Buy & Sell Job Lots

A job lot is a collection of various items that is bought or sold as a group. There is some good money to be made here if you are interested in a buying and selling business but also some things to look out for.

Getting Started
To get started in this business you need money to buy the products and you need a place to resell it.

Business Model
This business model involves buying a lot of items and then usually reselling them individually, the thing about job lots is that they are usually sold for cheap, that is because the seller often times just sells it to get rid of it. You will also get lots of non working goods that companies sell that they feel is not worth it to fix so they sell it, what might not be worth it to fix for a large company might be worth for a small entrepreneur.

Once you acquire a job lot, the goal is to resell it for as much as possible, usually individually (which will make the most profit but take longer to sell). This sometimes means cleaning dirty items, fixing broken items, refurbishing used items. That is essentially what this business is about. It allows a small business owner to make good profits but there is often a lot of labour involved, that is why people who buy and sell equipment at auctions often avoid job lots as it can be a lot of effort, and if you have a lot of capital then there is better ways to deploy your capital with less time and effort investment.

Where to buy job lots
Auctions
One of the most common place to buy job lots is from actions, often liquidation auctions. When a company is liquidated they usually have equipment and then they have various miscellaneous items like unsold stock or returns that was not yet repaired.

Reject goods
If a company ordered made products that has some imperfections meaning they cannot be sold new in retail they will often sell them as job lots to be taken all in one go.

Faulty goods
As mentioned above goods that companies think is not viable to fix. A good example are kettles, the professional labour involved to fix it cost more than the kettle is worth so they just sell it for next to nothing.

Odds & ends
Old stock, discontinued models etc.

Incomplete collections
Often times collectors buy and collect various items, but sometimes they end up with various items that have no place in their collection or they have stopped collecting that particular items then they often sell it as job lots.

Now all of the above depend on you going out and looking and that’s what an entrepreneur is about, you cannot expect things to fall on your lap because it won’t.

Yes you can have a look on Gumtree and bidorbuy to see what is being advertised on the internet, but the good stuff you will have to keep an eye out for auctions and speak to companies to ask what they do with stuff like this. Bidorbuy has 29 pages of job lots being advertised but a cursory glance does not excite me, Gumtree is a bit more interesting with some job lots of electronics and other products but its not as cheap as you would if you were to get it direct from the source.