As a
salesperson, I have the pleasure of speaking with a multitude of customers on a
daily basis. Our customer’s backgrounds are incredibly diverse. We deal with
clients all over the globe and with varying levels of experience; from beginners to decades old sellers
that can and do teach me a thing or two.
Now I
always make it a point to ask our customers about their previous experience
with other liquidators. You always want to know your competition and understand
what’s happening out there in the liquidation world. One thing that I hear time
and again from new and veteran sellers that still completely mystifies me is
how liquidators still offer merchandise without a manifest. Liquidation
veterans accustomed to buying merchandise like this may not see anything out of
the ordinary but stop and think about this for a moment and the absurdity of
this concept you have been conditioned to accept. What other purchases in your
life work like this? Did you buy your last car sight unseen? Did the
description say may contain things like seatbelts, airbag and stereo? Kind of
important to know these things, right? But sorry! You won’t know for certain
until you pay and it arrives. Pretty ridiculous right? And yet this still
happens in the liquidation industry on a daily basis!
The
most common explanation for this practice offered by liquidators is “we simply
cannot afford to manifest our merchandise because of the volume we deal with”.
I am going to channel my inner Joe Biden for a minute here and say “this is a
bunch of malarkey.” Liquidators cannot afford NOT to sort! Not sorting and
manifesting is a clear indication of one of two things; one it’s
been cherry picked already of all the best goods to be offered to their VIP
clients or two it’s not worth manifesting because the merchandises value is so
low. So what’s an honest hardworking reseller supposed to do? A lot of
beginners will assume, well I can just drive over to the warehouse and check it
out myself but there are pitfalls here as well. These same liquidators will
tell you to come on down to the warehouse! Check it out for yourself come
kick the tires so to speak. This is where you can often spot some used car
dealer tricks. You will often see some nicely shrink-wrapped pallets with
plenty of what looks like high dollar goods on the outside of the pallet but
buy it, take it home and dig a bit deeper and a lot of times you will discover
a clunker under the hood of that seemingly sexy pallet. Low dollar goods,
damaged goods or obsolete goods who’s to say what you might encounter? Because
it’s not manifested it’s a gamble often with thousands of dollars at stake. If
there is just one piece of advice that I could give to anyone buying or
interested in buying liquidation merchandise it is this, “Only buy manifested
merchandise!”. Is it possible to make
money on one of these mystery pallets of goods? Maybe…but is this something you
are comfortable gambling on? In my book, there is no substitution for manifested
goods.