The Pricing Strategy I Use to Sell Inventory Faster

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]A lot of resellers get pricing completely wrong. And honestly, I've made just about every pricing mistake in the book myself, too. Pricing is weird because you can honestly fail in two completely different directions. You can either price your item so completely high that it takes forever to sell and it just sits and sits and sits, or you can price your item so low that it sells immediately, but you're leaving tons of profit margin on the table. Really, setting a price is about increasing the probability of having the best possible outcome, which to me is just finding the balance between profit or how fast the item sells, demand from the market, and risk. In this video, I'm going to break down exactly how I set my pricing, and how you can get an optimal price for your items. I'll share how I use comps, how I interpret market demand, how I know when something is overpriced, when I lower prices, and what happens after the initial price is set. And I'm going to walk you through an example of how I set prices live so I can show you all of this in practice. The truth is that pricing, in my opinion, might actually be the most important step in the process of reselling. Because if you do this part wrong, then all of that work that you did before on sourcing and researching the item and taking beautiful photographs and writing a listing description that is accurate just stops mattering as much because if the price is wrong, then you're either going to miss out on margin or you're going to not be able to find the right buyer. If you're new here, I'm Laura. I was a full-time reseller for 2 years until I quit to go back to school to get my MBA. Since then, I've been restarting my reselling business with my new business school knowledge and I've been starting it from scratch and sharing my learnings here on YouTube. Let's start by talking about the pricing framework that I use. Now, essentially, it comes down to three different things. Number one is the current competition in the market. Number two are recently sold comparable listings. And number three is market context is what I'll call it. And all three of those factors matter together to set your price. So, let's start with the first thing that I look at, which is currently listed comps. In my opinion, this is probably the most overlooked factor when resellers are setting their pricing. And I think it's why I see a lot of delusional pricing on apps like Poshmark. A lot of resellers only look at how an item has sold historically when deciding how to price the item and even before that, whether or not to buy the item. If you're only looking at sold comps, then you're kind of missing out on half of the story. In fact, it's probably the more relevant half of the story because it's what's available to buyers right now at this exact moment. A current buyer who's looking for something doesn't actually care what yesterday's buyer bought the same piece for. All they care about is that they're getting a good deal on the piece today. And active listings are the only thing that can tell you what buyers are choosing between today. Right now, if there are a ton of pieces of the same item listed in the same colorway and the same size as the one that you have, you lose a lot of pricing leverage. At that point, it does not make sense for you to price significantly higher than what the other current listings are priced at.

[00:03:26]And yes, even if there are sold listings that are higher than what the current price is, it still doesn't make sense to price your listing according to the sold comps, if the current comps are lower.

[00:03:38]Think about it this way. If a buyer has two options for the exact same top and yours is listed for $50 and someone else's is listed for $25, which one are they more likely to buy? So, the current landscape matters a ton. Keep in mind that when buyers are looking to purchase things for themselves, they're only looking at their size. So, when you're looking at other listings, only look at the ones that are in your size that you have because it doesn't really matter if there's 25 listings in a size four if you have a size 10. And this also works both ways and can work in your favor because if there's currently very few listings available in the size and color way that you have, then you all of a sudden have a lot of leverage as the seller to set a higher price. Especially if that piece has a lot of solds but not a lot of available listings because now you know that demand exists and supply is low. And again, I'm going to get into an example of all of this, but I want to just run through what my process is first, and then we'll get into a specific specific example so you can see this in action. So, the second thing I look at after I look at what the current landscape looks like is recently sold comps. Notice that my emphasis there is on the word recently. We're looking for comps that have sold ideally in the last year. I would argue that comps that sold much longer ago than a year should sort of just be ignored because fashion changes so fast. Trends change so fast.

[00:05:09]Silhouettes that are popular change.

