6 Things to Look Out for When eBay Reselling That Surprised Me

I bought a tie for 47p.

It sold for £36.

Which is slightly ridiculous considering I don't even sell men's clothes.

That sale has become one of those little moments that completely changed how I look at stock.

When I first started eBay reselling, I naturally paid attention to the obvious things.

Nice dresses.

Recognisable brands.

Coats.

Jeans.

Anything that looked as though it should be worth decent money.

But the longer I've been doing this, the more I've realised that some of the things quietly making me money aren't necessarily the things I expected at all.

Tiny accessories.

Supermarket brands.

Fabric rather than brand.

Things where the label means very little but the actual quality is really good.

So these are six things I'm now paying much more attention to when I'm sourcing or sorting through wholesale bundles.

I'm still very much a beginner seller, so I'm not presenting any of these as secret eBay laws.

They're simply patterns I'm starting to notice from my own sales.

And honestly, that's how I'm learning most of this.

Try something.

See what happens.

Remember it next time.

If you'd rather watch than read, you can see the full YouTube video here.

1. Ties — apparently

Let's start with my 47p tie.

I don't really sell men's clothing.

It's not something I deliberately source because, at the moment, I know women's clothing much better and I'd rather get good at one area before deciding I need to sell absolutely everything.

But I love accessory wholesale bundles.

They can contain scarves, belts, hats, ties and all sorts of other little things that are quite easy to overlook.

And I think there's another advantage to them.

A wholesaler is probably going to recognise an obvious Reiss dress or premium coat quite quickly.

But there can be hundreds of tiny accessories going through these places.

They're not necessarily going to sit there researching every obscure tie or scarf to see whether one particular design is worth £30.

Which is how I ended up with a tie that cost me about 47p.

I listed it.

And somebody paid £36 for it.

I genuinely couldn't believe it.

Now, this is absolutely not me telling you to leave this blog post and buy 400 random ties.

Please don't do that and then come back here when you own a tie warehouse. 😂

But it did make me stop dismissing accessories.

A tie takes up virtually no storage space.

It's cheap to post.

It's simple to pack.

And particular makers, patterns, materials and designs can apparently have a much better resale value than I realised.

So now when ties turn up in my bundles, I actually check them.

I don't just think:

It's a tie. Nobody wants that.

Because somebody really, really wanted mine.

2. Lambswool scarves

This is another one I didn't expect to enjoy selling nearly as much as I do.

Lambswool scarves.

I've sold several for around £15–£20, while my cost through wholesale bundles has generally been somewhere around 40–50p each.

For me, that's a brilliant little eBay item.

They barely take up any storage space.

They're easy to package.

You don't have the sizing problems you get with clothing.

And we're heading into autumn and winter, which should make warm scarves even more useful.

I've started looking much more carefully at scarves in general now.

Particularly:

• lambswool

• wool

• cashmere

• silk

• unusual prints

• really nicely made pieces

When you're new to clothing reselling, I think your brain automatically looks for the big obvious things.

Dresses.

Coats.

Jackets.

Jeans.

But some of these tiny accessories can be excellent bread-and-butter stock.

If I can buy something for 50p, store fifty of them in hardly any space and sell each one for £15–£20, I'm quite happy with that arrangement.

3. Stop automatically ignoring supermarket and high-street brands

This one might upset the brand snobs.

But I went back through my first 100 sales and noticed something.

24 of those 100 sales came from brands such as Marks & Spencer, Tu, George, Next and F&F.

Nearly a quarter.

That really surprised me.

Obviously, I still want the premium stock.

If I find Boden, Hobbs or something with a higher resale value for the right price, lovely.

Give it to me.

But there's a huge difference between:

“This brand generally has a lower resale value.”

and:

“This brand doesn't sell.”

Those are not the same thing.

My stock costs are very low, which makes this particularly important for my business.

If I've paid 50p or £1 for a really nice M&S dress and somebody happily gives me £18 for it, I don't care that there isn't a designer label sewn into the neck.

Money is money.

I've sold Primark.

I've sold supermarket brands.

I've had F&F jeans sell so consistently that they're now something I actively notice.

And this is one area where I think new resellers can get distracted by YouTube and social media.

Premium brands make better content.

Nobody is screaming:

OH MY GOD, I FOUND TU BY SAINSBURY'S.

But a boring brand that makes you £5 profit again and again can be much more useful to a business than an exciting piece that sits there for eight months.

