I found a recent article on Ina Steiner’s eCommercebytes blog very interesting.  She wrote about a survey they ran among their readers (who are mainly eBay and Amazon sellers) asking what the sellers would do with $50,000 if given that money to invest in their business.

Inventory, Inventory, Inventory…

The results of the survey were completely consistent with what we always heard nearly 10 years ago when I worked at eBay and we surveyed our sellers.  It is what drove me to start the eBay Private Marketplace business in 2004.  The number one answer from Ina’s survey was that they would spend the money on inventory with 65% of responses mentioning that option.

From Ina’s post:  “One might expect the number one answer to be spend it on advertising and marketing. But the number one answer was actually to invest in inventory.”

“The first rule of any business, is that you have to have items to sell, which could be expanded if I had warehouse space.” They said they would also hire additional help to free them up to work on sourcing products…”

I know it is also still true that retailers and manufacturers can’t sell to all of these small buyers because the process is too cumbersome.  Again, same thing as 10 years ago.

B-Stock continues to bridge this gap by providing the tools and services that enable enterprises to sell to thousands of resellers just as easily as selling to one or two.  By doing so, we have created sourcing opportunities for these small buyers so they don’t have to hire staff to spend hours and hours hunting for and negotiating inventory purchases.

The excitement among these buyers to access the inventory is clear. It is obvious based on the numbers of buyers who have joined the B-Stock Sourcing Network. Every new marketplace we launch causes the value of the network to increase for buyers.

Sourcing will always be one of the major barriers to growth for small sellers, but having access to B-Stock’s network of liquidation marketplaces can make their lives a lot better.

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