What does it actually cost you to list one used part?

Ask a yard what it costs to list a part and you get a percentage. Thirteen and a bit, on the sale, and that is the answer.

It is also the smallest line in the calculation, and treating it as the whole thing is how yards end up with 4,000 listings and no idea which ones are losing money.

What are the real costs of listing a used part?

Six of them. Only one is a fee.

• The pull. Somebody time, on a vehicle, with tools - spent before you know whether the part sells.
• Photography. The highest-leverage minutes in the process and the least tracked. Nobody buys a $200 module described as "good condition" with one blurry photo, which makes photography the conversion mechanism rather than overhead.
• The description and the fitment. The one that quietly eats afternoons. None of it is creative work and all of it takes real minutes, per listing, per channel.
• Storage. Cheap per part, brutal in aggregate, and it accrues the entire time the part is unsold.
• Shipping and packing. Materials, weight, and the labour of packing something awkward.
• Returns. Not the average rate - YOUR rate on THAT category. Electronics behave differently from body panels and the average hides it.

Why the fee is the least interesting number

eBay's take on Motors Parts & Accessories runs 13.6% up to $7,500, and the detail sellers routinely miss is that it applies to shipping and sales tax as well as the item. The arithmetic is worked through here.

Real money. Still not the biggest number above it. The reason to care is that it is the one cost you cannot reduce by being better at your job - everything else on that list responds to process. The fee responds to nothing.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Time-to-sale. Two parts with identical margins are not identical businesses if one sells in nine days and the other in nine months. The second has been charged storage, has had your capital tied up in it, and has occupied the shelf that could have held something that moved.

The trade press framing is useful: a predictive view reduces exposure to inventory that looks valuable on paper but becomes expensive once storage, handling, photography, listing, shipping and returns are all counted. Which is the same sentence as "overheads double your cost basis", pointed forwards instead of backwards.

How do I work out my own cost per listing?

1. Time one listing end to end. Pull to published, on a stopwatch, including photography and fitment. Do it three times on three part types. Most yards are startled by the number.
2. Multiply by your real hourly cost - not a wage, a wage plus the overhead that wage carries.
3. Add storage per month multiplied by your MEDIAN days-to-sale for that category. Median, not mean: one transmission that sat two years will wreck a mean.
4. Add your category return rate multiplied by the full cost of a return - shipping both ways, re-inspection, re-listing.

You now have a number. Compare it against the parts you routinely list at $25 and you will find some of them have never made money, and that the problem was never the fee.

What actually moves the number

Two things, and they are unequal. Listing once instead of three times - if a part goes onto eBay, a storefront and the counter and each is typed separately, the description-and-fitment cost is paid three times for one physical part. That is the largest recoverable cost on the list and it is pure duplication.

And deciding earlier what not to list. Cheaper than listing something well is not listing it, and the parts that lose money are usually identifiable before the photography rather than after.

The fee is the number you can quote and cannot change. The cost killing your margin is the one you pay three times for one part.