Where do ebay sellers get their goods?

[MikeDT]

When it comes to quality clothes, fakes are really obvious. Good fabrics and good construction aren't worth counterfeiting.

Problem with Ebay a lot of the time, you don't realise you've bought a counterfeit until it arrives. Then you've got to ship it back to China or wherever at your expense, then hope for a refund.

 

[jimmyfingers]

At RL outlet, sellers go every day. they often drive around to different out. The larger RL outlets carry tons of PSR. They usually have a coupon and get it 80 percent of MSRP.

 

[keysort]

I'm a full time student that's turned thrifting into a part-time job. I scan every thrift store around every week, and I usually have at least a few pairs of Allen Edmonds, Aldens and vintage J&Ms and Florsheim Imperials for sale. I even scored some Crockett & Jones oxfords...although I am sure many sells out there have less than honest means of getting their products.

 

[32rollandrock]

Perhaps, but we're talking new stuff here. I suppose once in a great while you can find never-worn Aldens or AE at a thrift store, but it's never happened to me. Maybe I don't go to thrift stores often enough.

I'm a full time student that's turned thrifting into a part-time job. I scan every thrift store around every week, and I usually have at least a few pairs of Allen Edmonds, Aldens and vintage J&Ms and Florsheim Imperials for sale. I even scored some Crockett & Jones oxfords...although I am sure many sells out there have less than honest means of getting their products.

 

[32rollandrock]

Elves.

None of the suggestions here explains how a number of obviously legitimate sellers have a seemingly unending supply of fine English shoes - not all of them seconds.

 

[Taken Aback]

Perhaps, but we're talking new stuff here. I suppose once in a great while you can find never-worn Aldens or AE at a thrift store, but it's never happened to me. Maybe I don't go to thrift stores often enough.

I believe that pair of AE Graysons in 18B is still sitting on the same shelf I noticed them on months ago.

 

[Avers]

There are all kinds of sellers.

I often make impulse purchases, especially if it's on great sale. Later I realize that some of my items I don't really need or they are really not my style or whatever. At that point it's too late to return the goods to the store, so I put them on eBay.

Of course I am not talking about huge quantities, just one or two items here and there.

 

[MikeDT]

You're just a private seller, selling surplus and unwanted items, so that's OK. Not trying to sell 10,000 pairs of Nike Dunks or 5,000 Gucci handbags or something.

 

[Apatheticviews]

When I was selling with dealers like The North Face, and a few others what would happen during "season" shifts was that they would close out anything that hadn't been shipped from the manufacturer to the distributor. Basically you could buy the items at distributor level pricing, rather than going through your normal wholesaler.

Using simple math, it would be something like this:

40% cost to distributor (before discounts), sold to retailer at 45-50% cost.

Using a $100 item, we'd pay $40 (and normally get another 4-6% back later on, not to mention advertising, buy backs, and stock rebalancing), and sell it to a wholeseller/retailer for $45-50 for a 10-20% profit margin. Anything we sold retail (which was A LOT), we were making 150% profit margin.

The thing was though, that we pre-ordered everything a full season in advance. When things went out of season (fall to spring, spring to fall), we had to blow it out to make room for more stock. TNF doesn't keep back stock. As it's made, it goes out the door.

The ebay sellers are probably just taking advantage of other manufactures that don't have the "pre-order" system in place. I wouldn't assume foul play. Just an unevolved business practice.

 

[blue suede shoes]

There are all kinds of sellers.

I often make impulse purchases, especially if it's on great sale. Later I realize that some of my items I don't really need or they are really not my style or whatever. At that point it's too late to return the goods to the store, so I put them on eBay.

Of course I am not talking about huge quantities, just one or two items here and there.

I do the same.

Another source is out of style clothes that retailers are getting rid of. A while back there was a news story that raised somewhat of a ruckus in NYC when it was found out that fashion retailers were ripping new clothes (last year's styles and discontinued designs) to shreds and putting them out for the trash. Advocates for the poor were outraged that these perfectly good clothes were not donated to the poor and homeless instead of being destroyed. The obvious answer was that retailers did not want clothes with their names and logos on homeless people. Retailers agreed to stop the practice, but somehow I'm not convinced they are now donating these clothes to the poor and homeless.

 

[MikeDT]

I do the same.

