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A $1.20 Temu phone stand resold for $9.99 on eBay does not put $8.79 in your pocket. After landed cost ($1.95 with shipping, defects, and packaging), eBay final value fee (13.25 percent), payment processing (2.9 percent plus $0.30), and a $4.50 shipping label, your net profit per unit is closer to $2.30, not $7.
Temu to eBay reselling can work, but only on the right categories, with strict three-unit testing, and with real records of what each batch actually cost you.
You have seen the videos. Someone in a clean studio holds up a plastic phone stand, says they bought it on Temu for $1.20, shows their eBay listing at $9.99, and adds the multiplier on screen. $500 a day. $10,000 a month. The thumbnail says replace your job in 90 days. There are thousands of these videos and the math in them is almost never honest.
Take that same phone stand. The product is $1.20 on Temu. The listing reads $9.99 on eBay. The video math says $8.79 profit per unit. The actual math, after landed cost, defect allowance, eBay fees, payment processing, shipping label, and a realistic return rate, is closer to $2.30 per unit. That is still a 100-plus percent return on the $1.95 you actually have invested per unit, which is good. But it is not $8.79, and at the volumes the videos imply, the difference between $8.79 and $2.30 per unit is whether reselling replaces your income or buries you in unsellable inventory.
This article walks the real math, category by category, fee by fee, so you can decide whether a specific flip is worth doing before you place the order. No hype. No affiliate links to Temu. Just the numbers that actually move on the spreadsheet.
The price on the Temu product page is not your cost. Your cost is everything you spend to get a sellable unit ready to ship to a customer. There are five components and most resellers underestimate three of them.
True landed cost per sellable unit: ($120 + $18 + $11) / 80 = $1.86. Add a buffer for bad batches and the working number is closer to $1.95 to $2.20.
The marketplace takes a bigger bite than most new resellers expect. Here is what each platform charges on the same $9.99 phone stand, rounded for clarity. Use these as a baseline, then check your own category and account level because rates vary.
| Platform | Fees on a $9.99 sale | Net to you |
|---|---|---|
| eBay | Final value fee 13.25% ($1.32) + payment processing 2.9% + $0.30 ($0.59) + shipping label $4.50 | $9.99 - $6.41 = $3.58 before product cost |
| Amazon FBA | Referral fee 15% ($1.50) + fulfillment fee from $3.22 + monthly storage allocation around $0.10 | $9.99 - $4.82 = $5.17 before product cost |
| Facebook Marketplace | 5% selling fee ($0.50 minimum) + self-shipping label $4.50 | $9.99 - $4.99 = $5.00 before product cost |
To break even on a $1.95 landed cost unit, you need a sale price of roughly $7.20 on eBay, $5.50 on Amazon FBA, and $5.40 on Facebook Marketplace. Anything above those numbers is profit. Anything below and the listing is losing you money even if it is moving units.
The categories that work share four traits: high demand at impulse price points, low shipping weight, low return rates, and buyers who do not care about the brand. Specific categories that resellers consistently report margin on:
The losing categories share the opposite traits: brand expectations, certification requirements, weight that destroys shipping margin, or high return rates. Avoid:
Take 100 silicone drawer organizers from Temu at $1.85 each, listed on eBay at $12.99 with a 15 percent sell-through rate per week. Here is the full path from sourcing to net profit.
$443.87 net revenue minus $221.00 sourcing cost = $222.87 net profit on the batch, or $2.62 per sellable unit. Net margin on revenue is 20 percent. Return on capital is 100 percent over the roughly 8 to 10 week cycle from order to last sale.
That is a real result, and it is well below the $9-per-unit numbers the social media videos imply. It is also a result that compounds. Run that batch four times a year on the same product and you have $890 from a single SKU on $880 of working capital. Do it across ten SKUs and the math starts to matter.
Single-flip math hides the working capital problem. When you scale, you have multiple batches in different stages of the cycle at the same time:
To run ten products at meaningful volume you typically need $3,000 to $6,000 of working capital sitting in inventory and float at all times. The profit on each batch is real, but it is not available to spend until two to three months after you place the order. Reseller burnouts almost always trace to running out of working capital, not to picking the wrong products.
The three-unit test costs $4 to $15 and prevents most bad inventory decisions. The protocol:
Three metrics decide whether to scale: net margin per unit at least $1.50 after the full fee stack, sell-through of at least 10 percent of inventory per week, and return rate under 7 percent. Miss any one and the bigger order will not fix it.
Once you are running ten or twenty SKUs across Temu, AliExpress, and domestic restock from Amazon or Walmart, the bookkeeping side stops being optional. Three reasons it matters:
The clean version of this is one spreadsheet that pulls every order from every sourcing platform with date, vendor, SKU, quantity, and unit cost. That spreadsheet is the input to your COGS calculation and to every pricing decision after.
Once you are running real volume, tracking what you paid across Temu, AliExpress, Amazon, and other sourcing platforms gets complicated fast. OrderPro Analytics exports your complete purchase history from all of them, every order, every item, every amount, into one spreadsheet. So when it is time to calculate your actual COGS or file taxes, your sourcing records are already organised. Try it free, or calculate your margin on your next batch with our COGS Calculator.
Sometimes, but the headline margins on social media are gross margin, not net. Once you include landed cost, defect rate, marketplace fees, payment processing, returns, and shipping, a $1.20 Temu item that resells for $9.99 on eBay nets closer to $2.50 to $3.50 per unit, not the $7 the listing price suggests. Profitability depends on category, volume, and whether you can keep return rates under 5 percent.
In the United States the current de minimis threshold is $800 per shipment per day per recipient. Orders below that amount usually clear without import duties. Bulk orders over $800 can incur duties, and US trade policy has been actively reviewing the de minimis rule for low-cost overseas shipments, so the threshold can change. Plan as if duties may apply on any single shipment over $800.
Net margin on AliExpress to Amazon flips typically lands between 8 and 22 percent after the full Amazon FBA fee stack (15 percent referral fee plus fulfillment fee starting around $3.22), defect allowance, returns, and PPC. Sellers reporting 40 percent margins are usually quoting gross margin before fulfillment, returns, and ad spend.
Standard Temu shipping to the US runs 10 to 25 days. Express options exist on some products and reduce that to 5 to 12 days at higher cost. The shipping window matters because your capital is tied up the entire time, and a stockout on a hot listing can cost more than the shipping savings.
Yes. Order three units first. Inspect for defects, list one on the target marketplace at your planned price, and watch how it sells over two weeks. If it does not sell at that price, scaling to 100 units will not fix the demand problem. The three-unit test costs $4 to $15 and saves you from buying inventory you cannot move.