Tony Amrhein of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, has been stocking his eBay store with automotive parts for his side hustle, and also saving regularly off retail prices.
When items are returned to retailers, they are often steeply discounted and sold by a third-part company. Both Khan and Amrhein have been benefitting from scooping up those items. buying items returned to retailers and then steeply discounted by other companies that have purchased those returns.
While bargain hunters have been finding deals at stores that liquidate returns and overstocked items for years, a new wave of shoppers are finding deals on their phones or computers while solving a problem for the retail industry: finding new life for returned products that may otherwise go to a landfill.
Companies that take on retailers' returns and overstock and resell them to consumers in a variety ways help the retailers by offloading large volumes of returns, said Lauren Beitelspacher, a professor in the marketing division of Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, whose research includes return policies.
Returns cost retailers a lot of money. Total returns were expected to top $890 billion in 2024, according to a report in December 2024 by the National Retail Federation. Retailers estimated that 16.9% of their annual sales in 2024 would be returned.
