Looking to purchase your first pallet and have it delivered to your home?  Here's what you need to know:

1. A pallet of anything is too heavy to lift. This means you should request and pay for a “lift gate”. A lift gate lowers the pallet from the back of the truck to the ground. A lift gate costs around $65.
2. Alternatively, if you don't want to pay for a lift gate you can climb up onto the truck, open the pallet and move each box from it to the ground. This is a two-person job because one person needs to stand inside of the truck and hand the parcels to the person on the ground.
3. However, this can be very problematic because the boxes the merchandise is in can weigh 50, 100 or more pounds. Sometimes sellers will ship inside of one “Gaylord Box” (this photo isn’t very good but it will give you an idea of how big a Gaylord is)

There is basically no way at all to move a Gaylord off the back of the truck, so your only opinion at this point would be, if you are super strong, to push it onto the ground, which means it will fall several feet and you’ll have an inventory mess in addition to a lot of dirty or damaged merch.

5. Also, if you choose to unload the truck without a lift gate, you can’t take your sweet time. You have to haul ass because you are on a timer and if it takes too long you will incur a fine. At this point it makes more sense to just pay for the lift gate because with a lift gate the pallet is lowered from the truck to the ground and that’s it.

6. If you live in an apartment complex you will probably have to accept delivery of the pallet at a friend or families house because your apartments most likely have rules against it.

7. If you plan to purchase pallets on a regular basis you absolutely need to invest in a “portable hand truck”:

These range from $23 to $150+. If you asked me which one you should get, I would say this one:

The reason for this is because if you have to physically carry boxes across your driveway or even though your house you WILL destroy your back. Please learn from my mistakes. Once you destroy your back, it will never be good again. Like me, you will FOREVER live in severe pain. I started selling online in 2005 and in only a couple years I ruined my spine because I didn’t have anyone to tell me this. There’s not much worse than being an online seller who buys pallets for a living and also has a bad back. Please, invest in your health!

8. What to do with the pallet: You’ll see a lot of people online saying “You can sell them for cash!”. Here’s the truth: IF you can even find a place that will take it, the pay is very, very low, like $2. Also, not every pallet is sellable. Many are worthless. So you are going to spend more time and gas money driving it around to “sell it” than you would not selling it. We have guys that do sell pallets for a living so they come to our warehouse every week or two and they bring a trailer or a pickup truck with bungee cords and they load up, I mean they REALLY load up:

Because it’s not worth their time to only get a couple.  

9. The cost can be very expensive.  If the pallet is being shipped within your same state (for example, if it is being picked up in Detroit, Michigan and being brought to Belleville Michigan). the cost might come in around $200.  We shipped a pallet from Michigan to Maryland the other day and it was $330.  Obviously, if the pallet is going from New York to California the shipping cost is going to be super expensive and might not even be worth it to buy.