Hey all, I goofed up pretty big. I have a semi-successful app, and got it into my head that I could expand the business by building a brand of physical products for my customers. I ordered 4,000 collapsing silicone food storage containers (think foldable Tupperware) through Alibaba. Long story short, I realized that isn’t the kind of work I want to be doing. My expertise is in software, not in selling physical products or managing logistics. It also ties me down to one location and makes it impossible to travel for long periods of time, which is a freedom granted to me by my software business.
To add to the complication, I didn’t test the sample product as thoroughly as I should have before placing the order, and the lids are pretty tricky to snap on and off. I don’t want to sell them to my customers because it might hurt my brand’s reputation.
I’m at the point where I just want to get rid of them and move on, ideally recovering what I spent (about $5,000 including the shipping from China). I tried listing the product on Amazon, but no luck there either – the product isn’t even showing up in search results. I’d prefer to sell them in bulk so I don’t have to package and ship them in small sets. Worst case, I’d even consider donating them, but where do you even donate that many containers?
Any ideas on how to ditch these things, ideally without it being a very expensive mistake?
Contact a plastic free supermarket and let em hire them to their customers.
Send me a PM. I have ways to sell things like that
Sell them to a local liquidation store or take them to one of the those local auction houses that takes consignments.
Maybe a hardware store? I like water tight containers for nails, bits, small parts…
If you can’t figure out a way to sell them in bulk, checkout fulfilled by Amazon (Amazon FBA). Basically send it into the Amazon warehouse and they will do the shipping for you, you can continue to sell through any source you want and just have Amazon drop ship it for you.
eBay. Maybe break into 4 lots. Good luck!
Wait are they light weight? Would they be good for camping? This product sounds interesting.
Give them away to your software customers as a promotional item. Then the cost becomes a part of your software business and you can deduct the loss from your software profits.
What’s the item? Can you post it so we can give you better ideas?
You made a mistake trying to sell them.
Don’t make another trying to liquidate them.
Donate to Red Cross, American Vets, or whomever and take tax deduction.
You can sell them on eBay but would take a long time. You could see if Amazon would do the logistics part for you to sell them online cheap.
Donate them to a local soup kitchen or something like that and take the tax write off.
what size are the containers?
You could individually package a bag of rice