QUESTION: I just purchased a pallet of mixed general merchandise that primarily consists of bulky items, such as tabletop BBQ’s, cooling fans, yard tools, space heaters, humidifiers, etc.. What is the quickest and easiest way online to sell a mix of larger items such as this?
ANSWER: There are numerous ways to resell merchandise, but based upon your description of the items, I would probably start by listing each item separately on Craigslist.
I believe most who are reading this know of Craigslist, that is unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years. For those rock dwellers, Craigslist is an online classified network based within specific geographic zip code locations. As a registered user of Craigslist, one can list merchandise for sale at no cost, and there are no final value fees like eBay sellers face. Most who list merchandise on Craigslist are flooded with telephone calls and the hardest part of Craigslist selling is simply deciding who to sell an item to first.
Make an inventory of the items received in the pallet and figure your cost for each. For example, if your inventory reveals a total of 30 items and your cost for the pallet was $250, you can divide the cost by the number of items to get your cost per item, which happens to be $8.34 in this example. You can now apply a markup to each item based upon a predetermined percentage. Obviously, if you have a large item, such as a chainsaw, price it according to what you think your local market will pay. Just make sure you resell all items at a higher price point than your cost, otherwise you will be trading dollars for dollars.