How to price pallet stock for resale without guessing

The most common pricing error in reselling is anchoring on retail value. A pallet described as holding £4,000 of retail goods is not a £4,000 asset — it is a quantity of items, a proportion of which will sell, at a proportion of their original price, after costs you have not counted yet.

Step one: landed cost per sellable unit

Add the lot price, delivery, any pallet or handling charge, and your own realistic sorting time valued at whatever you would otherwise earn. Divide by the number of units you expect to be sellable — not the total unit count.

That £4.56 is the number to price against. Everything below it loses money, no matter what the item originally retailed for.

Step two: subtract channel costs before you set a price

• Marketplace commission, typically a percentage of the total including postage
• Payment processing where it is charged separately
• Packaging materials per item
• Postage, using real weights rather than optimistic estimates
• An allowance for returns and non-delivery claims

Step three: build in sell-through time

A margin that takes nine months to realise is worse than a smaller margin realised in six weeks, because the slower one ties up both cash and space. Track how long each category takes to clear and treat slow categories as more expensive than they look on paper.

Step four: review after every lot

1. 1Record the actual sellable percentage against your estimate
2. 2Record the average achieved price against your target
3. 3Record how many days it took to clear 80% of the lot
4. 4Feed all three back into the next purchase decision

After three or four lots in the same category, these numbers become genuinely predictive — and that predictability is what separates a hobby from a business.