Obstacles to Selling a Pre-owned (Used) Stairlift

Selling a pre-owned or used stairlift will take a long (if ever) time. The major obstacles impeding a sale include:

  1. Small Market (Demand): Unlike an automobile, a stairlift is not something a lot of people are looking to buy every day. Thus, the first obstacle for a private stairlift seller is that the pool of potential stairlift buyers is very, very small. In fact, most Americans will never purchase one.
  2. Secondly, most prospective stairlift buyers lack knowledge in selecting a stairlift. So in order to sooth this void, many tend to gravitate to stairlift dealers serving their area. By purchasing from a dealer, they find comfort that:
    1. someone is standing behind the sale and that the unit carries warranty should something happen to the stairlift, thus making a very small pool of potential stairlift buyers even smaller.
    2. short run stairlifts – the pool of potential buyers is even smaller for stairlift runs which will not reach to a second floor.

And as for prospects not concerned with warranties, services, etc., these buyers are often deterred by the seller’s:

  1. overpriced units – most sellers start with the price that they originally paid for the stairlift. If purchased from a dealer, the original price included the dealers’ costs for installation overhead & profit. These costs can amount to 45%+ more than the manufacturer’s price, meaning the dealer’s cost for $4,000 lift was somewhere around $2,000. Once installed, the lift loses about 50% of the dealer’s cost. The depreciation rate for stairlifts is much steeper (50-40-10) than that used for automobiles, such that a stairlift older than 3 years has very little marketability value.
  2. pile of parts presentations – oftentimes the owner removes the stairlift, resulting in a pile of complete or broken or do they even function? parts. Hardly anyone would give much consideration to purchasing a pile of parts unless they were scavenging for replacement parts.

The best way to increase the probability of selling a used stairlift is to:

  1. price it correctly, not necessarily competitive and,
  2. leave it installed for viewing and testing. When purchasing used stairlifts on-line (e.g., Marketplace), I’ll offer to send the seller an email picture of my driver’s license (with certain info redacted)*. If I’m invited, I’ll also show it when I arrive.

* redacted – street address, last 4 of license number, birth date,