How many hours per week does secondhand selling take

It's the question rarely asked out loud but that decides everything: how much time will this activity take each week? Without a concrete answer, it's impossible to know if it fits alongside a job, if it can replace a salary, or if you're simply creating a second poorly paid job for yourself.

The honest answer is not a single number. Time depends far less on your ambition than on the number of listings online and your level of organization. Here's the detail, position by position.

The only calculation that matters: time per item

All your time management comes down to one single measure: how many minutes does one item cost you, from its arrival at your place to its departure to the buyer.

On a standard operation, without any particular method, count between 25 and 35 minutes per article. That sounds enormous, and yet it's what most sellers measure when they honestly time themselves. The detail breaks down like this.

• Receiving and sorting: 2 to 3 minutes. Open, check condition, decide if the item goes for sale or not.
• Preparation: 4 to 8 minutes. Wash if needed, defrost, iron, remove pilling. This is the most underestimated position.
• Photos: 6 to 10 minutes. Set up, frame several angles, photograph defects, adjust lighting.
• Description and price: 5 to 8 minutes. Title, description, measurements, research of the price practised on comparable items.
• Exchanges with buyers: 3 to 6 minutes. Spread over the entire lifetime of the listing.
• Shipping: 5 to 8 minutes. Packaging, label, trip to drop-off point, averaged per item.

What that looks like depending on your activity size

Around twenty listings online

This is the level of an extended wardrobe clearance. Count 2 to 4 hours per week, concentrated mainly on times when you add new items. Weeks without new stock drop to less than an hour: a few messages, one or two shipments.

At this level, the activity fits in the gaps of a full-time job without any particular organizational effort.

Around a hundred listings

The shift happens here, and it surprises almost everyone. Count 8 to 12 hours per week. It's not just the volume that goes up: it's the nature of the work that changes. You shift from putting items up for sale to managing stock, with storage, tracking, follow-ups and items gathering dust.

This is the level where many quit, not from lack of sales but because the activity spills into everything else. We detail exactly what breaks at this moment in our article on moving from 50 to 200 listings.

Two to three hundred listings

Between 20 and 30 hours per week if you work the old way, item by item. That's a real part-time job, sometimes more. At this level, the gap between organized sellers and others becomes huge: the first hold the same volume in 12 to 15 hours.

The difference doesn't come from speed of execution but from grouping tasks, which we discuss below.

Beyond three hundred listings

It's full-time, and it won't hold without tools and method. Sellers who actually live from this activity at this level have all done two things: they've industrialized their movements, and they've equipped themselves.

The four positions that make hours skyrocket

When a seller finds that "it takes forever", it's almost always one of these four positions causing it.

Unit work. Photographing one item takes ten minutes. Photographing fifteen items in a row takes sixty, or four minutes each. Setting up the background, adjusting light, tidying: these gestures cost once for fifteen items as for one. Treating item by item, on the go, is by far the biggest waste.

Trips to the drop-off point. Shipping as soon as an order arrives gives the impression of being responsive and costs a full trip per package. Two fixed slots per week eliminate most of this time.

Researching price on every item. Looking up how much each piece is worth, one by one, takes considerable time. Building reference points by brand and category transforms this research into reflex. The method is detailed in how to set your prices.

Poorly organized stock. Finding a sold item is pure time, with no return. On a hundred listings, five minutes of searching per sale represents several hours per month. Noting a location at the time of listing eliminates this entirely.

The invisible time we forget to count

The estimates above only cover item processing. Three activities add to this and appear in no calculation.

Sourcing first. Finding stock takes time: thrift shop visits, supplier exchanges, sorting on site. Count 2 to 5 hours per month as soon as you buy to resell, more if you travel far.

Administration next. Sales tracking, accounting, declarations. It's little each week, but it's unavoidable, and it becomes heavy if you let it pile up. Our guide on status and declarations clarifies what's really mandatory.

Mental load finally, which doesn't get timed but which weighs. Thinking about follow-ups, items that won't sell, pending messages: that time doesn't show on any sheet and it tires as much as the rest. We devote an entire article to it, the mental load of the secondhand seller.

How many hours to live from it

That's the real question behind all the others. The answer depends on your average margin per item, not on the number of hours.

Take a simple example. If you make 12 euros net margin per item sold and you want 1,500 euros per month, you need to sell 125 items monthly. At 30 minutes per item, that's 62 hours of work, or roughly 15 hours per week. At 15 minutes per item, once organized and equipped, that's 31 hours, or less than 8 hours per week.

The lever is therefore not to work more, it's to bring down the time per item. Cutting that time in half doubles your hourly income without selling one more article. That's also why margin per item matters as much as volume, a calculation we detail in working out your margin in secondhand.

Three concrete ways to cut time in half

Sellers holding three hundred listings in fifteen hours per week don't work faster. They've eliminated repeated gestures.

Process in batches, never individually. Choose a day when you photograph everything that arrived during the week, in a row, with the background and light set up just once. The same day, you write product sheets one after another, while the items are fresh in your mind. This alone cuts time per item by ten to fifteen minutes.

Give yourself templates. A title template per category, a description template with fields to fill, a price grid per brand. Writing becomes filling in and not creating each time. This is where sellers waste the most time without noticing, because each sheet seems quick in isolation.

Organize by location, not by category. Number your bins and note the number on the sheet when listing. Finding a sold item goes from five minutes to fifteen seconds. On a hundred sales per month, that's almost eight hours recovered.

None of these three habits require investment. They only require being set up before volume forces you to in a rush.

What to remember

Secondhand selling costs between 2 and 4 hours per week at twenty listings, 8 to 12 hours at a hundred listings, and part-time beyond two hundred. These figures are not unavoidable: they correspond to item-by-item work.

Grouping tasks, organizing your stock by location, fixing two shipping slots and having price reference points bring time per item from 30 to 15 minutes. This is the only project that truly changes things, and it's better to run it before hitting the hundred-listing milestone than after.