How to work out the most you can pay
What is a buy-below price?
A buy-below price is the most to pay for an item: 70% of its typical resale price. For Vinted resale, Resale IQ models it as typical asking price × 0.70: the input is the typical asking price of watched listings, and 0.70 is 70% of the typical resale price. There is no fee factor, because Vinted charges private sellers no selling fee. It is a sourcing ceiling, not a promised profit—adjust for condition, size, market and the strength of the available sample before you buy.
You compute the number before you go sourcing, not as a feeling while standing in front of a rail. Pay under it and the flip is set up to profit; pay over it and you are speculating.
The derivation
Start from the price the item at its typical resale price — the asking price similar items were last listed at before they left the shelf, not the price hopeful sellers are currently asking. Take off whatever the platform deducts from you — on Vinted, for a private seller, that is nothing. What remains is your net revenue. Multiply that by one minus your target margin, and you have the most you can pay.
Concretely: Vinted charges private sellers no selling fee, so an item with a typical resale price of €40 nets €40. If you pay 70% of that price, you can pay up to €28. Pay €32 and the gap to the typical resale price narrows. Pay €36 and you are working for 10%, which one item in ten failing to sell wipes out.
If you resell somewhere that does charge a fee — other platforms take their own commission, and business accounts can differ — take it off before you multiply. The arithmetic does not care what the number is, only that you use the real one, so check the platform's own fee page rather than a figure you memorised a year ago.
The arithmetic is trivial. The hard part is the first input — the realistic sale price — and that is where almost every bad buy originates.
Why the realistic price is not the average price
The average sale price of a model blends every condition, size and colourway together. The item in your hand is one specific point in that distribution, and it is usually not the middle. A worn-out size XS in an unpopular colour will not fetch the model average no matter how good your photos are.
Adjust down for condition, for sizes at the edge of the range, and for anything seasonal that you are buying out of season. Adjust up only when you can point to something concrete — deadstock with tags, a colourway that is genuinely scarce, a size that sells faster than the rest.
Building the discipline
Set the target margin before you leave the house and do not renegotiate it in the shop. The pull to stretch on a specific item is strongest exactly when it should be resisted, because the reason you want to stretch is that the item is attractive — which means other resellers find it attractive too, which means it is priced accordingly.
Walking away from a marginal buy costs you nothing except an item you would have made €3 on. Buying it costs you the cash, the shelf space and the attention, all of which had a better use.
- ✓Max buy price = realistic sale price, minus any platform fee (none on Vinted for private sellers), times (1 − target margin).
- ✓Use the typical asking price from watched listings, not your own hoped-for price, as the input.
- ✓Adjust that asking price down for condition, edge sizes and out-of-season stock before you compute anything.
- ✓Fix the target margin before sourcing and refuse to renegotiate it item by item.
Questions
A buy-below price is the most to pay for an item: 70% of its typical resale price. For Vinted resale, Resale IQ models it as typical asking price × 0.70: the input is the typical asking price of watched listings, and 0.70 is 70% of the typical resale price. There is no fee factor, because Vinted charges private sellers no selling fee. It is a sourcing ceiling, not a promised profit—adjust for condition, size, market and the strength of the available sample before you buy.
Buy-below price = typical asking price × 0.70. The 0.70 is 70% of the typical resale price, and there is no fee factor because Vinted charges private sellers no selling fee. On a €40 typical asking price that is €28. If you resell on a platform that does charge a fee, take it off first.
Vinted's own search can be filtered to items sellers marked sold, which gives you a rough distribution for a specific model — though that is a seller's self-report, not a verified transaction. It is manual and slow across five markets, which is exactly the gap Resale IQ fills — the per-model figures it returns are computed from listings we watched leave the shelf across ES, FR, DE, IT and PT rather than one country's active listings.
No. Slow, expensive stock needs a wider margin because your money is tied up longer and the downside if it does not sell is larger. Fast, cheap stock can run thinner. A single blanket percentage is a reasonable starting point and a poor long-term policy.
The Buy-Below Sheet gives each model a buy-below price next to its median asking price, observed departures and sample size. Five rows are free on the page; the full sheet is €29, once.
See the five free rows →Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.
Try a live check — Fred Perry Polo →