How I Track My Reselling Inventory and Sales (+ Free Spreadsheet)
I use a simple spreadsheet to track every item in my reselling inventory - from where I bought it and where it's stored to what I paid, what it sold for, and how much profit I made.
If you're looking for an easy way to track your reselling inventory and sales, you don't need an expensive inventory management system. A spreadsheet may be all you need, especially when you're getting started.
I've included a free blank version of my reseller inventory spreadsheet below, but first I'll show you what I track, why I track it, and what I've learned from the data.
When you start reselling, keeping track of everything - from the point of purchase to the time of sale - is extremely important. You’ll want to develop a system up front. You can make adjustments as you go, but you cannot afford to rely on a system of jotting down one-off notes on sticky pads or in your phone!
At a minimum, for each item in your inventory, you need to track:
How much you paid
How much you listed it for
How much you sold it for
Any fees associated with the sale
Your total payout
You can download the spreadsheet here. Click on the button below, then choose:
File → Make a copy
Why You Should Track Your Reselling Inventory From Day One
You’ll want to start tracking your items right from the beginning, even if you only have 10-20 things in your inventory. There are a few reasons that setting up a system for tracking is important.
It helps you find things when they sell.
Tracking where things are stored allows for easy retrieval at the time of sale, which is especially important when you are storing items in various spaces around your home. I include a column in my spreadsheet to capture the storage location of each item.
It tells you whether you’re actually making money.
Making a sale is always exciting, and there is always anticipation of how much money will be deposited into your bank account. But the real amount you make is, of course, your net profit. That is, the sale price minus all fees, shipping, and the price you paid when you purchased the item. It’s a bit less exciting to see that real number, but calculating net profit is the only way to see how much money you’re actually making. So you’ll need to capture all of your expenses in your spreadsheet in order to do that.
It helps you become a better buyer.
Over time, your tracking spreadsheet will become a record of what worked and what didn’t. For example, whenever I lose money on a sale, I highlight it in red and make a note of what I could have done differently. Each of those losses becomes an invaluable lesson. You can also read about how to avoid losing money on an eBay sale.
Over time, you’ll start to notice patterns:
Which categories sell quickly?
Which brands perform well?
What tends to sit for months?
Which items produce the best profit?
What purchases do you wish you hadn’t made?
Even if you don’t make notes on what you learn from each sale, just the act of typing all of the numbers into your spreadsheet and making observations will drive home some important lessons that will stick with you.
It creates a business record.
Keeping accurate records can also make tax time much easier. Your spreadsheet gives you a record of purchase costs, sales and other business expenses that may not all appear in your marketplace reports. Be sure to check the tax requirements that apply to your particular situation.
What I Track in My Reseller Inventory Spreadsheet
I started with a very simple spreadsheet and have made adjustments over time. I’ve added and removed columns as my tracking preferences have changed, and as I’ve learned what information is really most important.
Here is everything that I track for each item in my inventory:
Item ~ A simple description that allows me to recognize the item
Category ~ Clothes, housewares, electronics, luggage, etc.
Date purchased ~ Useful in knowing how long I’ve owned an item
Source ~ Thrift store, estate sale, or my own home
Purchase price ~ How much I paid for the item
Storage location ~ Particularly important for those who live in small homes. I list location by descriptor, such as “under bed” or “top closet shelf.”
Date listed ~ Allows you to see how long an item takes to sell.
List price ~ The original asking price, which may not be the final sale price.
Date sold ~ When the sale occurred
Sale price ~ What the buyer actually paid
Fees/expenses ~ Marketplace fees or other expenses you chose to track. For example, I track whether I had to pay for all or part of the shipping.
Profit ~ My spreadsheet calculates how much I’ve actually earned so that I don’t have to do it manually.
A Real Example From My Reselling Spreadsheet
Below is an example of how I used my tracking spreadsheet for a real item that I sold earlier this year - a pair of women’s Chicago Bullet roller skates.
From this example I can glean a few important things. 1) These skates took about six weeks to sell. Not bad. 2) I sold them for $48.99 but my profit was only $18.51. That’s not great. Now I want to dig into why that was, and see what lessons can be learned for the next time I want to sell a pair of roller skates.
eBay charged me $7.58 in fees. That could not have been avoided. I paid $1.06 to promote my item so that buyers would have a better chance of seeing it. I think that was worth it to make a fairly quick sale. But I offered free shipping, and that wound up costing me $15.85. That was probably a mistake. I tend to offer free shipping on more expensive items, but roller skates are heavy and cost a lot to ship. Still, my ROI on this item was 309%.
Ultimately I am not unhappy with how this sale went. But this exercise gives you a sense of how I use the data in my spreadsheet.
How My Spreadsheet Helps Me Manage Inventory in a Small Home
When you run a reselling business out of an apartment or condo, you must find space for storing inventory wherever you can. I store things beneath my bed, in my bedroom closet, in my linen closet, in my bookcase, etc. Much more than a bookkeeping tool, my spreadsheet is invaluable in helping me keep track of where everything is.
We are all carrying a lot of information and to-do items in our heads all the time. When an item sells, I don’t want to have to remember where I put it; I want to be able to retrieve it easily. That, and being able to track my profits, are the reasons I am diligent about keeping up my spreadsheet.
