Many of those online auction sites are still surplus warehouses, but they just don’t need to operate as retail operations. You can still visit and inspect the goods when they’re listed.

A favourite in Australia that emerged over the last ten or so years is Grays Online [1], which sell everything from estate sales and office equipment, to military vehicles and mining machinery.

(Mentioning the name often made people think I was into alien conspiracies, which had some parallels to the subject of this post.)

[1] https://www.graysonline.com