Whether you’re new to wholesaling or looking for a way to scale your current wholesale business, liquidated electronics have a lot to offer. It’s wise to learn about liquidated goods and why it’s a good idea to strike up partnerships with wholesale liquidators. Here is how liquidators can help grow your wholesale electronics business.
What is Liquidation?
The liquidation process takes place when a business needs to get rid of its inventory fast. Companies do this for various reasons, especially to keep them in business or to pay off debts. By liquidating inventory, companies get rid of unwanted items and make fast profits.
How Goods Become Liquidated
Companies of all sizes enjoy liquidating goods. Now that you understand what this term means, it’s time to look at the most common types of liquidated items. Here are the five most common reasons why a company liquidates inventory.
1. Customer Returns: Retail employees know how often customers return items. Understandably, business owners would rather see customers buying new items instead of returning them. To take care of this situation, companies put returned items on liquidation pallets.
2. Overstock Products: Another reason goods get liquidated is due to overstock issues. Companies will label goods as overstock items for several reasons. These reasons include a lack of customer demand, seasonal retail changes, or because an employee ordered too much of something. Buying overstock products is one of many great ways to buy wholesale electronics.
3. Refurbished Items: Not every item a store or business receives is ready to sell to the public. Unfortunately, lots of bad things can happen as companies transport goods to stores. When these things happen, goods can arrive at stores or other locations in bad condition. To solve this problem, manufacturers take these goods back to repair them. After repairs are complete, these goods go back to retailers as refurbished items.
4. Business Closeouts: As mentioned earlier, closeouts take place when a business has to sell off inventory to pay off debts or salvage a bit of profit. Business closeouts are events marked by a sense of urgency. So, be sure to keep an eye out for these types of liquidation auctions as there’s the potential to find lots of valuable electronics.
5. Discontinued Goods: Business owners know that technology moves at a fast pace. Many electronics manufacturers are always competing to release the latest and greatest devices. Because of that, it sometimes causes items to become discontinued rather quickly.
When companies are about to release a new product, they’ll often stop making older versions of this same item. But, don’t think this means you’ll only find items of little to no worth here. Many types of discontinued electronics still have lots of demand and can fetch great resale prices.
Popular Types of Electronics for Wholesale Liquidators
It’s understandable to want to learn which types of electronics are the most popular, especially before you start making any purchases. By finding these types of electronics, it’s going to help you get your electronic liquidation business off the ground fast. Here are four types of electronics to look for at wholesale liquidation auctions.
Smartphones: One of the most popular electronics for wholesalers in countries throughout the world is the smartphone. Almost each year, popular manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, and Google release smartphones to the public. In 2019 alone, $77.5 billion worth of smartphones were sold throughout the United States.
Tablets: Considering the popularity of smartphones, it wasn’t long before companies would start releasing tablets. As smartphones do, tablets also have touchscreens and access to large selections of applications. Tablets are also popular goods for both consumers and wholesalers.
Computers: You’ll also want to keep an eye out for any liquidated wholesale computers. As you can imagine, computers show no signs of slowing down in popularity. To start finding wholesale computers, you’ll need to choose whether you want to buy and sell desktop computers, laptops, or both.
Smartwatches: Another popular type of electronics are smartwatches. While not as popular as smartphones and tablets, there’s a lot of resale potential from these devices. As it is with most electronics, Apple and Samsung remain the most popular smartwatch manufacturers.
6 Reasons Why Wholesalers Love Electronic Liquidations
It’s hard to deny the popularity of liquidated wholesale electronics. But, you might need more convincing about what makes electronic liquidations so beneficial. Here are five reasons why many successful wholesalers buy and sell liquidated electronics.
1. Lower Prices
An essential element of buying and selling electronics for a living is buying items at fair prices.
With that in mind, you’ll be glad to know that liquidated electronics often cost much less than buying them through other methods. The thought process behind liquidation focuses on getting rid of inventory right away. With this sense of urgency, companies often price liquidation pallets to sell them fast. If current wholesale prices are more than you’re wanting to spend, check out liquidation auctions.
2. Knowing Where Your Items Are Coming From
In any industry, there’s always the potential for scams to happen. So, it’s essential for wholesalers to feel secure when buying and selling electronic devices. Fortunately, you'll get the safety and security you’re longing for from buying liquidated electronics.
Some of the largest retailers in the world including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and many others liquidate items. If you can buy these items from electronic wholesale suppliers, you’ll never worry about being unsure of where your goods came from.
3. Items Available Around the Clock
Another key element is growing a company is being able to have a large selection of items to buy. Having lackluster inventory makes it tougher for customers and companies to want to work with you. Fortunately, you can solve this problem by working with wholesale liquidators.
