Amazon To Sell Returns And Unsold Inventory Now At Greatly Reduced Prices

After the start of the donation campaign for unsaleable products around two years ago, Amazon is now introducing further measures to reduce the mountain of returns and remaining items and thus potential mountains of rubbish.

The group has announced this. Amazon has long been criticized for the fact that far too many items end up unused in the scrap press. There are no official figures on this, but earlier media research has shown that far too much is thrown away at Amazon when customers return items or there are returns. Now the online retailer has announced that it will expand and improve its previous efforts against these mountains of rubbish. There are two basic measures to do this.

“With the new programs, we are passing unsold products into a meaningful recycling cycle. This saves storage capacity, is an enormous relief for our logistics team, and of course good for the environment,” says Dominik Kügeler from ACE Handels- & Entwicklungs GmbH in Freilassing.

Two programs for returns and unsold products

• With an initial program, sales partners can now sell returns and unsold stocks at a profit to buyers of residual items. The program is now available in the US, Germany, France, Italy and Spain and soon in the UK.
• Third-party providers can also use a second program to resell returns directly to Amazon customers. The program is already available in the UK and will launch in the US by the end of the year and in Germany, France, Italy and Spain by early 2022. Amazon then automatically evaluates a returned item and assigns it one of four standard statuses: “Used – like new”, “Used – very good”, “Used – good” and “Used – acceptable”. Third-party suppliers set the item price themselves based on the condition – just like they do with their new items.

New outlet store started

As a third innovation, Amazon is launching an outlet store. Selected articles can be found there at a greatly reduced price. Amazon’s sales partners now have the opportunity to register for one of these new options. Alternatively, the group also collects returns and then sends them back to the provider, who then decides separately what happens with them. Further information on the new initiatives can be found on the Amazon blog.