Two resellers each start with €1,000. One makes 20% per item and turns their stock every three weeks. The other makes 60% and turns it every six months. After a year the first has compounded roughly seventeen times; the second has done it twice. Same capital, radically different businesses.
A turn is one full cycle: cash becomes stock, stock becomes cash. Your annual return is roughly your per-turn margin compounded across however many turns you complete. Margin is the height of each step; turns are how many steps you take. Most beginners optimise the height and ignore the count.
The practical consequence is that shelf life is a cost with a price tag. Money sitting in an unsold jacket is money not buying the next three items. That opportunity cost never appears on any invoice, which is exactly why it gets ignored until the reseller notices they have €2,000 of stock and no cash.
Slow stock is rarely bought slow on purpose. It arrives through three routes: buying out of season, buying edge sizes because they were cheap, and buying premium items whose buyer pool is small. All three feel like good decisions at the moment of purchase, because the margin on paper is wide.
The wide margin is compensation for the wait, not free money. A €200 coat with a €120 buy price is not a better buy than a €30 hoodie with a €18 buy price if the coat takes four months and the hoodie takes twelve days. Run the per-week arithmetic on both before deciding which one you were right about.
Most working resellers end up with a deliberate blend: a base of fast, boring, reliable stock that generates the weekly cashflow, and a smaller allocation to slower, higher-margin items that would strangle the business if they were the whole of it. The base pays the bills and funds the next buy; the premium layer is where the upside lives.
The mistake is drifting into an accidental version of this — a portfolio that is 80% slow because the slow items are the ones that did not sell. That is not an allocation, it is an accumulation, and the difference is whether you chose it.
It depends entirely on price tier. Cheap, high-volume clothing can turn in two to four weeks when priced correctly. Premium outerwear and designer pieces routinely take months. Measure your own by tracking days-from-listing-to-sale for thirty items — the answer is usually slower than the one you would guess.
Usually yes, and sooner than feels comfortable. An item at 60 days has already told you the price is wrong. Recovering your capital at a thin margin and redeploying it beats holding out for a number the market has declined twice.
Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.
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