Save Money By Shopping Through The Secondary Market
BOSTON (CBS) - If you love to shop but hate to pay full price, there is a new trend you may want to check out.
Secondary market sellers are popping up online and opening stores across the country. They take overstock and returned items and sell them at a discount, sometimes as much as 90% of the retail price.
Robert Auray is the owner of Genco and Nobetterdeal.com, which are both secondary market companies. He has a massive warehouse filled with everything from flat screen TVs to furniture even designer clothing.
WBZ-TV's Paula Ebben reports
"The secondary market is big and it's definitely growing, particularly in an economy like ours where people are value strapped," he said.
If you are thinking of buying from a secondary market company, you need to understand a bit about how items are labeled. If something is marked 'new' it really means new. Chances are a retailer just had too many.
If a product is marked 'open box' or 'damaged box', it means the item has been opened or the box is torn but it should work just fine.
"There may be a little bit of a peripheral scratch somewhere on the product," Auray explained.
The riskiest items are marked 'as-is'. These products could have missing remotes or no instruction manuals and have not been retested.
"It's going to have the biggest discount associated with it," Auray said. "There is a little bit of buyer beware on it," he said.
Refurbished items are also popular on the secondary market. These are products that were returned to the store with a problem but they've been fixed and re-tested. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports in the last two years it has received only a handful of safety complaints about refurbished items, which is compared to the thousands of complaints the agency receives about new items.
Consumer advocate Edgar Dworsky furnished his Somerville home with secondary market items.
"I honestly have had very good experience buying refurbished items. Some of them appear to be brand new," he said.
The most important tip when shopping in the secondary market is to know the merchant's return policy.
"It's absolutely critical to know what the return policy is, particularly on refurbished items. You don't want to get stuck with it," Dworsky warned.
If you're buying something online, make sure you factor in the shipping costs. Heavy electronics like TVs could be quite expensive to ship. You may actually be better off buying something on sale at a local store.
