Spreadsheet or Inventory App: Which Should a Reseller Use?

What a spreadsheet does well

A sheet is free, and every column is yours to define. The free inventory spreadsheet template already has the ones that matter — buy price, extra costs, listed date, sale date, sale price, marketplace fee, shipping you paid — with net payout, profit, ROI and days-to-sell computed by plain formulas you can read and check. No subscription, no account limits, and nothing hidden behind a plan tier.

It also does exactly what you tell it to. Want a column for "who gave you the lead" or "condition on arrival"? Add it. Most inventory apps ask you to work inside their fixed fields; a sheet has none.

Where spreadsheets break

The cracks show up in a specific order. First, an item listed on two marketplaces at once has no single "sold" field — you have to check both, then update the sheet, then remember to end the other listing. Second, several people editing the same file leads to overwritten rows unless you're disciplined about locking cells or using version history. Third, a sheet doesn't hold a photo per row well, so identifying which physical item a row refers to means opening a separate folder. And fourth, editing forty columns on a phone screen between customers is its own kind of friction that a sheet was never built to solve.

None of this makes a spreadsheet wrong — it makes it a tool with a shape, and that shape stops fitting once an item can be listed in more than one place at once.

Signals it's time to switch

None of these is a row count. Our rule of thumb: watch for the moment the sheet starts costing you sales or money, not a number of items.

• You've sold the same item twice — it was live on two marketplaces and the sheet didn't catch the second sale in time
• As a rule of thumb: your weekly update takes over an hour, and most of that hour is cross-checking, not entering new rows
• You can't say, right now, what your unsold stock is worth without opening the sheet and adding a column
• Many rows have no sold date, so you can't tell what's actually still active without checking each marketplace by hand

What inventory features the apps list

Reading each tool's own pricing and help pages, as of 13 September 2026:

Vendoo lists inventory management, multi-quantity handling, custom labels and CSV download on its pricing page. Its mobile app, per its own help article, does not support importing, CSV download or sale detection — those need the desktop Chrome extension. Vinted support is unclear on Vendoo's own pages: the help centre's marketplace list (updated 9 Jul 2026) does not include Vinted, while the marketing marketplaces page still shows a Vinted logo.

List Perfectly lists a catalog, linking existing listings, updating across marketplaces, an SKU generator, QR inventory labels, an Issue Finder, a Pick List, Stale Listings tracking and Custom Marketplaces on its pricing page. Its own Vinted article states Vinted is supported on any List Perfectly plan, labelled "LITE" — the page doesn't define what LITE limits, and no Vinted region is stated.

Crosslist lists tags and filters, auto-linking imported listings, auto-mapping categories, multi-quantity handling, per-marketplace prices and markups, and shipping profiles on its pricing and marketplaces pages. Its own documentation states Vinted support only for its US (.com), UK (.co.uk) and Australia (.com.au) sites — not Canada.

None of the three states support for OLX or Allegro Lokalnie on the pages we read; treat that as "not offered", not as an oversight in our research.

The comparison, stock and money only

Run the numbers on your own stock, regardless of where you track it, with the inventory turnover calculator. For the fuller Vendoo-vs-List-Perfectly picture beyond inventory features, see Vendoo vs List Perfectly.

Moving from a sheet without losing history

Clean your item codes and fill in missing sold dates before you export anything — a migration copies whatever mess is already in the sheet, and a simple SKU system makes that cleanup faster the next time, too. Export a CSV, then check the receiving tool's own help centre for its current import process rather than assuming your columns map one to one; import fields and limits differ by tool and change over time.

Run the sheet and the new tool in parallel for a month before you retire the sheet. That overlap catches the rows that didn't import cleanly and gives you a fallback if the new tool's sale detection misses something — worth checking against the reseller KPIs you're already tracking, so the switch doesn't cost you a week of blind spots in the numbers that matter.