A buy-below price is the maximum you can pay for an item and still hit your target margin after fees. It is a number you compute before you go sourcing, not a feeling you have while standing in front of a rail.
Start from the price the item realistically sells for — 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. What remains is your net revenue. Multiply that by one minus your target margin, and you have the most you can pay.
Concretely, using the 5% deduction Resale IQ models for Vinted: an item that reliably sells for €40 nets about €38. If you want a 30% margin on the sale, you can pay up to about €26.60. Pay €30 and you are working for roughly 21%. Pay €34 and you are working for free once one item in ten fails to sell.
Substitute your own figure — fee structures differ by platform, by market and by whether you sell as a private individual or a business, and they change. The arithmetic does not care what the number is, only that you use the real one. The profit calculator applies the current per-platform rates so you are not working from 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.
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.
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.
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.
Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.
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