If you’re one of the over 1 million Amazon Prime members, chances are you’ve taken advantage of its free return policy. Known as a customer-centric company, Amazon (AMZN) allows customers to return orders within 30 days after they receive it. During the holiday season, it’s even more generous – Items shipped by Amazon in November and December may be returned until January 31 of the following year for a full refund. In most cases, Amazon can’t sell the products back to customers. It’s not uncommon for online retailers to see 30% of all products people ordered online returned, as compared to 8.89% in brick-and-mortar stores. Have you ever wondered where your Amazon returns go? Yahoo Finance found out and tried to get in on the action. Turns out there is a multi-million dollar business behind mounting Amazon returns. Some online marketplaces allow you to buy Amazon returns online- items are not individually packaged but are bundled in huge pallets based on categories. This po st was done with GSA Content Generator Demoversion!
Warehouse liquidation has always been how retailers remove inventory. As e-commerce evolves, this liquidation process has also moved online. On those websites, shopping for liquidated returns is similar to shopping for daily items from Amazon- but with a huge discount and orders come in big pallets. You can choose the product category, but you can’t decide what products are in a pallet. Liquidation platforms buy returns from Amazon and repackage things. The longer the retailer’s return period is, the worse the quality the returns may be. “So if you use something for seven days, it has fewer chances of having more wear than if you use it for 30,” Diego Medina, sneakers artist director of Direct Liquidation Sales, told Yahoo Finance. Platforms like Direct Liquidation do the math and decide what products should be put in the same package and how much they cost. “What determines that is the data that we have collected over the years, whether we’re going to profit more or not,” Medina said, adding that it depends on how fast they want to get rid of the inventory, they can set a bid process or fixed price.
People buy returns that are then delivered in pallets or truckloads for business purposes. “We have people who just buy from us to flip goods. We have people who own their own warehouses. They process every single item on the pallet and then they repalletize to do the sale,” Medina said. My co-worker Alec and sneakers for dancing I decided to buy our own pallet. I chose home appliances, which I thought would be easy to resell. Alec went for electronics. Search for the category you want and a list of pallets show up. The website provides a list of what products are in the pallet. But surprises remain – since they’re returns, you have no idea about the condition of each item and if they actually function or not. I ended up getting the pallet which claimed to be worth $1,516 by placing a winning bid of $170, which I believe is still a bargain. When I was about to pay, I was shocked by the shipping cost.
Shipping the pallet to our office in New York City cost a whopping $220! The other option that wouldn’t require paying for shipping would be to drive to a warehouse in Indiana to pick the pallet up. This is classic for online shopping – the shipping ended up costing more than the package itself. Since I already won the bid, I had to pay for the shipping, which ended up costing $390. The delivery of my pallet justified the shipping cost. Within a week, I got a call about the delivery – six giant boxes! That’s the ONE pallet I ordered. There were 59 items in the boxes. Alec only paid $80 for shipping since all of his stuff was in one box. As you can imagine, it took me a while to unbox everything. Some came in really nice and clean condition – The Precision Cooker, the most expensive product in my order, was perfectly sealed.
I had exactly the same one at home, which cost me $100. The waffle maker and coffee maker also appeared in good condition. Since everything is from Amazon Liquidation, we were able to find the link for every product on Amazon to learn about their retail price and customers reviews. From the packages, we also found things got returned for http://Instagram.com/solitaryisle various reasons: some were unopened, some seemed used, while some were just undeliverable packages because of missing addresses. Many packages still had the original Amazon shipping label, but the receivers’ information had been removed. Of course, not everything was nice and clean. A used white blanket with stains showed up in the boxes, which no one would ever want. And inside a very heavy package was 680 black plastic bags. That was probably why I paid so much for shipping. But nothing was weirder than the tiller from Alec’s package – an obviously used one with fresh dirt and leaves from someone’s backyard.
