A year from now, you will either know what "buyer's premium" means before the hammer falls — or you will be the new face at the auction-house cashier watching a $400 winning bid quietly become a $480 charge.
A year from now, you will either know that NWOT routinely sells 15–30% below NWT on the same designer dress — or you will be the seller who lists everything as "new" and wonders why half the inventory sits.
A year from now, you will either know that "specific identification" is the inventory accounting method built for one-of-a-kind items — or you will be the reseller scrambling on April 13 to back-fit a year of sales onto a method that does not match how the business actually works.
This is the dictionary that closes those gaps. Thirty-six terms, grouped by the four rooms a vintage or antique reseller walks through in any given week — the estate sale, the auction, the marketplace, and the tax office. Each entry leads with the textbook definition, then the version that matters to someone with a van full of furniture, an eBay store with three hundred active listings, and a Schedule C to file in April.
Read it straight through if you are new. Bookmark it for the day a term ambushes you.
How this glossary is organized
The terms are grouped by the four worlds a reseller is operating in at the same time:
- The estate sale — the in-person sourcing vocabulary
- The auction room — live, online, consignment, and the math at the cashier
- The marketplace — eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Mercari, and the listing language they share
- The tax office — Schedule C, 1099-K, specific identification, hobby loss
Most resellers learn each term in fragments — usually the moment one of them costs money. The order below is friendlier.
Section 1: The estate sale
The first room is the one with mismatched chairs in a dead-end Cape Cod, ten people in the driveway at 5:45 a.m., and a numbered slip of paper that decides whether you get the Mid-Century walnut credenza or not. The vocabulary below is what the people in line are already using.
Estate sale
A liquidation of the contents of a home, usually held over a weekend, run either by the family or — more commonly for items worth reselling — by a professional estate-sale company that prices the contents and runs the door. The host can be a deceased homeowner's family, a downsizing senior, or a divorcing couple. "Estate sale" is a category, not a guarantee anyone has died.
Why a reseller cares: Estate sales priced by professionals are denser concentrations of resaleable inventory than thrift stores by an order of magnitude — but the priced-by-professionals filter is also what protects most of it from underpricing. The arbitrage is at the edges: the maker mark the lister missed, the era they got wrong, the lot they bundled in haste.
Lot
A bundled group of items sold as a single unit at a single price. "Lot 14: contents of the bookcase, $85." A lot can be three pieces of crystal stemware, twenty-two paperbacks, or every garden tool in the shed.
Why a reseller cares: Lots are where the math works in the reseller's favor. The estate-sale company prices the lot for an in-person shopper who looks at it once; the reseller breaks it into eight listings and prices each individually. A $40 lot of mismatched flatware can yield $180 in individual pieces — minus the four hours of polish, photo, and listing time the math conveniently forgets to count.
Picker
A reseller whose primary sourcing channel is in-person buying — estate sales, auctions, garage sales, thrift stores, antique malls, flea markets. Distinct from a flipper (who buys from any channel) and a dealer (who often owns a physical booth).
Why a reseller cares: "Picker" describes a sourcing style with real tradeoffs. Pickers see condition with their own eyes, pay no shipping in, and find items that never make it online — but spend hours behind the wheel, burn weekends on dead leads, and live or die by their gas-and-mileage math.
Runner
A person who helps a picker carry items to the car, hold a piece in line while the picker keeps shopping, or wait at the cashier while the picker scouts the next room. Sometimes a paid helper; more often a family member or a paired-up reseller friend.
Why a reseller cares: A solo picker can clear about half the rooms in a 90-minute estate sale before fatigue sets in. A picker with a runner can clear all of them. For an estate sale with a $2,500 expected take, the marginal hour of a runner is worth more than the hourly cost of the running labor.
Walk-through
A pre-sale preview held by some estate-sale companies, sometimes only for invited dealers or paid attendees, the day before public hours begin. Allows the reseller to inventory the contents, price-check, and decide which items are worth the 5 a.m. line.
Why a reseller cares: The walk-through is the difference between speculating about whether a Heywood-Wakefield buffet is in the sale and knowing. Whether it is worth attending depends on the company, the entry fee (often $10–$50), and whether the early access is exclusive or simply earlier.
Numbers (the numbers system)
The first-come line management practice where attendees, on arrival, write their names in order on a sheet — or grab a pre-numbered card — and are admitted to the sale in that order. Some sales open the numbers list the day before; some require physical presence in line the morning of.
