How to tell a real discount from a marked-up sale

A shop showing you "was 160, now 96" is making a statement about its own past pricing. It is usually true and it is almost never the number you need, because it compares the shop to itself. The only comparison that tells you whether 96 is good is what everyone else is charging for the same product right now.

This matters more than it sounds. A forty per cent reduction from a high anchor can land above a neighbouring shop's ordinary, undiscounted price. A modest-looking ten per cent off an already keen price can be the lowest figure available anywhere. The percentage is the least informative number on the page.

A discount is a claim about one shop's history. A price is a fact about the market.

RestocksAIO

The lowest price on any given product is very often a shop clearing the last two or three sizes of a colourway. The figure looks spectacular next to the cluster, but it only exists for the feet it happens to fit. For a reseller this is worse than for a consumer: you are buying to sell, and the sizes that get cleared last are the sizes that sell slowest.

So the first question about a cheap listing is not "how cheap" but "how many sizes, and which". A full size run at a moderate discount is a sourcing opportunity. Two odd sizes at a steep one is usually someone else's leftover problem, priced to move for a reason.

• A price well below the cluster, with a full size run. This is the rare combination: a shop clearing a colourway early rather than late. It is the one worth moving on quickly.
• The same model cheap at several shops at once. Usually a season change rather than a one-off, which means it will get cheaper before it disappears — and it also means resale prices are about to soften.
• A single outlier far below everyone else. Check it carefully. Genuine clearance and a listing error look identical until you read the size list and the check date.

And the signal to ignore: a large percentage with no context. Without knowing what other shops charge, it is decoration.

All of this requires a view across retailers rather than one product page at a time. Retail comparison sites do that job — a page of price drops across European shops is the kind of view that turns a percentage into a judgement, because you can see the cluster and the outliers together with the sizes each shop still has.

The habit worth building is simply never to evaluate a discount alone. Open the product, look at what the other shops charge, and only then decide whether the crossed-out number means anything.

Once you believe the price, the rest is unglamorous. Landed cost including shipping and duty, the platform fee on the marketplace you will sell on, payment processing, your VAT treatment, and the realistic time to sell in that size. A genuinely good buy survives that arithmetic; a good-looking discount often does not.

If you are sourcing regularly, keep the calculation in the same place as your inventory rather than in a spreadsheet you update when you remember. Repricing and payout context only help if the number you started from was real.