You Don't Need Expensive Reseller Inventory Software
As I emphasize in my post How Much Does It Cost to Start Reselling? A Realistic Beginner Budget [link], you can and should build your inventory slowly. The same is true of your tracking system. Sure, there are software tools out there that you can use to track a lot of this information for you. But those cost money, and you want to keep your expenses as low as possible when you are getting started.
In the beginning, and I would argue for the first year at least, you don’t need:
Paid inventory-management software
Complicated dashboards
Barcode scanners
Hundreds of SKU labels
An elaborate accounting system
Maybe you will want some of those things eventually. But a beginner can learn a tremendous amount with a basic spreadsheet. I actually do use a paid subscription software platform now, but I still maintain my spreadsheet because I like being able to customize what I track.
Stephanie’s Advice
Give yourself permission to use a system that seems almost ridiculously simple if it works for you. A system doesn't become better simply because it's more sophisticated.
How I Keep My Inventory Spreadsheet Updated
Oh yes. This is the hard part. No matter how simple your tracking system is, you will have to force yourself to actually maintain it; otherwise it will be useless.
I will confess that I am a person who struggles with consistency. However, I have found a system that works for me, and I manage to keep my spreadsheet updated. You will have to find a system that works for you. But here’s mine:
After I purchase new items, I enter them into my spreadsheet the same day. I didn’t always do this. But I found out the hard way that I cannot rely on memory to retain important information about purchases, and so for a long time I was always missing basic information for my items - where and when I had bought things and how much I’d paid. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was annoying, and it impacted my ability to calculate real profits. So now I just force myself to make the entries right away. I also used to lose receipts, so now I toss them into a desk drawer as soon as I’ve made my entries.
I update all of my listings and sales once a week. I carve out 2-3 hours on Monday mornings to do this. You might find that you prefer to spend 20 minutes each evening handling updates. For me, doing it in one big block works, and I am able to stick with it.
Then on the last day of the month I pull a report. This is the fun part and I actually look forward to it, because I get to see how much money I actually made.
What My Reselling Sales Data Has Taught Me
Over time, your spreadsheet will become a goldmine of information that will shape the decisions you make about what to sell, how much to sell for, whether to offer free shipping, etc. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way.
Which categories of items don’t sell very well and which don’t result in much profit
Your spreadsheet will teach you things that may go against your gut or impulses. For example, I love shoes, and in the beginning, I saw reselling as a chance to buy lots of shoes without filling up my own closet. Most women love to buy shoes, right? But over time I noticed that I was building up a big collection of shoes in my inventory … and they weren’t selling. And my spreadsheet told me that even when I did sell shoes, I was only making a few dollars in profit. Now I don’t buy shoes unless they are vintage (read: unique).
Some items that you wouldn’t expect are actually good sellers.
If you experiment with different types of items, you will inevitably be surprised by some of the sales you make. One category I have learned sells pretty well is HVAC filters. One of my neighbors had left some out for grabs one day, and I decided to see if I could sell them. They sold in two weeks, and I wound up making $6 profit. So then I picked up a few more sets of different brands from whenever I came across them in thrift stores, and they all sold well. Now this is a go-to category for me.
Another is vintage German beer steins. They are handmade, and tend to be one-of-a-kind. I have sold several. They take a while to sell, but there are people out there who are collectors, and they seem to find my listings.
Your profit will be considerably lower than the sale price.
It’s exciting when you find an item that will sell for a high price. But after tracking many sales over 18 months, I have learned that inevitably, when you subtract the purchase price, fees, and (maybe) shipping, your profit will be much lower. At first I found this discouraging, but now I use that knowledge to set realistic expectations. Now when listing an item, I estimate that eBay will charge 17% in fees. The actual percentage varies by item category, but that is a good average. Knowing about how much my expenses will be arms me with the information I need to make an informed decision on a buyer offer as well.
There are important considerations to be made about shipping.
This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned. Shipping large or heavy items is expensive, and needs to be handled differently than shipping smaller and lighter items. When shipping something large or heavy, you cannot charge the full shipping cost to the buyer - your item would never sell. In the beginning, I lost money on sales because I didn’t yet understand that I needed to account for the full shipping cost, which could be as much as $60 or more. A lot of consideration has to go into how much of the shipping cost you will pass along to the buyer. One of the most valuable pieces of information in my spreadsheet is how much different items have cost to ship. I often rely on this information when setting prices for new listings of items similar to those I have sold in the past. You can also read about what shipping supplies you need.
Download My Reseller Inventory & Sales Spreadsheet
I’ve created a blank template of the spreadsheet I use to track my inventory and sales. It’s intentionally simple. You can download it, customize the categories and storage locations for your own business, and delete anything you don’t need. Click the button below, then choose File → Make a copy.
How to Customize the Spreadsheet for Your Own Business
The spreadsheet is meant to be a template. You may find that you want to add a column to track something additional, or track things in a different way than I do. Consider my template a starting point, and feel free to customize it as you see fit. Perhaps you are going to cross list on multiple reselling platforms. Perhaps you also want to track the condition of your items (e.g. new, new without tags, good used, fair, etc.). I encourage you to make this spreadsheet your own.
Final Thoughts: Simple Systems Make a Small Business Easier to Run
Running a resale business, or really any small business, out of your home requires you have good systems in place. When you live in an apartment, condo, or other small home, your systems will work best when they are personalized. Just like you need to have a good system for storing inventory, taking photos, and organizing shipping supplies, having a good system for tracking your inventory locations and sales will be a key to your success and save you a lot of time along the way!