# Why Your Profit Number Should Follow The Sale, Not The Listing

Here is a small bookkeeping problem that quietly wrecks a lot of resellers' numbers.

You list a jacket at $45. Three weeks later somebody offers $32 and you take it, because

$32 today beats $45 never. The sale is done, the money is real, and the jacket is on its

way. But if your records still say $45, every number downstream of that sale is now

wrong — your margin, your average sale price, your read on whether that category is worth

buying again.

Multiply that by a year of accepted offers and bundle discounts, and you end up running a

business on a set of books that describe a business you do not have.

The Ask Price Is A Hypothesis. The Sale Price Is A Fact.

The price you list at is a guess about what someone will pay. It is a useful guess, and it

should be informed by comps — but it is still a guess, and it stays a guess right up until

the moment somebody pays.

The moment they pay, you have something much better than a guess. You have an actual

number, produced by an actual buyer, for an actual item in the actual condition yours was

in. That number is the one worth keeping.

Where It Usually Goes Wrong

Three places, in rough order of how much damage they do:

Accepted offers. The most common. Marketplaces push offers hard, resellers accept them

constantly, and the difference between asking and accepted is exactly the part most

spreadsheets never capture.

Bundles. A buyer takes four items for one negotiated price. What did each of those four

items sell for? If your answer is "the four prices I listed them at," your per-item history

is fiction — the total is right and every line under it is wrong.

Promotions and shipping discounts. Smaller, but they stack. Anything that moves money

between the sticker and the payout belongs in the record.

When an item sells, FlipPress records what it actually sold for and updates the item to

reflect that. If you accepted an offer, the sold item shows the accepted number, not the

one you were hoping for. If it went out as part of a bundle, each item in that

order carries its own sold number rather than the price you had been asking.

That is not a reporting feature so much as a hygiene one. It means the history you go back

and read next month describes what happened.

Sourcing decisions are made out of history. When you are standing in a thrift store

deciding whether to buy the third pair of a certain brand of boots, the thing that should

answer the question is what the first two actually did — not what you wanted them to do.

If your records inflate every sale by the size of the average accepted offer, you will

systematically overestimate your worst categories and keep buying them. The error does not

show up as an obvious mistake. It shows up as a category that never quite performs the way

the numbers said it would.

Whatever system you use — ours, a spreadsheet, a notebook — make the sale price the number

you record, and record it at the moment of sale rather than at the end of the month when

you are reconstructing it from memory.

Then let it aggregate. Per item, per category, per haul. The picture that comes out the

other side is the only honest answer to the question every reseller is actually asking:

*is this working?*

*Your first 50 listings on FlipPress are free — no card needed.*