Process a pallet in one afternoon
A station-based intake workflow that gets 400 items sorted, scanned, priced, labelled, and on the floor before close.
Receiving is the part of a liquidation store that customers never see and that decides whether the store makes money. A pallet sitting in the back room is cash sitting in the back room. The goal of intake is to get it on the floor, priced, and trackable, in the same afternoon it arrives.
Here is a workflow that does that with two or three people.
Set up stations, not a pile
The mistake is one big table where everyone does everything. Someone opens a box, wanders off to look up a price, comes back, cannot find the label roll. Instead, give the room three stations in a line:
- Sort. Unpack, test, and split into three totes: bin, shelf, and pull-aside.
- Scan and price. Look up each item's UPC, set a price, print a label.
- Place. Labelled items go onto carts by destination and out to the floor.
Items move in one direction. Nobody leaves their station.
Station one: sort
The sorter's job is to open boxes and make quick decisions. They are not pricing. They have a printed or on-screen list of pull-aside items from the manifest, so the high-value items are identified before they even come out of the box.
Everything else gets a five-second test: does it look complete, does it power on, is the packaging intact enough to sell. Broken or incomplete items go into a fourth tote for parts or trash. Do not let them reach the pricing station.
The sorter also breaks down cardboard as they go. A back room full of empty boxes at 4 p.m. is a fire hazard and a tripping hazard.
Station two: scan and price
This is the bottleneck, so it gets the most attention.
The pricer has a barcode scanner, a thermal label printer, and a screen. Scan the UPC, the item's title, photo, and current retail price come back. Choose a condition tier, the price fills in. Print. Stick. Next.
At thirty seconds an item, a single pricer does 120 an hour. Two pricers with their own scanner and printer do 240. A 400-item pallet is priced in under two hours.
A few things that keep this station moving:
- Labels print automatically on save. If the pricer has to click print, find the print dialog, and pick a printer, thirty seconds becomes ninety.
- Retail price on the label. It sells the item later and it costs nothing now.
- Bin items do not get individually priced. If your store sells bins at a daily price, bin items get scanned in for inventory count and skipped for labels. That alone halves the time.
- No phones. If the lookup does not return a price, the item goes in a "look up later" tote. Nobody stops to search Amazon.
Station three: place
The placer takes labelled items and puts them on rolling carts sorted by where they go: which aisle, the glass case, the pull-aside shelf, the online-listing corner. When a cart is full, it goes out and comes back.
At the end of the day the placer also handles the "look up later" tote with a proper search for each item.
The pull-aside path
Pull-aside items skip the fast lane. They go from the sorter straight to a tote that gets handled after the pallet is on the floor. Each one gets a careful condition check, a real search of sold listings, and a decision: shelf it, list it online, or bin it after all. Fifteen to twenty items usually takes an hour.
This is also where you catch the item the manifest called "new" that is missing its charger.
Track everything as it moves
Every item that gets scanned at station two is now in inventory. Where it went, what it cost you, what it is priced at, and later, when it sold and at what register. That is what makes the next month's decisions possible: which categories sold through, which pallets from which supplier made money, and what is still sitting on the shelf after three weeks.
If intake is done on a clipboard, none of that exists. The pallet was received, things were sold, and nobody can say how the two are related.
Timing for a two-person crew
| Task | Time |
|---|---|
| Unload and stage | 20 minutes |
| Sort and test | 90 minutes |
| Scan, price, label | 2 hours |
| Place on floor | Concurrent with pricing |
| Pull-aside review | 1 hour |
| Clean up | 20 minutes |
Five hours from truck to floor with two people. With three, the sort and price stations run in parallel and it drops to under four. Either way, the pallet is selling the next morning, not next week.
Station two is what Scan Pro was built for: scan the UPC, pick a condition, and the label prints on save. Store Pro adds the register and the pallet-level inventory tracking that the rest of this workflow depends on.