Clearing old and discountinued stock

Clearance Seciton on web site or sell on Ebay

[lgn1]

Over the years, between retail and the web we have accumulated discontinued items, items on the web were pulled when we only had a few items remaining, etc and after 5 years its adds up to about 4 thousand worth of merchandise (our cost).

We are totally web based now, as the retail was seasonal and just to expensive.

We were thinking of dumping this stock by either having a clearance section on our website and selling the stuff at our cost, to give an incentive to get rid of it, or by selling it on eBay.

Any experience with one method or the other.

[zulufox]

If you are medium/small, then definitely ebay.

The auction systems means you will actually profit from the buyers competiting for the items.

The problem with selling on your own website is that not that many people will find your sale.

However, if you are microsoft, I think you can generate your own hype :)

[lgn1]

The only problem with Ebay, is that I can't sell mulitple items, until I get a reputation number above 30. The person may want to buy 1,2 or 10 of a particular item.

Is their anyway to bypass these restrictions, for established businesses. Getting grouped with the coffee table operations is a bit annoying, and their should be some way to prove that you are a reputable seller to ebay.

[hannamyluv]

how much do you have? Do you have an email list?

Our company is on the larger size so we constantly have overstock. We get rid of it 3 different ways.

1) Jobbers
Jobbers are people people who buy lots of merchandise at deep discounts. This is basically who you go to when you what to dump everything and just get rid of it. Expect to recover .03 - .30 on the dollar for the merchandise.

2) Upsell/Clearance
When we have overstock, it goes into an upsell rotation. We discount it and then offer it to customers at various places, checkout being the main one. It also goes into a clearance section. Here, you normally have a positive recovery, but you are looking at still having the stock sittingon the shelves for awhile.

3) Email Blast
We discount the merch to move and send an email out to our customers. This is the easiest and fastest, though to really move the stuff, you are looking at only a .50 - .70 on the dollar recovery. Better than jobbersand it moves faster than upselling.

We did try eBay, but if you have any sort of automated system, eBay starts to get a bit cumbersome.