Brighton Computers ·
Pricing refurbished laptops for resale from the lot price
Turn a lot price into a true cost per unit, split that cost fairly across grades, check real sold prices and set a resale price that leaves you a margin.
Start with the true cost of each unit
Dividing the lot price by the number of units gives you a headline figure, not your cost. A lot of 50 laptops at £9,000 is £180 a unit on paper, but each machine still has to be delivered, made complete, tested, cleaned, packed and sold, and every one of those steps costs money.
Add your share of delivery, then whatever each unit needs to be sellable. A laptop without a charger needs one: an adapter bought in a pack of 100 at £400 works out at £4 a unit, plus a mains lead. A unit without storage needs an SSD. Then add labour. If testing, wiping, cleaning and imaging takes 25 minutes and you value your time at £18 an hour, that is £7.50. Add packaging. In this example the £180 laptop has become something closer to £200 before you have sold it.
Do not spread the cost evenly across grades
Most lots contain a mix of grades and sometimes a mix of specifications. If you give every unit the same £200 cost, your grade A machines look wildly profitable and your grade C machines look like losses, and you end up making bad decisions about which to keep and which to move on.
A fairer method is to allocate cost by expected resale value. Estimate what each unit will sell for, add those figures up, and work out what fraction of that total the lot actually cost you. If the units should fetch £13,000 between them and your landed cost is £10,000, each unit carries a cost of about 77 percent of its own expected price. A grade A unit you expect to sell for £320 carries £246 of cost; a grade C you expect to sell for £190 carries £146. Now both show the same margin, and you can see clearly when one of them sells below plan.
Find the market price from sales, not asking prices
The price a laptop is listed at tells you very little. Look at completed sales on the marketplaces you use and compare like with like: the same model, the same processor generation, the same memory and storage, the same screen and a similar grade. A full HD screen against a lower resolution panel, or a touchscreen against a standard one, can move the price more than you would expect.
Check whether the machine meets the requirements for Windows 11. As a broad guide that means an Intel eighth generation processor or newer, or an AMD Ryzen 2000 series or newer, with TPM 2.0. Machines that can run it sell more easily to consumers than ones that cannot, even if the rest of the specification is similar.
Margin and markup are not the same number
Markup is profit as a share of cost; margin is profit as a share of the selling price. A unit that cost £200 and sells for £250 has a 25 percent markup but a 20 percent margin. Mixing the two up is one of the most common ways small resellers price themselves into a loss.
To set a price from a target margin, add your margin and your selling fees together as percentages, take that from 100 percent, and divide your cost by what is left. With a cost of £200, a target margin of 20 percent and marketplace and payment fees of around 13 percent, the price is £200 divided by 0.67, which is about £299. If the market is selling that model at £280, you either accept a thinner margin, reduce your costs, or pay less for the next lot. If you are VAT registered and not using the margin scheme, remember the price the buyer sees includes VAT, so work from the net figure.
Work backwards to the most you should pay
The same sum run in reverse tells you what a lot is worth to you before you buy it. Take the realistic selling price for each grade, take off fees and your target margin, then take off the extras each unit needs. What is left is the most you can pay per unit. Multiply by the number of units in each grade, add them up, and you have a ceiling for the lot price.
Using the figures above, a model selling at £280 leaves £187.60 after 13 percent fees and a 20 percent margin. Take off £20 of charger, labour, packaging and delivery share and the most you should pay is about £168 a unit, or roughly £8,380 for a lot of 50. If the lot is offered for more than that, it may still be worth buying, but you now know exactly what you are giving up.
Price to clear, then review
Laptops lose value steadily, so a sale this month at a slightly lower price is often worth more than a sale in three months at the price you hoped for. Put the best units in front of the buyers who pay most for condition, and move grade C and D machines to repairers, parts buyers or export customers who price on specification rather than looks.
Set a review date for every lot, such as 30 days after it arrives, and look at what is left. Compare the actual sale prices with the expected values you used to allocate cost. Over a few lots this record becomes the most valuable pricing tool you have, because it is built from your own sales rather than anyone else's guesswork.