If you are only writing off what you paid for your inventory, you are handing the government a tip it did not earn. Almost every dollar you spend to run your shop is a legitimate deduction, and most resellers miss half of them simply because nobody handed them the list. So here it is.
The big ones you cannot skip
These are the deductions that make up most of your total, so nail these first:
- Cost of goods sold – what you paid for the items you sold this year.
- Platform fees – every cut eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop, Etsy, and the rest take.
- Shipping – postage, labels, and any shipping software subscription.
- Supplies – poly mailers, boxes, tape, tissue, bubble wrap, thermal labels, printer ink.
- Mileage – every drive for sourcing, post office runs, and supply trips, logged with date and purpose.
Those five categories alone are often the bulk of a reseller’s write-offs. Do not leave them fuzzy.
The ones people forget
Here is where money quietly slips away. All of these can count when they are genuinely for your business:
- Home office space used exclusively for your shop (there is a simple per-square-foot method).
- A portion of your phone and internet.
- Software and subscriptions you use to run the business.
- Mileage to thrift stores, estate sales, storage units, and the bank.
- Fees for a tax pro, an accountant, or bookkeeping tools.
- Packing and photography equipment like scales, a label printer, or a light box.
The rule of thumb is simple: if it is an ordinary and necessary cost of running your reselling business, it is probably deductible. The catch is you have to be able to prove it, which means keeping receipts and a mileage log all year, not reconstructing it in a panic every April.
The part that makes it painless
The reason people miss deductions is not laziness, it is that receipts scatter across email, apps, and a shoebox. Keeping your sales organized in one place is half the battle, which is why I run Nifty – one listing, every platform, one clean record of what sold.
The other half is sorting a year of random receipts into the right tax buckets, and that is where I lean on Claude. It can read through a pile of receipts and sort them into shipping, supplies, fees, and the rest so nothing gets lost. I show the setup in the AI Reselling Playbook.
The bottom line
Every deduction you track is money that stays in your pocket, legally. Start capturing expenses now and next spring is a copy-paste job. Grab my free Schedule C Expense Tracker to have the categories ready to go, and run your final list by your own tax pro to make sure your situation is covered.
New here? Nifty is the AI crosslister I use to list once and sell everywhere – and if you want in, my code ALEXIS44 gets you 15% off: https://nifty.ai/?referral=ALEXIS44