) – The most basic membership, involves no fees and it can bring you some benefits, such as discounts and special offers. No business plan is possible if you only sign up as a Shopper.
- Starter/Premiere – $19.95 per sign up fee plus a monthly fee of $5.95. This is the first membership type that offers you access to the make money from home business plan. This membership offers you a 30% off of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, starter kit, monthly business consultation (1 hour), access to forums and advice areas, customer care via phone and email.
- Business/Enterprise – $39.95 sign up fee plus a monthly fee of $9.95. This is the most complex business plan offered by Smart Living Company. A 66% off of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price and non-stop business consultation come with this subscription plan.
Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price vs. Your Price.
The main way of making money from home with Smart Living Company is taking advantage of the discounts you can offer, accordingly with your subscription plan. On Smart Living Company site, manufacturers are selling their products at their suggested prices. Taking advantage of the possibility of offering discounts to your clients, might lead you to forming a portfolio of returning clients who are happy with the discounts you previously made.
For example, if a dinner table is listed at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $100 and you’re a Business/Enterprise member, then you can offer a 66% discount. That means that your client can buy from you that $100 in value dinner table with only $34.
By this method, you’re attracting clients, which will not stop to only buying a dinner table but will also add more stuff to their baskets once they’ll see how much discount they have.
How to make money?
The Smart Living Company will build and host your website, will offer catalogs for you to show to your clients, and also downloadable content for you to keep your site updated.
They will also coach you on how to successfully implement social media marketing campaigns and how to bring traffic to your site.
The best part is that you won’t have to worry about shipping and storing the products. The company will do all that for you. All you have to do is to register your clients’ orders and send them further for the company to deliver the products in time.
The company behind the whole thing
Smart Living Company site is conducted by a company with the same name: Smart Living Company, from Simi Valley, CA, which is registered on the BBB (Better Business Bureau) with an A+ rank.
On the BBB, there are 3 positive reviews and 3 negative ones. The positive ones claims that the company has great customer support, business coaches, and high quality products.
On the other hand, the negative reviews complain about poor quality of some products, latency of the customer support to manage refunds or replacements of faulty products, and about the rude behavior of some of the company’s customer care assistants.
Customer opinions on Smart Living Company work from home opportunity
Mainly, there are happy collaborators. Most of them who have followed the company’s business instructions manged to become financially stable only by selling others products.
Others, however, complain that even if collaborating with Smart Living Company for a long period of time, they have very few sales, even though they have followed the instructions and implemented successful marketing campaigns in the online environment.
Negative feedback from those collaborators doesn’t mean that the company is scam. It only means that some people are just not made for this kind of reselling activity, especially in the online environment, on which the competition on Smart Living Company’s niche is big.
Conclusion
Definitely, NOT a scam. Smart Living Company is active and running for 63 years now, which has to say a lot of positive things about it.
Moreover, dozens of positive reviews coming from collaborators can be reached by a simple search on Google.
Last, but not least, the company is not offering a regular affiliate marketing program, but it is offering more like a business opportunity.
The single break down for some people could be the membership fees, which, to be honest, could make some people to drop the idea of collaborating with Smart Living Company. And they are not to be accused. It is hard to invest your money, regardless of the sum in question, in something that might simply not work as expected.
In conclusion, Smart Living Company work from home business plan is not dedicated to people who want it simple and fast. It takes dedication, work, and the capacity of learning a lot of new things. That doesn’t mean that’s impossible! Give it a try if you know that you’re good at online sales.