[00:05:11]Styles that are popular change. Brands can become hotter or colder. If you're looking at comps from 3 years ago or more, it's very likely that those sales prices are not still the sales price that that piece would command if it were sold today. There are of course exceptions to this rule. Like if you're talking about vintage pieces or like rare designer finds or very specific styles that are increasing in popularity over time, especially if you're a reseller that's focused on like trend forward fashion reselling, overall those pieces will only decline in value over time. So, if the only sold comps you're seeing are from 2 3 4 years ago, that's not super helpful data for you to rely on when setting your price. And when we're doing the exercise where we list a pie, I will show you guys a little trick of how you can figure out approximately when a piece sold on Poshmark specific.

[00:06:12]And the third factor is a little bit more nuanced. It's market context is what I'll call it. This piece is a little bit harder to teach because it relies more on just you as the resellers knowledge of fashion trends, what's going on in the market, seasonality, um what's selling now, and just kind of being on top of reseller trends. I'll give you a couple of examples of times when I feel like the optimal price was not like fully reflected by recently sold comps and existing listings. So, for example, this was recent. I had found this really cute short sleeve J Crew sweater polo top and it was in this really pretty pink color. And the average sold comps were around $20. And I was noticing that a lot of the the recently solds were not in pink and a lot of them were just like different material composition. Like this one had a lot of cotton. Some of the other ones were more like polyester blends. And I also noticed that there were not a lot of these currently available in the pink color and in the size that I had, which was a size large. And polo sweaters are so trendy right now. Every time I've listed one of these recently, they've sold so fast. So instead of pricing around $20, which is what I was seeing the sold comps, I priced this at $45 because I felt like this is actually more on par with what I think the market will be willing to pay for this particular style. in peace. And this ended up selling in under two months. I got an offer, I think, on eBay for $35.

[00:07:50]And I was able to sell this at 35 instead of 20, which is what the comps, the sold comps kind of told me. Now, could I have sold it faster for $20?

[00:08:01]Almost definitely. So, again, that's always the balance that you're looking to find with price. You want to find the best price that feels good to you. And it really depends on what your priorities are. So, if you're someone who has so much storage space and you don't mind holding on to stuff and you want to just get the most premium price that you can for everything, then you might tend towards pricing things higher. If you're someone who doesn't have a lot of storage space and you want to move things out faster and you're getting things for a really low cost of goods, then maybe you want to price things lower. It really does depend on you in addition to the market. For me, I prefer to have a slightly higher average sales price on things, but I also want to move things quickly. So, I try to find a balance between the two where things will sell within 3 months and they'll sell for a good price. So, I'm not trying to price like the highest person on Poshmark, but I'm also not trying to like out bid the lowest person either. Let's get into an example so that I can show you these three factors in action. Again, that is current listings available on the market, comparable sold listings, recently sold listings, and market context. So, let's go through a real pricing example together using my framework. I've already preloaded all the details into a listing, and I'm just going to show you exactly what I do. So, I have this LPA dress from Revolve and I've already entered my measurements. I have all my photos. I have all my description in here. And I'm ready to list it. So, now what I need to do, figure out what to list it for. So, I'm going to go to a separate tab. Just me exposing myself for not knowing how to screen share.

[00:09:52]Um, okay.

[00:09:54]So, I'm going to a separate tab and I'm going to search my listings. I'm going to search Poshmark for this exact dress.

[00:10:02]So, we're just going to look up LPA Daria dress cuz that's what it was called.

[00:10:10]All right. So, it looks like there is also one in white. So, I'm just going to ignore those. And as a reminder, my first step here is to look at current listings that are available. So, we're going to ignore all the white and we're just going to look at the pink. And remember, I have a size small. So, we have a size small listed for $95. This one looks like it's not new with tags.

[00:10:32]This one is a size small listed for $129.

[00:10:36]This one is a size medium listed for 92.

[00:10:40]We have a size medium for $119. We have a size extra small for 50.

[00:10:46]And it looks like that is all we have.

[00:10:49]So, there are currently in a size small two available listings. And the two that are in a size small, which again, remember we are trying to focus on the listings in the size that we have, which is a small, the two available are 95 and 129 as the list price. So, now we're going to change our filter to sold.

