Followed you from TikTok; I wrote a software program like ten years ago for a company that processes returns and they needed a way to track inventory and estimate if items were worth reselling. I remember being amazed and horrified by the scale of waste in our commercial systems. The old guy that founded the "reverse logistics" company in the 1980s said that when he started, he would intercept tons of apparel that hadn't been sold and it was all headed straight into landfills.
Book publishers are pretty awful too; they print about 5x what they think will sell, because printing books is dirt cheap and they want to have plenty on hand in case the book turns out to be a hit. I saw literally thousands of copies of Sarah Palin's biography shipped there to make room for other stuff.
So glad you're writing this! This is how the culture changes.
Hi Matt! Thank you for reading and wow-- thanks for sharing your experience with this sort of liquidation warehousing. It’s crazy how so much of this is sorta hidden from the public. I’m really interested in learning more about the calculations behind deciding to resells vs. scrap returned inventory.
OK! So the system was pretty cool and I daydream about rewriting it so others can use it.
The person unpacking a shipping container would look for a barcode on the box they pick up. If they find a UPC or maybe Amazon’s own ASIN number, they would scan it with a portable bluetooth barcode reader that was hooked up to a cheap tablet. That tablet would search my database for that UPC or ASIN and hopefully return information like what the product was called, how much was it currently selling for, its category (e.g. wristwatch or beauty product or boys apparel or candy or whatever), and information like shipping size and weight. That data goes into a simple set of rules that told the human which big box to throw it in. Stuff like jewelry or perfume or electronics are examples of items worth listing individually on ebay. That preparation takes time, so only expensive items that are cheap to ship cuz they are small and light are worthwhile.
But a pair of athletic socks is not likely to sell for enough so it would go into the bulk apparel bin to be sold to other wholesalers.
Stuff like lawn equipment would be a third category, where it is too expensive to ship so we would email people that had signed up to be notified by categories.
I’ve been thinking that this technology might improve the operation of buy nothing groups. Those are great in theory but in practice people get 99 irrelevant posts for every one single thing that they might like.
Seeing those enormous stacks of brand new cookbooks and pop fiction kinda made me realize that us composting and recycling is great but is ultimately so far downstream from the real waste that it can’t fix everything.
Producers need to include the costs of eventual disposal or recycling of their products in the retail price for this system to have any chance of efficiency.
Great read Sarah! Wow didn’t realize that all the Amazon returns are not resold by Amazon. There sure is a lot of waste! Thanks for the eye opener and the tips.
some stuff sent back to Amazon is definitely restocked and resold (I've purchased things before that I could tell were other people's returns) but not everything.. sometimes it is actually cheaper for the business to not go through the hassle of restocking and reselling! I wish I could find a good statistic to know what portion of returns are resold to customers.
So, Amazon returns aren't then re-sold by Amazon? They end up in a warehouse piled up? I am (embarrassingly so) forever buying and returning Amazon purchases. Now I will definitely cut back on this,ugh.
Followed you from TikTok; I wrote a software program like ten years ago for a company that processes returns and they needed a way to track inventory and estimate if items were worth reselling. I remember being amazed and horrified by the scale of waste in our commercial systems. The old guy that founded the "reverse logistics" company in the 1980s said that when he started, he would intercept tons of apparel that hadn't been sold and it was all headed straight into landfills.
Book publishers are pretty awful too; they print about 5x what they think will sell, because printing books is dirt cheap and they want to have plenty on hand in case the book turns out to be a hit. I saw literally thousands of copies of Sarah Palin's biography shipped there to make room for other stuff.
So glad you're writing this! This is how the culture changes.
Hi Matt! Thank you for reading and wow-- thanks for sharing your experience with this sort of liquidation warehousing. It’s crazy how so much of this is sorta hidden from the public. I’m really interested in learning more about the calculations behind deciding to resells vs. scrap returned inventory.
OK! So the system was pretty cool and I daydream about rewriting it so others can use it.
The person unpacking a shipping container would look for a barcode on the box they pick up. If they find a UPC or maybe Amazon’s own ASIN number, they would scan it with a portable bluetooth barcode reader that was hooked up to a cheap tablet. That tablet would search my database for that UPC or ASIN and hopefully return information like what the product was called, how much was it currently selling for, its category (e.g. wristwatch or beauty product or boys apparel or candy or whatever), and information like shipping size and weight. That data goes into a simple set of rules that told the human which big box to throw it in. Stuff like jewelry or perfume or electronics are examples of items worth listing individually on ebay. That preparation takes time, so only expensive items that are cheap to ship cuz they are small and light are worthwhile.
But a pair of athletic socks is not likely to sell for enough so it would go into the bulk apparel bin to be sold to other wholesalers.
Stuff like lawn equipment would be a third category, where it is too expensive to ship so we would email people that had signed up to be notified by categories.
I’ve been thinking that this technology might improve the operation of buy nothing groups. Those are great in theory but in practice people get 99 irrelevant posts for every one single thing that they might like.
Seeing those enormous stacks of brand new cookbooks and pop fiction kinda made me realize that us composting and recycling is great but is ultimately so far downstream from the real waste that it can’t fix everything.
Producers need to include the costs of eventual disposal or recycling of their products in the retail price for this system to have any chance of efficiency.
Great read Sarah! Wow didn’t realize that all the Amazon returns are not resold by Amazon. There sure is a lot of waste! Thanks for the eye opener and the tips.
some stuff sent back to Amazon is definitely restocked and resold (I've purchased things before that I could tell were other people's returns) but not everything.. sometimes it is actually cheaper for the business to not go through the hassle of restocking and reselling! I wish I could find a good statistic to know what portion of returns are resold to customers.
So, Amazon returns aren't then re-sold by Amazon? They end up in a warehouse piled up? I am (embarrassingly so) forever buying and returning Amazon purchases. Now I will definitely cut back on this,ugh.