Depop Spreadsheet: Six Columns That Show Real Margin

How a tracking sheet pays for the twenty minutes it costs

Last updated: August 2026

Bottom line: a depop spreadsheet with six columns takes about twenty minutes to build and answers three questions the app cannot — what each item actually cost you, what it actually netted, and how long it sat — which on 200 sales a year is the difference between guessing at profit and knowing it.

The app shows you sales. It does not show you margin, because it has no idea what you paid for anything, and it does not show velocity by category, because it is not organised around your sourcing. Those two gaps are what a depop spreadsheet exists to close, and everything else people add to these files is decoration.

The six columns that matter

Item description, cost of goods, date listed, date sold, sale price, and actual fees taken. That last one is deliberately worded — record the fee amount from the payout itself rather than applying a remembered percentage, because fee structures change, differ between markets and occasionally include elements you did not expect.

A depop spreadsheet built on a rate you memorised two years ago will drift quietly away from reality and you will not notice until the annual numbers look wrong.

From those six columns everything useful is arithmetic. Sale price minus cost minus fees minus postage gives true margin per item.

Date sold minus date listed gives days-to-sale, and the median of that across a category is the single most useful number in a resale business — a category clearing in 21 days recycles your capital seventeen times a year, one clearing in 140 days recycles it twice.

The tax case is the other half. A record showing cost, sale price and fees per item is what turns a shoebox of transactions into a defensible set of figures, and sellers who keep it contemporaneously spend an hour at year end rather than a weekend reconstructing it.

How one sale looks once every line is recorded

Bottom line: a $48 sale that feels like $48 is closer to $27 once fees, postage, materials and cost of goods are subtracted — and sellers without a depop spreadsheet routinely plan their sourcing against the first number rather than the second. The table below is one ordinary garment, recorded the way the sheet should record it.

Why the fee row is copied rather than calculated

This is the design decision that keeps a depop spreadsheet accurate over time. Fee structures change, differ between markets and sometimes include components a seller has not accounted for, so a formula multiplying sale price by a memorised percentage will produce numbers that look right and are not.

Pasting the actual deduction from each payout takes a few extra seconds and means the sheet never drifts from what the platform really took.

The postage row deserves the same treatment. Sellers commonly enter an assumed figure and discover, when they finally check, that their real average is a dollar or more higher than the number they had been using — which across 200 sales is $200 of margin that existed only in the spreadsheet.

Once those two rows are honest, the outputs become worth acting on. Sort by true net margin and the bottom of the list is usually a surprise: items that felt like reasonable sales at $30 or $35 turn out to net single digits after postage on a heavy garment.

Sort by days listed to sold and a depop spreadsheet will show you which categories are funding the business and which are storing it.

The third output is sourcing performance. Add a column for where each item came from — a specific shop, a lot, a supplier — and after six months the sheet ranks your sourcing channels by average margin and average days-to-sale.

That single view is what turns buying from instinct into a decision, and it is the reason a depop spreadsheet outlives any app that promises to do the same thing automatically. , according to Federal Trade Commission consumer guides

There is one more column worth adding once the basics are running: the listing price you started at, kept alongside the price it eventually sold for. The gap between the two is your discounting behaviour made visible, and it is usually larger than sellers expect.

A shop where almost everything closes at full price is priced under the market and leaving money on each item; one where nothing sells without a 25% concession has list prices that are decorative and is paying for the illusion in storage time. A depop spreadsheet that records both numbers turns that judgement into a measurement.

Returns deserve a row rather than a column. When one comes back, record it as a separate line with the postage both ways and the item returned to stock, so the original sale does not sit in the file as revenue that never happened.

Sellers who quietly delete returned sales lose the ability to see their real return rate, which is one of the few numbers that can make an otherwise healthy category unprofitable.

None of this requires anything sophisticated. Six columns, two formulas and the discipline to fill it in weekly produce all of it, and the whole file stays under a hundred rows for most sellers in their first year.

Quick tangent — I use the Closo Crosslister to track what is actually moving right now, which saves me about three hours a week of manual search. Worth a peek before your next haul.

How sellers lose money in the gaps a sheet would have shown

Bottom line: the three most expensive blind spots are postage on heavy items, dead stock past 120 days, and sourcing channels that feel productive and are not — and each is invisible without records, which is why a $26.70 net can look like a $48 sale for a year.

When considering depop mean, When considering depop icon, When considering depop aus, When considering depop app logo, When considering depop app, When considering depop api, When considering depop ad, When considering depop stats, Postage is first because it is silent and universal. A knitted jumper and a t-shirt look identical in a sales list and differ by several dollars at the counter, so a category that appears profitable in aggregate can contain a subset that loses money on every order.

A depop spreadsheet with an actual postage figure per item exposes that within a month; without one, the loss hides inside an average that stays comfortably positive.

Dead stock is second and larger. Items past 120 days are not merely unsold — they are capital that has stopped working, and in a business where the whole model is turning money over, a fifth of your stock sitting still is a fifth of your buying power gone.