Why a reseller cares: At competitive sales, the first arrivals claim the bulk of the resale-worthy inventory before the next wave gets through the door. Sleeping in the car to be number two is a real, durable, money-making decision in this trade. Asking other resellers what "numbers" means on day one is the moment the line knows you are new.
Half-price day
Usually the second or third (final) day of an estate sale, when remaining items are discounted — typically to 50% of tag, sometimes graduated (25% off Saturday afternoon, 50% off Sunday morning). Reseller competition spikes mid-day as bargain hunters arrive.
Why a reseller cares: Half-price day inverts the calculus of day one. On day one, you pay full tag for what you most want. On half-price day, you sweep the leftovers — sometimes finding a sleeper the early crowd walked past, often filling a van with breakeven inventory for content and category coverage.
Bulk-out
The final hours of an estate sale, sometimes called "bag day" or "box day," when remaining contents are sold by the bag, box, or by the room for a flat price. "$5 a bag, fill it." The estate-sale company's incentive is to clear the house before the family arrives Monday.
Why a reseller cares: Bulk-out is where the unit economics get strange. Filling a $5 bag with 30 collectible PEZ dispensers worth $3 apiece on eBay is a brilliant trade. Filling the same bag with 30 chipped saucers is a hard afternoon of staging photos for items that sell for $2 minus a $0.40 final-value fee.
Sleeper
An item the estate-sale company priced below its true market value because they missed something — a maker mark on the underside, the era of a hallmark, a signature on a frame backing, a desirable color variant. Finding sleepers is the core skill that separates a hobbyist picker from a reseller with a sustainable margin.
Why a reseller cares: Sleepers are the alpha of the trade. The $12 Pyrex bowl with a barely-visible pattern stamp that sells for $340. The "Made in Occupied Japan" base mark on a $4 figurine. Most sleepers are not in the items everyone is fighting over at 8 a.m.; they are in the lots no one looked at twice.
Section 2: The auction room
The auction is a different kind of room — quieter, more procedural, with rules that get expensive fast if you do not know them. The vocabulary below is the bare minimum for sitting in the audience without losing money to your own ignorance.
Hammer price
The final winning bid amount on a lot, called by the auctioneer when the gavel falls. Does not include buyer's premium, taxes, or shipping. The hammer price is what the auction house reports as the "sold for" number; it is not what the buyer actually pays.
Why a reseller cares: Confusing hammer price with final price is the most expensive math mistake at any auction. A $400 hammer price at a house with a 22% buyer's premium and 7% state sales tax is a $521.84 charge at the cashier — 30% above the number you waved your paddle for.
Buyer's premium
A percentage fee added on top of the hammer price, kept by the auction house. Standard at every major auction house. Rates vary by venue: 15–18% at regional houses, 20–25% at mid-market houses, and 26%+ at the major international houses (Christie's published terms put the buyer's premium near 26% on the first tier of hammer price; Sotheby's tracks similarly).
Why a reseller cares: The buyer's premium is non-negotiable, applies to every winning bid, and dictates the math of every bidding decision. A reseller whose absolute ceiling is $300 at a house with a 22% premium needs to stop bidding at $245 to land at a $300 total. Bidders who do not subtract the premium in their heads regularly overpay by a quarter on every lot.
Reserve / Reserve price
A confidential minimum price the consigner has set, below which the lot will not sell. If bidding does not reach the reserve, the auctioneer "passes" the lot — no sale. Some houses disclose whether a lot is reserved; many do not.
Why a reseller cares: A reserved lot can vanish mid-bid, leaving you the underbidder on an item that did not actually sell to anyone. The auctioneer's "we couldn't get there today" is the giveaway. Reserves matter most when bidding to flip: a reseller who has driven two hours for one lot needs to know whether the reserve game is in play before booking the trip.
Absentee bid
A bid submitted in writing or by phone before the live auction. The auction house executes the bid on the bidder's behalf, bidding only as high as necessary to win, up to the absentee maximum.
Why a reseller cares: Absentee bids are the discipline tool of the resale trade. Setting a maximum at home — when comps and shipping and the buyer's premium are all worked out on paper — and then handing that maximum to the house removes the live-auction adrenaline that makes resellers overpay by 20%. The absentee max should already include the buyer's premium math.
Proxy bid (online)
The online auction equivalent of an absentee bid. The bidder enters a maximum; the platform bids on their behalf in standard increments, only as high as needed to stay ahead, up to the maximum.
