At some point selling your own old clothes becomes trading, and trading has obligations. This chapter describes the landscape in general terms so you know what to ask about. It is not tax or legal advice, and the details differ by country — take proper advice for your own situation.
Under the EU's DAC7 rules, online marketplaces are required to collect information about sellers and report it to tax authorities once a seller passes certain activity thresholds within a calendar year. The commonly cited triggers are a number of sales in the year or total proceeds above a set amount, and platforms typically ask for a tax identification number when a seller approaches them.
The practical point is not the exact threshold — it varies and it changes — but the direction of travel. Assume that anything you sell at volume is visible, and plan on that basis rather than on the assumption that small-scale selling is invisible.
Most tax systems distinguish between disposing of your own possessions and buying goods with the intention of selling them at a profit. The first is generally not trading. The second generally is, from the first item, regardless of scale or how casual it feels.
The signals that matter are intent and pattern: buying specifically to resell, repeated transactions, sourcing systematically, and organising the activity in a business-like way. If you are reading a manual about maximising resale margin, you are almost certainly on the trading side of that line, and the right move is to find out what that means where you live before it becomes a backdated problem.
Whatever your eventual status, the records are the same and they are the same ones the business needs anyway: purchase date, purchase price, proof of purchase where you have it, sale date, sale price, platform fees and shipping costs. One row per item.
Reconstructing a year of purchases from memory and bank statements is miserable and inaccurate, and it usually costs you money — because undocumented costs are costs you cannot deduct. Starting the record on day one costs a few seconds per item; starting it in month fourteen costs a weekend and is still wrong.
That depends on your country, your total income and whether the activity counts as trading rather than selling personal possessions. Because it varies so much, the only responsible answer is to ask a qualified accountant in your jurisdiction — and to have kept the records that let you answer their questions.
Typically what you paid, what you sold it for, when each happened, and the costs in between. That is the same data the five metrics in chapter 14 need, which is a good reason to keep one record that serves both purposes.
Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.
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