Allsurplus Deals

Which Buyers This Format Actually Suits

Last updated: August 2026

When considering public surplus, Bottom line: a winning bid of 400 dollars becomes roughly 610 once a 15 percent buyer premium adds 60 and a collection trip adds about 150 — so allsurplus deals suit buyers who can batch several wins into one journey and punish anyone treating a single lot as a delivered purchase.

The format is a surplus auction operated by Liquidity Services: assets are listed out of a regional warehouse, bidding windows are short, everything sells as-is with no returns. The winner collects in person inside an enforced removal window. None of that is hidden.

What catches people is the arithmetic, because the price you win at is roughly two thirds of what the item ends up costing.

The Trip Is the Real Cost

Work it through. A 90-mile round trip at around 65 cents a mile is 59 dollars. Three hours of driving, loading and paperwork at 30 an hour is 90 — call the collection 150 dollars. That figure is fixed. It does not care whether you collect one item or twelve.

Win a single 400-dollar lot and your landed cost is 610, with the trip alone adding 37 percent. Win five lots at the same warehouse and the same 150 dollars spreads to 30 an item, (a pattern we see repeatedly),which changes the economics of allsurplus deals completely without changing a single bid.

That is the whole test of fit. Buyers who watch one warehouse, bid on several lots in the same window and collect them together are using the format as designed. Buyers who bid on whatever looks cheap across four states are paying 150 dollars of overhead per item and wondering why the discounts do not show up in the bank.

When considering surplus funds list, Anyone who cannot get to the warehouse inside the removal window should not be bidding at all, because allsurplus deals are not shipped to you. A missed collection can cost both the item and the money already paid.

Four Ways to Buy the Same 400-Dollar Item

Bottom line: the same asset costs 610 dollars landed through a surplus auction collected solo, 490 through the same auction with five wins batched, 520 from a delivered manifested lot, and 400 flat from a local dealer — which means allsurplus deals win only when the trip is shared across several lots.

Read the last column rather than the first. Every row starts within 50 dollars of every other row and finishes 210 apart, and the spread is created entirely by fees and logistics. This is the single most useful thing to understand about allsurplus deals: the auction is not expensive, the trip is; the trip is the part nobody bids on.

What Each Route Is Actually Good For

Batched auction buying is the strongest row on the table and it requires organisation rather than skill. Watching one warehouse, bidding on several lots inside the same window and collecting them in a single journey turns 150 dollars of overhead into 30 an item.

Buyers who do this consistently outperform buyers with better instincts and worse logistics, because allsurplus deals reward the person who plans the van before placing the first bid.

The single-lot row exists as a warning rather than a recommendation. A 610-dollar landed cost on a 400-dollar hammer is a 52 percent markup, and at that level the discount that attracted you to the listing has usually evaporated. It is occasionally justified — a genuinely rare asset, a particularly high value item where 150 dollars is noise —.

When considering seconds and surplus, As a routine pattern it is how people conclude the format does not work.

A delivered manifested lot is the row for buyers who cannot travel. The unit price is slightly higher and the freight is real, but nothing depends on your calendar and nothing is lost to a missed removal window.

The trade is straightforward: you pay roughly 30 dollars more to remove all the logistics risk; for anyone without a vehicle or a free weekday that is cheap. It also carries stated condition and counts in advance, where allsurplus deals are sold as-is with no returns and frequently untested.

The local dealer row is the reminder that the cheapest route is sometimes the least interesting one. No premium, no freight, no removal deadline — but also no selection, no scale and no ability to repeat.

It works for one item and does not build an operation, which is precisely the gap allsurplus deals fill for a buyer who needs volume from a single location. , according to Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals

One thing what none of these rows include: the time spent watching listings. Auction formats consume attention before they consume money, and an hour a week spent monitoring a warehouse is thirteen hours a quarter that a delivered lot simply does not require.

When considering venture surplus, For a buyer whose weekends are already spoken for, that hidden line can outweigh the 30-dollar difference in the table entirely.

One factor the table cannot show deserves a line: bidding windows are short, which is a feature for the seller and a hazard for the buyer. Compressed timelines encourage bidding before the collection has been thought through, and that is exactly the sequence that produces a 610-dollar landed cost.

The discipline that makes allsurplus deals profitable is boring — decide the collection day first, decide the maximum landed cost second. Let the bid be whatever those two allow rather than whatever the clock tempts you into.

Quick tangent — I use the Closo Sell Lots to track what is actually moving right now, which saves me about three hours a week of manual search. Worth a peek before your next haul.

What Three Logged Runs Reveal

Bottom line: buyers who record bid, premium, mileage, hours and final sale price for three collection runs almost always discover the same thing — their average landed cost is 40 to 55 percent above the hammer price; the variable that moved it was never the bidding.

The first thing the log exposes is how badly memory serves. People remember the 400-dollar win and forget the 60-dollar premium, the 59 dollars of fuel and the three hours. Written down, a solo collection is 610 against 400 — 52 percent over — and a batched one is 490, or 22 percent over.

