How to Price Parts and Consumables for a Phone Repair Business

Repair shops live or die on two numbers they rarely separate: the margin on parts and the true cost of the small stuff. This guide covers how to price parts by tier, stop consumables from leaking profit, and keep slow stock from eating the money your labour earns.

Parts are inventory, not just cost of goods sold

Treating parts as a simple "cost plus markup" line hides the real economics. A screen that sits on the shelf for six months is not the same asset as one sold the week it arrived — its carrying cost, risk of damage, and model obsolescence all accrue while it waits.

Price parts so fast movers fund the slow movers, and so the whole shelf returns a profit after accounting for what never sells. That starts with understanding the tier you are actually buying, which the parts catalog should state in writing.

Mark up by tier, not by one flat percentage

A single markup across all parts is easy but wrong. Higher-ticket, lower-frequency parts — logic boards, some displays — justify a different margin than fast consumables, because they tie up capital and carry more failure risk. Lower-value, high-turnover items such as screws, adhesives and charge-port flexes can run on thinner percentage margins because they turn quickly.

Set tier-based markups that reflect turnover and risk rather than a uniform multiplier. The tier you bought — original, donor, or aftermarket — changes both the price ceiling and the comeback risk, so the markup has to follow the tier you specified.

Consumables are a line item, not a rounding error

Adhesives, gaskets, screws, cleaning wipes and anti-static materials disappear in small amounts on every job and are rarely billed as separate items. If you do not charge for them somewhere, they quietly erase a percentage point or two of margin on every single repair.

Fold a small consumables allowance into each job's price, or bundle them into a per-job "materials" line, so the true cost is recovered without nickel-and-diming the customer on every screw.

The carrying-cost trap: what slow stock really costs

Every unit of stock that sits is money you cannot spend on fast-moving parts, plus the risk it becomes obsolete or damaged. Measure turnover per part category and set a target. Dead stock — parts for models nobody brings in anymore — should be cleared or written down, not held forever at full value.

Set a parts price list that survives a comeback

A parts price list fails when a job comes back and the "free" part wipes out the original margin. Build your parts price to absorb a realistic comeback and rework rate — that means pricing parts and labour so an occasional warranty re-do is funded, not a surprise loss.

Keep the parts line separate from the labour line, as the repair pricing model requires, so a comeback can be traced to the part, the workmanship, or the diagnosis rather than lumped together.

Reorder and dead-stock discipline

A simple reorder routine prevents most of this. Set minimum and maximum stock levels per part, reorder against actual usage rather than memory, and review the dead-stock list monthly. When a part does not move, mark it down or scrap it and record the reason — the point is to turn shelf space and cash back into parts that actually earn.

The discipline is the same whether you buy wholesale or locally: match stock depth to the phones you actually see, not the ones you hope to see. This is the core of the workshop stocking routine.

Frequently asked questions