Why a reseller cares: Proxy bids change the bidding game at online auctions (Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers, HiBid, and most auction-house portals). A reseller who bids in real time against a proxy is bidding against a robot — the robot will bid one increment higher than the human, every time, until the human stops or the proxy maximum is exceeded. The right move is usually to set your own proxy and walk away from the screen.
Consignment auction
An auction in which the items are sold on behalf of consigners (the original owners) rather than purchased outright by the auction house. The house takes a commission from the hammer price (the "seller's commission," often 10–25%) and the buyer's premium on top from the buyer.
Why a reseller cares: Most auctions a reseller will encounter are consignment auctions. The implication is that the house is incentivized to maximize hammer price, not necessarily the consigner's net — the buyer's premium goes to the house regardless of what the consigner sees. Resellers consigning their own inventory should ask about the seller's commission, the buyer's premium structure, and any per-lot or photography fees before signing.
As-is, where-is
A condition of sale stating that the item is sold without warranty as to condition, authenticity, completeness, or fitness for any purpose, and the buyer is responsible for picking it up at the seller's location. Standard at virtually every estate, surplus, and auction sale.
Why a reseller cares: Once the gavel falls on an "as-is, where-is" lot, the item is the buyer's problem. Crack discovered after the sale? Missing component noticed at pickup? Reproduction instead of original? Not the house's concern. The countermeasure is condition reporting before the sale — phone calls, walk-throughs, condition reports, detailed photo requests. A reseller who treats every auction as if it were eBay's Money Back Guarantee will lose serious money within their first year.
Live online / Simulcast
A hybrid auction format combining in-room bidding with simultaneous online bidding via a platform like Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers, or the house's own portal. The auctioneer takes bids from both audiences in real time.
Why a reseller cares: Simulcast auctions widen the bidder pool — which usually means higher prices for the same lot. The reseller advantage at a quiet in-room sale (twelve people, three of them bored) disappears when the online side adds two hundred competing bidders. Knowing whether a sale is simulcast before driving an hour to bid is a basic operational check.
Shill bidding
The practice of placing fake bids — usually by a confederate or, on online platforms, by a secondary account controlled by the seller — to artificially inflate the price. Illegal under federal mail/wire fraud statutes and the laws of most states; explicitly prohibited by every major auction platform and by eBay.
Why a reseller cares: Shill bidding is real but uncommon at established auction houses (the regulatory risk is too high). It is more common on private online sales and informal Facebook auction groups. The defense is the same as for live overbidding: a hard, pre-set maximum based on comps and margin, executed with discipline whether the bidding feels real or not.
Section 3: The marketplace
Once the inventory is home, the third room opens — eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop, Whatnot. Each platform has its own dialect, but the core vocabulary below carries across most of them.
NWT (New With Tags)
A condition descriptor used on apparel, accessories, and some hard goods, indicating the item is new, unworn, and still has the original retail tags attached. Buyers searching "NWT" are looking for unworn merchandise at a discount to retail.
Why a reseller cares: NWT items routinely sell for 15–30% more than the same item as NWOT (next entry). The tags themselves are the verification — proof of newness, of authenticity, and of an unbroken chain from store to buyer. Treat retail tags as inventory: a $180 NWT designer dress with the tags cut off is no longer a $180 dress.
NWOT (New Without Tags)
New, unworn, and never used — but the original tags are no longer attached. The item is functionally new but commands a lower price than NWT because the buyer can no longer verify provenance from the tags alone.
Why a reseller cares: NWOT is honest. "New" without the qualifier, when the tags are missing, is misleading. Buyers who feel misled file Money Back Guarantee claims and leave one-star reviews, both of which compound across the platform's algorithm and cost more in suppressed visibility than the per-listing margin gap was ever worth.
BIN (Buy It Now)
The fixed-price sale format on eBay. The listing displays a single price; a buyer who clicks Buy It Now purchases the item immediately at that price, with no auction, no bidding, and no waiting.
Why a reseller cares: BIN is the format almost every serious eBay reseller defaults to. Auction-format listings (the original eBay model) routinely close below the seller's mental reserve and do not allow Best Offer. BIN with Best Offer enabled gives the reseller a posted price and room to negotiate — the best of both worlds.
Best Offer
A feature on eBay (with equivalents on Poshmark, Mercari, and Depop) allowing buyers to submit a counter-price below the listed BIN. The seller can accept, reject, or counter — or set automatic accept/reject thresholds.
