My First Two Days of eBay Reselling – Can a £80 Mystery Clothing Box Become a Business?

On 8th June, I finally stopped talking about trying eBay reselling and actually started it again.

I'd bought a mystery box of clothes for around £80 and decided to see whether I could turn it into a small income stream. My goal isn't to become a huge reseller. I simply want to see whether I can build something that helps pay the bills and gives me a little more financial freedom. My first goal - turn it into a £1000 a month income stream.

Day 1 – 8th June of eBay Reselling

The first day was mostly hard graft.

Every item had to be checked, photographed, researched, described and listed. It quickly became obvious that reselling is not the "easy money" some social media videos make it out to be.

The good news is that AI helped speed up the process considerably.

Using ChatGPT as my assistant, I was able to create listing titles, item specifics, descriptions and even suggestions for photographs. It didn't remove the work completely, but it certainly made the process faster and more organised.

Day 1 Results

• 13 listings created

• Around 2 hours of work

• 2 sales made

• £10.58 in sales

For the first day and only a handful of listings, I was encouraged.

Day 2 – 9th June of eBay Reselling

I carried on listing more items from the box.

By now I was becoming more familiar with the process and could create listings much more quickly than on the first day.

I also experimented with eBay's promoted listings feature. Since eBay is currently offering free postage on my first month's sales, I decided this was a good opportunity to test different approaches and learn what works.

Day 2 Results

• 10 additional listings created

• 4 sales made

• £33.40 in sales

That brought my running total to so far:

• 23 active listings created

• 6 sales in two days

• £43.98 total sales

Lessons After Two Days

The biggest surprise has been how quickly items started selling.

I expected to spend weeks waiting for the first sale, but buyers started purchasing almost immediately.

The second surprise was how useful AI has been as a reselling assistant. Rather than replacing the work, it helps reduce the time spent researching brands, writing descriptions and creating listings.

The third lesson is that organisation matters. Having a simple routine for photographing, listing, packing and posting makes the process far less overwhelming.

The Current Goal

My first target is simple:

Recover the cost of the first box and buy another. At £43.98 in sales after two days, I'm already more than halfway towards my £80 target.

Whether this eventually becomes a useful side income remains to be seen, but so far the experiment is off to a much better start than I expected. I'll continue documenting the journey and sharing the numbers as I go.