How Can You Expand a Small Business with Liquidation Auctions?

If you are in the business of reselling merchandise, either online or in a brick-and-mortar store, sourcing your stock from a Better Business Bureau-accredited online liquidation specialist like Direct Liquidation can help your business increase sales and achieve higher profit margins. 

Scaling Up A Small Business with Liquidation Auctions

• Buy liquidated stock cheaply to resell
• Upgrade your storage capacity
• Buy truckloads rather than pallets to save more on shipping
• Use tools to speed up and increase your online sales
• Consider opening up your own bricks and mortar store, if you trade online/ consider opening an online store if you only sell in a physical store or stall
• Refurbish untested electronics bought from a liquidator

How Can a Small Business Profit with Liquidated Stock?

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In the course of their activities, businesses may end up with a significant quantity of surplus items. These are products that, for a variety of reasons, the business is no longer able or is not willing to sell through their normal channels. For retail giants like Walmart, Amazon or Target, this can be a big problem, because these items take up valuable storage space that they would prefer to use for brand-new or more profitable items.

In order to free up storage space and retrieve some value from these surplus items, big retailers will often sell this kind of merchandise in large quantities to online liquidation platforms. These platforms will then resell this merchandise to smaller businesses like yours for a fraction of their original retail price, usually through online liquidation auctions.

Liquidated merchandise comes in several types, including customer returns, refurbished/reconditioned products, closeouts, and overstock items.

Customer returns make up by far the largest portion of products available at online liquidation marketplaces. The reasons as to why products get returned to retailers vary. In some cases, the product is defective or has some kind of damage (often superficial). In other cases, however, it’s because of a mix-up in sending the product, e.g. wrong color or size. In other cases, customers just make the most out of the retailer’s generous returns policy. In any case, often customers return products in perfect condition, unopened and unused. However, even in this case, retailers often prefer to liquidate these products instead of putting them back on the shelves. Retail stores do not have the ability to test their returns, so all returns are usually liquidated together.

Another type of liquidated merchandise is overstock. These are either seasonal merchandise that is surplus to requirements or else items that have been ordered in larger quantities than necessary by the retailer. In fact, even large retailers may make mistakes and overstock some of their products. In either case, retailers are interested in freeing up storage space and so sell these products in bulk at low prices to liquidation companies. The greatest advantage of these products is that they tend to be brand new.

Closeouts are yet another type of merchandise retailers sell to liquidation marketplaces. This is merchandise that comes from a store that is closing down. This happens even to large retailers. Whenever this happens, the stock held in the stores that are closing down are put into lots, and also sold at low prices to online liquidation marketplaces, where smaller businesses can bid on them.

Finally, refurbished and reconditioned are items that were returned and have since been tested. When these products are returned, they are checked for full functionality, and if necessary repaired or refurbished back to working condition. At Direct Liquidation, our refurbished stock is tested and repaired in-house, and we give these products a full 90-day guarantee. The takeaway point here is that refurbished products are sold at a fraction of their original price and are ‘as new’, and with a warranty.

Regardless of the type of merchandise you go for when you source your stock at a liquidation marketplace, you can be sure you’ll find the products listed for a price way below the MSRP. This is why this type of sourcing can really help you boost your profits.

What’s The Best Wholesale Source Of Liquidated Stock?

Simply put, the best place to source liquidated stock for your business is a reputable, top-tier online liquidation marketplace like Direct Liquidation. Sourcing your stock like this comes with a number of advantages. Not only is it affordable and convenient, there is an enormous variety of products on offer everyday. This will help you to always have a steady stream of merchandise to resell to your customers.

The merchandise you will find at an online liquidator’s website are in many cases top brand-name merchandise. This is because a top-tier liquidator like Direct Liquidation works directly with some of the country’s largest and most reputable retailers. These include Walmart, Target, Amazon and Lowe’s Hardware. These retailers sell mostly branded items or own-brand products of good quality. In fact, at Direct Liquidation’s online marketplace, you can find items from some of the world’s largest manufacturers, such as Apple, Samsung, DeWalt, Microsoft, and LEGO offered way below their MSRP.

Buying Liquidated Stock from an Online Auction

It is easy to buy liquidated stock from Direct Liquidation. The first step is to sign up for a free account here. You can then buy boxloads, pallets or truckloads of liquidated merchandise from retailers like Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, Amazon and others. This can be done either via live auction, for a fixed or for a negotiated price. Direct Liquidation sells a huge range of liquidated stock, including overstock, shelf-pulls and customer returns, so you are likely to find just what you need on our online liquidation marketplace.

