This idea has won serious viewership for some YouTubers. This is a variation on that hustle: Buy liquidation, sell high. My colleague Alana Semuels demonstrated in her story on the proselytizers selling get-rich-quick classes about retailing products on Amazon that the lure of the high-margin, online business is nearly irresistible. Who couldn’t sell $4,000 worth of stuff for more than $200? It seems so easy: Sort the still-good stuff from the broken objects, the trash, the worthless, and then post that stuff to Amazon or eBay. Of course, once people do buy all these unwanted goods, they rearrange them into more profitable configurations. Doing the rough math, we’re talking about inventory that once had a collective value reaching into the billions, before it landed in some box on a doorstep. And, assuming the company is trying to turn a profit, it must buy the inventory for a fraction of that. In its most recent SEC filing, the company disclosed that it spent approximately $33.7 million on Amazon liquidation inventory, which it then turns around and sells for maybe 5 percent of the supposed retail value. In the past fiscal year, it sold $626.4 million worth of stuff.Īmazon represents a growing chunk of Liquidity’s business. Liquidity Services now has 3,357,000 registered buyers on its various liquidation websites. The company calls dealing with returns “ the reverse supply chain”-a part of the retail business that has been growing in importance as online shopping becomes more popular. So, Liquidity Services, the operator of, became a major (though not exclusive) handler of Amazon’s American liquidations.
If Amazon and other retailers let another company pay them something, they avoid those costs and add some revenue. So is the labor necessary to repackage something for resale. If it sounds crazy to sell products at massive discounts, consider that goods sitting in a warehouse are a cost. While Amazon doesn’t publicly talk about how it chooses which returned products go back up for sale and which go to the liquidators, it does sell some products through Amazon Warehouse at a discount. If you add them up, the “value” of the box might be $4,000, while the auction price might only come to $200. On, each pallet’s manifest comes with suggested prices for each product in a pristine state. Most likely, never will this precise box of shit ever exist again in the world.
Amazon liquidation stores free#
On Amazon’s website, sophisticated sorting algorithms relentlessly rank and organize these products before they go out into the world, but once the goods return to the warehouse, they shake free of the database and become random objects thrown together into a box by fate.
A dog in a caterpillar hoodie (Amazon / Rubie’s)Įvery box is a core sample drilled through the digital crust of platform capitalism.
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