There’s a comfortable story every reseller tells about their store. The new stuff is fine. The money that’s stuck is in the old listings — the ones that have been sitting for a year, that you’d clear if you ever got round to it.
We believed it too. Then we measured it.
What the book actually looks like
Still In The Box carries 381 live listings, about $98,500 of ask. We split it by age, as at 5 September:
| listings | value | avg | share of value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under 90 days | 283 | $93,603 | $331 | 95% |
| 90 days+ | 98 | $4,924 | $50 | 5% |
| a year+ | 46 | $2,753 | $60 | 3% |
Ninety-five per cent of the money is in listings under three months old.
The aged tail — the stuff we’d been meaning to “deal with” — is 98 items averaging fifty dollars. If we cleared every single one of them tomorrow at full ask, it would move less than five thousand dollars on a hundred-thousand-dollar book.
That’s not where the problem is. It just looks like where the problem is, because age is the thing you can see.
Where the problem actually is
Here’s the number that reframed it for us.
Across 98 sales since June, the median item sold for exactly 100% of its asking price. Sixty-five per cent went at full price. Across all 98, negotiation moved the total by $642 on $27,724 of asks — about two per cent.
Read that again, because it means something uncomfortable: the price you list at is the price you get. Best Offer doesn’t correct a wrong price. Buyers don’t talk you up to market.
So a listing can fail in two ways, and both happen on the day you write it:
- Underprice it, and you’ve banked the error already. List at $189 what the market pays $222 for, and the $33 was gone before the first buyer arrived. It sells fast, you feel good, and you never find out.
- Overprice it, and there’s no sale at all. Not a smaller sale. None.
Neither shows up afterwards. The underpriced one looks like a win. The overpriced one looks like a slow item. Nobody re-reads a listing they priced properly three months ago — and the market doesn’t send you a note when it moves.
Age is the wrong axis
This is why “clear the old stock” is the wrong instinct, even though it feels productive.
The question isn’t how long has this been listed. It’s is this price still right — and that question applies to a listing that’s four days old exactly as much as one that’s four hundred. It just costs more to get wrong on the fresh stock, because that’s where the value is.
A re-comp doesn’t rescue dead inventory. It checks whether a decision you made properly on listing day is still true. Most of the time it is, and the answer is hold. Sometimes it isn’t, in either direction, and those are the ones worth an evening.
We wrote last week about running that check on eight aged listings. Four sold, two of them inside 48 hours after sitting more than a year. That’s a good story. But the bigger one is that we’d been looking at the wrong end of the book the whole time.