tl;dr: When a buyer offers below your listed price on a consigned item, you can't just accept — the discount comes out of the split, so it shrinks your consignor's cheque. The fix is to show the consignor their payout at the offer price, not the sticker discount, and let them accept / decline / counter in one tap. On a 30% commission a $250 discount is only a $175 change to them. Handle it cleanly and offers stop being a 9pm text thread — and your best consignors stay.

You list a consignor’s Chanel at $2,650. A buyer offers $2,400. Reasonable offer — but you can’t just accept it, because that $250 doesn’t come out of thin air. It comes out of the split. Say yes too fast and you’ve quietly shrunk your consignor’s cheque without asking. Say no and you might lose a sale that was never going higher.

Every consignment store deals with this weekly, and most handle it the same way: a flurry of texts and emails. “Hi, got an offer of $2,400 on your bag, that ok?” Then you wait. Then you do the mental maths on what they’ll actually get. Then you relay it back to the buyer. Multiply that by every item, every offer, and it’s a real slice of your week — and a real source of friction, because a consignor who feels their payout got trimmed without a heads-up is a consignor who doesn’t bring you their next piece.

The bit everyone gets wrong: the payout, not the price

The number that matters to your consignor isn’t the offer. It’s their payout after the offer. On a 30% commission, a $250 discount isn’t a $250 hit to them — it’s $175. That’s the number they should be deciding on, and it’s the number most “is this ok?” messages leave them to work out themselves.

Show the payout, not just the price, and the conversation gets shorter and warmer. “The buyer offered $2,400 — that puts your payout at $1,680 instead of $1,855. Happy to take it, or want to counter?” Now they’re deciding on the real thing, in one message, with no maths homework.

The workflow that removes the back-and-forth

Here’s how it should run, and how it runs in TurnGoods:

  1. A buyer makes an offer. You log it against the item — the offer, and where it came from.
  2. The software does the split maths and shows the consignor’s payout at the offer price versus the listed price, automatically, using your commission rate.
  3. The consignor gets one message with a single link: accept, decline, or (if you allow it) counter — in one tap, from their phone. No email tennis.
  4. You see the answer in your queue and go back to the buyer.

That’s it. The store keeps control of what it offers, the consignor sees the real number and responds in seconds, and nobody’s doing arithmetic in a text thread at 9pm.

A note on counter-offers: plenty of stores don’t want them — a clean “here’s the offer, yes or no?” is how most operate, and that’s the default. If you do run negotiations, you switch counters on. The tool should fit how you already work, not force a haggle.

Why this is a retention thing, not just an admin thing

The easy read is that this saves you time. It does. But the bigger win is quieter: a consignor who always sees their real payout, always gets asked before it changes, and can answer from their phone in five seconds is a consignor who trusts you. In a business where your inventory is your relationships, that trust is the whole moat. The store down the road that still runs offers through a spreadsheet and a group text is the store your best consignors quietly leave.

TurnGoods runs the back office of Australian consignment — intake, market pricing, listing to eBay and Shopify, GST and consignor payouts, and the offer workflow above. Built by an operator, not a US SaaS with an AU flag. Book a demo and we’ll run it on your actual stock.