Is Selling Your Clothes Really Worth It?

I sold some clothes to find out.

Photo by Noémie Roussel on Unsplash

When I was 12, I borrowed my dad’s identity to open an eBay account. At the time, I was obsessed with yard sales. eBay was like a 24/7, neverending yard sale and I wanted in on the action.

Fast forward to 2017. I’m sitting at my desk at work listening to videos on YouTube in the background. Gary Vee’s Trash Talk series starts playing. I’m instantly hooked. Even though I had been an active eBayer for more than a decade at this point, I had no idea people made a living flipping books, clothes, toys – whatever – on the platform.

That led me down a rabbit hole I would spend the next five years in. I followed resellers on YouTube and Instagram to learn the ropes. While I made some really good flips, most were far and few in between.

There was a lot to running a successful eBay store that I didn’t really understand. For one, you need volume. For every person making a full time wage selling things on Poshmark or eBay, they probably have thousands of items in inventory. You have to find those items, buy them, list them, and have enough room in your house to store them. It’s a lot more work than the average YouTuber lets on.

A lot has also changed for reselling in the past few years too. Shipping costs have gone way up. Platform fees have increased. Thrift stores no longer have good prices. And if you want people to actually see your listings, one way or another, you’re going to have to pay to promote your stuff.

At the end of the day, is reselling actually worth all the effort? Can you actually make decent money doing it?

That’s what this essay is going to dive into.

Aside from eBaying, I also used to write a lot of side hustle content. But just like eBay, once I actually started doing some of the side hustles, I realized the juice wasn’t really worth the squeeze. Content creators were simply selling the idea that you could make extra money just so they could sell a course teaching you how.

I decided to put reselling used clothes to the test. This article will dive into how I sold used clothes at a clothing reseller, what I made, and whether or not I think it’s worth it.

You can sell your clothes at clothing resellers and consignment shops for cash or store credit.

It used to be that if you wanted to buy used clothes you had to go to a thrift store. These days, there’s a plethora of secondhand shops you can choose from. And most of these secondhand shops are way better than thrift stores. They sell gently used brand named clothing for a fraction of the price.

Depending on where you live, some clothing resellers you might have come across include:

• Plato’s Closet

• Clothes Mentor

• Style Encore

• Buffalo Exchange

• Crossroads

• Uptown Cheapskate

• ThredUp

I’ve sold to most of these stores. Each has their own policies and preferences. Clothes Mentor, for example, caters more towards professional women while Plato’s Closet is geared towards teenagers and young adults.

To resell your clothes, bag them up and take them to the selling counter of whichever reseller you choose to go to. The buyer will take your info and let you know when your sale is ready. It could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Some selling counters close early if they get inundated with sellers. The earlier in the day you bring your stuff in, the better.

Resellers offer a percentage of the sale price as cash payment. Usually this is around 30%. That means if they can sell something on the floor for $10, they’ll pay you $3. If you opt for store credit instead of cash, you’ll get slightly more back.

Each buyer at one of these stores has their own preferences. I’ve seen buyers pass on lululemon but buy H&M, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to Plato’s Closet and skimmed racks full of Target brand items. For what it’s worth, there’s always a shortage of men’s clothing so if you’re going to sell anything, sell that.

If you shop at these stores regularly, reselling can be an affordable way to recycle your closet without spending any money. Just keep bringing clothes in, take the store credit, and shop for new-to-you clothes from the same store. If you do this, you can pretty much zero out your annual clothing costs.

But some people might want to do this as a part-time side hustle. The question is can you actually make money taking clothes to resellers and selling them for cash?

Here’s what I found when I took a bag of clothes into a clothing reseller.

Clothing is so ubiquitous it’s lost its value. Even if you have “good” brands to sell, there’s no guarantee a buyer will take it or if it’ll actually be worth your time.

To better understand the state of the reselling market, I took a bag of 26 items to Uptown Cheapskate. Brands in my bag included: Everlane, Madewell, Reformation, Frame, and Anthropologie. Almost everything in my bag would have cost $100+ new at their respective stores.

