Stop Pricing by Gut Feeling. The Gut Is Wrong.

You've been pricing lots the same way for ten years. Check what similar stuff sold for last time. Adjust for condition. Add a margin. Hope for the best. Send the quote. Wait.

It works. It has worked. It will continue to work, in the way that navigating by the stars works — you'll get roughly where you're going, eventually, unless it's cloudy. The question isn't whether gut-feel pricing works. The question is how much it costs you when it's wrong.

The Reference Price Problem

Your gut price is based on a reference — usually the last time you sold something similar. But the last time was three months ago. In three months:

— A wave of off-lease Latitude 5430s hit the European market, increasing supply by 30%.
— A major buyer in France shifted their procurement to a different model line, reducing demand.
— A competitor dropped prices to clear warehouse space before their lease expired.
— One of your regular buyers got acquired and their procurement process changed.

Your reference price doesn't know any of this. It's a fossil. A perfectly preserved snapshot of a market that no longer exists. You're using it anyway, because it's the best data you have, and it feels about right.

"Feels about right" is an expensive confidence.

A gut price is last quarter's market wearing this quarter's label. The label is convincing. The price is wrong.

What Competing Bidders Reveal

Here's an experiment. Instead of pricing the lot at €150 and waiting for one buyer to say yes, you list it with a starting price of €100 and let four buyers compete.

Buyer one bids €130. They have moderate demand and tight margins. Buyer two bids €155. They have a customer waiting and can afford to pay more. Buyer three bids €168. They're running low on this specific configuration and need it by Friday. Buyer four bids €182. They spotted an arbitrage opportunity with a buyer in Italy and the margin justifies the premium.

Final price: €182. Your gut said €150. The market said €182. That's a 21% difference. On a 500-unit lot, that's €16,000 in margin you would have left on the table if you'd trusted your gut instead of the market.

This isn't a hypothetical. This is what happens when competitive bidding replaces fixed pricing. The final price is frequently higher than the seller expected — because the seller's reference was outdated, or conservative, or based on a single data point, or influenced by the most recent bad deal. The market has more information than any individual seller. Auctions extract that information.

When Fixed Pricing Still Makes Sense

Not everything should be auctioned. Regular stock that moves predictably, in consistent volumes, to a stable pool of buyers — that's fine at fixed pricing. The relationship matters. The speed matters. The buyer wants to know the price before committing, and you want the certainty of a standing order.

But for non-standard lots — mixed grades, unusual configurations, large volumes, time-sensitive inventory — competitive bidding reveals the true price. And the true price is usually not what you guessed.

The cost of getting the price wrong isn't just the per-unit difference. It's also the time cost when the lot doesn't sell because the price is too high. Stock that sits in your warehouse depreciates at roughly 1-2% per week. A lot priced at €160 that doesn't sell for six weeks loses 9% of its value. You drop the price to €145 out of necessity. A buyer who would have paid €175 in an auction six weeks ago takes it at €145 and considers it a bargain. The €30 per unit gap didn't go to you. It went to time.

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Your gut is not wrong. It's imprecise. And in a market where margins are measured in single-digit percentages, imprecision is expensive. Four competing bidders won't tell you everything about the market. But they'll tell you more than your memory of a deal that closed last quarter in different conditions.

The gut gets you in the neighbourhood. The market gets you the address.