Resale IQ / Reselling manual
Chapter 9 · Selling · 7 min read

Pricing a listing, and when to cut

Pricing is two decisions, not one: what you open at, and what you do when it does not sell. Most resellers agonise over the first and improvise the second, which is the wrong way round — the second one is where the money actually goes.

The opening price

Open slightly above your target, not dramatically above it. A modest premium leaves room to accept an offer and lets a price drop register as a genuine reduction later. A large premium gets you filtered out of the searches where buyers set a maximum, which means nobody sees the listing at all and you learn nothing from the silence.

Anchor the number to the asking price at departure for the same model in similar condition. Where the item is at the edge of the distribution — worn, edge size, off-season — start closer to your floor, because the extra premium is not going to be paid and all it buys you is weeks of invisibility.

Price-filter awareness
A buyer who sets a maximum price will almost always set a round one. So listing at €51 risks being filtered out of the results of everyone who capped at €50 — for one euro of upside. Price just under the round numbers, not just over.

A markdown schedule beats improvisation

Decide the schedule when you list, not when you are frustrated. Something like: hold the opening price for two weeks, cut modestly at three, cut again at six, and set a hard decision point at ten weeks where the item either goes at whatever it will fetch or gets bundled. The exact numbers matter less than having them fixed in advance.

The reason to pre-commit is that the decision is emotionally distorted at the moment it has to be made. By week eight you are attached to the item, aware of what you paid, and inclined to wait one more week — repeatedly. A schedule you wrote when you were neutral is more reliable than a judgement you make when you are not.

Cutting is usually cheaper than waiting

An item that has been listed for two months has been shown to a large number of relevant buyers and declined by all of them. That is information, and the information is that the price is wrong. Holding out is a bet that the next buyer values it more than the last hundred did, which is occasionally true and usually not.

The comparison to run is not "this price versus the price I wanted". It is "this price now versus that price maybe, minus another two months of my capital being unavailable". Framed that way, the cut is often obviously correct at a point where it still feels premature.

Key points
  • Open modestly above target — enough to negotiate, not enough to be filtered out.
  • Write the markdown schedule at listing time, while you are still neutral about the item.
  • Sixty days of no sale is the market answering the question. Believe it.
  • Compare the cut against the price you want minus two more months of tied-up capital.

Questions

Should I accept low offers?

Compare the offer against your buy price and the realistic outcome of waiting, not against your asking price. An offer that clears a thin profit on week two is frequently better than the same money on week ten, because the capital comes back sooner.

Does relisting an item help?

It can restore visibility in feeds that favour recent listings, but it does not fix a pricing problem. If an item has been declined for two months, relisting it at the same price mostly buys you a fresh audience for the same wrong number.

Put this chapter to work.

Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.

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The 26 brands Resale IQ tracks had about 6,518 items leave the shelf in the last seven days across Vinted ES, FR, DE, IT and PT. Every figure in this manual's data pages comes from that same feed — see the full market data.
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