In 2020, Amazon had opened up their Liquidation program to the public. Along with their “Grade and Resell” program, these options have helped reduce the total items ending up in landfills over the past few years.

That being said, the program has its limitations that you may not realize. As stated on Amazon’s Liquidations details page (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GYVCG5Q3BEJ6MLMF), they don’t accept hazardous materials or recalled products. However, the more relevant limitation appears in the note below:

“…only items with a reason of Customer Damaged, Carrier Damaged, or Distributor Damaged are eligible for liquidation. Items with a reason of Expired, Defective, and Warehouse Damaged are not eligible for liquidation.”

You can probably already get where this is going. Amazon is classifying eligibility based on customer return reason. As we all know, customer return reason is highly unreliable and commonly inaccurate. Even when Amazon gets an item back, they probably have liability limitations related to reselling items that their customer claims are “defective”. By observing our client’s data, we at Stellar Service Ohio (www.stellarserviceohio.com) have noticed over the years that anywhere from 10-90% of customer returns for any SKU are considered “ineligible” with an average closer to 30-60% across any particular account.

As sellers, we can’t blame Amazon for these limitations, but we can do something about it. If you are considering using Amazon’s liquidation system, it is worth sending all your ineligible items to an alternative liquidator instead of disposing of them. Amazon-focused liquidation companies like ours (www.stellarserviceohio.com) can help by receiving and paying for those ineligible items.