Flip profit-per-hour calculator — is this buy worth your time?

The calculator Profit per hour, and the most you can pay

Try the two items from the book first:

What it sells for (median of recent solds, $)

What it costs you to buy ($)

Platform planning rate (%)

eBay: plan on 15% — its 13.6% is charged on the buyer's sales tax too.

Per-item costs (postage + packing + returns allowance + per-order fee, $)

Your minutes per item (sourcing to shipped)

Your hurdle ($ an hour every buy must pay)

Your numbers

Profit on this item —

Sells for … × what you paid —

Profit per hour —

Most you can pay —

The call —

Profit per hour, for this item's cost, at every selling price

The line is what an hour pays at each selling price; the dashed line is your hurdle. The orange dot is this item. Hover the chart to read any point, or open the table under it for every value.

The calculator needs JavaScript. The maths: profit = sells for × (1 − planning rate) − per-item costs − what you paid; profit per hour = profit ÷ (minutes ÷ 60); most you can pay = sells for × (1 − planning rate) − per-item costs − hurdle × minutes ÷ 60; buy only if the price is at or under that, otherwise walk.

A hurdle that prices your hour, written on the card you carry, is the method in Reselling — Advanced →

How to read it A high return on what you paid is not a high return on your time

The usual buying rule is a multiple: buy it if it sells for three, five, seven times what you paid. It's quick and it protects beginners from overpaying. But a cheap thing still has to be cleaned, photographed, listed, answered about and posted — nearly the same minutes as a dear one. Once your week is full, those minutes are the expensive part.

A worked example

The $2 gadget that sells for $14 is a 7× buy. After a 15% planning rate and $8 of per-item costs it leaves about $1.90 — at 48 minutes, roughly $2.38 an hour. The $14 scale that sells for $48 is only about 3.4×, and leaves about $18.80 — roughly $23.50 an hour. With a $20 hurdle, the most you could pay for the scale is $40.80 − $8 − $16 = $16.80, so at $14 it's a buy; nothing you could pay for the gadget would clear it.

Common questions

Where do my minutes per item come from?

From a one-week time study: every block of reselling time, written down, split across the items it served. An honest average beats a guess — guesses are almost always too low.

What should my hurdle be?

A figure between what your hours earn now and what your best kind of item earns, written down with a date — and raised only on a date, with evidence, never lowered in the aisle.

Is this advice?

No — arithmetic on numbers you enter. Your results depend on your buyers, your costs and the platform's current fees.

This calculator comes from a book.

It's the buy hurdle from Reselling — Advanced, where a reseller whose week is full learns to grow by changing the economics instead of adding hours.

See the Reselling series →