[00:11:13]We're moving on to step two, which is to look at recently sold comps. And I told you I was going to show you guys a little trick here. Now, I use Primelister and um if you want to sign up for Primelister, I actually have a referral code where you can get I think it's a week free and then 30% off your first month. So, I'll include that in the description below. This video is not sponsored, by the way. Um, but because I have Prime Listister, there is a tool where they'll tell you when the piece was listed. So, this does make it really helpful and you can see like a lot of these listings were listed over 3 years ago, this one 5 years ago, this one almost 3 years ago, 2 years ago. So, you can kind of find that information out that way. But if you don't have Primelister, figure this out yourself by looking in the URL of the listing. So, uh, basically, if you didn't see what I did there, you like right click on the listing and you click open image in new tab and the image will come up. And you'll see in the URL for the new tab, the date, there's a date listed here, which is October 16th, 2022. Now, this date is the date that this photo was uploaded to Poshmark. You know, all it really tells you is that this photo was uploaded in October 2022. So, it doesn't tell you anything about when it was sold. What you can do is sort the solds by just in, which I would actually recommend. You want to again look at the most recent solds. And now we're looking at, okay, two months ago, 3 months ago, etc. So, we're looking at the most recent solds here. And again, if you just do this little trick, then you'll see this photo was uploaded March 18th, 2026.

[00:13:16]So, this piece sold sometime between March 18th and today. We don't know exactly when because Poshmark is like that. Now, it's not a perfect system because if someone relists an item, it actually show it changes the date. Like, if you fully delete and relist the item, it'll change the date to the new date.

[00:13:34]So, if people are relisting every 60 days and fully deleting their original listing, then you're never going to know when it was first listed. It's not perfect, like I said, but it does give you a little bit of a better idea. So, we can see that the most recent solds from within this year of the pink version of this dress, $50 and this one was new with tags and then $36 for a notnew with tags one. After that we have this 2 years ago listing which sold for 65 and this 3 years ago list ago listing which sold for 100. Now as we saw there is a large disparity between the price that the current market is listing for and what these are actually selling for.

[00:14:27]The current market is listing for between 95 and 115 for a size small of this dress. And it looks like what the market is willing to pay for this dress is between $36 and $50.

[00:14:41]What that tells me is that I have two options here. I can either list it high somewhere in the range of 95 to 115 to be, you know, in the same range as the rest of the sellers on Poshmark and it won't look completely out of the norm.

[00:15:00]It's just going to look like, you know, what the other sellers are doing. Or I can try to list a little bit lower to be closer to what the buyers are willing to pay and make my listing the most attractive listing on the market so that when a buyer looks for this dress, they decide to buy mine instead of the other two. I'm going to list a little bit lower than what the other sellers are doing. So the other sellers are listing for 95 to 115.

[00:15:29]I would love to sell this for $50. And so I typically give discounts of 10 to 25% off when I'm sending out offers. So I think that I'm going to list this one for 75. And then if I give a 25% offer, it'll get me close to that 50 mark. And again, at $75, it is again, it's still a little bit above what the market is showing it's willing to pay. But I tend to like to list high so that I have wiggle room to negotiate with buyers, accept offers, and drop the price. So, I'm going to list at 75. It's still the cheapest one in the size available on Poshmark, and it gives me that nice wiggle room. And the original retail for this, find the original listing if you can. And this one was retailing for 178, but it was on sale for 68. So, I think 75 is actually like a pretty good price for it. Um, again, I'm not racing to the bottom with my pricing method, but I'm also trying to be realistic and I want things to sell quickly. So, I'm going to list it for $75 and it's going to be now you can see my listing there. And now when you search for LPA DAR address, mine is going to be one of the cheaper options, which is great.

[00:17:02]There it is. $75 right here. So if I'm a buyer and I'm looking at all these options and I want this pink Daria dress, I'm going to gravitate towards, okay, which one can I negotiate?

