When they start using terms like 'salvage' in the surplus market, you can expect the worst. Salvage will be everything under the sun, completely smashed, rusty, missing bits and so on.
Now having said that, if you're switched on you can sometimes still do ok with salvage, providing you don't get the biggest load a garbage dumped on you straight away...and that can happen.
Making money in liquidations is no short term exercise. Each load you buy, no matter if it's from the same seller and from the same batch as you bought last week, will deliver you different margins, and yes some can put you in the red.
I've seen so many people spend their savings of 700 or 800 on a load, and get a shocker straight off the bat, and that sinks them. You can never relay on making money from a single load, it's the type of business where you work on averages.
6 months, you may well get 6 loads that you lost cash on, but you may well get 17 that made cash, and 7 of those make a killing. It's the way it usually happens in this market because as you go forward you are gaining the experience, and with that you start to know how to maximize your profits.
Now I've gone a little off point to where I started lol, what I wanted to say was that even though an item may well look like garbage and you want to throw it, take a second look.
Lets say a blender without the jar is there. Test the base, if it works then throw it on eBay at 0.99, you never know what someone else is looking for, and bits and pieces of things sell all the time, so in any surplus load, there can often be more money staring you in the face than you fist realize.
It all depends on you product knowledge and ability to repair things yourself in the salvage market. For example, someone who knows how to repair Play Stations will most likely be able to make the very most from a salvage load of them, and so on.