What returns, shelf pulls and salvage close for

When a tracked listing ends or comes down, BStalker keeps its closing record: the final bid published before the lot left the feed, the unit count, and the condition grade the seller published, where the seller published one. Of the 245,865 closed lots in the archive on 13 October 2026, 172,445 (70.1%) carried a grade; the rest closed with the condition field blank. The closings measured here span 23 April to 13 October 2026.

Two scope notes before the numbers. A closing bid is the last bid observed before the lot closed, not a confirmed sale price; where nobody bid, it is the asking price the listing came down at. And every figure is bid only: buyer premium, tax and freight arrive on top, and none of them is in the numbers below.

The three labels side by side, measured 13 October 2026:

Measured 13 October 2026. "Priced" is the count carrying a recorded bid, the denominator the median and the middle half (25th to 75th percentile) are computed over. Customer returns: lots closed 9 July to 13 October 2026; per-unit figure over 28,723 closings with per-unit prices; units median over 29,592 with counts. Shelf pulls: lots closed 14 June to 13 October 2026; per-unit over all 5,910 priced; units over all 6,744. Salvage: lots closed 24 April to 13 October 2026; per-unit over 3,370; units over 3,937.

Read across the rows and the per-lot medians nearly agree, inside a $20 band. What separates the labels is what a lot is. The median shelf-pull lot holds 150 units, so its $150 median bid works out to about a dollar per item; the median returns lot holds 20 units and the median salvage lot 18, at $8.06 and $10.00 per unit respectively. Shelf pulls, goods that left the shelf without being sold, are the volume shape; returns and salvage lots are smaller and price higher per item at the median.

A condition grade is platform vocabulary: each source publishes its own scale, and the archive records it verbatim. That makes several rows in this post single-source reads. Every one of the 29,631 returns closings, and 6,728 of the 6,744 shelf-pull closings (the other 16 are BlueLots), are Liquidation.com lots; those two labels are how that marketplace grades its lots. Even the name is the source’s own: the literal label "Customer Returns" appears on just 2 archived closings, the 29,631-lot stream is labelled "Returns" at source, and the "Untested Customer Returns" variant sits on catalog-style listings with no closing date, outside this study’s closed-lot population entirely.

Salvage is the one label two of the tracked sources share, and it prices differently on each, measured 13 October 2026:

• Liquidation.com salvage: 3,219 closings, median bid $120 over 2,879 priced.
• B-Stock salvage: 1,077 closings, median bid $1,225 over 851 priced.

The archive’s other grades belong to their own sources too. Open Box, the largest labelled cohort at 54,490 closings with a $5 median, is QuickBidz vocabulary: small, mostly single-unit lots at a local-auction scale. Used Good (26,396 closings, $1,000 median over 26,296 priced), Used Fair (13,129 closings, $500 median over 8,687 priced) and Like New (4,226 closings, $1,201 median over 4,098 priced) are B-Stock’s grading scale. So a like-for-like condition comparison is only possible inside one source’s labels; across sources, the label also tells you who graded it.

Twelve grades have enough tracked closings to carry their own archive price page on the conditions index. All twelve, measured 13 October 2026:

Measured 13 October 2026 over the 245,865 closed lots in the archive. Each grade keeps its own closing window; the widest spans 23 April to 13 October 2026.

B-Stock’s device grades sit outside that twelve but are large enough to state plainly: Device Grade C closed 2,359 lots at a $5,025 median, Grade B 1,247 at $3,875, Grade A 1,040 at $6,525, Grade D 696 at $1,838.50 and Grade E 54 at $1,650, every one priced. The per-lot medians do not follow the grade order, because the lots differ in size. Per unit they nearly do: $314.02 on Grade A, $192.50 on B, $180.00 on C, $69.17 on D and $75.00 on E, with the bottom two within six dollars of each other.

Category moves the number inside a label as much as the label does. The largest clean cells for the three headline grades, measured 13 October 2026 (cells under 20 closings omitted):

Measured 13 October 2026. 8,107 of the 29,631 returns closings and 2,601 of the 6,744 shelf-pull closings carry no category in the archive, so these cells cover the categorized share. The salvage appliances row shows why the priced column matters: 521 closings, only 150 with a recorded bid.

The per-unit column is where the labels separate inside the same category: returns home goods at $4.17 per unit against shelf-pull home goods at $0.82, and salvage electronics at $17.07 against returns electronics at $37.50. The shelf-pull furniture cell, a $75 median bid at $50.00 per unit, is the reminder that a label is not a lot shape: furniture shelf pulls are single-item floor pieces, not 150-unit pallets.

• A closing bid is the last bid observed before the lot closed, not a confirmed sale price. Where no bid was placed, it is the asking price the listing came down at.
• Every figure is bid only. Buyer premium, tax and freight come on top, and on a heavy lot the freight can rival the bid: what 23,105 real freight quotes show is the measured version of that line item.
• 29.9% of the archive’s closed lots carried no grade at all. An ungraded lot appears in no row above, and its absence says nothing about its contents.
• A grade is the seller’s own label. The reason a customer returned an item is rarely disclosed, so a returns lot spans unopened to visibly used unless its own manifest says otherwise.
• The labels are platform vocabulary: returns vs shelf pulls is a within-Liquidation.com comparison, while Used Good and Like New are B-Stock’s scale. No row here grades one marketplace’s goods against another’s.
• A median describes a cohort, not the lot in front of you. The condition of any specific unit is on that lot’s own manifest, not in these figures.
• These figures are a snapshot of the archive on 13 October 2026. The archive grows daily and the medians drift with it.

The live version of each row above is its own archive price page, recomputed on its own schedule: returns, shelf pulls and salvage, with the full twelve on the conditions index and the sitewide figures on the statistics page. The sample feed shows the same live cards with no account.

The figures above stop at the closing bid; the arithmetic after it is yours, with your own premium, freight and resale prices. The free pallet calculator folds those into a landed cost per unit and a break-even figure on your own numbers.