Why a reseller cares: Sellers who turn on Best Offer with an auto-accept floor set 10–15% below the list price convert at higher rates than sellers who require every offer to be hand-reviewed. The marginal sale is usually a sale at 88% of list, not the next sale at 100% of list.
Comps
Short for "comparables" — recently sold listings of the same or similar item, used to estimate market price. Sellers and buyers pull comps from eBay's "Sold" search filter, from Worthpoint, from eBay's Terapeak research tool, and from auction-house archives.
Why a reseller cares: Comps are the only honest answer to "what is this worth?" Every other answer — appraiser intuition, dealer gut, family lore — is downstream of comps. The reseller who can pull comps in 90 seconds at an estate sale, on a phone, while a competitor is still trying to identify the maker, has a real edge. (The Vintage Resale Platform Comparator is the workshop's tool for going one step further — comping the platform itself, not just the item.)
Sell-through rate
The percentage of items in a listing or category that actually sell, calculated as sold listings ÷ total active listings, usually over a defined window (30 days, 60 days, 90 days). A sell-through rate of 30% on a category means roughly one in three listings sells in that window.
Why a reseller cares: Sell-through rate is the secondary metric that explains why two listings at the same price perform differently. A category with a 60% 30-day sell-through is liquid; the same category at 15% is illiquid, and the reseller's capital is tied up there. A reseller who tracks sell-through by category quickly learns which lanes are worth restocking and which to exit.
Final value fee
The percentage cut eBay (and similar platforms) take from the total amount a buyer pays — including shipping and sales tax — when an item sells. eBay's standard 2026 rates are 13.6–15% in most categories, plus a $0.40 per-order fee, with higher rates in books, music, video, and athletic-shoes-over-$150 (eBay seller fees).
Why a reseller cares: The final value fee is calculated on the gross, not the net. A $100 sale with $10 shipping owes the final value fee on $110 — plus the sales tax the buyer pays, in most states. The full math: a $100 listing with 14% final value fee, the $0.40 per-order fee, and 9% Texas sales tax has a fee base near $119; the eBay cut is roughly $17.06 on top of the $10 in shipping cost. The reseller nets approximately $72.94 before any acquisition cost.
Cross-listing
Listing the same item on multiple platforms simultaneously — eBay + Poshmark + Mercari + a personal site. When the item sells on one platform, the seller manually (or via software) ends the other listings to avoid double-selling.
Why a reseller cares: Cross-listing doubles or triples reach but multiplies operational risk. The double-sale (item sells on platform A, but the listing on platform B closes 90 seconds late) results in a cancellation, a negative review, and platform penalties. The countermeasure is dedicated cross-listing software (Vendoo, List Perfectly, Crosslist) — or an inventory system that holds a single source of truth for which items are listed where.
Sourcing
The act of acquiring inventory — at estate sales, auctions, thrift stores, garage sales, flea markets, antique malls, online platforms, or direct from sellers. The opposite end of the business from selling. For many resellers, sourcing is the single largest time block in the week — often rivaling the time spent on listing, packing, and shipping combined.
Why a reseller cares: Sourcing is the half of the business that does not feel like work but pays nothing per hour until the item ships. The temptation is to source until the basement is full. The discipline is to source only what comps, sell-through rate, and storage cost together justify — and to track every mile and minute, because the IRS recognizes mileage at a fixed rate per mile and does not recognize "I probably drove a lot" at all.
GMV (Gross Merchandise Value)
The total dollar value of all sales transacted on a platform or by a seller, gross of fees, refunds, and platform discounts. eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, and the rest report GMV as their primary business metric. For an individual seller, GMV is the top-line "sold" number on the dashboard.
Why a reseller cares: GMV is the number every platform shows because it is the most flattering. The reseller's actual cash receipt is GMV minus platform fees, minus shipping costs paid out, minus refunds and chargebacks. A reseller who looks at GMV and thinks "we cleared $12,000 last month" is making business decisions on a number that has not been deflated by the 14% the platform took.
Section 4: The tax office
The fourth room is the one that decides whether the year was a good one. Most resellers learn this vocabulary on April 13. Earlier is better.
Schedule C
The IRS form sole proprietors use to report business income and expenses. Filed with the personal Form 1040. Has line items for revenue, cost of goods sold, advertising, supplies, vehicle, home office, and so on (IRS Schedule C — Profit or Loss From Business).