If buying liquidated stock via live auction does not appeal to you, you will have many opportunities to buy merchandise for a fixed price instead. If a lot has a ‘Buy it Now’ button, you can buy it immediately without having to go through the auction process. The price you’ll pay will still be much lower than what each lot is worth, which means that you will still have a good chance of making a profit buying merchandise this way.

Finally, Direct Liquidation is open to offers, especially when they come from loyal customers. So you can approach Direct Liquidation with the price you have in mind, and, if we like your offer, that’s the price you will pay.

Direct Liquidation can also help you with shipping. In some cases, you might prefer to arrange that yourself, hiring your own courier or shipping company. But in some cases you also have the option to pick up the merchandise yourself. This is especially helpful if you happen to be located near one of the many warehouses Direct Liquidation has throughout the country. However, don’t miss out on the chance of checking out what Direct Liquidation can do for you in terms of shipping. Direct Liquidation has deals with shipping companies and you may find out that you’ll be better off arranging shipping through Direct Liquidation than going with a third party. On each auction page, you will find a shipping calculator, which can generate a quick quote.

Scaling Up A Small Business

You’ve been purchasing liquidated stock from Direct Liquidation for a while. If your business is doing well, scaling up will be your next step. This can be done effectively, cheaply and quickly in several ways.

Open Up A Physical or Online Store

Many resellers of liquidated stock do their businesses online. The reasons for this are clear: with 220 million digital shoppers in the US alone, this market has huge potential. There are also a large number of options for selling online. You can set up a seller account on sites like Amazon and eBay, or an online store on one of the smaller eCommerce sites like Wix and Shopify. Many electronics resellers choose to do business through their own websites. This allows them to control every aspect of the business from sales and special offers to customer service and payment methods.

A possibly good option is to open up your own physical store. While it’s true that online shopping is an increasingly popular choice,, there’s still a huge market out there of customers who prefer the personal touch. If the finances add up, opening up a store will help you reach a customer base exclusively online retailers cannot reach. Having knowledgeable staff can also be a great advantage. Plenty of customers need guidance when it comes to choosing the best products for them, and getting advice from someone who knows their stuff in a store will increase the chances of repeat business and word-of-mouth promotion.

Invest In More Storage Space

You will need more space as your business expands. And so you’ll have to consider investing in storage. You can upgrade your storage capability in several ways. You can rent space in a facility that already stores merchandise from other businesses; or you can rent your own warehouse space. You can even buy your own storage facility and rent out any space you’re not using to other businesses. Renting out storage space adds another revenue stream to your business.

Scale Up To Buying Full Truckloads

Most Direct Liquidation customers prefer to buy liquidated stock by the boxload or pallet. Switching up to buying truckloads of wholesale merchandise is a cheap and easy way to scale up your business. This allows you to expand your inventory of stock and, for example, offer multibuy deals and special offers more easily. In addition, buying by the truckload means saving on shipping costs, which allows you to offer your customers better prices.

Use Automation Tools

Automation tools are a cheap and effective way of scaling up your business. Automation software can streamline your business and make selling on big platforms like eBay and Amazon a lot easier. These tools help you find the best products to sell on these big platforms by keeping track of best sellers and rising stars. They can also adjust prices automatically and in real time to help you keep up with the competition. Automation tools can also help you win the coveted ‘Buy Box’ at Amazon. With 90% of Amazon sales going through the Buy Box, automation tools can help you massively increase your sales.

Become a Local Supplier

Other retailers are also looking for good quality liquidated stock. They are a potential market for your products that is often overlooked. Get in contact with the owners of discount shops and resellers renting out flea market stalls to check whether they would be interested in buying liquidated stock from you. If they’re interested, you can add another revenue stream to your business by supplying other businesses.

Consider Refurbishing Products Yourself

While many products, including customer returns will be good to sell straight out of the pallet or truckload, a percentage will need some attention. Doing the refurbishing yourself, or else hiring it out to a third party (if financially viable) gives you another opportunity to scale up your business. For example, Direct Liquidation sells untested electronics for very low prices. Returning them to factory spec can provide a lucrative extra revenue stream for your business.

There are many ways to scale up a small business using liquidation auctions. The priority is to source the right products to sell. This is the bedrock upon which you can build and scale up your business. Direct Liquidation can provide you with good quality affordable merchandise to resell. Check out what we can do for your business today. 

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