Track Reselling Inventory and Profit: UK Guide

A reseller in the United Kingdom sells £3,000 of items on eBay over a few months. At the end of the quarter, they check their bank balance and expect a tidy sum. What they find is closer to £400 in actual profit, once platform fees, postage, sourcing costs and a slice of their phone bill are factored in. The gap is not a mystery: they were tracking revenue, not profit, and they had never built a spreadsheet that showed the true cost-per-sale.

That is the single most common financial error I see in reselling. The fix is not complicated, but it does require discipline and a tracker built for the way UK reselling actually works. This guide walks you through exactly that: columns, formulas, HMRC alignment and the point at which a spreadsheet is no longer enough.

Why Most UK Resellers Are Tracking the Wrong Number

Revenue vs. Net Profit: The Fatal Blind Spot

Revenue is what the buyer pays you. Net profit is what you keep after every cost has been deducted. For most side-hustle resellers, those two numbers look similar in their heads and wildly different in reality. The gap is fees, postage, packaging, sourcing cost and anything else that left your account because of that sale.

If you are only recording what lands in your PayPal or bank account after a sale, you are already working with incomplete data. eBay, for example, deducts its fees before you receive a penny, so the deposit figure is not the same as gross revenue either. You need a row-by-row tracker that starts with the buyer's total payment and works downward to the number that actually matters.

For a deeper look at how platform costs interact with real margins on specific drops, the UK sneaker reseller profit per pair guide on this site runs through real-world examples that make the fee stacking very concrete.

How eBay Fees Stack (Including the February 2026 Per-Order Increase)

UK business eBay sellers face several fee layers on every transaction. According to Resell Radar's breakdown of eBay UK fees, the total cost across Final Value Fee, regulatory operating fee and per-order charge typically comes to 13-17% of the sale, depending on category. From February 2026, eBay raised its per-order fee to 40p for orders over £10.

One point most resellers miss: eBay calculates fees on the total amount the buyer pays, including postage. If you offer free shipping and bake the postage cost into the item price, your fee base is higher than if you charge postage separately. Neither approach is wrong, but you must model both correctly in your tracker. Listing an item at £30 with free delivery and expecting eBay to charge fees only on £30 is an error that silently erodes margin on every single sale.

For a full breakdown of how eBay and Vinted fees compare in 2026, the eBay and Vinted fees UK 2026 guide covers the current rate cards in detail.

What Your UK Reselling Spreadsheet Must Actually Record

The Non-Negotiable Columns for Multi-Platform Tracking

The columns below are the minimum viable set. Every row is one sold item. If you sourced ten units of the same product, each unit gets its own row when it sells, not a single bulk entry.

• Date of sale (in the UK tax year format, 6 April to 5 April)
• Item description
• Platform (eBay, Vinted, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, etc.)
• Sourcing cost (what you paid, including any delivery to you)
• Sale price (what the buyer paid in total, including any postage)
• Platform fees (broken out per platform, see formulas below)
• Postage cost (what you actually paid to ship the item)
• Packaging cost (bags, boxes, tape, labels - allocated per unit)
• Other direct costs (any cost specific to this sale)
• Net profit per item (sale price minus all of the above)
• Cumulative gross income (running total of sale prices for the tax year)

That last column, cumulative gross income, is not about profit. It is there specifically to monitor your position against HMRC thresholds. More on that in the tax year section below.

As Dashvue's guide to eBay selling fees in the UK makes clear, UK business eBay sellers also pay 20% VAT on their platform fees. That VAT is a real cost until you are VAT-registered (currently a turnover threshold of £90,000), at which point you can reclaim it. Until you reach that threshold, every pound of eBay fees costs you an extra 20p in VAT that you cannot recover.

Setting Up a Template for eBay, Vinted and Depop

The simplest approach is Google Sheets: free, cloud-backed and accessible on your phone when you are sourcing. Create one sheet per tax year, named by the April-to-April period. Use a separate tab as a summary dashboard that pulls totals from the transaction sheet using SUMIF formulas filtered by platform.

