Working Out What You Actually Net

The method

Start with the realistic sale figure for that route, not the hoped-for one. Subtract the percentage that route takes. Subtract every fixed charge it applies. Subtract the costs the seller carries directly. What remains is the only number worth comparing.

Do it separately for each route under consideration. The exercise takes twenty minutes and it regularly reverses the answer people expected, because the route with the highest headline is often not the route with the highest net.

The costs people leave out

Carriage is the big one, particularly for anything heavy or awkward, and particularly where the seller has offered to cover it. Packing materials cost real money once the object needs more than a box. Insurance for anything valuable in transit is a separate line.

Then the quieter ones: the trip to the saleroom, the cost of getting an opinion, the payment processing charge that is separate from the selling fee, and the seller's own hours. Hours are not a cash cost, but a route that consumes thirty of them for a modest gain over a route that consumes two is not actually winning.

Fixed costs and why small lots suffer

Percentage charges scale with the sale. Fixed charges do not, and they are what make low-value items uneconomic through routes that carry them.

The same photography charge that is a rounding error on a strong result can take a meaningful share of a weak one. This is the arithmetic behind the advice to group small items rather than offering each on its own, and it is worth doing explicitly rather than assuming.

When the numbers are close

Where two routes land within a few percent of each other, the money has stopped being the deciding factor and something else should decide it. Speed, certainty, effort, or simply wanting the object gone.

That is a legitimate way to choose and it is worth saying out loud, because sellers often grind on for weeks over a difference that was never material. The channel comparison in which channel suits an item is more useful at that point than another round of arithmetic.

Comparing routes that pay at different times

A figure today and a larger figure in four months are not directly comparable, and treating them as though they are is how sellers talk themselves into waiting for money they needed sooner.

The honest way to handle it is to decide what the wait is worth before comparing. For somebody with no deadline the answer may genuinely be nothing, in which case the larger number wins. For somebody who has to settle a bill next month the wait has a real cost, whether that is interest, a late fee, or simply not being able to close the matter.

Naming that cost turns an argument about patience into a comparison of numbers. It also stops the opposite error, which is taking the fast offer out of anxiety when nothing actually required speed.

A worked comparison, structurally

The arithmetic is easier to see laid out than described. For each route under consideration, write four lines: the realistic sale figure, the percentage deduction, the fixed charges, and the costs you carry yourself. Subtract the last three from the first.

The realistic figure is the one people get wrong, and it should be the middle of what an assessor suggested rather than the top. Using the optimistic number for the route you already prefer and a cautious one for the alternative is the most common way this exercise is quietly rigged.

Do it for every route including the one that looks obviously worst, because that is frequently the one that surprises. Then add a fifth line recording how many hours each route demands, without converting it to money. Two columns, money and time, are what an honest decision is made from.

Finally, write the answer down somewhere before acting on it. The arithmetic is easy to redo badly under pressure, particularly when a buyer is waiting on a decision or a deadline is close. A comparison worked out calmly and kept is what stops a seller talking themselves into a different answer three weeks later on worse information.