car booting in France

We did our first car boot in France today. Well it was more like a nearly new sale / table top sale as it was indoors and this particular one was a "baby" one, not selling actual babies of course but clothes, toys and equipment.
We had a couple boxes worth of Max's clothes from 0-12 months to sell, plus a few pieces of equipment. So we hired 2 metres of table for €8 and got a free café and crêpe included! The sale lasted from 9am to 6pm, and sellers were able to go from as early as 7am to set up! We got there at 8am and lasted till 4pm, there was no way we were staying till 6pm, we were exhausted standing all day long.
We didn't do as well as we would have liked, a lot of people wanted bigger sizes than what we had, or summer stuff for smaller babies or girls stuff. We sold or gave away ALL our girls stuff before we moved so had nothing to offer them! Anyway, we DID sell quite a bit of what we had, and made approximately €160 so not bad at all really. But we still have a massive box of clothes left. So will have to try again, or find time to sell it online, which is really time consuming and tedious!

There are a few different kind of sales in France, I've decided to work out the difference so I know for the future, not that François is very keen on doing one again anytime soon!

Puces (les marchés aux puces): Flea Market - this is what we did today. The Wikipedia definition states it as an open air market not selling food.


Vide-greniers : Empty-attics (literal translation) - This is more the equivalent of a car boot sale, as it's a general sale of anything from your home.

Brocantes : 2nd hand market - this type of sale can include professional sellers and antique sales.

Other names are Braderie, foire a tout, bric-a-brac and troc, it can depend on where you are in France as to what it will be named. There are quite a lot of 2nd hand shops here too, some are called "depot-vente" which means "drop-off-sell", and there's a big chain called Troc.com which has enormous shops and internet sales.

The one most people seem to talk about here currently though is a website called Leboncoin.fr this is like Gumtree in the UK, its not an auction site like Ebay but it has regional pages and then by category so you post a picture of what you have to sell with the price, description and your contact details then anyone interested will contact you and arrange to come and see it or buy it. This website is used for more than just selling bits and bobs, its used for advertising houses for rent and for sale as well as cars and holiday homes. Definitely worth a look if you live here and don't know if it already.