Spring is the season where homeowners stretch activities to include cleaning up, organizing, painting, and other home related tasks. Big box retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, Orchard supply Hardware, and Tractor Supply are more than ready to sell these homeowners just about anything needed to spruce up “ye olde homestead.”
If you’re like me, projects at home sometimes take multiple trips to these mega home improvement stores getting the correct items, parts, and accessories. With each trip, merchandise inevitably gets returned to these stores. It’s the returned merchandise we call secondary market goods, and there is plenty of it to be purchased by eBay sellers, flea market vendors, and discount store owners. I believe it’s a safe bet to assume each and every major home improvement retailer can amass 2-3 truckloads of consumer returned merchandise per week. Quantities such as this amount to an enormous amount of unsellable goods that end up being liquidated for pennies on the original retail dollar.
Within the liquidation industry, home improvement customer returned loads from stores such as Home Depot, Lowes, and Orchard supply (owned by Sears) are highly sought after by bulk buyers who know how to process and work with customer returned merchandise.
As with all customer returned merchandise, a certain percentage of each load will be damaged or completely unsellable, but there’s more than enough room to make a profit with customer returns by reselling the undamaged or slightly damaged merchandise. Even merchandise that is missing pieces is still valuable to a lot of people. Often, missing pieces can be reordered from the manufacturer to make an item good as new! With tool and home improvement loads it’s not uncommon to find items such as drill bit sets missing a few bits, decor lighting that might be missing a globe, tools may appear used, opened hardware packages and outdoor furniture missing parts or pieces.
As stated above, even with damages and missing pieces, resellers are literally sitting on a gold mine with home improvement products due to the ability to pass the retail savings on to their customers. Would you by a drill bit set for 50% off of retail if it was missing a single bit? Sure you would- any budget minded shopper will look past minor damages and/or missing parts or pieces to score great deal.
If you would like to get your hands on a pallet or truckload quantity of home improvement customer returns, search online to review loads from multiple wholesale liquidators. If you would like to source loads direct from a specific retailer, or their contracted third party reverse logistics provider, be sure to check out The Liquidators Guide for further details.
