In my last post, I talked about pricing in relation to sending out and accepting offers. I mentioned that pricing an item that you are trying to resell can be pretty difficult. My best advice would be to always check comps no matter what. By checking comps, I mean looking on a reselling platform for the same or a similar item to what you are trying to sell in order to see how much it is actually selling for. Poshmark is usually the easiest app to use when checking comps.
On Poshmark, you can search for specific items and can filter the results by category, brand, size, and sold/available listings. I find this to be very helpful when comparing prices; I will usually pick the brand that I am looking for, and then search within that brand for the specific item I am looking for. I find it is useful to change the filters to show all items, both sold and available, and also to change the size filter so that it shows all sizes. Once you find the item you are looking for however, you will have to take size into consideration when pricing it. Oftentimes, an XL will sell for a lot more money than, say, an XS. Check out this YouTube video on how to use the filter feature on Poshmark.
If you cannot find the exact same item you are looking for, I would suggest filtering your search by brand and size to look for similar items to determine your price. I tend to search by Availability: All first, and then I will filter it to show only the sold items once I have more information on the item I am looking to sell. This way, I can see how much the item is actually selling for. An item can have a ton of interest at a high price and not sell at that price, so it is important to look at sold comps specifically.
The only thing you need to be careful about when looking at sold comps is to ignore most outliers. For example, say that you find a number of sold comps for an item you are looking to sell, and they all seem to sell for around $25 or so. However, if you see one sold listing that shows a sell price of $45, there is a good chance that listing sold in a bundle of items, so the $45 does not reflect an accurate selling price. When someone sells a bundle, even if they offer a discount, the items that are sold in the bundle will show that they have sold at their original asking price.
Another thing that I find to be extremely helpful when determining prices or determining whether or not I will send out or accept an offer on one of my items, is that I keep a Google Docs of all of the items that I have ever bought to resell. I list the original purchase date, the price paid, and, when it sells, I list how much it sold for, which platform it sold on, and what my earnings were. I find that this is extremely helpful because firstly, it allowed me to see when I broke even, which was about five months after I started reselling officially. Secondly, it means that I can search for each specific item in my closet, find it on my Google Docs, and see how much I paid for that item. This way, if I want to send an offer to likers or if somebody sends me an offer, I can see how much of a profit I will make, in comparison to how much I paid for the item.
To reiterate what I said above, it is always extremely important to check comps in order to figure out your listing price. You need to be careful when sourcing items and must make sure that you check comps before you actually buy anything. You also need to take offers into consideration, because even if an item has a really good comps and is selling for a lot of money on a reselling platform, if you have to pay a lot of money for it, you will need to factor in that people will probably send you offers or you will have to send them offers in order to sell your item. While I do have items that sell straight out, most of the time that really doesn’t happen unless it is somebody buying the item off of Google and not off of Poshmark itself. Overall, you just need to be sure to check comps and price so that you can send out and/or accept offers on your items in order to sell them. What do you find most helpful when figuring out how to price an item? Let me know in the comments below!
Reselling: A Journey 