This post is part 3 of a 3 part series explaining how to become a liquidation merchandise Broker. A Broker is someone who locates and then sells merchandise he does not own, for a commission or markup. If you missed part two, no fear, you can read it here.
A Liquidation Broker builds a business based upon two important activities:
Locating Merchandise – Of the two activities mentioned within this post, finding inventory is the easiest of the two. Brokering department store merchandise is not difficult, as long as you have the direct contacts in place. Most of the customers a broker serves will want to buy pallets of the major big box stores, such as Best Buy, Macy’s, Kmart, Sears, Costco, Target, and Amazon.com.
Thinking about this logically, there are hundreds of other Brokers advertising this type of liquidation merchandise; this creates a lot of competition for a new broker. One way to stand out in the crowd, and hopefully capture a larger piece of the pie, is to specialize in unique inventory items. Tracking down inventory sources takes a lot of time with phone calls and, at times, traveling from location to location.
Locating wholesale buyers – Once a Broker has a good selection of inventory, the next step is finding buyers! A broker can have an extensive selection of goods, but without wholesale buyers, there’s no cash flow.
There are countless ways to locate buyers, but the fastest way is to advertise within one of the many wholesale industry directories. By advertising within a heavily visited B2B directory, a broker can take advantage of immediate rush of targeted web visitors looking to spend money.
A successful broker will spend an equal amount of time performing both activities above. I know when I was brokering full-time, I would spend my mornings looking for buyers, and the afternoons were spent looking for new customers.
Once a pallet and truckload broker has an established buying clientele, the cost of acquiring new buyers will decline; this is good news because web advertising costs a lot of money.
Would you like further, in depth information about becoming a wholesale pallet and truckload broker? You’re in luck…we wrote the complete guide: How to Broker Liquidation Merchandise.
