Getting started with reselling

By Jacob, founder of Flippo · 5 September 2026 · 7 min read

Almost nobody fails at reselling because they could not find things to buy. They fail because they paid too much, waited too long to list, and never worked out that the money they thought they were making had already gone on fees and postage.

Start with what you already own

Your first ten sales should cost you nothing. There is a cupboard in your home with a few hundred kroner of sellable things in it, and selling those teaches you the whole loop - photographing, describing, pricing, packing, posting, dealing with a buyer who asks a question at nine at night - without any of your money at risk.

You will get some of it wrong. Getting it wrong on something that cost you nothing is tuition. Getting it wrong on a box of stock you paid 3000 for is a loss.

Pick one category and stay in it

The instinct is to buy anything cheap. The problem is that you cannot price what you do not know. Someone who has sold forty pairs of the same brand of boots knows in two seconds what a pair is worth, which sizes move, and which sole wear is a dealbreaker. Someone buying across six categories is guessing in all six.

Narrow beats broad for the first few months, and it does not matter much which category you pick, as long as you already know something about it.

The only number that decides a purchase

Before you hand over money, you need one figure: what this item has actually sold for recently. Not the asking price on the listings you can see. Asking prices are what optimistic people want; sold prices are what buyers agreed to.

On most marketplaces you can filter to completed or sold listings. Take three or four recent ones in a similar condition, ignore the outlier, and use the middle. That number is the top of your world - everything else comes off it.

What comes off before it is profit

This is where new resellers lose money while believing they are making it. A 500 kroner sale is not 500 kroner.

Run those through a 500 kroner sale on an item you paid 200 for, and a 300 kroner "profit" is closer to 180. That is still a good flip. But if you had paid 350 for it believing you would clear 150, you would have made about 30 kroner for an hour of work.

List it the day it arrives

The most expensive thing in reselling is not a bad buy. It is a good buy sitting in a bag behind a door for six weeks. Money in unlisted stock earns nothing and quietly convinces you that you have no cash to buy with.

Photograph and list on the day it comes in, even if the listing is rough. A listing that is up and imperfect beats one that is perfect and still in your head.

Tips that pay for themselves

• Photograph the flaw deliberately. A close-up of the scratch stops the argument before it starts, and it converts better than hiding it, because the buyer believes the rest of the photos.
• Grade down when unsure. Grading one step low costs a little on the price. Grading one step high costs return postage, a refund, a relist and a review.
• Weigh things once, when they arrive. Postage brackets are decided by weight, and guessing wrong turns a profitable item into a break-even one.
• Keep the receipt at the moment of buying. Photograph it in the car park. Reconstructing what a haul cost, three months later, from memory, is how people end up guessing at their own accounts.
• Buy lots, sell singles. The bundle of ten games is cheap precisely because most buyers want one of them. That gap is the margin.
• Have a price you drop to. Decide, when you list, what you will accept after thirty days. Otherwise slow items stay at the hopeful price forever.
• Reply fast. On most marketplaces the first seller to answer gets the sale, and it costs nothing but attention.

Record it from the first purchase

Everyone starts by remembering. It works for about three weeks. Then you are holding forty items, you cannot recall what you paid for the third one, two of them came out of a single 800 kroner lot, and you genuinely do not know whether this month made money.

Whatever you use - a notebook, a spreadsheet, or something built for it - write down four things per item on the day it arrives: what you paid, where it came from, what condition it is in, and where it is stored. Adding those later is miserable, and most people never do.

What a normal first month looks like

Not everything sells. A sell-through of well under half in the first month is ordinary, not failure - some things take a season to find their buyer. What matters is whether the items that do sell cover what you paid across the whole batch, and whether you can tell which categories are carrying the rest.

You only get to see that if you wrote it down. Which is the whole argument for writing it down.