Back-to-school sales this year have not improved as much as retailers had hoped, leading to blowout sales this Labor Day weekend on school supplies from pencils to flash drives. Big box and department stores are banking that timid shoppers will be willing to open their wallets for the right item at the right price as the back-to-school shopping season wraps up.
Consumer spending may have some staying power, as several retailers’ August sales beat expectations Thursday, helped by increased promotions, sales-tax holidays and a pickup in back-to-school sales.
The e-commerce market is enjoying double-digit growth through the current stretch of economic uncertainty as consumers shop for bargains they can’t find in traditional stores.
Yes, the economy is struggling, but some entrepreneurs still have energy, dreams and drive, developing ideas, opening storefronts, starting businesses and finding ways to succeed amid the deep recession.
Online retailers have always operated in their own little corner of the retail world. Nowadays, they seem to exist in an alternate universe altogether. As traditional retailers struggle amid a halting recovery challenged by high unemployment and still-reluctant spenders, e-commerce companies have thrived, serving shoppers looking for a deal.
Liquidity Services Inc. has introduced a new website design for its Liquidation.com marketplace that includes auction recommendations placed throughout the site to help buyers find what they need, as well as detailed “Seller Performance Reports” on Item pages. Galleries, called “auction carousels,” provide an easy way for visitors to quickly browse the most popular auctions on the site.
I have no earthly idea why I would ever possibly need five 32 inch flat screen TVs but after cruising Liquidation.com, I am tempted to start bidding. Think of the Liquidation.com as a sort of bulk eBay. Instead of one TV to bid on, at this auction site, most likely they could be sold in sets of five. There might be bulk lots of various sporting equipment, toys or clothes. Liquidation.com is a company that buys up the merchandise that national retailers don’t need. The Christmas gifts you didn’t want and returned might end up on Liquidation.com. So would surplus items that stores can’t sell.
Slow sales of big-ticket items are good news for Liquidity Services (LQDT). Companies sell excess inventory through its Liquidation.com in bulk, mostly to small businesses, through auctions. “We know now that consumers are very focused on essential items and are staying away from higher-end discretionary items,” Angrick said. “So we have seen an influx of larger-screen LCD TVs, a lot of jewelry accessories, higher-end apparel, high-end fitness equipment and home theater gaming systems. These products are not selling as rapidly as expected and as a result are being pulled from the shelves and sold through our channels.”
What happens when your sweaters or electronics aren’t sold before the Christmas holiday? Instead of drastically marking down merchandise for post-holiday sales, there are a few ways to unload excess inventory without severely hurting your bottom line.
CEO Bill Angrick weighs in on the state of the wholesale services industry.
From televisions to bicycles to Guitar Hero and even a shower, Liquidation.com in Garland is a packed with inventory. The giant warehouse is a distribution center for an online auction marketplace. Liquidation.com is part of an emerging industry built on what won’t sell in stores or on major websites. It basically helps those stores clear their shelves.
Figuring Out the Basics to sell on eBay and Amazon. Find a reliable wholesaler who offers low enough prices to generate high enough profit margins on resale. Finding the right wholesaler can require an extensive search. Many sellers, Mr. McGrath said, source their products offline, through local wholesalers or flea markets. Comparison shopping can still be done online, using sites like Liquidation.com and eBay, which offer wholesale items in bulk.
“Liquidation.com said the Tuesday after Thanksgiving is traditionally one of its heaviest shopping days of the year as online and offline merchants restock their shelves following two of the busiest consumer shopping days, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The online auction marketplace is anticipating 50% more auction sales on “Restock Tuesday” this year compared to a year ago and has increased staffing at its six nationwide warehouse locations.
Retail Web sites tried to keep up the strong sales pace Monday that began over the Thanksgiving weekend. This is the day that the industry pitches as “Cyber Monday,” and Web sites have been offering deals aimed at attracting holiday shoppers. Liquidation.com, an online auction site with a warehouse in Garland, predicted Cyber Monday would kick off its busiest week of the year.
First there was Black Friday, a holiday devoted to shopping — or avoiding it. Then came Cyber Monday, the online equivalent. But what’s Restock Tuesday? Call it a holiday for the retail underworld, known as liquidation. It’s an emerging industry, built on what won’t sell in stores or on major Web sites, and it does its best business now through January. The worse retailers do, the better liquidators fair as they take on the excess and sell it in online auctions.
