When you return stuff to a store or in particular to an online store, generally it doesn’t end up back on the shelf. It ends up part of a collection of other returned items, which are sold at a discount to retailers specializing in closeouts. If you’re a businessperson who needs a truckload of baby stuff or watches, this may be your chance.

The site is sort of like eBay for truckloads of stuff, and other retailers use the same company, B-stock Solutions, to get rid of their random lots of inventory. The founder of the company actually calls this business “re-commerce.”

This might seem to contradict another recent piece of news out of Sears Holdings: that Kmart is buying its own pallets of closeout merchandise and selling them as Blue Light Specials in its stores and online. That’s true but also not true: there are retailers that specialize in selling these pallets full of random items, usually online or at flea markets, and labor-intensive work is that’s not something that Kmart is equipped to do. Yes, even if the merchandise originated at Kmart.

Sears Sells Excess Inventory and Returns in New Marketplace [ECommerceBytes]

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