Why your $60 sale is not a $60 sale
Sell a jacket for $60 and it feels like a $60 win. Then the real numbers land. You paid $22 for it at the thrift, the platform took roughly $6, the shipping label was $12, and the mailer was about a dollar. That $60 sale is a $19 sale. It is still a decent flip, but it is a completely different business than the one in your head, and the gap between those two numbers is where most resellers quietly lose money for years.
How to calculate reselling profit
The formula is simple, it is just that almost nobody runs it on every sale. Take everything the buyer paid, including shipping if they covered it. Subtract the platform fee, which is usually a percentage of that full amount plus a small fixed charge per order. Subtract the shipping label, the packaging, and anything you spent cleaning or repairing the piece. Finally subtract what you paid to source it. What is left is your net profit, and dividing that by your total costs gives the return that tells you whether the buy was worth repeating.
Margin is only half the picture
A piece with a great margin that sits for eight months costs you more than a thinner flip that turns in a week, because money tied up in dead stock cannot buy your next haul. Once you have twenty or thirty sales behind you, the number that matters is your average profit per sale, not your best win. That average tells you how many items a month you need to list to hit the income you are aiming for.
When a calculator stops being enough
A calculator answers one question at a time. Running a reselling business means knowing which stores keep returning, which categories carry your profit, how long each piece has been sitting, and what a whole month actually netted. Hauly does this math automatically across every sale and every platform, flags dead stock before you forget about it, and keeps your numbers on every device.