Pandemic gives legs to reseller hustle
It’s a hustle as old as humankind: Get something on the cheap; persuade someone to take it off your hands for more. After the pandemic shut people in and wiped out jobs, the gig got supercharged.
One couple has sold $12,400 of Walmart instant soup mix since June. Another reseller is peddling boxes of 200 slightly wrinkled dresses for $800.
These freshly minted entrepreneurs managed to bootstrap their own businesses with little or no funding, often starting by selling common consumer products online from their homes and then expanding to warehouses.
“We’ve seen crazy growth,” said Marcus Shen, chief operating officer of B-Stock Solutions, which bills itself as the world’s largest business-tobusiness online marketplace for the unsold, the surplus, the returned and the liquidated. The Belmont, Calif., company has experienced a 34% increase in new resellers in the last year, he said.
“We’ve seen a lot of new folks who are looking for that side hustle, the gig they can run on the side because they’re just sitting at home, or maybe underemployed,” Shen said. “They are experimenting with buying merchandise in bulk, and then creating reselling opportunities for their own e-commerce stores.”
These repeddlers aren’t the people using social networks and apps to clean out their closets and garages, which also became wildly popular during the shutdown.
They are dedicated product flippers with a vast internet audience, according to mobile marketplace OfferUp, primed by the pandemic to want items to make homes more comfortable and suitable for remote working and schooling.
Resellers have gotten some of the blame for big price increases of popular goods in the last year, causing crackdowns by Amazon and EBay. The New York Times famously found an Amazon reseller stuck with 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer, acquired mainly by driving around and cleaning out retailer shelves in Tennessee and Kentucky.
At EBay, Chief Executive Jamie Iannone told investors and analysts that in addition to the fourthquarter holiday surge, “we experienced unprecedented traffic levels for most of 2020.” The last three months of 2020 brought a 21% increase in the amount of merchandise sold (to $26.6 billion), a 5% rise in active sellers and a 7% increase in active buyers compared with the year-earlier quarter.
John Traches has experienced this boom in good and bad ways. Traches was forced to close his Santa Fe Springs business, JT Merchandise Outlet, when the coronavirus lockdown stopped sales cold.
“For about a good month and a half, there was nothing going on,” Traches said. But by the end of April 2020, Traches began to get a trickle of requests from prospective buyers, he said. Then it became a flood.
“It was incredible,” Traches said, with sales suddenly running 20% higher than before the pandemic, in 2019. “This industry just kind of took off ever since May of 2020.”