Purchasing liquidation, surplus or bankrupt stock is a great way to buy products at big discounts. However, knowing where to buy liquidation and surplus stock in the uk is tricky, with many clearance companies only offering discounted job lot pallets. We will guide you through the UK liquidation store market and give you hints and tips to getting the best bargains on liquidation and surplus stock.
Where does this stock come from?
When a business ceases trading, in order to pay creditors, administrators are called in to liquidate assets to create cash. Administrators will look to sell stock in bulk with large discounts in order to speed up the process. This stock will be offered to clearance wholesalers rather than to the public.
Surplus stock can be created due to a number of reasons. With difficulties accurately forecasting sales, businesses simply over order so need to shift excess stock stored in warehouses. If it's a food and drink product, short shelf life products have to be sold before they expire. To sell them quickly, as seen in your local supermarket, they are heavily reduced. Some brands may also have orders cancelled by big retailers and need to sell stock quickly to recoup some of the costs.
Many clothing retailers also sell returns, due to the cost of repacking, off in bulk as well. Selling of returns are usually quite generally described i.e. 'Mens branded jackets'. There are some great bargains to be had but also there's the risk of getting end of line stock due to the mystery of what will be in each package.
Of the above stock, much of this isn't accessible to the general public due to the bulk but there are ways to buy liquidation stock without spending a fortune.
Where to buy liquidation stock?
There are several options for purchasing liquidation stock in the UK, you've just got to know the best places to find bargains.
First of all, the variety of products available to purchase is vast so it's always good to have in mind what you are looking for. Also, depending on if you're looking for low quantity, shopping for yourself or you're a business looking to buy cheap stock to offer to customers, the websites for you are going to be very different.
1. Liquidation Wholesalers
Liquidation Wholesalers are the one of the first ports of call for administrators looking to sell stock quickly. Even Amazon sells liquidation stock to these wholesalers. In turn, the wholesalers break down the stock in categories, usually quite general e.g. 'Sporting Goods' and an assigned value as per the below.
As you can see by the quantity and price , this concept is made for B2B customers buying in bulk and separating down into individual items to sell.
2. Flash Sale Websites
Flash sales have been widely adopted across e-commerce whereby there's a limited time sale or a limited amount of stock to sell. This is usually end of season stock or when a brand is making room in the warehouses. The best way to get the big discounts on everything from food & drink and health & beauty to household products is signing up to be a subscriber. Specific times are the year are filled with deals for example Black Friday Offers amazing discounts and keeping a close eye on emails about upcoming deals to make sure that you don't miss out.
3. liquidation.store
liquidation.store is a new concept of liquidation store, giving the public access to the best liquidation offers. Working directly with brands, liquidation.store offers the best discounts on big brand products. Whether you're looking for cheap health and beauty products, cleaning products for the house or even discounted CBD products, liquidation.store has an array of products to suit.
Designed to give direct customers access to some of the best liquidation or excess stock deals, liquidation.store runs weekly flash sales with cherry picked offers. This means that you've got to be quick, otherwise you'll miss these one time offers.
4. Ebay/Amazon
Did you know the you can buy job lots on Amazon? Simply search 'Liquidation Stock' in Amazon and see the array of job lots you can purchase. This is the same on ebay. Again, based on the pallet quantities, it's made for B2B more than D2C and the granular nature of the products mean that you could easily find yourself with products that are unwanted and difficult to move on again.