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Liquidation.com is running a promotion in which it is giving away one 42-inch Vizio HDTV every week until the end of the year. The online-auction marketplace for surplus inventory wants users to know it is making available single-unit quantities this holiday season in addition to the larger lot sizes traditionally offered.
A 42-inch plasma tv for $250. A $690 Coleman generator for $220. A $250 Stanley tool set for $75 or an $820 Broil-King grill for $382.These are just a few of the items that sold recently on auction site Liquidation.com. The website has six warehouses nationwide, including one in Cranbury, New Jersey, which we visited.
In an industrial zone off the New Jersey Turnpike in Cranbury, there’s a large, hangar-like building that could be called the Warehouse of Retail Rejects. Inside the 48,000-square-foot structure, workers sort, inspect and repackage everything from exercise bicycles to big-screen televisions for resale. The warehouse, one of six owned around the country by Liquidity Services Inc., is where some of the country’s biggest retailers funnel their overstocks, returned items and damaged goods. On a recent weekday, the place looked like a retailer’s worst nightmare, with dozens of big-ticket items such as flat-panel televisions lined up in rows, along with stacks of laptop computers, and piles of Wii video-game consoles.
Todd Wallace explores how Liquidation.com allows customers to bid on deeply discounted items.
Outfitting the “man cave” with top of the line equipment just got easier. Liquidation.com sells the best electronics for next to nothing. Only one trick, you have to start online and bid for what you want. Think eBaywithout the Grandma doilies and outrageous shipping fees because you can pick up your stuff at a local warehouse. “You can buy just about anything over here,” said customer Antoine Abssy.
You’ll find big savings on big screen TVs — and other stuff for your home at Liquidation.com and its six national warehouse distribution centers.
For small and medium-sized businesses that make money by selling tangible goods, Liquidation.com is a wonderful tool for the critical task of finding a reliable source of inventory at the right price. Liquidation.com is meeting that need for over 1.1 million registered buyers through its solid relationships with key large retailers and manufacturers that regularly sell overstock, consumer returns, shelf-pulls and seasonal merchandise through its online channel. Please turn to page 80-81 to read the article.
No retailer (including store, catalog and online merchants) wants to see products returned, but as the National Retail Federation reported in 2008, more than $219 billion of merchandise made its way back to retail stores through consumer returns. Many astute companies, however, are winning customer loyalty, decreasing costs and creating positive revenue by effectively managing their returns processes.
As consumers get ready to celebrate July Fourth, many merchants already have dismissed summer as a washout. Bill Angrick, CEO of Liquidity Services, which auctions surplus goods to dollar stores and small resellers, said that in the past stores had usually held out hope for procrastinators and didn’t unload summer items until early August. But “there is no normal in this economic cycle,” so merchants are cutting their losses.
“The carbon footprint of a traditional live auction event versus a virtual online solution is not even comparable. And what we’ve found is that our clients view us as a green channel because they can recover value by disposing of items as usable items and not as waste.”
Guys, if you want to know where the economy is headed next, look in your underwear drawer. If you’re like most men, you’ve got more than a few skivvies in, well, less than perfect condition. It’s one of several unusual indicators economists turn to in hard times. We went looking through them in a quest for the much-discussed “green shoots” of an imminent recovery. The amount of stuff consumers return to stores can also tell us when a rebound is in store, says William Angrick, the chief of Liquidity Services.
Bundles of flat-panel televisions, DVD players and other electronics wrapped in clear, heavy-duty plastic sit on pallets inside a warehouse, awaiting potential buyers via Internet auction.
In an 85,000-square-foot warehouse in Bentonville, Cayce Roy walked through aisle after aisle of all sorts of merchandise. “What we do,” Roy explained, “is offer every product category from a variety of sources to our buyers. We have 1.1 million registered buyers who participate in our auctions. Some people are interested in supplying their own business, beginning a business or selling products on eBay or Craigslist.
Some people are taking it upon themselves to stimulate the economy by becoming Internet sales entrepreneurs.They’re visiting an 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Bentonville where thousands of returned, damaged or unsold items are being bought in bulk by people hoping to make some money on a sale.”You hear stories all the time about people who have started their own businesses and are doing very well,” said Cayce Roy of liquidation.com.
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As big-box retailers struggle with consumers who have reined in their spending, liquidators have become a second sales channel for consumers and small businesses that are looking for bargains and don’t mind buying items that are nearly new but not in perfect condition. Liquidity Services sells a little bit of everything in its auctions, including consumer home theater systems, iPods, video games, furniture a nd department store shelves. Some of the products are returns and some are damaged. The customers are mostly other businesses and some consumers who bid online to buy wooden pallets full of unsold products.
