If you’re looking to cash in on the current liquidation resale trend by buying pallets of new, shelf pulls, salvage, returned, or lost inventory, you’ve probably thought about buying Amazon liquidation pallets. You’ve also probably thought “why not cut out the middle man and buy direct from Amazon?”

Unfortunately, you cannot buy pallets direct from Amazon- they handle tens of thousands of truckloads of merchandise and to sell pallets one-by-one would be an immense waste of time. Instead, they deal with regional pallet liquidators who sell wholesale truckloads to then even smaller distributors who sell items either individually, in pallets, or by the truckload. These “third-down-the-line” distributors will sell the pallets as either manifested, meaning they give you an account of what is in the pallet, or unmanifested, meaning they have not sorted through the pallet and cherry-picked out the good stuff, or at least they claim they haven’t.

There are both pros and cons to each business model, but what remains constant is that you’ll be paying the markup of at least 2 middle-men, plus whatever amazon initially charges the wholesale truckload distributors. But don’t let this be taken as a sign that Amazon Liquidation Pallet flipping is dead, because it certainly isn’t, you just need to be price conscious and make several test buys from each supplier you are vetting to ensure that they’re trustworthy business partners.