Most of the items I took to sell I had purchased for myself, but some were items I had specifically picked up to flip. At some point in the last year all of these items had been listed on eBay but I never found a buyer for them. I knew they had some value so I didn’t want to just donate them. That’s why I decided to bag them up for Uptown Cheapskate.

I went in the middle of the week hoping it would be a slow day. I got there at 11am – an hour after the buying counter opened. It was a 20 minute drive to Uptown Cheapskate and it took the buyer TWO HOURS to process my bag. That means the entire reselling process cost me two hours and 40 minutes of my time.

From my bag, Uptown Cheapskate bought just six items:

• Brooks running shoes

• Vince sleeveless top

• Everlane jeans

• Athleta joggers

• Reformation tank top

• Madewell jeans

All of these items I had purchased for myself at a regular thrift store like Goodwill. I’d estimate I spent around $50 on everything Uptown Cheapskate purchased from me. When it came time to cash out, I was offered $49.50 in store credit or $33 in cash.

I took the cash. For my time I made about $12.36 per hour. But because reselling is a form of income, whatever you earn is technically taxable. After taxes, my hourly rate was less than $10 an hour.

I use fast food joints to benchmark the value of time. Considering most fast food places now pay well over $15 an hour, this isn’t really a good return on your time. If you want a side hustle to make consistent cash, you’re better off flipping burgers than reselling clothes.

The biggest issue, though, is the cost of inventory. It’s one thing to pull clothes out of your closet and recycle them at a clothing reseller. It’s another thing to buy clothes from a thrift store with the intent of generating profit from them.

I spent $50 to earn $33. It takes time to source inventory and it takes time to convert it to cash. Unless you’re selling designer pieces like Prada or Louis Vuitton, you’re probably not going to make enough money to justify doing this as a side hustle.

I used to advocate going to a Goodwill Outlet to cheaply source inventory. If you’re not familiar with them, Goodwill Outlets – known as the Bins – sell clothing by the pound. It’s possible to buy something for less than $1 and resell at a place like Uptown Cheapskate for a profit.

But again, the math doesn’t math. I sold six items for $33 which averages to $5.50 per item. But only 26% of all the items I brought to sell were actually purchased. Assuming a $4.50 profit per item, you’d need to sell about 222 items per month to make $1,000. That means you’d need to bring Uptown Cheapskate 854 items to sell. That’s a lot of clothing!

Sourcing items to sell isn’t easy. For clothes, you need to know brands, styles, and trends. You’ll spend more time than you realize looking for the right clothes to buy in the first place.

Fortunately, I was able to work on a freelance writing project at a nearby coffee shop while I waited for my buy to finish. But $33 wasn’t worth driving halfway across town to wait two hours for the Uptown Cheapskate buyer to figure out what they wanted to purchase from me.

If you’re in a pinch and need extra cash ASAP, this is one of the easiest ways to get it. But is it worth investing time and effort into developing into a side hustle? I don’t think so.

Is it worth trying to sell clothes?

Most clothes don’t have the value you think they do. Even lululemon, a brand that used to command a pretty penny on eBay, has fully saturated the market. There’s so much of it, unless you’re selling something new, it’s going to be hard to make money reselling it.

If you’re looking for an affordable way to shop and you go to stores like Uptown Cheapskate that have a buying counter, then by all means, sell your unwanted clothes. It’s a good way to recycle your clothes and get store credit to shop at stores you already shop at.

But don’t go out of your way to turn this into a side hustle. The only way to make enough money to make it worth your time is to sell a large volume of clothing. Unless you know what to source AND have access to cheap secondhand clothing, you’re not going to be able to get the volume you need to make it worth it.

A lot of blogs and YouTubers will tell you that you can make money selling used clothes but that doesn’t mean you should.

What do you think? Have you tried reselling clothes? What was your experience like? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.