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One retailer’s unsold or returned items - and even its store fixtures - can become another company’s treasure, as entrepreneurs are rapidly discovering online. In the past year, Washington, DC-based Liquidity Services Inc., an online auction site for excess merchandise, has seen unprecedented growth, and has even launched a new category - selling the fixtures of shuttering stores. Bill Angrick, CEO, spoke with GlobeSt.com about how the resale market benefits the buyers, sellers and even the environment as the ultimate form of recycling.
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U.S. municipalities, strapped for cash as the recession decimates revenues, are stepping up sales of everything from old police cars, helicopters and bicycles to confiscated jewelry and slot machines in an effort to reduce swollen deficits. And municipalities that previously relied on old-fashioned auctions conducted in local parking lots are getting more sophisticated, turning to the online world as they seek to maximize their sales.
Liquidity Services Inc which runs the retail inventory auction website Liquidation.com, said struggling retailers are paying much closer attention to their inventory levels. Volume on the website was eight times above 2007 levels even before Christmas last year, as retailers sent goods straight to auction to raise cash, without even trying to sell them on their shelves.
The central New Jersey distribution center of Liquidation.com is a pretty good snapshot of the disastrous holiday shopping season, even more than a month later. Pallets are stacked up to the ceiling, loaded with apparel, flat-screen TVs, even food. There are more goods moving through this warehouse than ever before. And it’s not just the scratch-and-dent stuff you might be thinking.
¿Cuantas personas están haciendo ventas de garaje para ganarse dinero adicional? Pues, existe una posibilidad de comprar artículos de las grandes tiendas a un precio mucho menor a través del Internet. ¿Usted se ha preguntado a donde llegan los productos que ya no venden las tiendas grandes? Pues justamente esta es una de las bodegas de Liquidation.com donde encontrará las estibas llenas de productos que se rematarán.
The tough economy has forced Americans to return $47 billion worth of Christmas presents. That’s up $7 billion compared to last year. Some are using these returns to find great deals and turn their own finances around using a warehouse in Plainfield. In Plainfield, a warehouse is full of giant flat screen televisions, digital cameras, Guitar Heroes and iPods.
An Indiana company is reaping the rewards of all those holiday returns and pulling in big profits from selling overstocked items, often at deep discounts. Liquidation.com’s largest warehouses nationwide sits in Plainfield, Ind., Call 6’s Rafael Sanchez reported. Overstocked items, returns that stores can’t sell and damaged merchandise end up at the huge facility, where the goods are inspected, sorted, photographed and auctioned off online to registered buyers. Many of the items are resold to people with online businesses or who sell the merchandise on eBay or Craigslist.
The tough economy has forced Americans to return $47 billion worth of Christmas presents. That’s up $7 billion compared to last year. Some are using these returns to find great deals and turn their own finances around using a warehouse in Plainfield. In Plainfield, a warehouse is full of giant flat screen televisions, digital cameras, Guitar Heroes and iPods. “Many of them are customer returns,” said Cayce Roy, Liquidation.com asset recovery.
Dinorah Perez de Telemundo 52 Los Angeles nos presenta un reportaje que es una oportunidad, cientos de articulos practamento nuevos a precios rebajadisimos.
It’s a new year, but the weakest season for holiday retail sales since at least 1970 could worsen still. The ghost of Christmas past haunting store results is returns. The economic pinch “has created the expectation that this year’s volume of returns will be up considerably,” said Bill Angrick, chief executive of Liquidity Services (LQDT), an auction firm retailers use to dispose of returns in bulk.
These are sunny days for the merchants of doom. Retailers across the nation may be going bankrupt, closing stores and watching unsold goods pile up, but that spells unprecedented buying — and selling — opportunities for the liquidators and salvagers who resell all that unwanted merchandise.
Retailing has always been a gamble, with inventory management perhaps the consummate game of chance. In times of economic peril, the stakes are even higher. To quote a country-music legend: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” This is the month to run—at least in terms of moving excess inventories through the point of sale at deep discounts or back through the supply chain. Although each of these venues has proved worthwhile for selling small quantities of product to consumers, the bigger challenges are off-loading large volumes of multi-million dollar inventories. For transactions on this scale, Best Buy has partnered with Washington, D.C.-based LSI, which enables the retailer to liquidate pallets and even full truck-loads of excess product.
