August 11, 2026 · 7 min read
The Best Thrift Store Categories to Resell, By Actual Data
Short answer
Measured across half a million eBay comp sets, sell-through by category is far more tightly clustered than sourcing advice suggests: most categories fall between 42% and 46%. Dresses, outerwear, shoes and glassware sit at the top; books sit clearly last at 38%. The practical conclusion is that category is a weak filter and the individual item is what matters.
Most “best things to flip” lists are written from memory and anecdote. This one is measured, and its main finding is inconvenient for the genre: category matters much less than people say.
The numbers
Below is average eBay sell-through by category across half a million sold-comp result sets gathered through ThriftAI scans, restricted to categories with a sample of at least 1,000.
| Category | Avg sell-through | Sample (scans) |
|---|---|---|
| Dresses | 46.3% | 8,564 |
| Outerwear | 45.9% | 9,507 |
| Shoes | 45.7% | 7,106 |
| Underwear | 45.7% | 1,052 |
| Glassware | 45.5% | 3,994 |
| Tops | 45.4% | 27,617 |
| Other | 45.3% | 7,171 |
| Accessories | 44.8% | 11,578 |
| Bottoms | 44.6% | 12,757 |
| Tools | 44.4% | 1,422 |
| Kitchenware | 44.3% | 7,794 |
| Ceramics | 44.2% | 8,082 |
| Electronics | 44.1% | 4,548 |
| Decorative | 43.9% | 17,724 |
| Toys | 43.9% | 7,504 |
| Collectibles | 43.5% | 18,690 |
| Jewelry | 43.5% | 6,211 |
| Art | 42.9% | 2,718 |
| Furniture | 41.9% | 2,109 |
| Books | 37.8% | 4,903 |
The spread is small
From the top of that table to the bottom is about eight percentage points, and if you drop books the entire remaining field fits inside four. Apparel (dresses, outerwear, tops, bottoms, shoes) clusters between 44% and 47%. Ceramics, kitchenware, glassware and decorative items all land in the mid forties too.
That is the real story. “Clothing sells better than housewares” is true by roughly a percentage point, which is noise next to the difference between a good individual item and a bad one in either category.
The one real exception
Books are the clear outlier at 38%, several points below everything else, with the lowest average sold-listing count of any major category. That does not mean books cannot be profitable; it means the average book is a poor use of tote space, and success there depends on volume, barcode scanning and knowing your niche.
If books and media are the bulk of your sourcing, a dedicated barcode scanner with Amazon data will serve you better than a general visual tool. We say so plainly on our Flippr comparison.
Where the volume actually is
Sell-through is only half the picture; how often you encounter the category is the other half. In the items our users scan the categories that come up most are tops, collectibles, decorative items, bottoms and accessories. High-frequency, mid-forties sell-through, no barcode on any of them, which is a fair description of what a thrift store mostly contains.
Of the 2 million items scanned through ThriftAI, 96% of categorized scans are non-media goods. The barcode is the exception in a thrift store, not the rule.
Method and caveats
- Figures are means across scans that returned a full eBay sold-comp set, measured 2026-08-11.
- Sample counts reflect what ThriftAI users scanned, which is a real sourcing population but not a random sample of all thrift inventory.
- Categories under 1,000 scans are excluded from the table above as too small to read.
- Category is assigned by our item analysis, not by store signage.