Reviewing your pricing regularly

Pricing isn't a decision you make once. The fees you pay change, service and shipping costs rise, and the market moves under references you thought you knew. A dealer who set their targets a year ago and hasn't looked since is usually pricing from a world that no longer exists.

The fix is a short, regular review of your own results. It's the one exercise that improves every future deal at once.

What to compare

Pull your last stretch of completed deals and look at:

• Profit per watch after every cost, not the gap between buy and sell. The profit article covers what to include.
• Days to sell, from purchase to payment received.
• Asking price against final price, which shows how much discounting is actually happening, as the discounting article explains.
• Results by channel, since fees and buyers differ.
• Results by price band and reference, which often differ more than dealers expect.
• Deals that lost money, and what they had in common.

What the patterns mean

• Watches selling immediately at full price. Often a sign your prices are below the market. Fast sales feel like success and can be quiet underpricing.
• Long times to sell with heavy discounting at the end. Prices are above the market, or the listings aren't making the case. The listing article helps with the second.
• Thin margins despite good buying. Usually costs: fees, prep, shipping, or holding time creeping up since you set your inputs.
• One channel consistently behind. Check whether its fees still make sense for what you sell there, using the channel article.
• A reference that's always slow. It may not belong in your stock, whatever the margin looks like on paper.

Update the inputs you price from

Most pricing drift comes from stale inputs rather than bad judgment. Check and update:

• Channel fees, which platforms change.
• Payment processing rates, including any that differ by method.
• Shipping and insurance costs, which rise quietly.
• Prep and service costs, from your watchmaker's current prices.
• Your cost of capital and typical holding time, which decide the carrying cost, as the carrying cost article covers.
• Your target margin, which should reflect the risk you're actually taking, as the target margin article explains.

Then re-run a few recent deals through the max buy calculator with the updated numbers. If your ceilings move noticeably, you've been buying with out-of-date assumptions.

Review the stock you're holding

The same session is a good moment to look at unsold watches: how long each has been listed, how the market has moved, and whether the price still reflects it. The aged inventory article covers acting on what you find, and the loss article covers the positions you'd rather not think about.

Keep the review honest

Two traps make reviews useless. The first is only counting the good deals, which is easy to do from memory and impossible from records. The second is explaining every disappointment away as a one-off. If three deals in a row had the same "one-off" problem, it's a pattern.

Write the conclusions down, with the specific change you're making: a fee updated, a target margin raised, a channel dropped, a reference avoided. Vague resolutions don't survive contact with the next tempting watch.

Make it a routine

Put the review in the calendar rather than doing it when something feels wrong. Quarterly suits most dealers, with a quick monthly look at days to sell and any aging stock. It takes an hour and it compounds, because every deal after it is priced from better information.

Seasonality in watch sales covers testing whether the patterns in that record are real.