Another source is out of style clothes that retailers are getting rid of. A while back there was a news story that raised somewhat of a ruckus in NYC when it was found out that fashion retailers were ripping new clothes (last year's styles and discontinued designs) to shreds and putting them out for the trash. Advocates for the poor were outraged that these perfectly good clothes were not donated to the poor and homeless instead of being destroyed. The obvious answer was that retailers did not want clothes with their names and logos on homeless people. Retailers agreed to stop the practice, but somehow I'm not convinced they are now donating these clothes to the poor and homeless.

I think some of the more ethical companies do this. I was in London a few years ago working on a job for Pepe Jeans. What they did with the surplus past-season and unsellable stock, they defaced, slashed or cut-out the branding, then gave it all to the Salvation Army and other charitable organisations.

There was a BBC documentary a few years ago about Marks & Spencer's policy of destroying perfectly good but unsellable clothing. But since then I've sometimes seen apparently new or little used M&S garments in UK charity shops, but the tags and labels are always removed or slashed.

I'm sure some of it is containered-up and makes its way back to China. I've seen slashed label M&S, C&A, Debenhams, Macy's etc. garments on sale here in Xilinhot and on Taobao.

British Telecom(BT) does a similar thing with all its surplus and unusable corporate wear. They remove or slash any branding and then send it to Africa.

 

[Orsini]

I always assumed it was stolen, counterfeit, or both.

 

[eagle2250]

We have an ebay vendor who resides in a town near our home who sells a pretty fair number of items on consignment for others who don't want to go through the hassel of becoming a vendor themselves, but have a few items they would like to sell. The ebay vendor has a small store front and his only advertising for suppliers seems periodic ads in the local paper and a sign in his window.

 

[Avers]

Sure I remember reading those stories about companies destroying their excess inventory clothes.

I can understand them, in the end you want to control the market, and dumping/donating large loads of old inventory will certainly cannibalize your future sales.

 

[MikeDT]

Sure I remember reading those stories about companies destroying their excess inventory clothes.

I can understand them, in the end you want to control the market, and dumping/donating large loads of old inventory will certainly cannibalize your future sales.

I think this is why the more ethical companies who do donate old inventory to the needy, remove and/or slash their branding, tags and labels, so as not to jeopardise any future sales or hurt their image. Anyway the poor, homeless and starving who are wearing donated clothing, are not really in a position to buy the new clothes.

I remember the BBC documentory about M&S destroying good clothes caused one hell of a stink at the time, it certainly hurt their image for a while.

Here's another recent BBC story about Primark destroying good clothes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11284968
Primark are always saying they're supposed to be ethical and responsible on their website, about use of sweatshops and child labour though. M&S are also mentioned, seems they're the good guys this time. However I did mention earlier, apparently some of M&S's old inventory comes back to China, for sale here, with the labels removed, cut or obfuscated with indelible marker pen.

 

[Taken Aback]

We have an ebay vendor who resides in a town near our home who sells a pretty fair number of items on consignment for others who don't want to go through the hassel of becoming a vendor themselves, but have a few items they would like to sell. The ebay vendor has a small store front and his only advertising for suppliers seems periodic ads in the local paper and a sign in his window.

Didn't seem that successful except for attracting virgins...

 

[eagle2250]

^^
LOL. Well played, sir, but that just does not look like Chesterton, IN.?

 

[RedBluff]

Another alternative is salvage. Say a truck carrying RLPL goods jack-knifes in the middle of a cornfield and turns over: the company probably liquidates the truck's contents to a salvage company and writes the balance off as a casualty loss. The salvager, in turn, tosses what's ruined and sells the balance on ebay.

I don't know if that actually happens, but it could.

It's a racket my friend.
Growing up my father moonlighted as a longshoreman.
It was very common for them to "drop" things back then.
The bulk of the shipment got fenced but the workers always got a "taste" of the merchandise.
I'm sure it still happens now.

I've also heard it's quite common for organized crime to target truck and trailers with high end merchandise.

 

[MikeDT]

"Yeh...fell off back of a lorry...didn' they"

 

[CuffDaddy]

Before the rise of eBay and diffusion brands, one could walk into any of the (very few) outlets of Neimans, Saks, Nordstrom, etc., and routinely find extraordinary deals on top-notch stuff. I got a Zegna sportcoat for $169 while I was in law school, for example, and an Oxxford suit for $250 (plus $50 cash I paid the other customer who was carrying it to let go!). Nowadays, that stuff gets hoovered up and sold on eBay for many times the price that it used to fetch at the outlets. The market is more efficient, I guess, but that's no help to those of us who benefited from the inefficiencies of the old arrangement.