Challenge
This U.S.-based retail home-improvement chain sells a wide variety of brands and products. Categories include hand-held tools and home furnishings, as well as riding lawnmowers and large home appliances in stores across the US.
Managing a high volume of product of varying size and value, the company specifically needed a solution to help speed the rate of recovery on cancelled and returned appliance orders that was both efficient and cost-effective, while at the same time improving the buyer experience.
Facing mounting volumes of idle open-box product in numerous locations, it was important for the company to work with a partner that not only understood their need for more rapid recovery across the board but could provide an in-house service with minimal required support and without a significant investment.
Based on our extensive experience with large-scale asset-liquidation, the retailer ultimately selected Liquidity Services and Scan.N.$ell, our proprietary, self-service mobile-app-based solution that enables clients to recover product value and resell to end consumers by leveraging Liquidity Services’ various online marketplace services.
Solution
Liquidity Services took best practices learned from 15+ years of serving many of the worlds largest and most successful retailers and channeled them into Scan.N.$ell with a customized, turn-key arrangement that helped meet the company’s need for its unique product-recovery challenges. Liquidity deployed the app in a pilot program at a third-party-managed fulfilment center that serviced multiple store regions, helping maximize recovery velocity and maintain a vastly decreased rate of idle product in a practical, sustainable and client-controlled process.
Scan.N.$ell helped accelerate the rate of recovery and minimize process adoption challenges by allowing the client to use the app-based Scan.N.$ell platform to list product on top marketplaces and provide the maximum buyer-base for the best recovery.
Through Scan.N.$ell, Liquidity Services managed the listing, pricing, payment-processing and customer service and reporting, which allowed the company to eliminate extra expenditure and recoup a high percentage of the ultimate selling price by selling directly from each store or distribution center, thereby avoiding transportation and handling costs and third-party mark-ups.
Results:
The Scan.N.$ell pilot program helped the client demonstrate strong demand and consumer confidence in broad categories and open-box product and generated significant incremental increases in web traffic. Recovery rates registered a dramatic increase of 40 percent when compared to pre-Scan.N.$ell results.