TurnGoods Blog

End of financial year is looming for Australian consignment stores. If you dread the bookkeeping catch-up — unpicking marketplace payouts, calculating GST on consignor commissions, reconciling bank deposits with eBay statements — you’re not alone. Consignment accounting is uniquely messy. Most small business software treats every dollar the same. But in consignment, not all dollars are equal: the full sale price includes GST, while the consignor payout is a cost of sale — not taxable. ...

Running a consignment store means making hundreds of inventory decisions a month: what to price this handbag at, how long to wait before marking it down, which consignors to take more stock from, which categories to focus on. Most store owners make these decisions on gut feel. “This brand usually sells fast.” “That colour never moves.” Sometimes gut feel is right. Sometimes it costs you weeks of dead stock. A sales analytics dashboard replaces guesses with numbers. ...

If you’re listing the same item on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, Depop, and Trade Me — each one individually, typing the same description five times — you already know how much time that burns. Five to ten hours a week, depending on how many items you’re moving. Now add the cost of a double-sell: an item sells on eBay while your Facebook listing is still live. A buyer puts in an order, you have to cancel, apologise, refund. It erodes trust, and it costs time and fees. ...

If you manage ten or more consignors, you already know the monthly scramble: pulling sales data from every platform, calculating commissions, formatting individual reports, emailing each one. For a store with 15 consignors, that’s easily two to three hours of admin time every month. More if someone wants a resend or asks “how did you calculate this?” It doesn’t need to be this way. Automated consignor statements turn a full day’s work into a button click. ...

If you are selling on eBay Australia, the fee structure has changed significantly. From May 12, eBay is rolling out free selling for casual sellers, and restructuring its plans for everyone else. This guide covers exactly what you will pay — no marketing fluff, just the numbers. We have already covered how to choose between eBay and Gumtree as an Australian reseller and how to optimise your eBay listings for faster sales. This post focuses on the one thing that directly determines your bottom line: fees. ...

Every consignment store has one. The rack in the back corner that nobody opens. The shelf of items that arrived with such promise six months ago and have been collecting dust ever since. The pile of things you keep meaning to mark down, return, or do something with, but somehow never get around to. In reseller communities, it’s called the deathpile — inventory that sits so long it becomes a liability instead of an asset. It costs you floor space, it frustrates your consignors, and the longer it sits, the less it’s worth. ...

Every resale business in Australia hits the same wall. You start because you love the hunt — finding great items, listing them, selling them. Simple. Then it’s not simple. You’re managing 100 items and can’t remember what’s listed where. You’re jumping between eBay, Gumtree, and Facebook Marketplace with sticky notes on your monitor. Consignment sounded like a great way to get more stock without buying it, but now you’re tracking payouts in a spreadsheet that’s lying to you. ...

Every second software product claims to have AI these days. A spreadsheet with a random number generator could call itself “AI-powered” and nobody would blink. Consignment store owners are right to be sceptical. You’ve been pricing items by hand for years — checking eBay, tweaking based on what moves, building intuition about your local market. Can a computer really do better? Short answer: yes, in specific and measurable ways. Here’s the honest version of how it works, where it helps, and where it still needs a human eye. ...

If you run an Australian consignment store and you’re not on Facebook Marketplace, you’re leaving money on the table. If you’re only on Facebook Marketplace, you’re leaving even more. For Australian resellers, Facebook Marketplace is the most accessible sales channel in the country. It’s free to list. It reaches millions of local buyers. And for certain categories — furniture, bulky items, whitegoods — it has no serious competitor in terms of local buyer density. ...

If you’re listing consignment stock manually, you already know it’s slow. The question is how slow — and whether the difference actually matters for your bottom line. Let’s run the numbers side by side. The Manual Workflow — Minute by Minute Every item that comes through your door follows the same path. Here’s what the manual version looks like for a typical consignment store listing one handbag across two marketplaces. ...