Every yard knows what it paid for a car. It is on the invoice. Ask what that car has returned since, and most yards cannot say, because its parts sold on eBay, on the storefront and at the counter, and none of those sales records which car the part came off.
That second number is the one the business actually runs on.
The number you know and the one you do not
Purchase price, towing, the auction fee: known on day one. What the car has returned is scattered across three channels' sales reports, each of which knows the part and not the vehicle. Rebuilding it afterwards means matching every sale back to a car by hand, and nobody does that for a whole yard.
Why it is usually unknowable
An eBay sale records the item. It does not record that the alternator came off the grey Silverado you bought in March. Unless every part carries its donor's identity from the moment it is pulled, the car-level number cannot be rebuilt later. That is the same reason fitment should start from the donor (see start from the donor vehicle, not the part).
What "earned" has to include
- every sale of a part from that car, on every channel
- minus the channel's fees
- minus what it cost to list each part
- plus what the shell brought as scrap
The fees are in what eBay actually takes from a used parts sale, and the listing cost in what it costs to list one used part.
The 90-day question
Bill Stevens, then CEO of Fenix Parts, put the rule at an ARA convention: a yard needs to recoup its investment in a vehicle within 90 days of buying it, "otherwise it's hard to fund next purchase", as Recycling Today reported. So the useful question is not the lifetime total. It is how much of the purchase price was back by day 30, day 60 and day 90.
To make that concrete, here is an illustration rather than a real car. Bought for $1,200, it has returned $540 by day 30, $980 by day 60 and $1,310 by day 90. It paid for itself somewhere between day 60 and day 90, and everything after that is what funds the next bid.
What the curve says about the next bid
A few parts usually pay for the car. The rest is a long tail. One eBay seller put the spread well: "Could take a couple weeks to sell or a couple years." Another has parts listed since 2008 that still sell every month.
So look at the median days to sale per part type, not the average, which one slow transmission skews. It is a way of reading your own history, not a bidding tool.
Doing it without software
It can be done by hand. Put the donor's stock number on every part tag. Keep one sheet with a row per car (purchase price, date bought) and a row per sale (date, channel, price, fees, stock number). It works. It is also an hour a week that most yards do not have, and it breaks the first time a sale goes in without the stock number.
Where YardTerminal sits
YardTerminal keeps the purchase price on the vehicle record, and every part pulled from that car, and every sale recorded through YardTerminal, keeps the link to it. So the record this needs exists from the day the car is logged.
It does not add that record up for you yet. There is no per-car or per-channel earnings report today, so for now the sheet above is still how you get the curve. It also does not record what the shell brings as scrap, it does not see sales rung up in your yard system, and it keeps a sold part's history for 90 days. It has no auction data and makes no bid predictions.