The Logistics Problem Everyone Ignored

Returns are up. Storage costs are rising. Expired goods and unsold inventory are stacking up in warehouses across the country often with no exit plan.

It’s a familiar story. But few have tackled it with the clarity or speed of Amrita Bhasin.

Speaking with ClickZ at Lead Summit, the Sotira co-founder described an ecosystem where some of the world’s most well-known brands, including publicly traded players, still manage liquidation manually or not at all. “Most teams don’t have a defined process,” she noted. “The problem is constant. But the approach is reactive, inconsistent, and expensive.”

Not a Marketplace. An Operating System.

Sotira doesn’t operate like a typical resale platform. There are no listings to scroll through or negotiation loops to manage. Instead, the system pulls inventory data directly whether from a warehouse management tool or a spreadsheet and matches it with vetted buyers across its network.

Orders are often fulfilled within 48 hours. Compliance documents, once the domain of clipboards and long email chains, are generated instantly in-platform. The process is designed to feel invisible and for the client, low-lift.

Bhasin describes it not as a marketplace, but as infrastructure. “We don’t ask brands to become logistics experts. We just make the stock move.”

AI in the Background, Urgency in the Foreground

The company’s use of AI is deliberately quiet. Rather than deploying generative tools or flashy interfaces, Sotira focuses on practical value: understanding buyer behavior, predicting readiness, and making sure no one receives a shipment they can’t handle.

If a buyer has recently accepted several truckloads of a certain category, they won’t be sent more. If warehouse space is limited, that’s accounted for too. The result is intelligent matching not just between product and buyer, but between timing and capacity.

This matters, because the pain point is real. In late December, Bhasin’s team fielded urgent calls from brands racing to clear stock before January storage fees kicked in. Many had expiry dates just weeks out.

In that moment, strategy wasn’t the point. Speed was.

Making Liquidation Viable for the First Time

Sotira isn’t just making resale more efficient, it’s making it approachable. Many of its clients are transacting in the secondary market for the first time. Some are billion-dollar brands who’ve historically avoided liquidation altogether.

The shift, Bhasin explains, isn’t philosophical. It’s operational. There’s too much at stake to treat overstock as an afterthought. But for companies without a dedicated reverse logistics team, the barriers, legal, technical, procedural, have always been high.

Sotira lowers them. Documents that once took weeks to coordinate are now signed in minutes. Buyers are pre-vetted. Freight is handled. For the client, the process requires no specific knowledge. And perhaps most critically, it reduces risk.

Resale’s Quiet Revolution

There’s nothing glamorous about liquidation. It doesn’t come with splashy headlines or hero metrics. But as Bhasin makes clear, it’s one of the most economically urgent problems in modern retail and one of the least modernized.

What Sotira offers isn’t a new concept. It’s a long-neglected layer of commerce, rebuilt with the tools of today: automation, data, structure, and trust.

In a market where margins are shrinking and inventory decisions carry more risk than ever, that layer is no longer optional.

It’s foundational.

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication in the Events division