I Tried eBay Reselling for 5 Weeks — Here’s Exactly What I Made

Five weeks ago, I bought my first proper box of stock and decided to see whether I could actually turn eBay reselling into a business.

Not a sell three things from the wardrobe and make £40 business.

An actual business.

The kind that could eventually bring in around £2,000 a month and become one of several income streams I can run from home.

So far, I’ve sold clothes I would never have picked myself, paid eBay far too much money in promoted listing fees, discovered that opening 50kg boxes of mystery clothing is worryingly addictive and built my shop up to nearly 400 listings.

But the important question is:

Have I actually made any money?

Yes.

Not £10,000. Not quit-your-job money. But enough that I’m starting to think there might genuinely be something here.

And because I love reading other people’s real numbers, I’m going to show you mine.

The figures in this post are from 14 August, when I filmed my first video for The Rural Reseller.

How I actually started eBay reselling

Technically, I started selling on eBay in June.

But I don't really count June.

I had things around the house that I didn't want anymore, so I started listing them. They sold. I listed more.

And I realised something slightly unexpected.

I actually really liked doing it.

There’s something incredibly satisfying about it.

Buy something. Sell something. Parcel goes out. Money comes in.

Very simple.

At the beginning of July, I decided to try doing it properly. I bought my first stock box and changed my eBay account from a private account to a business account.

That's the point I count as the start of the actual business.

By 14 August, I'd sold 85 things through the eBay shop, although that number includes some of the personal things I sold during June.

The proper stock-selling numbers are a little lower, which I'll get to in a minute.

My reselling business looks a little different

One reason I wanted to document this from the beginning is that I can't really follow the standard reseller model.

I live in rural Scotland.

I also have severe OCD and agoraphobia. Things became bad enough at one point that I ended up under the crisis team, and rebuilding my life in a way that actually works for me has become pretty important.

That includes work.

Watch enough reseller videos and you'll see plenty of people jumping in the car, visiting six charity shops in a day and coming home with 40 things to list.

I can't currently do that.

We do have one charity shop in my little village, which I love. I try to get down there every couple of weeks when I can.

But the village has a population of about 400 people.

We're not exactly drowning in charity shops.

So most of my stock comes from clothing wholesalers instead.

And I'm genuinely curious about where that can go.

Can you build a decent eBay reselling business primarily using wholesale clothing rather than spending your week driving around charity shops?

I don't know yet.

But that's the model that's accessible to me, so that's the one I'm testing.

Why eBay?

I've become slightly obsessed with having multiple income streams.

I've learned the hard way that I don't particularly want my entire income dependent on one thing.

I used to have a candle business. It actually did pretty well, particularly because I had a YouTube audience behind it.

Then my OCD became extremely severe.

And, unsurprisingly, fire and severe OCD are not an especially relaxing business combination.

I eventually had to give it up.

Now I'm building several things again. My blogs. Digital products. I'm writing my first novel in about ten years. I've done remote AI training work.

But I wanted a physical business in there too.

And eBay has a bit of history in my family.

My dad used to sell on eBay and was doing really well with it. He mainly sold new-with-tags stock, so his business was slightly different to mine.

Then he had his strokes.

There was stock left from the business, and I had become his full-time carer at 22.

I started selling that stock.

And genuinely, the money from eBay paid for our food shopping every week.

So I've always known eBay can be more than somewhere to flog the contents of your wardrobe.

I've seen it work.

Now I'm trying to see whether I can make it work again.

Only this time, I'm starting from scratch.

So... how much did I make in my first month?

July was my first proper month as a business seller.

I sold:

37 items.

My total sales revenue before eBay fees, promoted listing fees and other selling costs was:

£532.87

After the selling fees and advertising costs had come off, but before deducting what I'd paid for the stock, I had:

£302.41

Then I deducted the cost of the stock itself.

My actual item-level profit was:

£248.01

That works out at roughly:

£6.70 profit per item.

My profit margin against the original sales revenue was around 46.5%.

And I'm actually quite pleased with that.

Especially because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

Cheap stock is doing a lot of the heavy lifting

One of the biggest things helping me at the moment is my stock cost.

I'm buying incredibly cheaply.

Across the stock I've been getting, I'm currently paying roughly £1.50 per item.

In July specifically, it worked out at about £1.47 per item sold.

That gives me room to make mistakes.

And trust me, I am making them.

Some things will inevitably sit there for months. Some pieces won't sell for what I thought they would.

Occasionally I'll open a wholesale box and wonder who on earth I thought was going to buy something.

But if you've only paid £1.50 for it, you're not staring at £20 of your money hanging sadly in the spare room.

Which helps.

The promoted listings mistake

Then we come to the rather large elephant in the room.

Promoted listings.

When I started, I basically did this:

eBay recommends 10%.

eBay presumably knows eBay.

10% it is!

And yes, things sold.

Lovely.

Then I started properly looking at how much money was disappearing in advertising fees.

Ah.

Right.

Perhaps eBay doesn't need quite that much of my money.

So I've started experimenting.

