Liquidation Pallet Profit Calculator

Everything above is plain arithmetic on the numbers you enter. Here it is in words.

1. Total landed cost. The pallet price, plus the buyer's premium (the pallet price times the premium percentage), plus freight, plus sales tax. It is what the pallet cost you by the time it was in your hands, as far as the costs you entered go.
2. Sellable items. The number of items minus the unsellable items. Unsellable items still cost money, but they cannot be sold, so they are left out of the count and their share of the cost is carried by the items you can sell.
3. Cost per sellable item. Total landed cost divided by sellable items. Every sellable item carries an equal share, whatever it is: a $5 item and a $200 item get the same share, so read this as an average, not as any one item's own cost.
4. Break-even asking price. Cost per sellable item divided by one minus the platform fee (written as a decimal). When the platform charges a fee, the average selling price must exceed the cost per item to recover it. With no fee, it can equal the cost per item. With a 15% fee you divide by 0.85. The figure shown is rounded up to a whole cent when needed, rather than rounded to the nearest cent, so selling every sellable item at that price covers the cost.
5. Profit if everything sells at your asking prices. Your average asking price times the sellable items, times one minus the platform fee, minus the total landed cost. It assumes every sellable item sells at your asking price. That is an assumption, not a forecast.

What it leaves out. Shipping you pay to send an item, packing supplies, payment-processing charges beyond the fee you enter, returns, storage, mileage and your time are not counted. Other amounts are rounded to the nearest cent when shown.

The profit line uses your asking prices, and an asking price is where a negotiation starts, not where it ends. Four reasons the real total can come in lower:

• Asking prices are advertised prices. The prices on live listings, yours included, are what sellers are asking. They are not what buyers ended up paying, and completed sales are a different set of numbers that can be lower.
• Offers. Buyers make offers, and a sale can close below the asking price after a counter-offer or a markdown.
• Returns. A buyer can send an item back. That takes the sale away, and you may not get every fee back.
• Unsold items. Some items sit for a long time and some never sell. They still carry their share of the cost, and the profit line assumes none of them are left over.

How much this can matter: in the worked example, suppose only 24 of the 32 sellable items sell at $30.00 and the other 8 do not sell at all. The profit line becomes $30.00 × 24 × (1 − 0.15) − $680.00 = -$68.00, a loss. That split is an illustration of how sensitive the result is, not a typical or expected rate.

Use the break-even figure as an average selling-price check before you bid: if every sellable item sells at that price, their net proceeds cover the landed cost. Then look at what is on the pallet and decide whether that price is realistic for those items.