What power-tool lots actually close for

BStalker aggregates live auctions and catalog lots from nine liquidation marketplaces, and the tools category picks up everything filed under tools on any of them: single power tools from local auction houses, mixed pallets from big-box return streams, and the occasional truckload. When a listing ends or comes down, the archive keeps its closing bid: the highest bid published before the lot left the feed.

That definition carries the whole post, so it is worth stating plainly. A closing bid is not a confirmed sale price; where nobody bid, it is the asking price the listing came down at. And every figure here is bid only: buyer premium, tax and freight arrive on top, and none of them is in the numbers below.

The tools row on the statistics page, computed 13 October 2026 UTC, is the baseline every brand figure below reads against:

• Median closing bid: $57.50 per lot, across 8,839 priced tools closings.
• Median cost per unit: $8.02.
• Tools lots live in the feed right now: 1,218.

The live count moves daily; the medians move whenever the page is recomputed. What does not move is the method behind them, which is why the rest of this post can quote the brand pages the same way.

The brands index publishes one page for each of the twenty brands with the most tracked closings in the archive, and four of the twenty are tool names. Each page measures its own window, so every column below carries its own dates and denominators:

Windows and denominators, per the brand pages on 13 October 2026. Milwaukee: 841 lots closed 28 April to 12 October 2026; median over 832 priced closings, per-unit figure over 820 with unit counts, units-per-lot median over 826; tools rows over 136 priced. Craftsman: 913 lots closed 24 April to 11 October 2026; median over 784 priced, per-unit over 745, units-per-lot median over 860; tools rows over 277 priced. Kobalt: 572 lots closed 16 June to 11 October 2026; median over 572 priced, per-unit over 568; tools rows over 261 priced. Stanley: 317 lots closed 25 April to 12 October 2026; median over 301 priced, per-unit over 242; tools rows over 61 priced.

Read down the table and the shape of each cohort is the story. The median Milwaukee lot is a single unit closing at $50, while the Milwaukee lots filed specifically under tools, the multi-item end of the brand’s mix, close at a $372.50 median. The median Craftsman lot holds 20 units and closes at $100. The median Kobalt lot is a 45-unit pallet closing at $220, and its tools rows sit at the same $220. The median Stanley lot is one item closing at $7: Stanley’s cohort is mostly single-item listings, so its row describes individual items, not pallets.

DeWalt, the other tool name a reader would look for, has no brand page yet: the brands index publishes only the top twenty by tracked closings, so a brand outside that set has no page until its cohort is large enough.

• A closing bid is the highest bid published 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 tool pallet the freight can rival the bid: what 23,105 real freight quotes show is the measured version of that line item.
• 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.
• Each brand cohort spans every category the brand appears in; the tools rows are the subset filed under tools. Stanley’s brand page, for instance, covers its drinkware and coolers alongside its tools, which is part of why its median sits at $7.
• The windows differ per brand, each printed under the table, so one brand’s figure is not measured over the same days as another’s.

The live version of this post is the tools category page, listing the tool lots open right now across the same nine marketplaces, and the sample feed shows the same cards with no account.

The figures above stop at the closing bid; the decision arithmetic starts after it, 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, and subscribers using the ChatGPT connector can ask its bid-ceiling tool to run the same arithmetic on any lot in the feed.