Market equilibrium, as a marketplace
Buyers name the price they will actually pay. Retailers see the entire demand curve sitting behind their shelf — and clear stock at every buyer's own bid, without ever cutting a public price.
One product, one price, one expiry date. Thirty seconds, then they forget about it.
Not one bid — every open bid on that SKU, plotted against the stock they are holding.
A private, named offer to each buyer. The public price never moves.
The problem
A shelf price is a single guess, made once, for an entire market, with almost no information behind it. And it is wrong in both directions at the same time.
Below the price, every buyer who values the product at less than the sticker walks away. The retailer earns nothing and the buyer gets nothing. The sale simply does not happen — and nobody is better off for it.
Above the price, every buyer who would happily have paid more pays the sticker instead. That difference is gone the moment the number goes up on the shelf.
And the retailer learns nothing from either group. A product that does not move tells you the price was too high. It does not tell you by how much, or for how many people, or whether the demand is ten buyers or three hundred.
This is not a failure of retail. It is a structural limit: you cannot discover a distribution by posting a single number. So the price stops being a measurement and becomes a standing guess that everyone — buyer and seller — pays for.
Because the number is a guess, somebody has to go and check whether it moved. Today that somebody is the customer — searching, comparing, setting price alerts, coming back for months to see whether the thing finally went on sale.
They are the worst-placed party in the market to be doing it. They cannot see what is in stock, how long it has been sitting there, or what it cost to buy.
Why it works at all
A buyer whose price is above the shelf price never comes here — they just buy. eqprice only operates below the shelf price, where the sale currently doesn't happen at all. Nothing is being taken from anyone.
You already know what a Forerunner 970 is worth to you. The only thing standing between you and it is months of checking whether the price moved.
Overstock ties up roughly a third of working capital. Today the only lever is a public markdown — which hands the discount to every customer, including the ones who would have paid full price.
The buyer's side
Anyone who has bought a share understands this instantly: you state the price you're willing to pay and the order sits there until the market comes to you. We changed exactly one thing — nothing executes automatically. When a retailer meets your bid, you get 24 hours to say yes.
Your bid is visible to retailers as an anonymous data point. They never see who you are, what else you've bid on, or anything about you.
Nothing is charged and no contract exists until you confirm. If you do nothing for 24 hours, the offer simply lapses and your bid stays open.
The retailer's side
A retailer holding 79 unsold Forerunner 970s knows exactly one number: their own shelf price. They do not know what the market would pay. They find out by cutting the price and watching what happens — which costs margin every single time they guess.
So we hand over the curve, and stop there. We do not recommend a price, we do not tell you which bids to take, and we never show you what another retailer is doing. Slice it however your own cost base says. Drag the band.
Two handles. The floor is the lowest price your cost base allows; the ceiling is the top of the band you are releasing stock into. Bids outside the band are neither accepted nor declined — they stay open.
— · Buyers inside your band receive a private, named offer at their own bid. Your shelf price stays at 4,500 kr throughout, and bids outside the band stay open for whenever you want them. Figures are illustrative, built on a modelled bid distribution.
The arithmetic
This is the whole commercial argument, and it is just geometry.
When you cut a public price to clear stock, everyone pays the same number. Your revenue is units × price — a rectangle. Every buyer who would happily have paid more keeps the difference.
When each buyer pays the price they themselves named, your revenue is the area under the demand curve down to your cut-off. Same units, same day, same warehouse. The rectangle plus the triangle sitting on top of it.
Early access
One category, standardised SKUs, enough bids per product for a curve to actually form. If you sell it or you want it, tell us which — that's what decides what we launch first.
Be first to post standing bids when we open. We'll ask you which products, and that list decides which retailers we call.
No spam, no price alerts, no newsletter. One email when bidding opens.
We'll show you the live demand curve for your slowest SKUs before you commit to anything. No feed integration needed for the first look.
We'll come back with the curve for up to five of your SKUs.