Why a reseller cares: If you sell a single Pyrex bowl for money, you are filing Schedule C. The form decides what counts as a business expense and what does not, and it is the place where every receipt, every mile, and every estate-sale entry fee lands at year-end. The earlier a reseller tracks numbers in Schedule C categories, the easier April becomes.
Cost basis
What you paid for an item plus any directly attributable acquisition costs — auction buyer's premium, sales tax paid on purchase, shipping in, mileage to pick it up. Cost basis is the number that gets subtracted from the sale price to compute the profit or loss on each sale.
Why a reseller cares: Cost basis is the second-most-mis-recorded number on a reseller's Schedule C (after total revenue). Resellers who track only "the sale" lose deductions: the $12 paid for the Pyrex bowl, the $2.40 buyer's premium, the $0.74 sales tax, and the 5 miles to the estate sale at the IRS standard rate are all part of the cost basis. Recording only the $12 understates basis by 25%+ and overstates taxable income by the same.
Specific identification
An IRS-permitted inventory accounting method where cost of goods sold is calculated using the actual purchase price of each specific item sold, rather than an averaged or formula-based cost. Authorized for any inventory the seller can specifically identify — by serial number, photograph, SKU, or unique description (IRS Publication 538 — Accounting Periods and Methods).
Why a reseller cares: Specific identification is the inventory method for vintage and antique reselling, because every item is genuinely unique. FIFO and weighted-average cost are accounting fictions designed for fungible goods; neither describes a business where each item has a one-of-a-kind acquisition cost. A reseller using specific identification needs a system that links each sale to the original purchase record — the natural job of an inventory tool, not a spreadsheet. Ardent Seller is built for this: every piece of inventory carries its own acquisition cost from the moment it enters the system until it sells.
Hobby loss rule
The IRS limit on deducting expenses from an activity classified as a hobby rather than a business (IRC Section 183). If an activity does not show a profit in at least three of any five consecutive years, the IRS can presume it is a hobby — at which point expenses are no longer deductible against income. Other factors the IRS considers include whether the activity is conducted in a businesslike manner, the time and effort devoted to it, and whether the taxpayer depends on the income.
Why a reseller cares: Hobby classification is the worst of both worlds: revenue is taxable, but expenses are not deductible. The fix is operating as a business from day one — separate bank account, intentional records, written pricing strategy, demonstrable profit motive. See hobby vs. business taxes and record-keeping for the full diagnostic.
1099-K
An IRS information return that payment settlement entities — credit card processors and third-party network payment platforms like eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Mercari, PayPal, and Venmo — must issue to sellers who exceed a gross payment threshold during the calendar year. The threshold has been in transition: $5,000 for 2024 transactions, $2,500 for 2025, and $600 starting in 2026 per IRS Notice 2024-85.
Why a reseller cares: A reseller doing $700 a year on eBay in 2026 will receive a 1099-K. The threshold is reporting, not taxability — every dollar of net profit has always been taxable, with or without a 1099-K. What changes is that the IRS now has matched data showing the gross receipts, and a reseller who does not file (or under-reports) is suddenly visible. The countermeasure is correct Schedule C reporting from year one, regardless of whether a 1099-K is expected.
Mileage deduction
The IRS standard mileage rate that may be deducted in lieu of actual vehicle expenses for business driving. For 2025, the rate was $0.70 per mile (IRS Notice 2025-3); 2026 rates are announced annually by the IRS in December. Records must document date, miles, business purpose, and destination.
Why a reseller cares: Pickers drive. A reseller covering 8,000 business miles a year for sourcing, drop-offs, and supply runs has roughly $5,600 in mileage deductions at the 2025 rate alone — separate from any other vehicle expense. Resellers who do not log mileage lose this deduction entirely; the IRS does not accept "I probably drove a lot" as a substantiation method.
Section 179
An IRS provision allowing a business to expense — rather than depreciate over multiple years — the cost of qualifying business equipment in the year of purchase, up to an annual cap. For 2025, the cap was $1.25 million (IRS Publication 946 — How To Depreciate Property). Eligible equipment includes vehicles over 6,000 lbs, computers, shelving, and other tangible business property.
Why a reseller cares: Section 179 is the rule that lets a reseller deduct a $3,200 photo light kit, a $1,800 thermal label printer, or the laptop used to list and accept payment in the same year they were bought — instead of spreading the deduction over five or seven years. Most resellers will never hit the seven-figure cap; the value is the timing, not the amount.