KB joined Mervyns and Linens ‘n Things in shutting down in what was a grim 2008 for retailers. And retailers’ pain is only expected to continue, said Bill Angrick, chief executive officer of Washington, D.C.-based Liquidity Services, Inc., which markets and sells retail assets. Angrick expects as many as 2,600 store locations will close in the coming year as retailers “revisit their overall footprint.”
A deeper understanding of the relationship between sustainability and supply chain efficiency continues to reveal new layers of opportunity, with the latest example including a company new to Northwest Arkansas that provides a solution to the issues of merchandise returns and store fixture disposal.
Worried about getting stuck with too much merchandise, many retailers are already selling shipments of computers and other high-priced items to liquidators, even before sending them to stores. Bill Angrick, the chief executive of Liquidity Services Inc., a firm that takes excess inventory from dozens of Fortune 500 retailers and operates online clearinghouse Liquidation.com, said his auctions in days leading up to Black Friday increased more than eight times, compared to the year-earlier period.
Small-business owners and managers also are scrounging for deals. On Thanksgiving Day, Liquidation.com handled 200 auctions, up from just 20 a year ago. The activity is a sign of the times, Angrick says. “People are online (looking for) where they can find a deal, save money and create a business opportunity,” he said.
While US shoppers search the stores for post-Thanksgiving bargains, small businesses that buy and sell excess stock are being offered even more extreme deals this winter, as leading retailers struggle to shrink their inventories. Liquidation.com, a web-site that stages auctions of excess products, or those that have been returned, says it has had an increase of “about 800 per cent” in the number of auctions currently on its site compared to last year.
The holiday shopping season begins Friday with a blitz of early morning specials. For some merchants, though, it’s practically over already. At warehouses operated by Liquidity Services Inc., a leading online auction company for surplus goods, there are rows and rows of pallets of offloaded merchandise ranging from jewelry to consumer electronics. At the company’s Liquidation.com, which auctions surplus goods offered by stores and manufacturers to dollar stores and small businesses that sell on eBay, the number of auctions scheduled for the Thanksgiving weekend has soared to 2,100 - eight times more than last Thanksgiving, said chief executive Bill Angrick. In other words, what normally happens after Christmas is taking place this weekend, he said.
Liquidity Services, Inc. is a newcomer to the Forbes Magazine 200 Best Small Companies, ranking #26.
While some firms are simply trying to stay afloat during this national economic slump, D.C.-based Liquidity Services is finding a booming market thanks to online bargain seekers. The company has about 900,000 registered buyers, most of whom are small businesses. Liquidity sells overstocked or returned goods from retailers, including some Fortune 500 companies, and the government. Many of the small firms buy from Liquidity and then refurbish and repackage the goods to sell to customers.
The online auction marketplace will allow professional buyers to review photos and detailed product information at Liquidation.com. They also can physically see items in one of the five distribution centers Liquidation has throughout the U.S.
You might think that a website like Liquidation.com would balk at the suggestion that it is, “the eBay for wholesale liquidations.” Considering the comparison, it is a heavy statement. However, the description is right on the money, especially considering how the online auction destination has grown since being founded just a few years ago. Sales for its parent company, Liquidity Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: LQDT), have seen an annual compounded growth rate of 37 percent over the last 5 years, while commercial sales have surged 137 percent in the last year alone.
Ever wonder what happens to all those gifts that are returned after the holidays? They are sold and big discounts to the rest of us and Fox News interviews Bill Angrick, CEO of Liquidity Services, Inc.
Each holiday season, we relegate our unwanted gifts to the return bins of retailers across the country and never think of them again. But these items have a second life. “We help [stores] rapidly convert those excess items into cash sales,” said Bill Angrick, chief executive of Liquidity Services, a District company that works with many big-box stores. With Liquidity Services, retailers ship their unwanted merchandise to one of the company’s six distribution centers across the country as frequently as once a week. The company then inspects and sorts the goods before holding a private online auction for interested buyers, typically small businesses.
It’s possible you’ll recognize some of the items for sale at Liquidation.com — many of them came from the streets of the District. The District’s batch of items seized by police were once sold off to buyers at auctions. Now, everything from decommissioned police cruisers to cars and trucks swiped from criminals are online for prospective purchasers to page through as easily as they might surf eBay.
The 6th annual eBay Live conference wrapped up Saturday with Kool and the Gang helping attendees celebrate good times, but now it’s back to business. For those of you who didn’t make it to Boston, here we’ll highlight some of the exhibitors that caught our eye or made announcements.