Multi-platform resellers face genuinely different fee structures. eBay sits at 13-17% of the total transaction. Vinted and Depop operate on different models with their own percentage and fixed charges. Trying to use a single flat-percentage estimate across all three platforms will give you wrong numbers on most of your sales. The tracker must have a platform column precisely so your fee formula can apply the right rate to each row.

If you want to see how the fee arithmetic interacts with sourcing decisions on specific product categories, the how to run reselling like a real business guide covers the operator mindset behind these numbers.

Calculating True Profit Per Item Across eBay, Vinted and Depop

The Fee Formula for Each Platform

Below is the net profit formula for eBay UK, expressed in plain terms. This is what each cell in your net profit column should calculate:

Net profit = Sale price (including postage) minus sourcing cost minus postage cost minus packaging cost minus (FVF + per-order fee + regulatory operating fee + 20% VAT on those fees)

In a spreadsheet, if your sale price (including postage) is in column D and your sourcing cost is in column E, you might express the eBay fee block as a percentage of column D plus the fixed per-order fee, then multiply by 1.2 to apply the VAT. The exact percentages vary by category, so create a reference table on a separate tab with each category's FVF rate. When you list an item, you record which category it falls into and the formula pulls the right rate.

For Vinted and Depop, the fee structures are simpler but still need their own column logic. Do not use a single average fee percentage across platforms: it will overstate margin on eBay sales and understate it on others, or vice versa, depending on which direction you estimate.

Why VAT on Fees Matters to Your Cashflow

This is the point almost every UK reselling tracker ignores. When eBay charges you a Final Value Fee, it adds 20% VAT on top of that fee. If your FVF is £2.00, you actually pay £2.40. That extra 40p is not recoverable until you are VAT-registered, which requires turnover of £90,000 or more. Below that threshold, the VAT on fees is a real cash cost, and it compounds across every sale.

At modest volumes, the impact feels small. At scale, it is material. A reseller doing £40,000 a year in eBay sales might be paying several hundred pounds in irrecoverable VAT on fees annually. Your spreadsheet should make this visible, not hide it inside a blended fee percentage.

As noted in Xero's guide to Self Assessment for sole traders, understanding which costs are deductible and which are not is foundational to accurate profit reporting. VAT on fees, while frustrating, is a legitimate business cost that reduces your taxable profit if you are recording it correctly.

Aligning Your Tracker to the UK Tax Year, the £1,000 Trading Allowance and Self Assessment

The 6 April to 5 April Tax Year: Why Your Spreadsheet Column Structure Must Match HMRC

Almost every US-built reseller template runs on a January-to-December calendar year. That is wrong for UK resellers. HMRC measures trading income across the tax year from 6 April to 5 April. If your spreadsheet resets on 1 January, your annual totals will never align with your Self Assessment return, and you will spend time reconciling numbers that should have matched automatically.

The fix is straightforward: name your sheet tabs by tax year (for example, "2026-27" for the period 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027) and include a date column in every transaction row. Your cumulative totals then run from 6 April. When it is time to file, you have a single source of truth that already speaks HMRC's language.

Anyone who began trading during 2025/26 must register for Self Assessment by 5 October 2026 and file their return by 31 January 2027. Miss the registration deadline and you risk a penalty before you have even submitted anything.

When Gross Income Triggers HMRC Registration

The UK trading allowance stands at £1,000 for 2026/27, as confirmed by The Accountancy's guidance on the trading allowance. Below this threshold in gross trading income, you have no obligation to notify HMRC or pay tax on that income.

The critical word is gross. The allowance applies to gross receipts, not to your profit. If you bought items for £800 and sold them for £1,100, your gross income is £1,100. You have already breached the £1,000 threshold and you must register with HMRC, even though your actual profit is only £300. This is a distinction that trips up a huge number of early-stage resellers.

This is precisely why the cumulative gross income column in your tracker matters so much. You need to know when you cross £1,000 in receipts, not just when you turn your first pound of profit. You also need it for the next threshold: Self Assessment registration for anyone earning meaningfully above the allowance. The spreadsheet makes these triggers visible in real time rather than as a nasty surprise at year end.

For a broader look at the cashflow discipline that keeps a reselling operation healthy, the reselling cashflow mistakes guide covers the errors that quietly sink UK side hustles.

