I have a lot to talk about today, so bear with me. How has the week gone, it’s Friday? The past several days I’ve been working on a new partnership with the closeoutindustry.com to bring my faithful follows more product sourcing content.
Wholesale 101
A good friend of mine Jason Precott, from TopTenWholesale.com, wrote a new book titled Wholesale 101. I purchased a copy and read it cover to cover….it’s good stuff, especially for those interested in importing products for resell. Jason does a fine job of explaining how the wholesale industry works from his years of experience, and a little help from the many people he interviewed for the book. Hey, and you might notice he references our book, The Liquidators Guide, within a couple of areas. Way to go Jason, congratulations on the book!
New Liquidation Contact
As a side note, Ellen Petterson, from Genco Marketplace, made contact with me this last week and offered her email address and phone number as a point of contact for questions about sourcing products through Genco. Go ahead and add her information to your Outlook contacts data base just in case you have questions about purchasing pallets and truckload of merchandise through Genco. Having a personal contact means you and I can call on that particular person should questions arise within a purchase transaction.
Liquidation Boot Camp
Some of you already know that here at the Liquidators Guide we offer a free 3-day email boot camp where we discuss the basics of product sourcing. If you haven’t already signed up, please do so by offering your name and email address within the box just to the right of this post.
Within the boot camp there is a section where we turn the tables and ask you a few questions. Here is an actual question taken from the email series, and an actual response from one of our boot camp attendees who emailed back in late July:
Question – Have you purchased customer returns, shelf pulls, or overstock items in quantity?
Answer from attendee – “I have never purchased any liquidation items at all, but have worked for a company doing all of their listing on eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist for all the items they purchased. I became interested in the business after working with them.” – A. Ali email from 07/23/2013
I wanted you to read this answer because I think it really speaks for most of our audience, here at the Liquidators Guide blog. Most of you are just now learning about the liquidation industry, and are probably excited about the prospect of purchasing name brand merchandise returns and shelf pulls. I know I was way back when I started. This is a great time to direct and guide you through your first purchase. If you know me at all, you’ll know what I’m going to say next, and that is…take your time and do not rush! Learn all about the industry before wiring someone, or some company, thousands of dollars. Read all you can here at our blog, and by all means, purchase the Liquidators Guide where I go into detail about the pros and cons of buying pallets and truckloads.
Industry Articles:
I read an interesting article on the Washington Post site about consumer merchandise returns, where large retail companies are keeping tabs on those people who return merchandise on a regular basis. Apparently considered fraud, big companies such as Best Buy, J.C. Penney, Victoria’s Secret, Home Depot and Nike are utilizing third party companies to detect consumer merchandise return fraud. Here at the Liquidators Guide, we love customer returns because that is how we source inventory!
Our friend, Howard Rosenberg, co-founder of the B-Stock marketplace wrote an informative blog post about the retail giant Macy’s. Much like Howard says, I’m often asked how to acquire Macy’s customer returns and job lot merchandise. According to Howard, Macy’s shows a presence in every major market with sales of more than 25 billion (that’s billion with a B). Checkout Howard blog post HERE.
Well, friends that’s all for now. Hey, do you want a free copy of our Liquidators Guide? It’s easy…just draft an informal article relating to your business or an article in general about the liquidation industry. Send it to us by EMAIL, and if we publish it on our blog…you get a free copy of The Liquidators Guide. It’s as easy as that! (article must be a minimum of 500 words to qualify…now get crackin!