Shipping Supplies for Resellers: A Cost-Per-Parcel Kit

The minimum kit before your first sale

You don't need a shop's worth of supplies to start. This is part of the wider inventory management guide for keeping a resale operation organised without overbuying.

• A few poly mailers, for clothes and other soft, non-fragile items
• Two or three box sizes, flat-packed, for shoes, books and anything with corners
• A roll of packing tape (buy more than feels necessary — you'll use it)
• Filler: kraft paper or reused packaging material, not loose and not none
• A permanent marker for covering old labels and writing addresses
• A digital kitchen or luggage scale, and a tape measure

No shop names or prices appear here because what's available and what it costs varies by supplier and changes often; the point of the list is what to buy, not where.

Mailers, boxes and filler: which item gets which

Clothes go in poly mailers — they protect against dirt and light rain, and fabric has no hard edge to punch through the plastic. Shoes and books go in a box: a mailer won't stop a sole from crushing in transit or a spine from bending under other parcels stacked on top. Anything breakable — glass, ceramics, electronics with a screen — needs its own handling beyond a box and some paper; the packing fragile items guide covers that in full rather than repeating it here.

Reused packaging: when it is fine and when it risks a claim

A reused box is fine once the old shipping label and any barcode are fully removed or covered — a leftover label can send the parcel to the wrong address as easily as it can confuse a buyer — and once the corners are still sharp, not crushed or soft. What isn't fine is packaging that's already failed once: a box with a crushed corner or a mailer with a worn seam doesn't protect as well the second time, and that gap is exactly what turns into a dispute. On OLX, the Pakiet Ochronny protection covers an item that doesn't match the listing, including undisclosed damage, and if the claim is accepted, the return ships at the seller's cost — weak packaging that lets an item arrive damaged can cost you the return shipping on top of the lost sale.

Costing supplies per parcel

The habit that actually saves money is costing packaging per parcel, not per pack. Divide what you paid for a pack of mailers or boxes by how many parcels it covers, add your tape and filler as their own small line, and you get a real number to put into your pricing instead of a guess.

On Vinted, the buyer pays for shipping and the seller gets a Vinted-generated, prepaid label, so a seller's real shipping cost on that sale is mostly the packaging and the time it takes, not the courier fee itself. That's exactly why packaging deserves its own line rather than being lumped into "shipping" when you work out what a sale actually earned — the resale profit calculator has a field for it.

Fitting the carrier size classes

Orlen Paczka's official page sets three size classes, each up to 20 kg: S at 8×38×60 cm, M at 19×38×60 cm and L at 41×38×60 cm, and lists direct-sender prices of 13.49 zł, 14.49 zł and 15.49 zł. Those are Orlen's own sender prices, not what a buyer pays through Vinted, OLX or Allegro Lokalnie checkout — marketplace shipping is priced separately and usually paid by the buyer. On Allegro Lokalnie, the listed gross prices are 10.95 zł for Allegro Paczkomaty InPost and 10.49 zł for Allegro One Box.

InPost lockers take A (8×38×64 cm), B (19×38×64 cm) and C (41×38×64 cm), up to 25 kg — still check the size shown at checkout before you pack. Deadlines and size rules across all three marketplaces are in the marketplace shipping rules guide.

Storing supplies so packing takes minutes

One shelf, at chest height, near where you photograph and list items, does more for how fast you pack than any amount of extra stock. Flat-packed boxes take almost no space stored on edge; mailers and filler fit in one bin each. If packaging is scattered between a cupboard and a garage, five minutes of packing turns into fifteen spent looking for tape.

Restock checklist

• Count mailers and each box size before you're down to your last one, not after
• Reorder tape when you're on your last roll, not your last inch
• Check filler stock separately from boxes — it runs out faster than either
• Keep the scale and tape measure in the same spot as the rest, not a drawer away

If you're shipping items across borders rather than just within Poland, shipping within the EU and UK covers what changes, and for parcel lockers specifically, see parcel lockers for sellers.

Packaging is only one line in what a sale actually costs you — hidden costs of reselling covers the rest.