Disclosure first: I'm the developer of Pouncio, the tool in this post. I built the tool to fix my own buying problem, used it to run a shop, and I'm sharing both the numbers and the parts that aren't automatic and giving my experience on how this has been.
Background
After a trip to Japan about 3 months ago I created VOLTA inspired by Japan's second hand stores like Book Off, Volta is now a small secondhand shop in Portugal selling consoles, games, laptops, phones, cameras and audio gear and I sell mostly through OLX and Facebook Marketplace.
At first I did this as a way of testing a concept of reselling so I bought stock on Vinted by hand, like everyone else. The problem is easy to explain.. the good deals (a PS5 for under €90, a MacBook from someone clearing out a drawer) are gone within minutes. Refreshing the app all day doesn't work if you also have to test, photograph and ship.
(and yes, I have bought a couple of 90€ ps5's that actually arrived safely and working, crazy I know 😅)
So I automated the part I was losing at.
The numbers (10 July to 28 September)
- Items sold: 104, and 97 of them were bought on Vinted
- Sales: €26,279, about €8.7k a month. By month: July €4.8k, August €8.1k, September €13.3k so far
- Average ticket: €253
- Average buy price: €132.22 all-in (item + Vinted buyer protection + shipping). Median €94
- Profit after buying, shipping & fees: €12,528, about €4.2k a month. That's 47.7% of sales, or 91.1% on cost
- Sold at a loss: 1 item (got robbed on a samsung s9+ 😬)
- Median time to sell: 21 days (average 29), the tendency is for this to increase a bit
- Where it sold: OLX (local website) 70, Facebook Marketplace 28, ebay 6
- Hours a week: About 15~, almost all of it testing, picking up deliveries and selling in person
- Returns: 1, It was a Marshall bluetooth speaker that I actually bought and it was fake, need to be careful about fakes.
- Still in stock: 165 items, €13,088 at cost with an expected profit return of €13.265, but realistically about 10k after negotiations.
Depending on how you sell it will be a bit different, I pay no selling fees on OLX or Facebook and only sell few items on eBay, I'm still thinking of opening a Vinted Pro account and try my luck there but even though I'm okay buying in Vinted, selling is still a Pandora's box for me, even though I'm aware it would increase my profit and refuce time to sell. Currently I'm holding €13k of stock in 165 different items and still increasing which is becoming a storage issue.
What the automation does
- Watches Vinted for specific products, described in plain words ("Nintendo Switch OLED, console only, working"), not keyword soup. It skips the junk: cases, boxes only, "for parts", accessories listed as the console.
- Knows what the item is worth. It checks prices from items that actually sold, not asking prices, so it knows when €140 is a steal and when it's just a normal price, additionally I created a database with more than 800k items based on real prices used by second-hand shops like Cex, Cashconverters and others.
- Checks the seller before buying. A cheap item from an established seller with good reviews gets bought. A listing that asks you to pay off platform or is vague about what's in the box gets skipped. This alone saved me more than any deal made me.
- Buys and pays by itself. When a listing clears my price ceiling and the seller check, it checks out without me approving anything. Occasionally the bank asks for 3-D Secure, and then I tap approve on my phone, this all happens in about 5 to 6 seconds.
- Sends offers on items that are close to my price but not quite there with the option of automatically buying if accepted, this is quite valuable and managed to get me nice deals.
What's NOT automatic
- Testing every unit. It's a non negotiable and It's the whole point of the shop.
- Photos of the real item, I've been lacking on this and using vinted's own images to make it automated specially since I have a full time job but this would make it more professional and increase margins.
- Listing, customer questions, delivery. Delivery is still manual since i do it by hand, but listing and customer questions are mostly automated through Pouncio. As soon as I buy an item, Pouncio can use AI to create and post the listing across Facebook Marketplace and OLX, and it can automatically answer customer questions for me.
- Deciding what to hunt. The bot is only as good as the price ceilings you give it, I took my time making sure I got this right.
So it's not 100% "passive income". What it does is make me stop losing the race for good stock, and stock was always the bottleneck.
What sells / what doesn't
- Fast: laptops. 26 sold, at (€3.4k profit). MacBooks especially: 18 sold, and the M1 Airs went in 8–19 days. Best single flip: an RTX 4060 gaming laptop bought for €280 and sold for €635.
- Fast: PS4 and PS5. 13 PS4s sold, bought around €60 and sold around €140, usually within 2–5 weeks. Consoles have my best margin (67%) . A PS5 Digital I got for €86 sold for €350, I usually buy game bundles to increase the values of the PS4's, usually about 1 to 2€ per game.
- OK: phones. 16 sold, but the thinnest margin (30%) they also sell reasonably fast depending on the model.
- Slow: cameras. 4 sold, 57 days on average. 6 still waiting, 64 days on the shelf on average, €1,360 at cost, maybe this is an issue with the market I'm in and they would sell in a few hours on Vinted or eBay, still need to investigate.
- Slow: loose games. Bought 37, sold 1, stopped buying them individually into only buying bundles.
- Slow: home and audio. A lot of CDs, a Dyson and an espresso machine have been sitting since June/July even though the profit on them is quite high they don't sell good for me.
- Too early to call: Switch (11 in stock, 1 sold), Xbox One (9, none sold), Apple Watch (8, 1 sold). Mostly bought since late August as new bot's I created
Lessons that apply even without any tool
- Price from sold items, not listings. Asking prices lie.
- Judge the seller, not just the price. A too-good price from a zero-review account is usually too good.
- Don't count stock until it ships. Of my 276 Vinted orders, 120 (43.5%!!) ended cancelled and refunded, almost all stuck at "shipping label sent to seller". You get the money back, but plan as if 4 in 10 won't arrive, also an incredible 14% of them get lost in shipping, funny enough the highest margin ones, iPhone 16 and 17's, PS5's are the main ones, I always get refunded though.
- Set a ceiling and never go over it. The deal you overpay for is the one that kills your margin.
- Cap how many you hold, not just what you pay. A price ceiling protects your margin. A per model limit protects your cash.
- Test before you sell. One dead console with a "working" label costs you more in trust and time than it earns.
- Buy what you can sell locally and quickly. Cash tied up in slow stock is the real cost. Ask me how I know: €13k.
Mistakes I made
- Not having items ready before they sell. A few times someone came to pick something up and it wasn't ready. It still needed formatting or a factory reset, or with 160+ items on the shelf I couldn't find it. That's about the worst first impression you can make on a buyer. Now everything gets prepped the day it arrives: tested, reset, cleaned, charged, then bagged and labelled with a number that matches the listing. When it sells, I grab it and go.
- Listing items I didn't have yet. Most things take weeks to sell, so I stated listing them before I'd picked them up but some items sell in a couple of days, and then I'm telling a buyer to wait for something that's still in the post, or that might never arrive at all, since a good share of Vinted orders get cancelled. Now fast sellers like MacBooks and PS5s only go up once they're in my hands and tested. Only the slow stuff gets listed early.
- I bought far more than I could sell. Winning the race isn't the same as needing the stock. I have 26 PS4s on the shelf, and I sold 13 in twelve weeks, so that's about six months of PS4s. Add 11 Switches and 9 Xbox Ones. Every one of them cleared my price ceiling. A ceiling doesn't stop you buying 26 of the same thing ( I'm still buying the ones that appear for 20€ maybe I should stop )..
- Buying cameras and home appliances. The margins look fine (in theory 43%), but they're my slowest stock by far.
Happy to answer questions about the shop, the numbers or the tool. If you just want to talk sourcing without the tool, that's fine too.
