Dollars among the discards
EasySale finding treasure reselling used items
The inventory is always surprising in the Arlington warehouse, and most of it will be gone and replaced with something else in just a few weeks.
Stewart Asimus points to photos of some memorable sales. A mounted European boar’s head went for $124 and a wooden surgery and exam table went for $125.38. A lot of Mary Kay products sold for $5,299.99, and documents and a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald, asking if he could return to the United States, fetched media attention and $29,309.
Asimus, co-founder, co-owner and president of EasySale Inc., oversees a range of items because his sellers are from all over the North Texas region and his buyers are worldwide. EasySale, which started with the Arlington warehouse and a fleet of trucks in 2007, is today an expanding full-service company that handles eBay sales for individuals, businesses and various organizations.
While the company’s growth has all been in conjunction with a faltering economy, EasySale is expanding and in March 2009 bought a chain of four eBay-centered iSold It storefronts. By helping monetize idle assets, EasySale is growing throughout the area and its managers have their eyes on other markets in the future.
“We’re one of the businesses that, in rough times, we probably do better,” Asimus said.
Since acquiring the four storefronts, located in Southlake, Addison, Plano and Dallas, EasySale has grown roughly 35 percent to 40 percent month over month, he estimated. The company was founded on trucks that would pick up large items from people’s homes or businesses and then sell them on eBay from the warehouse and deliver a check to the owner, and the smaller stores give people a way to drop off small items, like clothing, accessories or collectibles. It also gives employees the chance to explain the other EasySale services, like cash for cell phones and commercial account managers who can coordinate with businesses looking to get rid of extra items.
SoftLayer Technologies, a Plano-based Internet and computing data and hosting company, turned to EasySale to get rid of telecom and network computing equipment, like servers for its data center and processing equipment.
George Karidis, chief marking officer for SoftLayer, said the company replaces servers and other equipment that are at the end of their usefulness for their clients but still have value and would work elsewhere. Putting things up on eBay takes a little bit of time, he said, but Asimus said because EasySale gets 40 percent of the sale price, the company works to maximize profit on items. Karidis said it was more profitable than other options the company considered.
“If we went to a broker, we may have been able to sell more volume at once . . . but at the same time, we wouldn’t have made anything on it because they would have discounted it,” he said.
Additionally, turning everything over to EasySale meant SoftLayer employees didn’t have to put in a lot of time and effort toward logistics. Most company employees have personally bought something over eBay, Karidis said, but posting an item on the Web site requires taking on a set of potential issues.
“We didn’t have to worry about whether we were going to get paid or not, all that fun stuff,” he said.
Having someone else take care of posting items, answering questions from potential buyers, handling payments and shipping is one reason people turn to EasySale, Asimus said, and another reason is safety or confidentiality. Posting an item on Craigslist or in a newspaper classified requires giving out contact information or meeting a person for a transaction, and those instances leave a seller vulnerable to theft or other possible attacks, Asimus said. Someone with a valuable or unusual item—like the Oswald documents—may not want to open themselves up to questions, or a company may not want to show that it is going out of business when it posts all of its items for sale under its own name online, he said.
EasySale is, as far as Asimus knows, the only U.S. eBay sales company that offers both truck fleet services for individuals and businesses as well as storefronts. Asimus worked for 30 years with RadioShack, rising from a part-time sales position to senior vice president and chief channels operator, he said, and developing a new company was an experience he’d never been though prior to EasySale. His two partners, EasySale CEO Dave Edmondson and CFO Gary Stone, also are RadioShack veterans. With the help of his two partners and some venture capital, though, they have developed something which he hopes can spread beyond Fort Worth and Dallas and continue to meet demands of a large customer base.
“We have two customers: the seller and the buyer, and they’re actually opposed to each other,” he said. “The seller wants to make as much as they can, and the buyer wants to pay as little as they can.”
