Don’t shame yourself for a “bad investment”. As online sellers we have no way to tell the future and we sure as heck have no control over Amazon acquiring our identical merchandise then blowing it out at a price we can never compete with. Equally, online sellers are typically small businesses (or just 1 person doing literally everything), so spending endless hours price-comparing before making an investment isn’t a realistic time investment.

If you overpaid for your inventory you have several options:

Wait it out - IF the merchandise isn’t tying up your cash flow and IF the merchandise isn’t taking up space you need to stock fresh inventory, whats the rush? Inventory can be a lot like the stock market; one day the price is low, the next day the price is high.

Over all of my years of selling I have noticed that sometimes things just take for-friggin-ever to sell, then suddenly it all sells out within a month. It’s a very strange thing, but it happens all the time. Sometimes all it takes is waiting for other sellers (or Amazon) to deplete their stock then you can get your full asking price.

Dump it and move on - trying to salvage a lousy relationship isn’t worth the time. If you have come to the realization that this inventory is taking up space and tying up your money, you MUST cut your losses and move on because the amount of money you are LOSING by endlessly waiting isn’t worth waiting! If you instead take a loss on the current stock you can quickly move on to fresh stock and get back to cash flow!

Create a Promotion - If you need to get $50 for a pair of jeans to break even, you can try running a promotion, such as “Buy 2 and get _____”, “Spend $____ on jeans and get free shipping!”, “2 Free pairs of womens socks with any jean purchase!”. It’s more cost effective for you to give away a couple pairs of socks, offer a discount if they buy multiple or throw in free shipping than it is to sell it at a large loss.

Liquidate it in bulk - If you have decided the best solution is to dump the bad stock, instead of messing around with a bunch of little orders you can create larger bulk lots move it faster.  If you want to learn how to liquidate your unsold inventory, check out our blog post 11 Tips for Contacting a Liquidator

Donate it - If you’re an online seller you can donate “unsellables” and write it off on your taxes!!! This will reduce the amount of taxes you owe to the government (or you might get an even bigger refund, depending on your income level!)