Liquidation.com, the District of Columbia’s private online auctioneer, is in the midst of its latest seized-vehicle sell-off. Liquidity Services Inc., the parent of Liquidation.com, regularly conducts auctions of city assets. Since August 2006, the District MPD has rid itself of nearly $175,000 worth of stuff, including dishwashers, lawn mowers, laptops, tires, ladders, golf clubs, camera equipment, jackhammers, bicycle frames, mixed electronics, power tools, a six-man dome tent and a portable gazebo.
Customer returns have started to clog up the backroom; unsold seasonal inventory is spreading to every nook and cranny of the store — and the cost of shipping all this back through the supply chain threatens to undo the bottom line. Faced with scenarios like this, many retailers are choosing different paths for surplus merchandise — liquidation or online auctions. These are methods that can work to the advantage of both buyers and sellers. We recently spoke with Bill Angrick, CEO of Liquidity Services, an online wholesale marketplace.
LSI ranks #18 in BusinessWeek’s annual tally of the 100 hottest small companies in the U.S. By drawing thousands of buyers to a single online marketplace to win higher sales, this dot-com is reinventing the resale and surplus industries the way other internet auctioneers transformed flea markets. Analysts predict that this “reverse logistics” market will hit $63 billion in 2008. “The opportunity,” says CEO Bill Angrick, “is incredible.”
“The Internet has created a business- to-business market that couldn’t have existed before,” says Paul Keung, an Internet analyst with CIBC World Markets in New York. “It has totally changed the values.” An example of this emerging business-to-business Internet growth is Liquidity Services Inc. “Liquidity has a strong B2B model with network effects and compelling value proposition,” says Mr. Keung.
No matter what kind of online business you have you can most likely benefit from adding liquidated goods to your product offering. The rock bottom prices provide you with a competitive edge and still let you make an excellent profit. Here to talk about what online liquidation services can do for your eBiz is Bill Angrick, Chairman and CEO of Liquidity Services Inc.
Retailers are experts at getting their goods to customers in an efficient, timely manner. Problems happen, however, when you reverse the supply chain, when retailers are stuck with surplus, returned, out-of-style or out-of-season merchandise. Liquidity Services Inc. (LQDT) says it can make the reverse supply chain as efficient as the regular one. A product of the dot-com boom and a survivor of the bust, Liquidity Services says the Internet is the best way to connect wholesale liquidation buyers with sellers.
William Angrick III, Chairman and CEO of Liquidity Services, Inc. (Nasdaq: LQDT) updated the investment community in an all-new interview including highlights from the company’s Q4 and FY06 earnings release.
Given the size and sophistication of its platform, Liquidity Services certainly appears to be positioned to benefit from a large market opportunity. And, so far, management has been able to handle the growth. In other words, the company has the kind of ingredients that long-term investors look for.
To stay competitive with larger retailers and the growing number of independents, savvy retailers have learned that online sourcing can be an efficient and cost effective way to find quality inventory for resale in traditional and online stores. For the small independent, some of the best online resources come in the form of B2B online auction sites for bulk inventory, vertical search engines, online directory listings, and peer group forums.
Forget eBay, the Saturday morning yard sales, the tiresome scanning of ads in all types of publications. Everything you need or want - or at least most of it - is available after a few keystrokes on your home computer. How about four Harleys? Two cavalry horses? Aircraft? Buses? Dump trucks? Camping equipment? Metal and woodworking machines? Boats? Snow skis? Clothing and shoes? A surgical microscope? All are for sale right now to the highest bidder at the www.govliquidation.com Web site.
“The acquisition of STR strengthens LSI’s business by adding long-standing relationships with traditional discount store chain buyers as well as Fortune 500 commercial sellers,” says Bill Angrick, chairman and CEO of the D.C. company.
Online auction marketplaces generate higher rates of return over traditional disposition methods by providing access to a broad qualified buyer base that competes for merchandise, and thus drives the maximum pricing for the goods.
Overstocked, returned and outdated products have long been thorns in the sides of retailers. They take up valuable warehouse or shelf space that could be better used to stockpile current inventory. And perhaps more importantly, they represent lost revenue.
Liquidity Services, Inc. recently completed an IPO. The company is a leading online auction marketplace for wholesale, surplus and salvage assets. In this week’s issue, we interview Bill Angrick, CEO of Liquidity Services to discuss the company’s business model, how the IPO impacts the company, and we learn that he was a boxer in college.
Liquidity was founded by William P. Angrick III, Jaime Mateus-Tique and Benjamin R. Brown during the height of the Internet frenzy in 1999. The three, all in their thirties, still run the 286-person company.
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