ThredUp runs two completely different ways to sell right now. Clean Out, its original consignment service, pays you a sliding percentage after ThredUp lists and ships your items for you. Direct Listing, a new beta launched in June 2026, lets you set your own price and keep 100% of it, more like a standard marketplace. Here's how each one actually pays out:
With a Clean Out Kit, you ship ThredUp a bag of clothes and they decide what to accept, what to price it at, and what percentage you earn when it sells. The percentage rises with the listing price: items priced low, in the $5 to $15 range, typically earn you somewhere around 5% to 15% of the sale. Items priced over $100 to $200 can earn 60% to 80%. Most of what people send in falls into the lower tiers, which is why average payouts per accepted item tend to land in the low single digits.
On top of the sliding percentage, a service fee comes out of your earnings once items actually sell: $14.99 for a Standard bag, or $34.99 for Premium. Premium also comes with a meaningfully higher acceptance rate, 80-90% versus 60-80% for Standard. If your total earnings come in under the service fee, you're not charged the difference.
| Item type | Typical payout | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Low-priced items ($5–$15) | ~5%–15% | Most submitted items fall here |
| Mid-priced items ($15–$100) | ~20%–40% | Varies by brand and demand |
| Premium items ($100+) | ~60%–80% | Designer and high-demand brands |
| Service fee | $14.99 or $34.99 | Deducted from earnings, only if items sell |
ThredUp accepts an average of 60–80% of items in Standard Clean Outs and 80–90% in Premium. Rejected items are donated or recycled unless you pay a $10.99 fee to get them back. About 38% of accepted items don't sell within their consignment window, which can shrink or eliminate the payout you were expecting.
Direct Listing flips the entire structure. You photograph and price the item yourself, set a minimum of $20, and ship it directly once it sells. There's no selling fee at all, you keep 100% of your listed price. ThredUp covers the cost instead through a separate fee charged to the buyer, similar to how Vinted's model works.
The tradeoff is effort. Clean Out hands off all the work, including pricing, photography, and listing, in exchange for a much smaller cut. Direct Listing asks you to do that work yourself, the way you would on Poshmark or Depop, but it pays you the full price you set.
The gap is the entire reason Direct Listing exists. ThredUp's own beta data showed Direct Listings averaging a $60 sale price, more than double the average sale price on the traditional Clean Out marketplace, suggesting sellers are reserving their higher-value items for the model that pays them more directly.
For resellers running multiple shops
ThredUp's two parallel fee models are a different calculation than Poshmark's flat commission or Mercari's flat 10%. If you're crosslisting the same inventory across platforms, those differences change your real margin on every sale. Oly syncs your listings and lets you set markup rules per platform, so your pricing accounts for each marketplace's actual fee structure instead of a flat guess.
See how Oly works →If an item would sell for less than $20, it's not eligible for Direct Listing anyway. Clean Out is the better fit for closet-clearing in bulk.
Once an item is worth enough to justify ten minutes of photography and listing, the 100% payout almost always beats Clean Out's sliding percentage.
Premium has a meaningfully higher acceptance rate (80-90% versus 60-80% for Standard), which is often worth the higher service fee for pricier inventory.
Mixing a designer bag into a Clean Out bag full of low-value basics means it earns the consignment percentage instead of the full price you'd get listing it yourself.
It depends on the item's selling price. Lower-priced items earn sellers roughly 5% to 15%, while items priced over $100 to $200 can earn 60% to 80%. A service fee is also deducted from earnings once items sell.
Yes, according to ThredUp's own announcement. Sellers keep 100% of their listed price. The cost is covered by a separate fee charged to the buyer instead.
Yes, for a $10.99 return fee covering processing and shipping. Otherwise, rejected items are donated or recycled rather than returned.
Oly crosslists your inventory to Poshmark, Depop, Mercari, and more, automatically. One dashboard, every marketplace.
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