Forty years or so ago, I started the craft of woodworking. Shortly after that, a few of my things started selling. Like many, I desired to sell more, if only to allow me to buy more and better equipment, or to buy more and better materials needed to produce things.

Outlet sources for selling things are abundant, but getting a store to buy your things outright can be a challenge, as I found out. Because of that, I decided to look into consignment sales. However, I soon discovered the following:

1) Stores do not all want the same percentage of a consignment sale. Some might settle for twenty-five percent, another thirty and yet another fifty percent.

2) Determining the retail price was its own challenge. Most stores wanted to take my wholesale price, take their percentage of that, then add the result to the wholesale and call it retail.


If the store just took the money they added to my wholesale for each sale, I would get my required wholesale price. Taking their percentage off the entire retail, on the other hand, left me less than my wholesale, and gave the store a higher percent of the sale.

I needed a way of arriving at a retail price from which stores could just subtract their percentage. I inquired around to stores, bankers and mathematicians, but just got the method noted above. In addition to the problem noted, above, it seemed a cumbersome way of figuring one hundred different retail prices. Since each item was often quite differently and, accordingly, would be priced differently. Using that method, I had to enter the 1.25, or the 1.30 and so on, then multiply it against each of my required wholesale prices.

For the reasons stated, I needed a better way, so experimented and, after some time, lucked on to the right formula. It is simple and to the point. A warning though, many calculators are defective or otherwise incapable of this simple calculation. So if you buy one and hope to use this formula, check first to be sure that subtracting the store's percentage leaves you with your wholesale price. That said, here is the price method:


First, you need to know your percentage of the sale.

Next, divide your percentage into your wholesale amount for your retail price.

NOTE: Divide the decimal representing your percentage (e.g., for 75%, use .7 (store's share 30%), for 75%, use .75 (store's share 25%)
into the wholesale price, or use the percent key. However, the percentage key may put you a decimal off. If so, it should be obvious
and you can just move the decimal right one place.


When you subtract the store's percentage, you will have your wholesale amount.




NOTE: The process of computing retail was made more complicated by that I hadn't done that kind of math in years and forgot things, like 100% equaled one, 99% and less was the same number in a decimal and so forth. As such, it taxed my brain [and there was no internet to get it back on track] to figure out all I had to do was add a one in front of the store's percentage to arrive at their method of determining retail.