How to Find Real Profit per Item: Fees, Shipping, Supplies, Miles

Four numbers, four formulas

Each of these answers a different question, and they are easy to confuse. The definitions below are the ones every tool on this site uses.

Item price here means the price of the item itself, excluding the shipping and the sales tax the buyer pays. Margin can’t exceed 100%; ROI and markup often do on thrifted items, which is why a 300% markup can sit next to a 45% margin on the same sale.

The measures can also point in opposite directions. Compare the house example below with a pair of athletic shoes bought for $150.00 plus $12.00 sales tax and sold on eBay for $250.00 with free shipping, a $12.00 label, the same $0.85 of supplies and 6 miles:

The shoes earn more than twice the dollars but tie up $162.00 to do it. Which matters more depends on whether your limit is cash for inventory or time and shelf space.

The worked example, start to finish

The house example: you bought a piece of clothing at a thrift store for $12.00 and paid $0.96 in sales tax at the register (8%, an example). You sell it on eBay for $50.00, charge $8.00 shipping and buy an $8.00 label. The buyer pays 8% sales tax on item and shipping (an example rate; the marketplace charges the rate for the buyer’s address). You used $0.85 of supplies and allocate 6 miles of a sourcing trip to it. Sale date: October 5, 2026.

From that profit:

• Margin: $22.71 ÷ $50.00 = 45.4%
• ROI: $22.71 ÷ ($12.00 + $0.96) = $22.71 ÷ $12.96 = 175.2%
• Markup: ($50.00 − $12.00) ÷ $12.00 = 316.7%

The “$38 profit” from the first paragraph is really the markup in dollars. After everything else, $22.71 is left, and $27.27 if you leave the mileage out. Fee components are rounded to the cent and then added; platforms may round differently by a cent. The eBay fee rules behind these two lines are in eBay’s selling fees page, as of October 5, 2026.

If you offer free shipping instead

Shipping is where per-item profit leaks most quietly. List the same item at $50.00 with free shipping and you still buy the $8.00 label, but nothing comes in to cover it. On eBay the buyer then pays $54.00 ($50.00 plus 8% tax), the fees fall to $7.74, and the net payout drops to $50.00 − $7.74 − $8.00 = $34.26. With the same $18.37 of costs, profit falls from $22.71 to $15.89, a 31.8% margin.

Raise the price to $58.00 with free shipping and the buyer pays the same $62.64 as before. Because eBay charges its fee on the total, the fees are the same $8.92 and the profit is the same $22.71. The margin reads 39.2% only because the item price in the formula is now $58.00. Free shipping is a pricing choice, not a cost saving.

Spreading shared costs: supplies and sourcing trips

Supplies: spread the pack over the items

Supplies are bought in bulk and used one package at a time, so the per-item cost is a division. A worked example with example prices that add up to the house $0.85:

Use your own receipts and counts. A box instead of a mailer, or a bundle that ships several items in one package, changes the figure, so it’s worth redoing the division whenever you change suppliers or packaging.

Sourcing trips: allocate the miles

A thrift run is shared by everything you bought on it. The simplest fair split is by item: drive 30 miles round trip, come home with 5 items, and charge each one 6 miles. At 76¢ a mile that is 30 × 76¢ = $22.80 for the trip, or $4.56 per item.

The rate is the IRS business standard mileage rate. For 2026 it changed mid-year: 72.5¢ a mile from January 1 to June 30 (IR-2025-128) and 76¢ from July 1 to December 31, set by Announcement 2026-11 in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29. It was 70¢ for 2025 (IRS rate table). The same item sold on March 14, 2026 would carry 6 × 72.5¢ = $4.35 of mileage and a $22.92 profit.

Splitting by item count is simple but not the only way. If the five items cost $12, $8, $5, $3 and $2 ($30 in all), you could split the 30 miles by share of cost instead: the $12 item would carry 12 miles, or $9.12 at 76¢. Pick one method and use it consistently, so items stay comparable.

Two cautions. First, the IRS rate is a deduction rate, not your car’s actual cost per mile; our calculator uses it only as a stand-in, and your real cost may be higher or lower. Second, using it in profit math doesn’t make the trip deductible; whether sourcing miles are deductible depends on IRS rules about your place of business and your records, covered in the mileage guide.

Item cost: include the tax you paid

The sales tax on your thrift receipt is part of what the item cost you. IRS Publication 334 says that when you buy merchandise for resale, the sales tax is part of the cost of the merchandise (Pub 334). That is why the example counts $12.96 as the money invested, not $12.00, and why ROI divides by $12.96.

