Rob delivers other people's parcels for a living and has still never once offered to carry mine. In 2025 I sold 43 items on Vinted, which came to about thirty parcels, a lot of old carrier bags and a lot of Tuesday evenings on the landing with a roll of tape and the cat sitting on the pile. This is what a year of it came to.
The numbers
- Sold: 43 items for £186.40, an average of £4.33 each
- Bought: 31 items for £142.60, an average of £4.60 each, with postage and the buyer protection fee included
- Net: £43.80 in our favour
As a seller I pay nothing, because the buyer covers the protection fee, so the £186.40 is what arrived in my account. The £142.60 is what I actually paid. Add the shop-bought clothes, the charity shop finds and the school's preloved uniform rail, and the children's clothes cost us £644 across 2025, with about 41% of the items second-hand. That's roughly 110 items, 45 of them second-hand and 31 of those from Vinted. So Vinted is only part of the picture, but it's the part with a spreadsheet.
What sold, and what didn't
Bundles sold. A bundle of six of Alfie's outgrown t-shirts, all one size, went for £14 within an hour of listing, whereas a single t-shirt at £2 sat there for five weeks. Wellies, football boots, a decent fleece and anything with a dinosaur on it moved quickly. A pair of Isla's Clarks sandals went for £7 and her old winter coat for £12.
School uniform didn't sell. It has the school's logo on it and nobody outside the school wants it, which is why the PTA rail exists and why the outgrown sweatshirts went there instead. Party dresses sold for far less than I'd hoped, and underwear is not something I'd list. Anaya gets Isla's outgrown clothes directly, through Priya, and that's a tidier arrangement than any app. Some things are worth more handed over at the school gate than they are at £2.
Photographing takes the longest. I do it at ten o'clock on a bright morning, with the item flat on a white sheet on the bed by the bay window and a ruler beside it for the measurements. A decent photograph and an honest description save half the messages. It still takes me about two hours a month, which I stopped counting somewhere around March.
Messages are the other time cost. "Is this still available?" arrives, roughly once a week, about an item that is plainly still listed, and the polite answer is always yes. Some buyers ask for a lower price on a £2 t-shirt. I say yes to most of them, because the alternative is the t-shirt living in a box until Alfie's grown out of the next size too.
The refund
There was one bad sale. A buyer bought a coat (Alfie's old navy puffer, £11) and messaged three days later to say the zip was stiff. A day after that she wanted to send it back. She attached a photograph, and in the photograph the coat was very clearly being worn, on what looked like the touchline of a muddy football match. I wasn't cross. I offered her half back, £5.50, she took it, and that sale counts in the £186.40 as £5.50. It isn't a win, exactly, but it closed the matter, and I've kept a note of her username.
I also bought two things that didn't fit. One was a pair of football trousers for Alfie, labelled 5 to 6 and sized for a bear, which went straight back on the site at what I paid. The other was a navy cardigan with a hole in the elbow that the photographs hadn't shown. I now ask for a picture of the inside.
What I do now
I buy from the same seller where I can, so the postage is shared. I list on a Sunday night, when people seem to be scrolling. The clothes sit in labelled boxes by size under Alfie's bed. And I no longer assume every outgrown item is worth listing, because some are worth more as a free hand-me-down than as £2 in an account.
The sums: sold £186.40, bought £142.60, so £43.80 up. Add the coat we didn't have to buy new, Alfie's £12 one this winter, and it's a decent little habit. Not a business, though. Very small, very tidy and, I'd say, very much worth the carrier bags.
