In this video, Matt Lovell, CEO of Buy Low Warehouse, introduces the company’s 2022 State of the Liquidation Industry Report. He explains that the report was created to answer recurring questions from newcomers and veterans about market trends, pricing, seasonality, and operational challenges. The report is based on an anonymous survey of industry participants, covering demographics, early profitability, purchasing preferences, busy months, cost pressures, customer growth, sales channels, product category performance, and revenue benchmarks. Key findings include a 60% male / 39% female participant split with an average age of 25‑34, 90% of respondents having less than six years in the industry, 35% achieving profit within three to six months, an even split between manifested and non‑manifested loads, March‑April identified as the busiest months, rising freight and product costs offset by a growing customer base, 50% selling in small lots and 36% selling per piece, consumer electronics being both the best and worst performing category, and an average annual revenue of about $1 million. The video concludes with an invitation to visit Buy Low Warehouse and a call to like, comment, and share.
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Hey, welcome to Buy Low Warehouse, where we're working to build a trusted community within the liquidation corner of the internet. My name is Matt Lovell, and I'm the CEO of Buy Low Warehouse, where we're striving every day to always deliver value to our customers. Here at Buy Low, we are dedicated to providing you with information, value, and as always, a great product. Today we're here to tell you a little bit more about our State of the Liquidation Industry Report from calendar year 2022. 2022. I get the question regularly, why did we take the time to build this report? And it really comes down to some simple answers. Because of our position in the industry, we work with a lot of people. We get the same questions over and over from newcomers to the industry as well as people who have been in it for a while. What are we seeing from our standpoint in the industry? Are things going to get better? Is there going to be more product, less product? Prices going up, prices coming down? When's the busy season? What is normal markups for selling different types of product and different methods? There's a lot of questions. And when I take myself and I put myself back in the situation where a lot of these people are right now, a lot of times they're new and it can be really, really scary. How do you plan for something when you don't even know what it is that's coming? And that's a position we find a lot of our customers in. So we decided one day, we said, man, why don't we just survey our customers try to really get a lot of information on an anonymous basis, and nobody's really putting their secrets out there or anything like that, but then return it to the industry as a favor of a, "Hey guys, here's kind of what you can expect. Here's what's going on." And we are super excited with the responses that we've gotten with our first annual survey. Very, very excited. We got a lot of responses, and we think we got some really great information. So hopefully you find the value in it as much as we are. So a lot of people ask us, what is even in the report? Well, we decided we wanted to focus the report on our most commonly asked questions of us. So we covered a lot of different topics, including the demographics that are common in the industry, the demo— not only the demographics, but the situation of those demographics when they're starting in the industry. We pulled insights out of this data and then asked our surveyors, hey, what about the challenges? What opportunities do you see coming? What about your customers? Have you had more or less? Same thing with competitors. Are you seeing more competition, less competition? And what about your cost structure? Are you seeing your costs go up or down? We then get into sales channels. How do most people sell the, the product that they get? And what kind of products and categories are working well or not working well for them? So we've tried to cover a really broad range of what is going on in the industry so that someone can read the report and get a really good sense of where the industry sits. Some of the key statistics that we found in the report is that the industry is made up of about 60% male, 39% female, with an average age of 25 to 34 years old. When they started out, 90% of the survey participants have said they have been in the industry for less than 6 years. And 35% of those people said that they turned a monthly profit within 3 to 6 months of starting out. That, that's pretty good. That was pretty intriguing. We then go on to a little bit more insights where we We see an even split on a preference of either manifested or non-manifested truckloads during purchasing, or pallets for that matter. We also had a pretty good agreement by most people that the busiest months in the industry are both March and April. We then moved on to a few challenges and opportunities, and we found that it was pretty well documented that most of the challenges people experience from both a freight and product perspective is the cost going up. Which I can agree with that. But they also paired that to say that they're getting more customers, which is pretty awesome. So the customer base is growing to support the growing cost and be able to still sell. We then looked at sales channel, found it pretty interesting that 50% of all the survey participants sell their product in small lots. So not a truckload, not a pallet, but in a smaller lot than that. And even 36% of the participants in the survey sell it on a per-piece basis. On categories, I found this probably the most interesting of everything. The both best and worst performing product category was consumer electronics. Hmm, I guess it just depends on who was buying it. Not really sure, but that's pretty cool to see. And then from a sales perspective, we found that the average total revenue of all survey participants in 2022 was around $1 million. We would love for you to come by and see us in person here at Buy Low Warehouse. Thank you for watching the video, and if you enjoyed it, leave a like, make a comment, and even share the video with all your friends in the liquidation industry. Have a great day and see you guys soon.