I don't want an entire shop full of low-value stock.

But I'm definitely not walking past something good purely because somebody online told me the label wasn't exciting enough.

4. Linen

Linen sells.

That is going firmly into my notes for next spring and summer.

Next year I am going to be looking for as much good linen as I reasonably can.

Linen dresses.

Loose shirts.

Oversized pieces.

Neutral colours.

Holiday clothing.

Comfortable summer pieces.

And this is another area where the brand doesn't always have to do all the work.

People search for the fabric.

Someone might literally type:

women's linen dress

rather than searching for one particular label.

I've started checking fabric labels far more carefully than I did when I began.

Because sometimes:

silk

linen

wool

or

cashmere

gets me more interested than the brand itself.

Material can be part of the value.

That sounds obvious now, but it wasn't something I really thought about when I started.

At first, I was looking at the neck label.

Now I'm looking at the whole thing.

Brand.

Fabric.

Style.

Condition.

Size.

Season.

What somebody might actually type into eBay looking for it.

So next spring, if you're standing between me and a rail of linen dresses...

I apologise in advance.

5. The premium and semi-premium brands that are working for me

There are obviously brands I get particularly happy about finding.

So far, some of the names I've sold or consistently seen decent interest in include:

White Stuff

Coast

Hobbs

Joules

Joe Browns

Quiz

Max Studio

Boden

Laura Ashley

Wallis

Mint Velvet

LK Bennett

Monsoon

Phase Eight

French Connection

And anything silk immediately gets me looking more closely too.

But there's a big caveat here.

The brand isn't enough.

A hideous, damaged, outdated dress doesn't suddenly become fantastic inventory because it says Hobbs on the tag.

Style matters.

Size matters.

Condition matters.

The actual item matters.

What I like about many of these brands is that they sit in what I think is a really useful middle ground.

Everybody dreams about finding some obscure designer piece worth £300.

Obviously.

I'd quite like that too.

But if you're trying to build a high-volume store, there's a huge amount of useful stock sitting in that £20–£40 resale range.

I don't need every item to make £100.

I'd rather have lots of pieces making me sensible, repeatable profit.

£10 here.

£15 there.

£25 somewhere else.

Over and over again.

That's what starts turning a pile of clothing into an actual business.

6. Anything Made in Italy makes me stop and look

This has become one of my slightly weird eBay rules.

If I see:

Made in Italy

I stop.

Scarves.

Jumpers.

Dresses.

Tops.

It doesn't really matter what the item is.

Italian-made clothing and accessories have sold surprisingly nicely for me.

And sometimes the actual brand means absolutely nothing to me.

I've had pieces where I look at the label and think:

Never heard of you.

But then I touch the fabric.

The item is beautifully made.

The style is lovely.

It says Made in Italy.

And somebody buys it.

Again, please don't turn this into:

MADE IN ITALY = £100

because it absolutely doesn't.

You still need to research the item.

But it's now one of those details that stops me throwing something immediately into the cheap pile.

It has also made me realise something bigger about reselling.

Buyers aren't always shopping for brands.

They're shopping for things they actually like.

Quality.

Fabric.

Fit.

Style.

Colour.

Where something was made.

The label on the neck is only one part of the decision.

The biggest thing I've learned from all six

When I started eBay reselling, I think I subconsciously imagined the business worked something like this:

Find expensive brand.

Buy expensive brand cheaply.

Sell expensive brand.

And yes.

Obviously that works.

But there's this whole other layer underneath it.

The 50p scarf.

The supermarket jeans that sell surprisingly quickly.

The obscure Italian top.

The fabric somebody is specifically searching for.

The tiny accessory that's worth far more than it looks.

Those little sales start adding up.

And if I'm serious about eventually building a large eBay store, I think that's really important.

You can't build your entire business waiting for spectacular £100 flips to walk through the door.

Or at least I don't particularly want to.

I want the £8 profit.

Then £15.

Then £7.

Then £25.

Then maybe a really good £50 one.

Then another £8.

Repeated hundreds of times.

I'm still learning what belongs in that mix.

Give me another six months and I could probably write a completely different version of this post.

But that's actually one of the things I'm enjoying most about building the business.

I'm starting to notice things I would have walked straight past when I began.

And I'm sure there are still loads of things I'm walking straight past now.

Which makes me wonder:

What's the weirdest thing you've ever sold for unexpectedly good money?