What if I told you that you could make thousands of dollars by reselling the things people return to big box stores like Amazon, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy on Houston Craigslist?
Yeah, that’s right! These big box stores liquidate truckloads of goods an hour to liquidators: businesses set up regionally that take all these unwanted items and sell them for pennies on the dollar. Often liquidated merchandise are scratch and dents, marked or bent boxes, customer returns, overstock, shelf-pulls to make room for seasonal displays, or unwanted seasonal items that weren’t sold. These customer returns are being used to build a great source of steady revenue. There’s a business model for Houston Craigslist using liquidation that works!
You probably have a lot of questions about how to make money with liquidation stock pallets. I’m Chris Traylor, the founder and owner of Liquidation Map, and I’m here to tell you how it works, and how to make this kind of living… because I’ve done it.
Craigslist Houston- Getting Customers In Front of Your Products
The hardest part of making any business is getting your products in front of customers. It’s good to think of this as a math game. Generally speaking, most of the people who search for things to buy are window shopping: they’re not ready to actually shell out the cash. Now think about everything you know about ecommerce. Millions of people a month use amazon.com to buy products… so everybody wants to register on amazon.com to sell products. Amazon is a platform providing the eyes to your products, and takes a cut of your sale for the privilege.
How many people use Craigslist Houston? 869,000, that number is per month.. Sure, it’s not as much as Amazon. But you don’t need to have a business tax number to register: in fact, it’s so easy to post listings that you could do it in your sleep. Think about all the rental complexes and small businesses who advertise on Craigslist. They know that even though it looks cheap, their ads are getting seen.
Here’s the proof:
So, Craigslist is where you want to sell. It’s easy to make postings, free, and gets a TON of traffic. Other similar but less old websites like letsgo.com and Facebook marketplace are also good spots to market your products, but are just likely to have a fraction of the eyes.
But what is it that you sell? How do you use this to turn a profit? That’s where Liquidation comes in.
Source High Quality Liquidation Locally
Liquidation is where the Big Box Retailers such as Target, Walmart, Amazon and more liquidate there overstock, shelf pulls, warehouse damages and customer returns to companies that then make this inventory available to the public through the secondary market.
You can buy liquidated merchandise by the piece, pallet or by the truckload. So when it comes to finding product to resell on Craigslist, the liquidation industry can be a gold mine.
The most common liquidation business you will find are Bin Stores, where you can buy individual items way below retail. This will allow you to go and pick the items you want to resell by the piece. Another common place to buy liquidation merchandise is Liquidation Pallet warehouses.
Liquidation Pallet warehouses is where you can go and look at pallets stacked with liquidation product. Most of these places sell products in various conditions, New and customer returns are the most common. When buying customer returns. Be smart and shop wisely. Customer return pallets can be the biggest winners and biggest losers as Customer returns can have lots of used and damaged items but are usually sold as the cheapest pallets. Which creates the biggest chance of making more money. Think of customer returns pallets like a Scratch off lottery ticket. Some are winners and some are losers.
If you are looking to buy a lot of product at really great discounts. Buying liquidation Truckloads is where you have some of the best opportunity to make money. You will need space and a way to unload a semi though. Most companies will not deliver to a residential address so keep that in mind.
Liquidation Map is the largest directory for finding liquidation products near you. Below is a list of companies that sell liquidation. Check out are Map for more liquidation and wholesale opportunities.
Sort Your Pallet of Products
Upon receiving your pallet, you’ll need to inspect and catalog it.
Make sure you have a clear surface to store and sort things. It’s important to be efficient when selling liquidation pallets. Your online liquidation business depends on identifying and organizing the items.
Ask these questions while inspecting each item:
- What’s the condition of the packaging?
- What’s the condition of the products?
- Has the product been discontinued?
- Does the product have a brand name or is it a knockoff?
- Is there a warranty from the manufacturer?
You might find it helpful to have a junk pile as you go through the pallet. These are the things that are too damaged or defective. Don’t forget electronics – some parts and components might be worth reselling, even if others are damaged.
Make sure to snap at least 5 good pictures of every item worth reselling in this stage to save time. Remember to take pictures that are clear, and where the product takes up as much space in the photo as possible. Craigslist pictures are small on mobile, so making your product bigger actually helps to increase sales a little bit.
Set Your Price on Craigslist So You Actually Turn A Profit
Most hustlers doing side gigs like this aren’t great at math, and that causes a lot of regrettable early failures for people doing this on a shoe string budget. The first thing you should do is start recording the time you spend working on this. And then assign yourself a wage value, let’s just say $15 to start.
Calculate this as a cost. Calculate the cost of your gas to go visit pallet liquidation places. Add those costs up, those are your business expenses. What you don’t want to do is get into a cycle where you’re making cash, but spending a lot of time and man hours making that cash. Keeping track of these things will help you in the long run make better decisions.
When you have your liquidated items, break down your pallet and start a spreadsheet. Divide the cost of your pallet by all the items in it, so you have an idea of what your per-item cost is. Always keep track of the cost of your products. But you should also add what the MSRP of the item is next to the cost and name of the product. Then, list it on Craigslist. Make sure the cost you are selling it for is UNDER the MSRP and worth someone’s gas price and other expenses to pick it up. If you have a bunch of little things, like toys, group them together in bundles or boxes to make the savings point more appealing to buyers on Craigslist.
Then, record your sale price after the products are picked up. After 2 or 3 pallets, you will begin to notice a trend: some products make way bigger margins than others. This is usually related to where you live and where you do your craigslist handoffs (by the way – never invite people to your house to pick up items!). The people who live in your nearby area are the most likely to buy from you. Cater to their tastes, and find more of the kinds of items you make high margins on.
When you first begin, you may make only a few hundred bucks on your first pallet. And it’s a lot of work to break it down, sit in your garage with your laptop to find the MSRP of EVERY single item. And of course, part of your pallets will all be junk and unsellable. But if you have done a very good job picking your liquidation supplier, you will always make money. You start to really see your best returns after optimizing your second and third pallets.
