Project Overload
By Candace Sheppard

Retail Buyers’ e-brochure on featured product and suppliers web page.

Screen shot of personal shopping cart on retailbuyers.com.

Shopping sites birth a needed niche for suppliers and retailers to sell excess stock

Space is often limited in a supplier’s warehouse and on a retailer sales floor, so moving product out is always a challenge. Online selling is seemingly a smart and fresh approach to showcase and liquidate discontinued and overstocked inventory.

“There aren’t a lot of avenues [for] retailers and suppliers to move their overstock,” says Deborah Lilande, ceo and founder of two Canada-based overstock sites—retailerbuyers.com and retailertoretailer.com—that provide e-commerce service to suppliers and retailers in home furnishings and giftware industries.

Through retailbuyers.com, suppliers and manufacturers can sell overstock to smaller independent retailers and generate a larger profit, compared to the standard 10 cents on the dollar offered to them by most big-box retailers.

Retailers can quickly clear their store floors of closeout goods by selling products at or below the wholesale costs directly to other retailers via retailertoretailer.com.

“On our sites, there is more money to be made,” says Lilande, “especially since most suppliers don’t have…a local resource center [to set up] cash and carry.”

By paying a $100 annual registration fee, suppliers and retailers have unlimited access to upload merchandise to sell to the 1,300 registered retailers who shop the sites. Each site takes five-percent commission from a sale and, according to Lilande, both suppliers and retailers have been satisfied with their revenue and purchased merchandise. Lilande and her staff make shoppers aware that merchandise is new, but items are clearance and what you see is what you get.

“Since it is overstock we make things as easy as possible,” says Lilande. “We phone the retailer after an order placement and remind them that all items are final sale.”

New prospects also arise as users sell and buy. Suppliers, for example, forge new retailer relationships and partnerships with interior designers through the web exchange. Retailers and suppliers also benefit from posting their free classified ads and will soon be able to advertise regularly on the sites.

Registered users are e-blasted monthly as well with an e-brochure that keeps them abreast of upcoming shows, inside resources, and new products and suppliers.

As both sites are expanding to service all of North America and internationally, the success with users who appreciate the “[convenience to] shop for opportunity buys” and the pleasure of an “accommodating and friendly” staff, as attested to by some testimonials, is sure to sustain these innovative sites as excellent forums through which to expand one’s market.