“We have buyers that will spend a thousand pounds a week or a month and we have buyers that can spend over a million pounds a month,” he explains. The bidders on B-Stock, Vitale says, can be ordinary people who are buying pallets as a side hustle or they can be large corporate resellers. Towards the back end of January and into early February is peak return season.” “With consumers being forced to spend more online, it’s resulted in more consumer returns.

“We’ve been extremely busy,” says Giorgio Vitale, B-Stock’s EMEA head of business development. It’s been a demanding few months for the stock liquidation company. B-Stock also allows buyers to bid on truckloads of returned goods, which they can then sell on. On liquidation inventory websites like B-Stock, registered buyers can peruse a manifest of all the returned items inside various different pallets, along with their recommended retail prices. It’s supposedly cheaper for Amazon to shift already opened, potentially broken items to somebody else than to inspect, repackage and re-list the items itself. Liquidation websites either purchase pallets of returns from retailers like Amazon, or are contracted by Amazon to get rid of the returned stock via their marketplace websites. Commercial real estate company CBRE estimates that 400 million square feet of warehouse space will be needed over the next five years to handle the continued surge in online returns.Īmazon’s plan to avoid clogging up its warehouse space with returns is simple. It’s predicted that £60 billion worth of goods are returned each year. Estimates suggest that 30 per cent of items bought online are returned, compared to 8.9 per cent for items bought in brick and mortar stores. B-Stock says that it had its best year on record in 2020, selling a massive 120 million items, a figure that was up by 55 per cent.

Amazon liquidation stores