Closet Clean-Out: Appraising Your Activewear and Choosing A Selling Price

Pricing your listings right really makes the selling process easier.  Your listings are more likely to sell faster if they’re priced fairly, and having a good idea of the price means you’ll get a fair payment for your goods, too.  Here’s my strategy for deciding how to price my listings.

Finding the style and color name

First: find the name of the item you’re selling.  This can really help get your listings out the door, so it’s worth taking a few minutes to do this if you don’t remember off the top of your head.  If you still have the tags, perfect!  If you don’t, and you ordered the item online, you can try searching through your old emails (I use gmail and archive all of my order confirmations instead of deleting them).

If none of that is an option for you, try searching Google images for some keywords.  Maybe “lululemon pink shorts” as a good first pass.  If you remember the color but not the name, try searching something like “lululemon bordeaux crops”.  Scroll through the search results and see if you recognize something that pops up.  Often, search results will have the name attached either in the image name itself or the page it was originally posted in.

Having the actual style and color name really helps with the selling process, especially for lululemon listings.  It helps people find your listings more easily and therefore makes them more likely to sell.  Also, it helps potential buyers know exactly what they’re going to get.

The color name isn’t quite as important as the style name, but also can be very helpful.  It’s more important for common styles like lululemon cool racerbacks.  There are a million shades of blue out there, so knowing the actual name can go a long way.

Searching sold listings

The (not so) secret sauce behind my pricing strategy: looking up sold listings!  The sold section of eBay and Poshmark are an excellent resource for finding out what people have recently paid for something very similar to what you’re selling.  The key here is checking the sold listings, not the active listings.  Although you might be able to glean a little something out of active listings, they usually don’t give you nearly as much insight as to the actual worth.  Someone could have a listing going where they’re asking $1,000 for used socks, but that doesn’t mean that’s what they’re worth!

Here’s a brief video showing how to search sold listings on both eBay and Poshmark:

As I mentioned in the video, you might need to do a couple of searches before you can start to get a sense of what prices are the norm.  Try starting with one specific search, and then cast a wider net (or a smaller one!) with your search terms if you don’t feel like the search results were helpful.

Once you’ve perused a fair few listings, you can make a more informed decision on what price you’re comfortable with.  You’ll usually see both high and low outliers, but try to focus on what the more common selling prices are.  If you want your listing to sell quickly, choose a price on the lower end of what you saw in the sold section, or the higher end if you’re willing to be a little more patient.  Personally, I usually opt to price mine right around the middle or maybe a tad bit below, then lower it later on as I see fit.  I like to get my goods out the door in a month or less, so I price accordingly.

If you’re doing a more generic search, keep in mind that different colors can have different levels of demand and therefore different prices.  Although different colors of the same style can provide some helpful clues, take them with a grain of salt, especially if they appear to be much higher or lower than yours.  Interestingly, different sizes of the same item also can command slightly different prices.  The most popular sizes for lululemon seem to be 4 and 6, so these sizes usually sell for slightly higher than others.  You can expect roughly the same sizes (XS and S) to sell a little more easily in other brands as well.  Overall, you definitely want to weigh the differences between your item and the specific sold listings you’re seeing.  If one listing had pictures that were really bad and yours are good, you might be able to ask a tad bit higher.  If the sold listing was NWT and yours shows signs of wear, expect yours to go for a little lower.

Although it may seem a bit confusing at first, you’ll eventually get an intuition for the pricing thing!  Practice, practice.

Some final suggestions

If after all this, you can’t find any good comparison points, or you’re just feeling overwhelmed, my rule of thumb is to start out with a price around one third to one half of retail value.  This strategy almost always works!  One of the main reasons I do a sold search is to be sure I’m not selling myself short.  As you could see in the define jacket video, if I priced that jacket at $40 (1/3 of retail), I’d be seriously missing out!

Also, this post seems like an opportune time to point out: forget about what you paid!  A lot of people fall into the trap that just because they paid x dollars for something, that automatically means it’s worth about the same amount.  Even if the item in question is brand new, it’s hard to get full price for something on the resale market.  Although some styles (like arguably the define jacket above) might hold their value very well, most people on the resale market are looking to get a deal and want to see a price that’s noticeably more affordable than the full retail value.  Don’t automatically assume anything about value, and don’t be afraid to absorb the loss.  What you paid in the past is the past!

Next in the closet clean-out series: we still need to cover how to take nice pictures of your items, then we’ll (finally!) get to an in-depth tutorial on where and how to list, plus go over best practices for getting fast sales.