What happens if your machine does not sell

This is the question people are too polite to ask on the first call, and it is the right question. A consignment is a relationship that runs for months, and the honest way to start one is by saying out loud what happens if the good outcome does not arrive.

The short answer: the provision is written into your agreement before the machine ships, so you know the answer before you decide, not afterwards. Along with the commission, payment timing, storage, the minimum period, inbound freight and rigging, insurance while it is in our care, and preparation, it is one of the 8 things settled in writing before anything moves.

The longer answer is about why machines sit, and what we do about it.

Why a machine sits

The market for it is thin. Some machines have 2 buyers in the world in a given year. That is not a failure of marketing, it is the shape of that market, and it is why the first thing we do with your list is tell you which category each machine falls into. If we think a machine is a hard sell, we say so before you spend anything on freight. Shipping something we cannot move helps nobody.

It is priced ahead of the market. Comparable machines are selling, yours is not, and the difference is the number. This is the most common and the easiest to fix.

It is incomplete. Missing tooling, missing controls, missing manuals. A buyer prices the gap, not the machine, and often just moves on to a complete one.

It is described in a way that does not answer the first question. Every industry has one: working width, capacity, tonnage, gauge, screw diameter, number of colors. A listing that makes a buyer ask is a listing that loses to one that already answered.

Timing. 4 of the same machine came out of other closures that quarter, or the industry that uses it is not buying this year.

What we change when it sits

We do not leave a machine to sit and hope. In order:

1. Re-photograph it. New angles, better light, the control screen powered up, the tooling laid out, the faults shown deliberately. Photographs move more machines than adjectives do.
2. Rewrite the specification. Lead with the field a buyer in that industry asks first, add the numbers that were missing, and say plainly what condition it is in.
3. Widen the industries we market it into. Plenty of machines have a second industry that buys them under a different name, and that is where the surprising sales come from.
4. Take it back to the buyer network directly. Not a listing, a conversation, with the people who ask us for that class of equipment.
5. Talk to you about the number. Openly, with what comparable machines have actually been selling for.

What we will not do

We will not take the first low number to clear our floor, and we will not let a machine sit unlooked at either. Both of those are ways of being paid to do nothing.

We will also not tell you what your machine will sell for before it sells. A machine is worth what a buyer pays for it. Anything said before that moment is an estimate, and an estimate presented as a promise is how consignments turn into arguments.

The best protection is the conversation before it ships

Almost every consignment that ends badly started with a machine that should not have been shipped. Send the list first. We will tell you plainly whether it is something we can sell, what kind of buyer we would be selling it to, and what we would expect the market for it to be. If the answer is no, you have saved a freight bill and we have both saved months.