Somebody at your store picked the discount on your open box listings. They probably picked it once, off a dropdown, and it has been the default ever since.
We wanted to know what that guess costs. So we went through more than 20,000 open box sales on Shopify stores running DRIP. Here is what the book actually says.
The average open box item sells at 31.3 percent off
Median 29 percent. The middle half of everything sold falls between 17 and 46 percent off, which is an enormous spread for what is supposed to be a condition adjustment.
That spread is the first clue. If discounts were being set by condition, they would cluster. They do not.
The fastest sales carry the shallowest cuts
This is the part that surprised us.
Items that sold inside two weeks went out at 26 to 28 percent off. The deep cuts, the 40s and 50s, sit almost entirely on stock that took 31 to 90 days to move. And 38 percent of everything sold went in the first seven days at an average of 28.4 percent off.
More than a third of the book cleared in a week without anybody cutting deep.
What that does and does not prove
It would be easy to turn that into "discount less and sell faster," and it would be wrong, so here is the honest reading.
DRIP steps a price down a little each day until the item sells. That means a deep discount is largely what happens to stock that did not move, not what caused it to move. The 47 percent cut on a unit that took seven weeks is the mechanism doing its job on something nobody wanted at 20 percent off.
So the finding is not that deep discounts repel buyers. The finding is narrower and more useful:
- A deep discount is a symptom, not a lever. It tells you the starting price was wrong or the demand was not there. It is not the thing that produces a fast sale.
- Most stock that sells fast sells under 30 percent off. If a third of your returns would clear in a week at 28, every point you hand over above that is margin you did not need to spend.
- The starting price is the decision that matters. The floor and the daily step handle the rest. Merchants agonise over the discount and set it once, when the thing worth revisiting is where the price starts.
Almost nobody is pricing by condition. They are picking round numbers.
The single most common discount setting across the entire platform is exactly 50 percent off. After that: 25, 20, 10, 30 and 40. Every one a round number off a menu.
Nearly a quarter of everything sold went at half price or deeper.
Think about what that means for a unit that came back sealed, unopened, because somebody ordered the wrong colour. It is functionally new. It goes out at half price because half price was the number on the dropdown the day the store set this up, and nobody revisited it.
That is not a pricing strategy. It is a default. And defaults on an open box listing are expensive, because every point of discount comes straight off the bottom line of inventory you have already paid for twice, once to buy and once to take back.
What to do with this on your own store
Three things, in order of how much they are worth.
Stop starting at 50. If your default is half price, you are almost certainly giving away margin on the units in the best condition. Start a near-new unit in the 20s and let the price find its level. The ones that would have sold at half price will still get there.
Let the start price carry the condition, not the discount. A sealed return and a scuffed demo unit should not begin at the same percentage off. The grade is the input to the starting price.
Describe it properly so you do not have to cut as deep. A buyer who can see the scuff photographed and the grade stated has stopped guessing, and a buyer who has stopped guessing does not need a half-price incentive to take the risk. We went through what a real condition description contains in a separate post.
The limits of this data, stated plainly
Two things you should know before you lean on any of it.
These numbers are platform-wide. The admin cannot split discount behaviour per merchant, so this is the whole book across every store running DRIP, not a controlled comparison between them. Your mix, your categories and your condition grades will move all of it.
And as above, the correlation between deep discounts and slow sales is partly mechanical, because the price steps down on its own while an item sits. Read it as evidence about where to start, not as proof that a smaller discount sells faster.
What it does settle is this: the stock that moves quickly is not the stock that was cut hardest, and the most popular discount on the platform is a round number nobody tested.
Stop writing returns off. DRIP by Returns For Sale relists your returned and open-box items on your own product pages, drops the price a little each day until they sell, and removes the listing automatically when they do. No subscription, no setup fee, and your first 30 days are commission-free.