Sellers routinely underestimate this because slow items are physically out of sight in a box while fast ones are memorable. Sorting a depop spreadsheet by days listed puts the honest picture on one screen, and it is usually uncomfortable the first time.

The sourcing channel that feels good and is not

The third blind spot is where inventory comes from. A shop you enjoy visiting, close by, with plenty of stock, will feel like a productive channel regardless of what it actually returns.

Add a source column to your depop spreadsheet and after six months the ranking is unambiguous: one channel returns $22 average margin on 28-day sell-through and another returns $9 on 96 days, and no amount of enjoying the second one changes that.

That comparison is the highest-value output of the whole exercise, because sourcing decides more of your result than pricing or listing quality ever will. Shifting budget from the weak channel to the strong one is a change you can make next weekend, and it compounds across every subsequent purchase. , according to Statista market research

The fourth loss is subtler: unmeasured discounting. Offers sent to likers and gradual price drops feel like small concessions individually, and a depop spreadsheet recording both list price and final price shows the aggregate.

A seller discounting an average of 18% across 200 sales at $40 has given away $1,440, which is a decision worth making deliberately rather than one item at a time at eleven at night.

A fifth loss shows up only in the second year: repeat purchases of things that did not work the first time. Without a depop spreadsheet, a style that sold slowly eighteen months ago looks new again on a rail, and sellers buy the same mistake two or three times before the pattern registers.

With records, a quick search of past descriptions answers the question in ten seconds at the point of purchase, which is the only moment the answer is useful.

The correction for all four is the same and unglamorous: fill the sheet in weekly, sort it two ways each month, and act on what the sort shows.

Sellers who do that for two quarters know something about their own business that no dashboard supplies, because the numbers that matter here — cost, source, days held — exist nowhere except in records the seller keeps.

How to build it in twenty minutes

Bottom line: eight steps, twenty minutes, and the only two that people get wrong are recording fees from the payout rather than a formula, and filling it in weekly rather than when you need an answer.

1. Create six columns first: description, cost of goods, date listed, date sold, sale price, actual fees. Resist adding more until these have been used for a month, because an over-built depop spreadsheet is one nobody maintains.
2. Add two formula columns: net margin (sale price minus cost minus fees minus postage minus materials) and days held (date sold minus date listed). These are the two outputs everything else exists to produce.
3. Enter your postage per item from the actual label cost, not an assumed average. Sellers who check usually find their real figure a dollar or more above the one they had been using, which is $200 across 200 sales.
4. Copy the fee amount from each payout rather than multiplying by a remembered percentage. Fee structures change and differ by market, and a formula built on last year’s rate produces confident wrong numbers.
5. Add a source column naming where each item came from — the specific shop, lot or supplier. After six months this ranks your sourcing channels by margin and speed, which is the highest-value thing the sheet will ever tell you.
6. Add a list-price column alongside sale price so your discounting becomes visible in aggregate. An 18% average concession across 200 sales at $40 is $1,440.
7. Record returns as their own line with postage both ways, rather than deleting the original sale. Deleting them hides your real return rate, which is one of the few numbers that can turn a healthy category unprofitable.
8. Put a recurring fifteen-minute slot in the calendar each week to fill it in, and a monthly slot to sort by margin and by days held. A depop spreadsheet updated quarterly is an archive; one updated weekly is a tool.

The check before every purchase

Search your own depop spreadsheet for the brand or style in front of you before buying it. Ten seconds answers whether you have sold that thing before and how long it took, which stops the most repeated mistake in resale: buying the same slow item twice.

How to work out what this is worth to you

Bottom line: fifteen minutes a week is thirteen hours a year, against three findings that typically recover far more — a postage figure a dollar higher than assumed ($200 on 200 sales), a sourcing channel returning $9 against another’s $22, and $1,440 of discounting nobody decided on.

Run the estimate on your own volume before committing to the habit. Multiply your annual sales by the gap between the $48 a sale feels like and the $26.70 it nets, and you have the size of the thing you are currently guessing at.

A seller doing 200 sales a year is managing roughly $5,300 of margin without a record of where it comes from, and a depop spreadsheet is the cheapest instrument that exists for measuring it.

Start small and let it earn the additions

Build the six columns today and fill in the last twenty sales from your order history — that takes about twenty minutes and gives you something to sort immediately. Add the source column next week and the list-price column the week after, once the base habit is holding.

A depop spreadsheet that starts elaborate is one that gets abandoned in March.

Then set two recurring slots: fifteen minutes weekly to enter sales, and thirty minutes monthly to sort by net margin and by days held. Those two sorts are where the decisions come from — what to stop buying, what to buy more of, and what to mark down before it becomes dead capital.

A depop spreadsheet nobody sorts is just data entry, and the sorting is the part that pays.

Guides on sourcing analysis, pricing against sold comparables, and running one catalogue across Depop, eBay, Poshmark and Mercari at once are on the Closo blog hub.

Keep going: Closo Crosslister · Closo Wholesale · Closo Sell Lots.