[00:17:19]I'm a size small. Nice. This 175, that's a nice price for me. So, that's pricing in action. So, that's an example of how I price my listings. And now, I want to just talk about a couple of mistakes that I see people traps that people fall into a lot with pricing. One trap that I think a lot of sellers fall into is emotional pricing. Let me give you a little bit of tough love here. The market does not care how much you paid for an item. It doesn't care how attached you are to the item. It doesn't care what a buyer paid for that item 10 years ago. And it certainly doesn't care what you want it to sell for. I fall into this trap sometimes. This is probably one of the bigger mistakes that I tend to make because I either get attached to a price, like if I look up sold comps in the thrift store really quick and I think that the price that I'm seeing is like $85 and I get really excited and when I come home I do more research and then I realize actually the market is kind of saying more like $50.

[00:18:22]Sometimes I still want to price at that higher price point cuz I'm emotionally attached to that outcome at that point.

[00:18:27]And I will say, especially since I've been dabbling more in retail arbitrage recently and also buying more of my inventory at consignment stores where I'm paying up for items, so my average cost of goods for those pieces goes from $7 at the thrift store to $35 in retail arbitrage. I get even more emotionally attached because I've spent so much more money on the piece to begin with. But one thing that I'm learning is a lesson that I think all of you can apply in your own closets, which is it's way better to learn from a mistake quickly and move on from it than it is to dwell in the mistake. If you regret buying something after doing further research, you have two options. Option one is to double down on that mistake by pricing it how you thought it was going to go, even after you've done research and realize that that's not actually what the market is willing to pay. and watch that item get shared in your closet for months and months on end with no offers and just get more and more frustrated with it. Spend more time relisting it, taking new photos, um just all that emotional energy that you're spending on that item. That's one option. And honestly, the ending of that story typically is that you're still going to have to accept a lower price anyway. And option two is you price it at the realistic non-delusional price that the market is demanding. You sell it within 2 to 3 months. You recoup your investment. You flip it into better inventory. You learn from that lesson and you move on with your life. And remember that every item that is sitting in your closet and sitting in your storage is taking up hidden cost for you. It's taking up obviously storage space. It's also taking up mental bandwidth and it's taking up cash that could have been used to be better invested into other inventory. And this is where I think a lot of resellers misunderstand why pricing is so important to begin with because a lot of resellers tend to think about each sale individually on an island, especially beginner resellers. And I was like this too. In the beginning, I thought about each sale as its own island. So I bought this piece for $5. I sold it for $25.

[00:20:43]After Poshmark takes its fee, I make $15 profit. Great. And while that is true, it's also not how the cash actually flows through your reselling business.

[00:20:53]When you go to a thrift store, you pay for all your inventory upfront. So, say you go to a thrift store and you spend $100 on inventory for 20 items. That money is now frozen in those items until they sell. So, let's say that you make one of those sales, you make $20 on it, but not all 20 of those dollars are going to go back into your inventory, right? You need to pay back your cost of goods. So, five of those dollars are replenishing the cost that it took you to buy the item in the first place. You have to pay for all your other costs of running a business, which could include storage unit fees, um, shipping supplies, operating expenses, and ideally paying yourself a salary. So, if inventory sits for months and months and months and your business slows down financially, and there's also a concept here called the time value of money. I don't want to get too indepth into it cuz it's a little bit boring, but essentially what it means is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. So, the more dollars that you can get today, the better instead of putting them all off and getting more dollars tomorrow. And that's why I think sometimes accepting a slightly lower price now is better and more profitable long term than holding out for every last dollar that you can get from a piece. I'll share one example of this. I recently listed a Monday swimwear bikini. This was a new with tags bikini.

[00:22:20]It was both a top and a bottom. And I was having a lot of trouble finding exact comps. Like I couldn't find an exact listing of a top and a bottom because if you don't know, Monday Swimwear typically sells their tops and bottoms separately and they sell a lot of different styles of tops and bottoms, but they're all in like the same colors.

[00:22:41]They have lots of different colors, but like you can get the same color orange top in many different styles of bottoms.

