But then other big players like us such as Returnbuy who I mentioned before popped up and started negotiating direct deals which forced up to negotiate lower prices to still be able to get merch. We were also direct with Circuit City, Best Buy, and Sears. We were also buying full truckloads, often more than one at a time at well over six figures in cost. We even got to where if you bought something from them and wanted to return it, they would issue a UPS return shipping label and the item actually came directly to my warehouse where we would check it in and notify them that is was received and they would refund their customer. Those will be larger loads though.īack when I had the company doing this we were direct with who is still around but back then they were a major auction site that was selling closeouts of prior models for many major top brands. That side is where you are buying directly from the major retailers. Then there is the other side of their site, Direct. If its from som no name place and you have to get it directly from the seller versus from one of the actual warehouses it can be a bit more risk but not always. As long as you do some proper due diligence in checking the sellers ratings, who the seller is, where the merch is located, etc it can be perfectly fine. That being said a lot of it still is merch that is sourced and is directly from major retailers. On the main Liquidation site there are some great deals to be had but the merchandise is from any number of sellers so you really have to look close at the details. What can then happen (been out of it for many years so I have no idea if Liquidation does this but I'd think not as they are a very reputable company) though is that a place will buy the load and then rather than just take each pallet as received, they will break each down and build up their own pallets to sell while cherry picking out certain premium or the most profitable bits to sell through their own separate company or partner leaving a lot of less desirable merchandise carefully mixed in at the bottom of the pallets they put together to resell to others. Major retailers (physical or online) typically just put everything they have into one huge load and it is sold. Another is that nowadays much of the returns are cherry picked. But with no overhead, if local to their facility (no freight costs) you can buy a pallet, go down there and load it in your vehicle, take it home, unload it all in the living room and go through it, check, test, cleanup, document and resell and make very good money. Potential returns from who you sell to (very much a consideration on eBay nowadays). If you do enough you quickly can become a business and start having to collect state sales tax, etc. Bear in mind though, your time is money, costs and fees with reselling things like PayPal, eBay, credit card fees. So yes, the short of it is, if you can somewhat establish what the inventory is, likelihood of defects (some things are more prone to issue like being fragile, etc), and whatnot you can potentially make a LOT of profit. The other 10% was actual defective things, abusive returns (bought cordless phone a year ago, it dies, go buy a new one, stick old one in box and return it), buy a vacuum to clean up cat mess etc to get deposit back from apt and return it all nasty, etc. Majority were buyers remorse, SEU (stupid end user), etc. What we observed was that in the retail returns industry was that roughly 90% or more of products returned have nothing at all wrong with them. Yes, if you have the patience and time, you can make some very good money. That being said Liquidation is a legit company and fine to do business with. With our overhead it became unsustainable so we closed it down. The market got flooded with people buying one to a few pallets at a time and doing the same thing out of their garage and living room with no overhead. Then Liquidation (we also worked directly with them at times on larger loads) and a couple of other companies started making bigger direct deals with retailers and selling individual pallets of merchandise to anyone along with other larger companies like ours that started to pop up like (they got bought out and still exist but not like their original setup). We got big enough in a short enough time that we became one of the top 5 sellers, eBay invited us to a special private event at the Bellagio, etc. Document, photograph and list it on eBay. We would then go over every single item, cleanup as needed, test all functionality, etc. Literally full truckloads of merchandise. 25 per dollar of their original wholesale cost. We made our own direct deals with a few retailers where we bought all of their returns for (example). I actually ran a company back in 2000-2002 doing just that.
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