Is that pile in your garage clutter or collectible? The difference could put a sizable amount of change in your pocket. Smart Hot Buys, a registered eBay drop-off center off Bonny Oaks Drive, is where those who are curious about the value of what they have cleaned out of the closet can take their items.
Anil Anand, president of Smart Hot Buys, and his family have been participating in ecommerce, selling items online, since 2001. They opened their warehouse five years ago, and have another 40,000 square foot warehouse on Dodds Avenue. At their Bonny Oaks warehouse is a showroom open to the public as well as their original ecommerce company they initially formed.
Anand got started in ecommerce by buying tractor-trailer loads and pallets of overstock merchandise and merchandise that owners were trying to liquidate, a practice they still participate in. His company breaks up these items and sells them on the Internet on sites such as Overstock.com, Amazon and eBay. It was about three years ago when eBay came out with the registered eBay drop-off store model that his business evolved. “Since we were doing all this with our own products in house, we decided to open it up to consigners walking in,” Anand says.
Although these days, the eBay store model that was popular in the early 2000’s doesn’t work as well because owners never know what is walking in the door and it is difficult keeping the business up with so little merchandise. Yet, Anand’s model of selling the more than 10,000 barcoded items of overstock and liquidated merchandise as well as opening up his service to consigners has worked really well, he says. Smart Hot Buys stays busy as the only registered eBay drop-off center in Chattanooga, and the only center in at least 100 miles; bringing in customers from as far away as Murfreesboro and above Athens.
Customers who are interested in selling online bring in their merchandise or come in for a consultation where Anand gets an idea of what they have to sell. Smart Hot Buys has a research tool that allows Anand to go back a year on eBay and see exactly what an item sold for, how many have been listed there, and more.
Once a consigner decides to use Smart Hot Buys to sell their items, Anand takes over and does the rest. By taking pictures of the item with their onsite professional light boxes and backdrops, listing the item, answering buyer questions and shipping the item, Anand and his staff take the item from drop-off to the cash-in for the consigner.
With the down economy, Anand has seen an increase in people bringing in items, but sometimes the value of the items they bring in are not what consigners think it will be, he says. Smart Hot Buys doesn’t take items less than $50 of eBay value, but he says collectibles are always good selling items, while jewelry, art and big furniture pieces usually are not. “That’s where the education comes in, where we give them an idea of what the value is,” he says. “The perceived value you have…is not necessarily what the value is on eBay, and we go off of that.
“We’ve seen a big flood of people bringing in items and thinking they have got a goldmine, but when you see a flood of sellers, sometimes the buyers are not on the other end. The buying has dried up a little bit because everyone is trying to sell right now,” he says. Anand says that since eBay has changed their site from the original model of an all auction format to more toward emulating Amazon with a fixed price model, Smart Hot Buys tries to stick with the fixed price model on items they sell for consigners. They also utilize the best offer option on eBay.
“The way the best offer option is working for us is…someone can look at an item and make an offer, and we make a counter offer and so on…People like that perceived haggling they can do; they don’t have to see the person and so don’t feel intimidated, and it works really well,” Anand says.
Anand says what he finds interesting about his work is that he sees things everyday that he has never seen before. One such item brought in is a 1930’s painted Coca-Cola cooler. The owner was going to take the item to the scrap yard, but cleaned it up and brought it in to find that, when restored, the item is worth $2,000. Anand is currently selling it for $600 and has had about 30 offers on the item. “You never know what you are going to see, and that’s the really neat thing. You never know what something is worth,” Anand says.
Visit Smarthotbuys.com or call 423-648-7800 for more on their services.