![]() The liquidation industry of buying and selling return pallets is still fairly small in the UK. Jay has since pivoted to buying overstock and liquidated stock, recently acquiring a pallet of 700 pub glasses from a wholesaler that went out of business and hopes to sell them on eBay in the summer.Īn insider at a liquidation warehouse in the UK told WIRED that companies that work with Amazon sign non-disclosure agreements, which is why when you scroll through different liquidation websites and marketplaces the origin of the pallet is never stated. You don’t know if they’ve actually come from Amazon or not,” he says. “You Google and you get tons of different answers. The problem with Amazon returns in the UK, Jay says, is that it’s hard to know whether the pallet you’re buying the returns from is genuine. To be out £500 at the start of a pandemic is quite scary.” One ear wasn’t working, so I just sold them as spares or repairs. ![]() “I was lucky with my first pallet because headphones that were broken. He managed to acquire a pallet of gaming items from a third-party seller, but it wasn’t the haul he was expecting. When charity shops and car boot sales shut down at the start of the first UK lockdown, 27-year-old Jay from Surrey, who runs a YouTube channel called Flipping Sloth, switched from selling treasures on the high street to trying his hand at return pallets. Not everyone has success flipping pallets for big profits. Barker runs a tech repair shop and is able to fix some of the broken gadgets he receives in his pallets. Many are small independent traders that want to buy a few pallets to resell and make some extra cash, he says.īarker went on to order an articulated lorry, full to the brim with 32 kitchen and floor care pallets valued at £100,000 later in April, and recruited the support of his brother-in-law to help him process the goods. “We have buyers that will spend a thousand pounds a week or a month and we have buyers that can spend over a million pounds a month,” he explains. The bidders on B-Stock, Vitale says, can be ordinary people who are buying pallets as a side hustle or they can be large corporate resellers. Towards the back end of January and into early February is peak return season.” “With consumers being forced to spend more online, it’s resulted in more consumer returns. “We’ve been extremely busy,” says Giorgio Vitale, B-Stock’s EMEA head of business development. ![]() It’s been a demanding few months for the stock liquidation company. B-Stock also allows buyers to bid on truckloads of returned goods, which they can then sell on. ![]() On liquidation inventory websites like B-Stock, registered buyers can peruse a manifest of all the returned items inside various different pallets, along with their recommended retail prices. It’s supposedly cheaper for Amazon to shift already opened, potentially broken items to somebody else than to inspect, repackage and re-list the items itself. Liquidation websites either purchase pallets of returns from retailers like Amazon, or are contracted by Amazon to get rid of the returned stock via their marketplace websites. Commercial real estate company CBRE estimates that 400 million square feet of warehouse space will be needed over the next five years to handle the continued surge in online returns.Īmazon’s plan to avoid clogging up its warehouse space with returns is simple. It’s predicted that £60 billion worth of goods are returned each year. Estimates suggest that 30 per cent of items bought online are returned, compared to 8.9 per cent for items bought in brick and mortar stores. B-Stock says that it had its best year on record in 2020, selling a massive 120 million items, a figure that was up by 55 per cent.
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