HOW SMART ENTREPRENEURS MAKES MILLIONS AS A RESELLER DURING THE PANDEMIC

It’s a hustle as old as humankind: Get something on the cheap; persuade someone to take it off your hands for more. Entrepreneurs often start by selling common consumer products online from their homes and then expanding to warehouses. One couple has sold $12,400 of Walmart instant soup mix since June. Another reseller is peddling boxes of 200 dresses for $800. As the pandemic shut people in and wiped out jobs, the reselling gig got supercharged. 

These freshly minted entrepreneurs managed to bootstrap their own businesses with little or no funding, often starting by selling common consumer products online from their homes and then expanding to warehouses. We’ve seen crazy growth,” said Marcus Shen, chief operating officer of B-Stock Solutions,which bills itself as the world’s largest business-to-business online marketplace for the unsold, the surplus, the returned and the liquidated. The Belmont, Calif., company has experienced a 34% increase in new resellers in the last year, he said.

“We’ve seen crazy growth,” said Marcus Shen, chief operating officer of B-Stock Solutions, which bills itself as the world’s largest business-to-business online marketplace for the unsold, the surplus, the returned and the liquidated. Resellers have gotten some of the blame for big price increases of popular goods in the last year, causing crackdowns by Amazon and EBay.

John Traches has experienced this boom in good and bad ways. Traches was forced to close his business, JT Merchandise Outlet, when the coronavirus lockdown stopped sales cold. Then, Traches began to get a flood of requests from prospective buyers. He has been selling pallets of athletic shoes for $1,000, boxes of 200 dresses for $800, collections of pots, pans and other kitchen equipment for $450.

What will happen to reselling entrepreneurs as more people receive COVID-19 vaccines and become less hesitant to do in-person browsing inside a bricks-and-mortar store? Will reselling as a side gig peter out as the virus fades away?. Lots of people got into reselling common consumer products during the pandemic. Are there big upfront costs, Is this even legal?

When asked on the future of a reselling business, he has this to say; “I think that we certainly will see some normalization here,” Shen said, “and when people are no longer stuck in front of their phones and their laptops and with nothing better to do, I expect that we’ll start to see things taper off. “But I don’t think that entrepreneurial spirit will stop. That’s not going back in the box.”