Direct Sale: Selling Off-Platform Without Losing the Paper Trail
Why a sale to your own account customer, a broker or a repair shop needs a dossier before the warehouse may ship — and what that dossier locks.
ITAD is not only Market and Auction. A lot of resale runs through channels the platform never sees: a long-standing account customer, a broker who takes everything in grade C, a repair shop that buys for parts, an ERP order from a reseller. The warehouse can ship those in an afternoon. The problem shows up six months later, when finance, compliance or the client asks who bought these forty devices, at what price, on which terms, and why no escrow — and the answer lives in someone’s mailbox. The platform closes that gap by making the off-platform sale a record before it is a shipment.
The sale dossier
A sale outbound that has no Market deal or Auction lot behind it is a direct sale, and the New Outbound dialog turns into the dossier: the buyer, the exact assets with a unit price each, the sale source — regular ITAD sale, account sale, broker sale, external sale, ERP order or other — an external reference such as a PO or ERP number, the currency and tax rate, payment terms, the invoice policy (create the invoice in the platform, invoice later, external invoice, or no invoice with a reason), the settlement policy with its reason, and the escrow policy with a reason why the platform’s escrow is not used. A direct sale without selected assets cannot be created: the warehouse may only ship once sales has written down exactly which items were sold. Sales writes the dossier. Warehouse reads the outbound. Finance reads both, months later, without opening a single e-mail.
The channel lock
The moment the direct sale exists, its assets are committed to the channel direct sale, the same kind of lock Market and Auction place. They cannot appear in a Market listing or an Auction lot at the same time, cannot be added to another outbound, and the server refuses the attempt even if a screen somewhere would let you try. In Inventory the rows stay visible with their direct-sale state, but bulk selection for new outbound work is disabled; in the add-items picker of another order they show as found but unselectable, with the reason. A laptop that is physically still on the rack is not free stock because it is still on the rack.
The narrow condition-sale exception
Market and Auction only accept free, market-ready stock; an asset that fails the sellable-quality gate is hard-blocked there. Direct sale is the deliberate exception for as-is, for-repair and parts sales — but only when the dossier says so explicitly. The condition sale type must be set to as-is, for repair or parts, and the dossier must record why that condition is acceptable, how it affected the agreed price, and which buyer acceptance and evidence support it. That context is stored on the outbound and shown on its detail page, so warehouse, finance and compliance can see why this order is allowed to leave without reading between the lines of the shipping instructions.
Data security is not a commercial exception
A data-bearing asset still needs erasure evidence before a direct sale can be recorded or shipped. The buyer accepting a cracked screen does not make the drive clean. The condition exception covers the device’s state, never its data.
What a direct-sale reason is not
A no-escrow reason written into a direct-sale dossier is valid for that dossier only. A sale that comes from a Market or Auction deal ships only when the escrow is held or waived, or the deal has a confirmed mutual waiver — the shipping guard looks at the deal, not at a text field. That keeps an ordinary account sale, which never involved platform escrow, separate from a cross-tenant marketplace deal that would otherwise leave without its money protected.
The invoice links back
When the invoice policy is to create the invoice in the platform, the outbound detail offers a prefilled invoice draft that takes over the buyer, the item lines, the currency, tax and payment terms and the external reference. The invoice links back to the outbound and its direct-sale dossier, so from the invoice you reach the order, from the order the dossier, and from the dossier the exact serial numbers. When a credit note is later applied to that invoice, the outbound shows the gross, the active credit and the net, so operations can see the goods are unchanged and finance corrected the value. One sale. One dossier. Every question answered from a row.