When to Leave the Spreadsheet Behind: Scaling, Making Tax Digital and What Comes Next

The Making Tax Digital Income Tax Threshold (April 2026 Onwards)

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD ITSA) launched on 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with gross income above £50,000. As Sage's MTD guide for sole traders explains, these individuals must now submit quarterly digital records to HMRC rather than a single annual Self Assessment return. The threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and to £20,000 in April 2028.

A plain spreadsheet does not satisfy MTD obligations. HMRC requires submissions through MTD-compatible software. If you are approaching £50,000 in gross income (and remember, that is gross, not profit), the time to set up compatible software is now, not when you hit the threshold and scramble.

Even below the MTD thresholds, the spreadsheet is always a transitional tool. It is stage one. The habits you build at stage one, clean rows, accurate fee accounting, tax-year alignment, are exactly the habits that make the move to dedicated software straightforward rather than a painful data archaeology project.

The Middle Step: Reseller OS for Inventory and Sales Tracking

Before you need full accounting software, there is a more efficient middle ground. Reseller OS - one of HTD's verified partners - is a desktop app designed specifically for resellers. It connects to your email notifications and automatically pulls in incoming stock as it arrives, so you are not manually logging every purchase. From there it manages order tracking and syncs directly with platforms like eBay to pull your sales and profit data automatically.

It is not accounting software and it is not a replacement for the HMRC-aligned record-keeping covered above. But for the operational layer - knowing what stock you are holding, what has shipped, and what you have actually made on each sale - it is considerably more efficient than maintaining that picture by hand in a spreadsheet. If you find yourself spending meaningful time each week updating rows rather than sourcing, Reseller OS is worth looking at before committing to a full accounting package.

Moving to Xero, QuickBooks or FreeAgent as You Scale

Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent are all MTD-compatible and all integrate with major selling platforms. When your volume grows to the point where updating the spreadsheet manually is eating into sourcing time, these tools automate the data entry and keep your records HMRC-ready by default. As LinkMyBooks notes, a spreadsheet suits early-stage sellers well, but automation tools become significantly more efficient at higher volumes.

The migration from spreadsheet to software is far easier if your spreadsheet has been structured correctly from the start. Columns that match standard bookkeeping categories (income, cost of goods sold, platform fees, postage, other direct costs) map cleanly into any accounting package. A spreadsheet that mixed everything into a single "fees" column will require manual sorting before it can be imported anywhere useful.

If you are running automated checkout on sneaker or limited drops alongside your manual reselling activity, that income sits in the same sole-trader tax picture and needs to be in the same tracker. The HTD ACO service operates on a pay-after-success basis, so income only arises when a checkout actually lands. That makes the accounting straightforward: record the sale and the ACO fee as a cost in the same row, and your net profit per unit is accurate from the start.

Build the Tracker Once, Use It Every Drop

The spreadsheet described in this guide is not complex. It is a disciplined structure applied consistently. The value is not in the formula sophistication: it is in the habit of recording every cost before you book a sale as a win. Reselling without accurate tracking is guessing, and guessing does not survive at scale.

Once your tracker is live, the best next step is to audit one month of actual sales across all your platforms. Pull your bank deposits, your platform payout summaries and your postage receipts, then reconcile them against your spreadsheet rows. Any gap you find is a cost you were not capturing. Close that gap before you add more inventory, because margin errors compound as volume grows.

If you want to build this kind of operational discipline alongside other UK resellers who are doing the same thing properly, Hit The Drop is a community built around exactly that mindset. No income guarantees, no hype: just operators sharing what actually works and what it actually costs. Request community access and see whether it is the right fit for where you want to take your reselling.

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Sources

• https://resellradar.co.uk/blog/ebay-fees-explained-uk-sellers
• https://dashvue.co.uk/blog/what-are-ebay-selling-fees-uk-guide
• https://www.theaccountancy.co.uk/tax/tax-relief/can-i-use-the-trading-allowance-57305.html
• https://www.sage.com/en-gb/blog/self-assessment-ending-making-tax-digital-sole-traders/
• https://www.xero.com/uk/guides/self-assessment-for-sole-trader/
• https://linkmybooks.com/blog/ebay-seller-accounting-spreadsheet-free-download

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