"Days to sale" sounds like a single obvious number, but it depends entirely on which starting point you measure from — and mixing starting points across items quietly makes the average meaningless.
Pick one starting point and use it consistently
Common starting points
| Starting point | What it measures | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Date acquired → date sold | Total time an item was in your possession, including any prep/queue time | Understanding total holding cost, including cleaning/repair delays |
| Date listed → date sold | How long it took to sell once actually posted | Judging pricing and listing quality specifically |
Both are legitimate — they answer different questions. Total holding time includes how long an item sat in your intake or repair queue before it was even listed, while listed-to-sold time isolates the market-facing part of the process. Comparing an item's total holding time against another item's listed-to-sold time will produce a misleading conclusion, so pick one and be consistent across your own reporting.
Days to sale (per item)
daysToSale = dateSold − startingDate
Example (illustrative): An item acquired on the 1st, listed on the 4th, and sold on the 19th has a total holding time of 18 days and a listed-to-sold time of 15 days — both correct, describing different things.
Using the average, and its limits
An average days-to-sale across your recently sold items is useful for spotting a trend over time (getting faster or slower) but is easily skewed by a few outliers — one item that sat for six months before finally selling can distort an average built from a small sample. A median, or looking at the distribution rather than a single average, is often more informative once you have enough sold items to compare.
Where this lives in ListNestly
The Spreadsheet's Inventory Age column measures from date added and, for a sold item, freezes at the actual sale date rather than continuing to count upward — which is exactly the total-holding-time version of this metric, already computed per item without a manual calculation.