[00:22:49]So anyway, it was hard to find an exact match of what I had. I didn't really know how to price it. A lot of the pieces were priced individually, like a top and a bottom separately. So, I priced it at 135. And Monday swimwear retails really high. Like the entire swimsuit retailed for about $200, the two pieces. So, I priced it at 135, which was not unreasonable.

[00:23:12]And I started getting a lot of offers. I got three offers from three different buyers that were between $65 and $75.

[00:23:21]Now, a lot of resellers get upset when they get what they consider to be lowball offers. And you could definitely consider this a lowball offer because it was like half of my listed price.

[00:23:32]However, after it happened three times, I had to take a second to reflect and say, maybe this is the market telling me something. This is what people are willing to pay for this right now. I don't have to accept the price, but this might be the market value of what I have. So, the fourth time that someone sent me an offer, she sent me an offer for $75.

[00:23:58]Now, I countered that offer at $95 because I still felt like that was a fair price given that one of those pieces alone was worth $95 new with tags. and she countered at 85, which I did decide to accept after some hemming and hawing. At that point, it had been listed for 24 days. I love selling stuff within 30 days, and it was still a great sale. I still made a great profit margin on it, and I was still happy with it at the end of the day. And the buyer loved it, and it was just a great lesson for me. The buyer does not care how much I want to sell it for. It doesn't The buyer doesn't care how much I paid for it, and the market doesn't care how much. And this sometimes works the opposite way, too. So, another example here, I recently sold a pair of Good American flare leg jeans. And I only had them listed for 8 days. I had them listed for $50 when I received an offer of $30. And the jeans were getting a lot of attention. I was getting a lot of likes on them, but I hadn't gotten any offers yet. This was my first offer.

[00:25:00]And I really considered whether or not to take it because part of me wanted to counter at 35, which is the price that I would have been a little bit happier to sell them at.

[00:25:10]But I also was thinking, well, am I really going to counter and risk losing the sale for $5 extra dollars, which would have Poshmark fees been four extra dollars? Or I could just take the sale, make the profit, and not have to store the store these potentially relist them if they don't sell overtime, um, and just deal with them for longer.

[00:25:32]I could just sell them within a week and make a profit and then reinvest the money into new inventory. So, I took the $30 offer even though it might have been a little bit lower than what my optimal price would have been. And of course, just a quick note, obviously this all varies by platform. I typically sell on Poshmark. I do crosslist my items to eBay and Dep Depot, but my the bulk of my sales are on Poshmark. They always have been. I started on Poshmark. And so when I price, I look at Poshmark to set my prices. However, I have been experimenting with lowering my prices slightly on eBay and slightly more on Dep Depot because buyers across platforms are different and also the fees are slightly lower on eBay than Poshmark and a lot lower on Depop than Poshmark. So, I'm willing to sell things for a lower price given that it'll still work out to be about the same profit for me. At the end of the day, pricing is not about perfection. You're balancing so many things and only a few of them are known. You're balancing what you want your margin to be, what the demand is for the item, what the market looks like currently, what people have paid for these pieces in the past, and you're trying to find a price that fits within all of those market conditions. And the more data points you collect as a reseller, the better your information will become. I'm personally obsessed with collecting data. I focused on data analytics when I was doing my MBA and it's one of the things that I am really excited about as I come back into reselling is learning how to apply that to reselling to make my business that much better. I am working on developing a tool for resellers that basically analyzes your personal data as a reseller and tells you what to buy more of and what to buy less of. and it it analyzes your data by category, by size, and by brand. If that sounds interesting to you, sign up in the description of this video. I have started a wait list of for people who are interested in this, and when it goes live, you will be the first to know. I will email you before I even talk about it on YouTube.

[00:27:40]So, definitely sign up for the wait list. I'm also going to be giving away a few spreadsheets to a few lucky viewers who sign up for the weight list. So, only if you sign up for the weight list and you subscribe to my channel will you be considered for one of these giveaways. So, definitely make sure that you hit that subscribe button. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it. Join the wait list for my new reseller intelligence tool. And I will see you guys in the next video. Thank you so much for watching until the end. You're the best and I appreciate you. Wishing you all amazing sales this week and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.