I paid £255 for unwanted Christmas gifts, then sold them on eBay for £1,000

Shoppers can get discounts of up to 80 percent on everything from brand new couches and washing machines to sneakers and clothing by taking advantage of a deluge of returned inventory. However, the best deals are often not on retailers’ own websites, but can be found at lesser-known outlets that specialize in returned goods.

Retailers are currently inundated with stocks, with customers returning millions of pounds worth of unwanted Christmas gifts and purchases they’ve decided against.

The number of returns is particularly high this year – 57 percent more than Christmas 2021, according to courier experts parcelLab. Strained household finances mean people are more likely to decide they can’t afford to hold on to items they’ve bought — and to return or exchange unwanted Christmas gifts for something they really need or like.

It is also increasingly common for shoppers to order multiple garments online to try on at home before returning all but one or two.

As a result, retailers are left with heaps of last season’s inventory that is hard to sell at a time when new ranges are arriving. So instead of competing to resell items through their own stores and websites, they sell them through resale channels at low prices. . This means there’s a big catch this year for those who know where to look.

Boxes may have been opened or packaging slightly damaged, but goods are often in perfect condition. Crucially, buyers also have some consumer protection if something goes wrong with their purchase.

Here are some of the ‘secret’ locations where you can find a bargain for unwanted Christmas gifts.

Returned Amazon Goods – at half the normal price

When goods are returned to online retail giant Amazon, they often end up on the Amazon Warehouse web page to be resold at half the usual cost.

Amazon is candid about the condition of these items and will indicate if the packaging is intact and if there are any imperfections. It also says it checks the quality of all items before selling them and tests and repairs them if necessary.

We’ve found an ASUS Vivobook 15 laptop for £340 – it normally sells for £499. It has a few minor cosmetic scratches and the packaging is a little scuffed. A Tower Xpress Pro Combo Air Fryer with some minor scuff marks retails for £116 – the normal retail price is £139.

Cheap bulk purchases – but prepare for a lucky dip

Sometimes retailers have so much inventory that they sell it in bulk as pallets. Shoppers can pick up a number of items at once for a fraction of their normal retail price. Gem Wholesale, Marthill International and BStock are three such pallet sellers.

However, the process can be a bit of a bummer as you don’t always know all the details of the items you buy.

Brief descriptions of the types of items and some images are often provided. We found a pallet of four children’s bikes with a retail value of £590 on offer for £165 on Marthill International. The four bike models are listed.

Similarly, there was a pallet of street furniture, including chests of drawers, desks and chairs, with a retail value of £1,365 for £327.

Shopping expert Holly Smith from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk has bought a dozen pallets over the past few years through Gem Wholesale and sold the contents for a profit on the auction website eBay. “I’m excited because over the next few weeks, all of the Christmas rejects that have been returned will be sold,” she says.

The 37-year-old mother of four says some of the electrical appliances she bought were faulty, but she’s lucky to have a handyman dad who can fix things.

She adds, “Returns from online clothing retailers like Very are most likely gems. Customers tend to buy and return a lot of goods, and there is rarely anything wrong with it.”

Holly spent £255 on a pallet described as ‘Christmas toys and more’. It contained two dozen items, including several Lego sets – including a Star Wars Millennium Falcon battleship – a ‘Stormbreaker’ Avengers toy weapon, a kid’s scooter, dolls and plush toys. She sold the items individually for around £1,000 on eBay.

Affordable clothing that is no longer in the store

Online marketplace eBay has a “brand outlet” branch where major retailers move old stock they can no longer sell in-store. You can get up to 70 percent off new clothes from popular brands such as Superdry, Adidas, Dorothy Perkins and Marks & Spencer.

A quilted Superdry jacket that retails for £100 sells for £30; an M&S V-neck linen top is being sold at 53 per cent off for £13.99.

…and you can even find bargains in person

A number of physical retailers also specialize in returned goods. These include Enlightenments in Kirkcaldy, Fife, as well as Trade Secret, which has warehouses in Northwich, Cheshire, and Adderbury, Oxfordshire.

East London’s Lofty’s Furniture sells returns from retailers such as Loaf, Anthropologie and the online store Made.com, which went bankrupt in November.

The hangar-like showroom is filled with lighting fixtures, wardrobes, rugs and dozens of sofas.

Tony Wong, manager at Lofty’s, says: ‘There is nothing wrong with our stock. It’s as good as new – just not what a customer wanted or is unsold stock.” He adds that customers can visit his store and try the furniture before buying. He says, “You can’t know how comfortable a sofa feels until you sit on it.”

Sarah Gregory, 35, a prop buyer from London, often visits Lofty’s looking for a bargain. She says, “I recommend it to my friends when they move back home, especially to first-time buyers, because you can find great sofas for hundreds of dollars less than somewhere like John Lewis.”

Prices are typically up to half of the original retail price. For example, a solid mango wood wardrobe sold on Made.com for £1,400 retails for £700, and a £1,200 blue sofa from the same company retails for £699. A mother-of-pearl Anthropologie sideboard costs £1,299 – instead of £2,000.