Both are perfectly workable numbers if you knew them before bidding. The failure is not the cost, it is bidding as though the cost were 400. It is why allsurplus deals so often feel worse in the bank than they looked on the screen.

When considering government surplus auctions, The second finding concerns condition, and it is where allsurplus deals differ most from a graded lot. Sold as-is and frequently untested means the working share is a variable you own.

Across a few runs most buyers settle on a personal discount — a figure like 70 or 75 percent of what the item would be worth if it worked, applied automatically to anything untested. That number is worth more than any listing description, since it is derived from your own outcomes rather than from a seller's photography.

Buyers who never establish it keep treating each untested lot as if it were the good one from last month.

Accessories and Removal Windows Do the Rest

The third pattern is boringly consistent: incomplete items. A machine without its controller, a unit without its power supply, a set missing the one component that made it a set. Photographs show what is present, not what is absent; counting the accessories visible in the images rather than assuming a normal complement is the cheapest habit available.

In a log of three runs this shows up as a cluster of items that sold for far less than projected, all for the same reason.

Fourth is the removal window, which is the only line that can go to a total loss. Warehouses turn inventory on a schedule, deadlines are enforced; a lot you cannot collect can cost both the item and the money already paid.

When considering resource auction, Nothing in the arithmetic of allsurplus deals survives that outcome, which is why experienced buyers fix the collection day before the bidding window opens rather than after it closes. The practical form of that discipline is a rule: no bid on a lot whose collection day is not already in the diary.

Run the log for three trips and allsurplus deals stop being a gamble and become a spreadsheet. Bid, premium, miles, hours, sale price. Five columns, one row per item; the honest answer to whether this format belongs in your sourcing mix appears by itself. , according to Federal Trade Commission consumer guides

Decision-Making FAQ

Bottom line: five answers, three numbers — a 15 percent buyer premium, about 150 dollars per collection trip, and a landed cost that runs 40 to 55 percent above whatever you bid.

Who runs it?

Liquidity Services, the operator behind the wider surplus marketplace and its business-to-business channels. That matters practically: the terms are corporate and consistent rather than improvised, and the warehouses are real regional facilities with fixed hours. It does not mean anyone inspected the goods — allsurplus deals sell as-is, in whatever condition they arrived.

Is it cheaper than a pallet broker?

Per item usually yes, per hour of your time often no. A broker delivers a sealed pallet for a freight charge quoted in advance. A surplus auction gives you a lower price and a collection obligation costing roughly 150 dollars whether you fetch one item or twelve.

Brokers suit predictable volume; allsurplus deals suit individual higher-value items you can collect on a planned run.

What happens if I cannot collect in time?

When considering triangle liquidators, You can lose both the item and the money. Removal windows are short and enforced, given that a warehouse turning inventory weekly must clear space for the next load. This is the most expensive mistake available in the format and the most avoidable — decide who drives, in what vehicle, on which day, before bidding rather than after winning.

How do I value an untested item?

As if it does not work, and treat working as upside. Untested means nobody plugged it in, not that it is probably fine.

Count the accessories visible in the photographs instead of assuming a box holds what boxes usually hold; a missing charger or controller does not shave the resale, it removes the item from the tier that justified your bid.

What should my first three runs teach me?

The gap between your bid and your landed cost. Log items, miles, hours, premiums and total spend, then compare against what each item finally sold for. That single figure tells you whether allsurplus deals belong in your sourcing mix. It is the only one that accounts for the trip — the cost the listing will never show you.

Decide the Trip First, Then the Bid

Bottom line: pick one warehouse within about 90 miles, fix a collection day, bid on several lots inside that window, and cap each bid so the landed cost — hammer plus 15 percent plus a 30-dollar share of a 150-dollar trip — still leaves your margin.

That sequence is the whole method for buying allsurplus deals profitably; it is deliberately unromantic. One warehouse, because a single trip has to justify itself. One diary date, because the removal window is the only line that can cost you both the item and the money.

Several lots, because 150 dollars divided by five is 30 and divided by one is 150. Buyers who run allsurplus deals this way report steady, unspectacular margins; buyers who bid opportunistically across four states report the format does not work. Both are describing the same auctions.

When to Buy Delivered Instead

Some weeks there is no trip worth making — nothing good at your warehouse, no free weekday, no van. That is not a reason to stretch for a marginal lot; it is a reason to buy something delivered.

Manifested lots state the unit count, category and condition before the money moves, arrive by freight, and have no removal deadline attached to them at all. Live lots are browsable by category, deal type and condition on theCloso wholesale marketplace.

Comparing a stated-condition lot page against an as-is auction listing is the fastest way to see what the auction discount is really paying you for.

Run both and the pattern usually settles: allsurplus deals for the higher-value single assets you can collect on a planned run, delivered lots for the weeks when the calendar says no. For the same arithmetic applied to liquidation pallets, bin stores, salvage sourcing and thrift channels, the breakdowns sit on theCloso blog.

Read one before your next bidding window and the number you type will be a limit rather than a hope.

Keep going: Closo Sell Lots · Closo Seller Hub · Closo Demand Insights.