The same publication treats freight-in (what you pay to get purchased stock delivered to you) as part of cost of goods sold. If you buy a lot online and pay shipping on it, divide that shipping across the items in the lot along with the purchase price.

For your tax return, item costs are counted through cost of goods sold on Schedule C, which subtracts the inventory still on hand at the end of the year, so the timing follows its own rules; small business taxpayers have other inventory options (Schedule C instructions, Part III). The per-item profit here is a pricing tool, not a tax figure; the inventory guide covers the tax side.

The same item on four platforms

Costs don’t change with the platform, but the net payout does. Here is the house example (same $18.37 of costs) on four clothing-friendly marketplaces, with fees as of October 5, 2026:

The fee bases come from each platform’s own page: Depop, Mercari, eBay and Poshmark. The $7.48 gap between the best and worst net carries straight through to profit, because the costs are identical. Depop leads here because it charges U.S. sellers no selling fee, only processing; Mercari and Poshmark don’t charge their fee on the sales tax at all. To see all eight marketplaces at your own price, use the comparison tool; the platform comparison guide explains why the order changes at other prices.

Work backward: the price that hits your target

The same lines answer the question you face at the rack: what does this item have to sell for? With $8 shipping charged, an $8 label where you buy it, an example 8% buyer’s tax and the same $18.37 of costs, these are the lowest prices that reach each goal:

On eBay, any price below $23.38 loses money once supplies and miles are counted, even though $23.38 is $11.38 above the thrift price. Notice that Poshmark breaks even below eBay but needs a higher price for a $20 profit: its flat 20% weighs more as the price rises, while eBay’s fee on the shipping and tax, plus its per-order fee, weighs more at low prices. Our price-to-list calculator solves these for every platform at once, with your own costs.

Profit per hour

Profit per item ignores time, and time is often the real limit. Divide the profit by the hours the item took: sourcing share, cleaning, photos (see product photo setup for the gear and desk space), listing, answering questions and packing.

Batch work makes the minutes harder to see. If you photograph and list 20 items in a two-hour session, each one carries 6 minutes of that session, plus its own packing time and its share of the sourcing trip. Timing one session with a phone stopwatch and dividing by the item count gives a usable average.

Two items with the same profit can be very different uses of an afternoon. A low-profit item that lists in five minutes can beat a high-profit one that needs an hour of repairs and research.

Calculate it for your own item

1. Write down the sale: item price, shipping you charged, label you bought, and the platform with its options (Store, tier, boost).
2. Get the net payout from the platform’s order details, or compute it with our calculators. Remember the buyer’s sales tax is not yours, even where the fee is charged on it; on eBay and Depop, for example, it raises the fee.
3. Add your item cost with the sales tax from the receipt, plus any shipping you paid to get the item.
4. Add supplies per item from your pack-price divisions.
5. Allocate sourcing miles (trip miles ÷ items bought) and value them at the IRS rate for the sale date, or at your own cost per mile.
6. Add other costs that belong to this item: repairs, cleaning, authentication.
7. Subtract to get profit, then compute margin (÷ item price), ROI (÷ cost plus sourcing tax) and profit per hour (÷ hours).

What the per-item number leaves out

A few costs don’t belong to one sale but still come out of your pocket:

• Monthly subscriptions: an eBay Store, Amazon’s $39.99 Professional plan, crosslisting or shipping software. Spread them over your monthly sales: the Amazon plan over 40 sales a month adds $1.00 per item (which plan is cheaper), so the house example sold on Amazon would show $20.77 profit instead of $21.77.
• Payout fees, such as Mercari’s $3 Instant Pay, if you use them.
• Returns and items that never sell. An item that doesn’t sell still cost you its price, its sourcing tax and its share of the trip. The per-item profit on the items that do sell overstates the result of the whole haul; for a truer picture, add up profit across everything bought on a trip, including the leftovers at their cost. For a pallet or bin bought as one lot, the liquidation pallet guide works out the break-even count when part of the lot never sells.
• Income tax and self-employment tax on the profit, which depend on your whole return. Our tax set-aside calculator estimates them; for your own situation, ask a tax professional.

Next step

Run your item through the reseller profit calculator: it starts from the real net payout for the platform you pick, then subtracts cost, sourcing tax, supplies and miles at the IRS rate for your sale date, and shows margin, ROI, markup and profit per hour.