8 Reasons Liquidators Can Be an Ideal Source of Products for Your Business

In this day and age, where margins are tight and competition has never been fiercer, it’s important for a retail, wholesale or export business to stay one step ahead. You are competing for the same customers as your rivals, after all, even if that customer base has vastly expanded thanks to the Internet and the explosion of online purchasing.

Whatever your business, be it online retail, flea marketing, discount and off-sales, wholesale and distribution or exporting, you’ll know that sourcing the stock you need to sell to your customers at the cheapest possible price is key to continuing success of your business. Buy at the wrong price and it could spell disaster. Buy at the right price and you’ll be sailing through the calm waters of profitability and success.

However, finding merchandise for your store can be a real challenge. That’s true whether you run a brick and mortar shop, or an e-commerce store. Most suppliers/distributors require that you sign up for a long-term commitment, or that you buy in bulk. Neither of those is particularly advantageous for many business owners.

So, where do you go to get all that lovely discounted merchandise for your wholesale, export or retail business? Well, it’s called an online liquidation marketplace, and it’s probably the best place to source stock in the 21st Century.

1. Liquidations Give Access to a Vast Range of Products

Perhaps the single most important reason that liquidators can be an ideal supplier for your business is that you’ll gain access to an incredible range of product types. The right liquidator won’t specialize in a particular area, but will give bidders the chance to buy everything from sporting goods to electronics to clothing, all on the same website.

Online liquidators are better than those you have to visit in person. You’ll find exactly what you need on a liquidator’s website. Thanks to exclusive contracts liquidator have with some of the nation’s biggest retailers, their websites are positively bursting at the seams with a vast array of merchandise. Electronic equipment, sporting goods, high-end fashion and fashion accessories, top quality watches and jewelry, toys and games – you name it, you’ll find it in abundance on online liquidation marketplaces.

Online liquidators are also far more convenient. With an online liquidator, you can bid without having to deal with a crowd, from the comfort of your own home or business premises. Also, since prices tend to be lower, your chances of saving serious cash are greater.

2. Pay Pennies on the Dollar for Products

Liquidators do exactly what the name implies – they sell products at speed, which means the prices are often very low. In fact, it’s not uncommon to pay only pennies on the dollar for new products that can then be sold for full price in your store or through your website.

For example, a twenty-four-piece pallet of returned GPS and navigation computer accessories from manufacturers such as Garmin, TomTom and ACR Electronics valued at $3,157 was recently bought for just under $300 from our online liquidation website. If you sell electronics online that’s the sort of price you’ll be looking for.

By maximizing your buying potential, you’re able to ensure that you have more money for other things, like investing in more merchandise, enhancing your website, adding new fixtures to your physical store, or investing in advertising to improve the market share for your business. This will give you better chances of success and allow you to increase your profit margins without increasing prices for your customers.

3. You Can Resell Liquidation Products Anywhere

Buying through traditional distributors requires that you have certain things in place, like a warehouse to receive your shipments, adequate room for your merchandise both on the sales floor and in storage, and more. Really, the supply chain is built with brick and mortar stores in mind, but things have changed greatly in recent years.

These days, it’s not uncommon for a business owner to offer items for sale in a physical store, as well as through potentially multiple online portals, including Amazon. With liquidators, you can take delivery of your purchase and then sell it through whatever outlet you want, even if it’s going to be fulfilled by Amazon and needs to go to a fulfillment center.

Using liquidators gives you more flexibility, which is an advantage in a market that is constantly changing.

4. No Need to Buy Merchandise in Bulk

Often, small businesses are required to buy in bulk in order to do business with distributors. That does them little good, though. If your customers don’t purchase enough of a particular product to reduce your inventory, you could be left with a lot of unsold merchandise. That amounts to a loss, as you’ll need to find a way to dispose of it or it will just occupy precious storage space that could be filled with other merchandise.

One of the advantages of working with liquidators is that you can buy in much smaller quantities, and focus on your particular niche, be it video games, tools, or smartwatches. Most of them offer access to pallets of merchandise, but some sell by the case, or even by the single unit.

This allows you to customize your orders to meet demand and run leaner than would otherwise be possible. That can spell the difference between success or failure for a small retail operation.

5. Buy Trending Items

Retail operations often find themselves locked into their inventory and unable to take advantage of market trends in the short-term. Think about it this way – you’ve got most of your money tied up in a large stock of inventory from a conventional distributor. Then the market shifts. Suddenly, different items are hot. They might be trending for a week, a month, or even six months, but eventually, that popularity will fade.

If you invested through a regular distributor, you could be stuck with unwanted merchandise, on top of your regular inventory. Ordinarily, you might miss out on these trends.

However, working with liquidators will give you a far greater chance of taking advantage of changing trends. You can purchase trending items in small quantities, move them quickly, and capitalize on trends while they’re happening.

6. Shelf Pulls, Overstock and Buyer Returns

While you will definitely want to work with regular distributors for the majority of your store’s stock, you can benefit from the variety offered by liquidators. This applies not just to the range of product types that we talked about previously, but also to the variety of conditions of products sold. For instance, with a distributor, you only get new products. With liquidators, however, you have access to a range of other products, in a variety of conditions.

One of the best options available to you when working with a liquidator is buying customer returns. Current online sales have grown rapidly to $294 million yearly, and is expected to grow by $100 million more by 2018. As an unexpected result of the growth of sales of products that a consumer can’t test, or try on, in person – customer returns to large retailers have grown significantly.  At least 30% of all products ordered online are returned compared to only 8.89% bought in brick-and-mortar shops.

These may become a significant source of cheap merchandise for your business. Most customer returns are in perfectly good condition since the most common reason for a customer to return a product is buyer’s remorse. In other cases, people are returning gifts they don’t really want, which makes the period just after Christmas the best time for you to buy customer returns.

From liquidation suppliers you can purchase shelf-pulls/discontinued cellphones, overstock fashion items, buyer returned televisions and other items. You can also buy refurbished electronics. These are used electronics that have been repaired to perfect working condition, and they can be very attractive to customers who want to enjoy the benefits of high tech gadgets for a fraction of the price of a new product.

All these products are offered by liquidation suppliers at deep discounts, allowing you to use them as incentives, as exploratory items to test the waters in your store, and in many other ways, as well. Depending on the liquidator in question, you may also opt for name-brand merchandise, or generic merchandise.

7. Helping You Build Your Niche

Today, you almost have to specialize in a particular niche to be successful as a retailer. Amazon and Walmart have the general merchandise sector covered very well, and while you can sell through those platforms, defining your own niche can ensure success independent of those retailers.

Working with liquidators can help you do that by providing you with access to pallets and cases of specialized merchandise ranging from electronics to fitness products to health and beauty products and everything in between.

8. Access to Cheap Electronics Merchandise

Technology is the driver of today’s world, and it evolves very quickly. That can make it difficult for small business owners to recognize a product that would sell well and differentiate it from one that’s either waning in popularity, or has no chance of really catching on. Working with liquidators can help you test the tech waters and find electronics items that sell well without investing a ton of money in a lot of stock that might just sit there in your backroom and gather dust.

As you can see from the information above, there are many compelling reasons that working with liquidators can be highly beneficial for your retail business.

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Henley Johnson

Henley currently works as a sales representative for Direct Liquidation, assisting businesses with product sourcing of liquidated merchandise from the largest retailers in the world. Whether you are looking for a pallet or a truckload Henley is here to help you grow your business.

View Henley’s Bio on YouTube.