Each day, companies around the world place unwanted items onto liquidation pallets. With this happening, it means there are tons of electronics liquidation pallets for sale. If you’ve been struggling to find the electronics you need, consider checking out everything the world of liquidation has to offer.
4. Shipments of All Sizes
While finding and purchasing liquidated electronics, you’ll also have options when it comes to shipment sizes. Companies liquidate enough goods to fill a few boxes, pallets, and even entire truckloads full of merchandise. Having these options means that it’s easy for companies of all sizes to enter the wholesale liquidation industry and start making money.
5. The Fun of Finding Hidden Treasures
We’ve mentioned that you’ll often find lower prices from buying liquidated goods than you would through other avenues. However, it’s also important to note that there is potential to find these prices on items that are worth far more. When this happens, you can resale these items and enjoy the immense profit these goods bring in.
6. Meeting New Potential Business Partners
Yet another advantage of buying liquidated electronics is meeting new business suppliers. There are many electronics wholesale professionals working with liquidated goods. Much like you, these professionals are always eager to grow their companies by networking. You never know, these new business partners could be what takes your wholesale company to the next level.
Wholesale Liquidation Auctions vs Direct Purchases
When it comes to buying and reselling electronics, you’ll have two choices. You can choose to either buy pallets from electronic liquidation from auctions or purchase them at a set price. With that in mind, each of these methods has advantages and drawbacks.
Buying electronic liquidation pallets through auctions has its advantages. It’s always possible to walk away with amazing deals at auctions because bidders set the final prices. With that said, it’s also possible to find popular auctions with lots of bids that might not be worth it.
Your other option is to buy pallets at a set price. Buying electronic liquidation pallets for a set price is a good option for wholesalers that don’t want to deal with auctions. Instead, by buying liquidation goods at a set price, you know how much you’re going to spend right away. But, buying liquidation electronics at a set price can reduce your chances of finding bargains you would find at auctions.
4 Smart Tips to Help You Sell Liquidation Electronics
When it comes to managing a business, no company owner wants to wait to start seeing results. To help you out, let’s look at how to avoid risks and maximize profit while buying wholesale liquidated electronics. Check out these four tips to sell liquidation electronics fast.
1. Establish an Online Presence
When it comes to selling electronics you need to grow your wholesale business online. This might sound a little complicated, but it isn’t. You can start setting up an online presence in several ways. One way to do this is by creating a website that features more information about your business. It’s also wise to include a spreadsheet that offers your prices.
You can also gain traffic by creating and posting content on social media accounts. Electronics wholesalers everywhere use social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A major benefit of having these pages is that you’ll have places to post and share website content.
2. Try Paid Advertising
If you’re wanting to drum up new customers, it’s essential to have a website that looks great. Another important element of having a “successful” website is how much traffic or visitors you’re getting. To help increase web traffic and profits, a website needs to be optimized to get those prime spots in search engines like Google. In fact, a recent study from SEO company Backlinko reported that only 0.78% of people click on websites listed past the first page of Google’s results.
Not every company has the resources to start learning how to do this, especially brand-new businesses. With that in mind, you can start getting those first critical leads you need through paid advertising. The concept of paid advertising is simple. As you would with television or radio commercials, paid advertising involves a company paying another business for exposure.
With paid advertising, your company spends money when someone either views or clicks a link that goes to your website. You’ll have the best success with paid advertising by targeting the right keywords and keeping a close eye on how much you’re spending. Whether you’re operating a B2C or B2B wholesale company, paid advertising can provide a great ROI.
3. Become a Trade-In Tech Member
Another way to make smarter purchases in the wholesale electronics industry is by joining Trade-In Tech. Our wholesale social platform is specifically for electronics wholesalers. This means that you won’t be wasting time and energy trying to find electronics listings. Our members buy and sell iPads, iPhones, tablets, smartwatches, and even wholesale computers.
It’s also easy to communicate with electronics wholesalers on Trade-In Tech because we verify each of our members. Our verification process helps keep each valued member of our platform safe from scammers. We also make it easy to speak with our network of verified buyback companies and other wholesale professionals throughout the world.
4. Learn How to Refurbish Electronics
When you’re looking through lots of liquidation electronics, it’s possible to find lots of items that need repairs. Most business owners solve this problem by striking up deals with refurbishing companies. However, if you have the time and want to save even more money, it might be beneficial to learn how to refurbish electronics in-house.
Sure, it will take time and more than a few broken electronics before you get good at refurbishing. With that said, knowing how to refurbish electronics will help you save lots of money if you buy used devices.
To wrap everything up, there are many ways that wholesalers specializing in liquidated electronics can help your business. As long as you know what types of liquidated electronics to look for, you’ll find plenty of valuable items to purchase. Best of all, you benefit from getting these goods at low prices with the potential to find massive bargains. After spending a little time and effort getting your name out there, your liquidated electronics business should start booming.