Reseller Margin Math: What Your Numbers Actually Look Like

Nobody explains the actual math before you start, so most new resellers are guessing at their own margins for the first few weeks. It's not complicated once you see it laid out — but it does involve more than one number, and skipping any of them is how people end up surprised by how little is actually left over. Here's the whole equation.

The two prices you're actually working with

Every product page shows two prices: the retail price a shopper pays, and the reseller price — what you pay to acquire the piece. The gap between those two is your gross margin before anything else gets subtracted. That gap is real, but it's not what lands in your account after a sale, because whatever platform you sell on takes its own cut too.

A worked example

Say a piece has a $40 retail price and a $22 reseller price — an $18 gross margin, or 45% of the retail price, before fees. If you sell it on Whatnot at that same $40, you're paying roughly 8% commission plus 2.9% + $0.30 in payment processing — call it about $4.50 total on a $40 sale. That leaves $40 − $22 − $4.50 = $13.50, or about 34% of the sale price, as your actual take. That's the real number — not the 45% the sticker gap on the product page implies on its own.

Why the gap between gross and net matters

The instinct is to look at the retail-minus-reseller gap and treat that as "the margin." It isn't — it's the starting point. Platform fees are predictable and easy to plan around once you know the rate. What's harder to plan for, and easy to forget when you're estimating margin, is your own time: photographing, listing, hosting a live, packing, and shipping all take real hours, and none of that shows up in the retail-minus-reseller number. Pricing your time into what you consider "worth it" to sell is part of doing this honestly, not an afterthought.

Restocking is where the real margin lives

Margin on a single sale is one number. Margin over a month is a different question, and it's driven almost entirely by restocking discipline — noticing what actually sold and reordering it quickly, instead of letting capital sit in slow-moving pieces because they're already paid for. Two resellers with identical margin-per-item can end up with very different monthly totals purely because one restocked their winners within days and the other let them sit out of stock for two weeks while deciding what to do next.

The honest version of this

This isn't passive income — every number above assumes you actually did the selling: photographed it, listed it or hosted the live, packed it, shipped it. The margin is real and it's yours, but it's earned per item, not automatic. Anyone selling you a version of this where the effort disappears is skipping the part that actually determines whether your numbers look like the example above or worse.

FAQ: Q: Is the reseller price the same as my final profit? A: No — it's the acquisition cost. Your actual margin is the retail price minus the reseller price minus whatever fees your selling platform charges.

Q: Do platform fees vary much between where I sell? A: Yes, meaningfully — see our TikTok Shop vs. Whatnot breakdown for real numbers on each.

Q: What actually determines monthly earnings more than per-item margin? A: Restocking speed. Reordering what's already selling matters more to your total than squeezing a few extra points of margin out of any single item.