Selling a pre-owned or used stairlift will take a long (if ever) time. The major obstacles impeding a sale include:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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:
- price it correctly, not necessarily competitive and,
- 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,