Inventory at year-end (Schedule C Part III)
The valuation of unsold inventory at the close of the tax year, reported on Schedule C Part III as part of the cost of goods sold calculation: beginning inventory + purchases − ending inventory = COGS. Without an accurate ending inventory, COGS is wrong, and either revenue is overstated or expenses are double-counted.
Why a reseller cares: A reseller with 600 unsold items on December 31 — $18,000 in acquisition cost sitting on shelves and in storage — must report that $18,000 as ending inventory. Failing to do so understates inventory and inflates COGS, generating a paper loss the IRS will eventually unwind. The annual physical count is the part of resale bookkeeping no software fully automates away — but a clean inventory system makes the count an afternoon instead of a weekend.
A short closing list of words this post did not include
Vintage reselling has more vocabulary than thirty-six terms can hold. Words to meet next, in case any of them ambush you:
- DBA (doing business as — the trade name a reseller files when operating under a name other than their legal one)
- EIN (employer identification number — the IRS-issued business tax ID; not required for sole proprietors but useful for keeping a Social Security number off forms)
- MAP (minimum advertised price — relevant for resellers of branded goods)
- Provenance (the documented chain of ownership of an item — central to high-value antiques and authentication)
- Reproduction (a modern copy of an antique design — sometimes innocent, sometimes a counterfeit; the difference matters)
- Sales tax permit / Resale certificate (state-issued license letting a reseller collect sales tax on sales and buy inventory tax-free for resale)
- Shipping calculator (eBay's per-listing tool for buyer-pays shipping based on weight and dimensions; the alternative to flat-rate)
- Wayfair / economic nexus (the rule that decides which states' sales tax a reseller must collect — see sales tax nexus for handmade sellers)
Each will get its own paragraph in a reseller's life eventually. None is urgent in week one.
Where this stops being a vocabulary problem
A glossary helps a reseller read the room. It does not help them keep the numbers it describes. Once the vocabulary stops feeling foreign, the obvious next question is: where does all of this live?
A spreadsheet works at thirty SKUs. At three hundred, it starts to creak. At a thousand — which is roughly where a serious one-person reseller lands inside two years — the spreadsheet has become the bottleneck. Cost basis is in one tab, comps in another, sales receipts in a third, and the year-end inventory count is the worst weekend of December.
Ardent Seller is built for the reseller who has outgrown the sheet. Specific-identification inventory baked in. Per-item cost basis with acquisition photos, mileage, and buyer's premium folded into the basis automatically. Multi-location inventory for antique-mall booths, storage units, and the consignment shelves the inventory sits on. Final-value-fee and platform-fee tracking so the GMV number on the dashboard is the actual cash number, not the eBay-flattering one. An audit trail every tax preparer and Schedule C reviewer wants to see.
The vocabulary in this post is the vocabulary the software speaks.
Start a free Ardent Seller account and the next time one of these terms shows up at an auction cashier or in a 1099-K envelope, the answer is already a tab away.
Related reading
- Vintage Resale Inventory Tracking: When Every SKU Is One of a Kind — the deep-dive on running specific-identification inventory at scale, once the glossary entry above is the part that needs to become operational.
- 12 Inventory Mistakes Vintage Resellers Make — the failure-mode catalog that names the cost-basis, mileage, and shrinkage errors most resellers learn about the hard way.
- Sales Tax Nexus for Handmade Sellers — once the marketplace and tax-office vocabulary clicks, the next question is which states' sales tax you actually owe.
Free resources
A few free downloads from the Ardent Workshop library that pair well with this post:
- Vintage Resale Platform Comparator — an interactive tool that takes the marketplace-section vocabulary (final value fee, BIN, Best Offer, sell-through rate) and turns it into a per-platform profit comparison for any single item.
- 1099-K Threshold Tracker — the live tracker that pairs with the 1099-K glossary entry, watching gross receipts across every platform against the $600 reporting threshold in 2026.
- Year-End Inventory Reset Checklist — the operational playbook for the Schedule C Part III count described in the last glossary entry — what to count, how to value it, and how to back it up for the tax preparer.
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or accounting advice. 1099-K thresholds, mileage rates, Section 179 limits, hobby loss enforcement, and specific-identification inventory rules vary by year and can change with each IRS publication. Consult a qualified CPA or tax preparer before making decisions that affect your business.