Lost volume seller is a legal term in the law of contracts. Such a seller is a special case in contract law. Ordinarily, a seller whose buyer breaches a contract and refuses to purchase the goods can recover from the breaching buyer only the difference between the contract price and the price for which the seller ultimately sells the goods to another buyer (plus, under some circumstances, incidental damages).
In the case of a lost volume seller, the seller goes on to sell the goods to someone else, usually for the same price. Under the usual measure of damages, such a seller would have no damages (the contract price less the sale price to the other customer is zero) and the breaching buyer would have no liability.
The objective of the law of contracts with respect to damages is to put the aggrieved party in as good a position as the aggrieved party would have been in if the breaching party had fully performed. The ordinary measure of damages fails to put the lost volume seller in as good a position as the lost volume seller would have been had the breaching buyer fully performed. The lost volume seller would have had the profit from two sales if the first buyer had performed instead of the profit from only one sale as a result of the first buyer’s breach. In such a case, certain law (including Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code in the United States) permits the aggrieved seller to recover the lost profit that the seller would have made had the buyer not breached (plus, under some circumstances, incidental damages).
Lost volume sellers tend to be those whose capacity to sell or to produce or acquire the subject goods is sufficiently large to meet the demands of all customers who seek to buy those goods. The term generally arises in the context of a breach of contract action in which the selling party seeks to recover against a breaching buyer who repudiates his or her promise to buy. For a lost volume seller, the failure to make one sale (i.e., due to the buyer's breach) reduces the seller's profits by the amount of profit that would accrue from that sale. (For legal definition and application of "lost volume sellers" see legal citations below. Typically the citation will give results in google.)
Famous quotes containing the words lost, volume and/or seller:
“I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“So it is with books, for the most part: they work no redemption on us. The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and after to reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did without surprise of a surly bank director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No more astounding relic of the subjection of women survives in western civilization than the status of the prostitute.... In connection with what other illegal vice is the seller alone penalized, and not the buyer?”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)