Home Based Business Review: Is Specialty Merchandise Corporation a Good Work at Home Opportunity?

Specialty Merchandise Corporation has been in business now for a while. Their infomercials still run on television quite often. If you've seen their advertisements on television over the years, you may be wondering if they are a great way to make money from home. After all, if they weren't then why are they still in business?

SMC doesn't only make their profits from the products that the members are selling. They also make money on all of those memberships and websites that they sell for hundreds of dollars each. And let's not forget the yearly renewal fee. The yearly membership renewal fee has nearly doubled since I first joined. Eventually, it's going to be so high that I will probably cancel my membership.

Over the years, I've came across other SMC members. I haven't met anyone so far who has managed to make a profit selling SMC's merchandise. They're lucky if they break even after the costs involved. I imagine that most of the members buy the merchandise for themselves since it is a good deal at member prices. I know that's what I do. But that also isn't making money, which is the purpose of SMC.

I have been with SMC for over eight years now. I joined before SMC sold the pre-designed websites, so I made my own website. I spent more time than I could possibly estimate building the site's product section. Each item had to be added individually. I promoted the site, submitted it to search engines, created the correct tags, etc. Eight years later, my site has yet to have even one sale. All of that effort was for nothing. During that time, I also had another online store. That site received numerous sales. A few years ago, I linked those two sites together. But it didn't make any difference. People simply were not interested in the SMC products. This probably has to do with the widespread availability of their products online.

I removed the discontinued items from my website, but I haven't added any new items in almost a year. SMC used to have easy access to the product pictures on their website. All of the pictures could be downloaded in one attempt through FTP. However, this changed a while back. Now, if you want the pictures for free, they have to be opened and saved one at a time from the website. This is beyond time consuming. Honestly, I think it'd be impossible to get all of the pictures this way, load them onto your website, and be finished adding the products before the new catalog would come out. I couldn't imagine opening a picture and choosing save over three thousand times!

Along with this change in the availability of the pictures came the opportunity to purchase a cd of the product pictures. I feel it is completely ridiculous that they made acquiring the product pictures harder and are selling the cd. Since the price of the yearly renewal is rapidly increasing, the picture cd should be included in this cost and come with the new catalogs that are sent out biannually.

I have no doubt in my mind that the product pictures have become harder to obtain because the company is looking for another way to make money. Not to mention that if they can deter people from creating their own website that the members might purchase a pre-designed site from them. This is just another way that they make money.