Instead of automatically accepting the recommended percentage, I've been trying promoted listing rates closer to 3–5%, depending on the item.

I am absolutely not presenting this as some universal eBay rule.

I've been doing this for five weeks.

That would be ridiculous.

My entire approach to this business is basically:

I tried this. Here's what happened.

That's it.

I'll keep changing things, tracking the numbers and seeing what actually works for my shop.

What happened in August?

When I recorded these figures on 14 August, I'd sold another:

27 items.

Sales revenue before eBay and advertising fees:

£409.50

After those fees, but before deducting what I paid for the stock:

£229.28

After stock costs:

£188.78 profit.

That's almost exactly:

£7 profit per item.

And again, my margin was sitting at around 46%.

I was really pleased to see that because it meant July wasn't a complete fluke.

The numbers were staying remarkably consistent.

My next goal is getting that average profit closer to £10 per item.

I think there are two obvious ways I can start working towards that.

Buying better-quality, more premium stock when it makes sense.

And giving less of the sale price back to eBay through advertising.

We'll see.

My eBay reselling results after five weeks

Across July and the first half of August, I'd sold 64 pieces of bought-in stock.

Together, those sales had generated around:

£942 in revenue

and approximately:

£437 in item-level profit.

That works out at around:

£6.82 profit per sale.

There is one important caveat here.

I also have an eBay business shop subscription which costs me roughly £28 a month.

So when I talk about profit in these figures, I mean the money left on the individual sales after selling costs and the original stock cost.

There are still general business overheads sitting above that.

Also, if we're being completely accurate...

I'm not exactly sitting with £437 profit in my bank account.

Because eBay gives me money and I immediately respond by buying more clothes.

Almost everything is being reinvested.

Which brings me to the slightly ridiculous number I've become fixated on.

I want 1,000 active eBay listings

My first big milestone is 1,000 active listings.

When I filmed the original video, I had:

387 listings live.

I also had another 15 going on that day, which would take me over 400.

And weirdly, that felt massive.

Not because 400 listings is particularly huge compared with established sellers.

It isn't.

But when you've physically photographed, checked, measured, listed, priced and stored hundreds of separate pieces of clothing yourself, you become extremely aware of what that number actually represents.

I want to get to 1,000 reasonably quickly because I want enough stock sitting there to give the business a proper chance.

I want consistent daily sales.

I also want enough inventory that I can finally get a useful idea of my real sell-through rate.

But I don't want to throw every penny I have at stock just to reach an arbitrary number.

Ideally, I want the business to start funding more and more of its own growth.

Sell stock.

Use some of that money to buy the next stock box.

List it.

Sell more.

Repeat.

That's the plan anyway.

What does listing 400 pieces actually involve?

This is the bit I don't think you fully understand until you start doing it.

"Listing" doesn't mean sitting on the sofa tapping out an eBay description.

I wish.

It means pulling stock out.

Sorting it.

Checking for damage.

Photographing it.

Measuring it.

Researching it.

Pricing it.

Writing the listing.

Giving it a stock number.

Putting it into storage.

Then eventually finding it again when someone buys it.

I've currently got two big work days each week that are pretty much entirely dedicated to eBay.

As I've become more organised, I've reached the point where I can usually get around 15–20 new listings live in a day if I've already got enough stock photographed and ready to go.

I also try to list something every day rather than putting 100 things online in one enormous burst and then disappearing for a week.

Is that helping my sales?

No idea.

Another experiment.

I'm not obsessing over sell-through rate yet

I've seen people calculate their sell-through rate very early, but I'm not sure mine would tell me much at the moment.

My inventory is changing too quickly.

If I'm adding stock almost every day, taking whatever number happens to be live today and comparing it against everything I've sold since I started isn't particularly useful.

Once the shop settles down a little, I'll start tracking it properly.

For now, I'm concentrating on a handful of numbers:

• how many items I'm listing

• how many I'm selling

• average profit per item

• stock cost

• advertising costs

• whether my monthly profit is actually increasing

That's enough to keep me occupied.

The bit of eBay reselling I rarely saw people show

This is one of the reasons I wanted to start The Rural Reseller now rather than waiting until I was successful.

I love watching eBay reseller videos.

But sometimes you'll find someone's earliest video and they're casually standing in front of 1,500 listings.

Which is great.

But...

How did you get there?

You didn't wake up one Tuesday morning with 1,500 pieces of stock photographed, listed and neatly labelled in storage boxes.

There's a slog in the middle.

That's the bit I'm interested in.

The bit where you've got hundreds left to list.

Where you're changing your pricing because you got it wrong.

Where you've bought something terrible.

Where one day you sell five things and the next day you wonder if eBay has quietly deleted your account because absolutely nothing happens.

I'm building it now.

So that's what I want to document.

At the time of these figures, I was sitting at 387 listings.

Next comes 500.

Then 750.

Then hopefully 1,000.

And somewhere along the way, we'll find out whether I can turn this into the £2,000-a-month income stream I'm aiming for.

Maybe I can.

Maybe I discover I've filled half the cottage with women's blouses and made £14.

Either way, I'll have the numbers.