Load price divided by stated count is the number every seller quotes. It is also not your cost per unit, and the gap between the two is where most first loads stop being profitable.
Why the headline figure misleads
A $650 pallet with 1,000 stated units looks like 65 cents a piece. That number is true and useless, because you will not sell 1,000 units.
Every mixed load contains merchandise that is damaged, incomplete, expired, unsellable in your channel, or simply not worth the minutes it takes to list. On a customer-return load that share runs anywhere from 10 percent on softlines to 45 percent on small electronics.
Your real cost per unit is the load price divided by the units you actually sell. Not by the units that arrive.
Cost per sellable unit
| Optimistic | Realistic | Bad load | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Load price | $650 | $650 | $650 |
| Stated count | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Unsellable share | 10 percent | 25 percent | 45 percent |
| Units you sell | 900 | 750 | 550 |
| True cost per unit | $0.72 | $0.87 | $1.18 |
| Needed sale price at 3x | $2.16 | $2.61 | $3.54 |
The same pallet needs a $2.16 average sale price in the good case and $3.54 in the bad one. If your channel realises $2.50 a piece, that load is profitable twice and a loss once, and you find out which after you have opened it.
The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Your time. Sorting a mixed skid properly takes an afternoon on your first attempt. Photographing and listing 750 individual items takes considerably longer than that.
This is why experienced resellers bundle aggressively below about five dollars a unit, and why the bin-store model exists at all. Selling the pile is not laziness, it is the correct response to the arithmetic.
If you are listing individually, price your hours in. If a load nets $1,300 and costs you forty hours, you have bought yourself a job at $32 an hour, which may well be fine, but you should know that is the trade you made.
Three rules that keep the numbers honest
Track sold, not received
The only number worth recording is what each load actually returned after everything that could sell had sold.
Assume the middle case
Plan at roughly 25 percent unsellable on a mixed load until your own data says otherwise.
Compare loads, not listings
The load that returned the most per hour of your time is the one to buy again, regardless of what the listing promised.
Run the numbers on a real load
Every listing carries the price, the class, the condition and an approximate count.