Retailers Need a Liquidation Solution for Returned Items

The news no online retailer wants to hear: around 30% of all online purchases are returned. What’s more, nearly half of all consumers will at one point return something they purchased online. For the 2017 holiday season, it was estimated that online holiday sales would rise 13.8% to $107.4 billion; imagine having a third of that returned. Zac Rogers, an operations and supply chain professor at Colorado State University, estimated that post-retail sales, which includes returns and overstock items, is growing at an estimated 7.5% a year. In some fashion categories, such as shoes, the returns rate is estimated to be as high as 70%. Amy Augustine, the senior manager of reverse logistics for U.S. Cellular, estimates that her organization handled nearly 550,000 returned electronic devices and accessories in 2017. We are living in a world where around $400 billion worth of merchandise is sent back to the store. It’s no wonder large retailers have warehouses filled with returned merchandise!

Customers return things for a wide range of reasons: they order the wrong item, a shirt doesn’t fit, or they decide to purchase three pairs of pants and return the two that don’t work. Considering it costs twice as much for an item to be repossessed back on the shelf as it does to sell it, sometimes it’s better to slate the inventory for liquidation and recover as much as you can.

Enter B-Stock. We provide retailers an online auction marketplace solution to help them support strategic liquidation goals. The platform is completely customizable: your branding, your product, your choice on who can buy and where it ends up. This year over 100 million items were sold across our network of client marketplaces.

More Than Just A Marketplace

Having a marketplace is just one aspect. In order to achieve the best results requires a little expert know-how and strategy. Our team has decades of experience with online auction marketplaces. We’ve spent years collecting and analyzing data to determine the best auction strategies that increase pricing. This might include looking at lot configurations, adjusting starting bid price, or targeting specific buyer groups. To elaborate on that last one: an auction with multiple active buyers will increase competition, which increases pricing. What’s more, the right buyers can increase pricing substantially. 

But don’t take our word for it, check out some of our client success stories:

• After eliminating its dependence on a single liquidator, a global ecommerce company doubled its prices on returned and overstock inventory in three months.
• A Fortune 500 home improvement retailer was experiencing an increase in customer-returned appliances—name-brand washers, dryers, ranges and refrigerators and more. Find out how the the retailer increased recovery rates by 42% in a single quarter.
• One of the world’s largest online destinations for home furnishings and décor, was experiencing a higher volume of customer returns and other excess inventory due to explosive growth in sales. Find out how B-Stock’s customized data-driven methods have generated a 31% increase in gross merchandise value (GMV) over the retailer’s previous solution and target recovery goal.
• After separating out its mixed lots into smaller categories, including food and sundries, a Fortune 500 retailer tripled its pricing on the inventory.
• A large North American paper manufacturer was selling its excess product to a handful of buyers via a slow, manual process and wanted to: automate the sales process, increase the amount of interested buyers, and increase demand and pricing for the product.

Ready to optimize your liquidation strategy?

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