The last reselling scorecard closed two months at $1,348.60 profit after fees and pickup. Eighty sales. About $28 a sale. eBay on top.
What that post left out on purpose: hours.
Profit without time is a screenshot. Here’s the time, as it actually runs now — and what it looked like before I stopped doing this the hard way.
The current weekly rhythm
This is not a timesheet for every minute since August 1. It is the pattern I run now:
| Work | How long | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing / pickup | ~1 hour | ~3× per week |
| Photos + editing | 30–45 minutes | depends on how many items I shot |
| Listing + pricing | ~5–10 minutes | with the current system |
| Messages / packing / drop-off | ~5 minutes max | when something sells |
Sourcing is the biggest block: roughly three hours a week in the field. Photos are the next chunk. Listing used to be the silent killer. Packing is short because the pipeline is already set up.
The listing change that mattered
Before I had a real listing system, each item took about 10 minutes to list. Titles, comps, fields, platform quirks — ten minutes adds up fast when you are trying to keep a closet full.
Now listing and pricing for an item sits in a 5–10 minute band, not a 10-minute floor every time. That is not “I type faster.” It is a repeatable process so I am not reinventing the title and the comps from scratch on every SKU.
I also built a sourcing helper so pickup is not pure guesswork — what is worth putting in the cart vs what will sit. I am not going to pretend that tool is a public product in this post. I will say this: removing “what should I buy?” from every trip is a big part of why sourcing stays about an hour, a few times a week, instead of an all-day wander.
Rough hours for the two profitable months
If you run that weekly pattern across roughly nine weeks (Aug + Sep):
- Sourcing: ~3 hours × 9 ≈ 27 hours
- Photos / listing / ops: variable, but clearly less than sourcing for me now
Call the whole operation on the order of ~35–45 hours across two months if the photo and listing weeks stay light-to-normal. That is an estimate, not a stopwatch. If I was heavier on photos some weeks, it trends up.
On $1,348.60 profit, that band is roughly $30–$40 per hour after fees and pickup — before tax, before the cost of my own mistakes, and before counting the weeks that were still underwater at the start of the experiment.
That hourly range is the useful number. Not “I made $1,349.” Not “reselling is easy.” About thirty to forty dollars an hour when the month locks, with a system that keeps listing from eating the day.
What this is not
- A claim that every week hits that rate. August had to climb out of the early hole.
- A claim that packing is always five minutes. Returns and odd ships exist; they have not been the bulk of the time.
- A course pitch. The sourcing helper and listing system are how I removed guesswork. If I ever productize them, that gets its own receipt — cost to build, time saved, whether anyone else should care.
Compared to the old way
Old listing math at 10 minutes an item: 80 sold items alone would be 13+ hours of listing, and that ignores everything that listed and did not sell. The new process does not make photography free and does not make sourcing optional. It stops listing from being the part that makes you quit after a long pickup.
Verdict
Would I trade the systems for “just wing it” again? No.
The profit post without hours was incomplete. With hours, $1,349 looks like what it is: a real side stream at a real hourly rate when the cost column is locked and the workflow is not chaos.
Next scorecard still follows the same rule — gross, fees, COGS, profit — and I will keep the time buckets honest when the range changes.
If you want the shortlist of hustles I’d try before building any of this, the free starter kit is still the front door.
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