Meet the Ebay veteran cashing in on the $369 billion returns boom by helping retailers like Target, Walmart and Macy’s auction inventory at the best prices:
to sift through the inventory of America’s rejects. It’s mid-December and the holiday shopping spree is at a fevered pitch, but inside this 120,000-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of Phoenix, a hodge-podge collection of returned items sits in rows of boxes stacked 10 feet tall. Twenty-eight-pound bags of dog food, brownie mix, toys and weighted blankets are lined up alongside vacuums, sporting goods and patio furniture.
Retailers come to B-Stock for help to quickly unload goods they can’t put back on shelves. Through its online auction site, B-Stock sells the products in bulk, posting them under marketplaces branded by retail chains, sold off in time-limited auctions to the highest bidder. It offers retailers access to 570,000 resellers, ranging from mom-and-pop discount stores to independent E-Bay super sellers who operate 21st“We are giving products second, third or fourth lives.
“We are giving products second, third or fourth lives,” says Rosenberg, over the whir of a forklift. He points to a treadmill. “Instead of it going to a landfill, it will get sold to someone.”osenberg built his company with eBay’s money. After collecting degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School, and cutting his teeth as a New York investment banker and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, he joined eBay’s business development team in 2002.
Howard Rosenberg, 53, sits atop a pallet of unsold boxed brownie mix at a third-party warehouse in Phoenix. The amount of merchandise, like the mixes, that his company, B-Stock, auctions off jumped by an average 174% for each of the past three years.He raised $1.2 million from friends at VC firms True Ventures and Harrison Metal in 2009 and has collected a total of $73 million from investors.
“There are times when we get bogged down with returns,” says a manager at a Fortune 500 company that has worked with B-Stock for six years and declined to speak on the record. “We needed someone to help us find homes for product that might beforehand been thrown away.”
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