Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Luxury Items (1): Buyout, Consignment, or Self-List?

When you’re deciding how to sell a luxury item, you’re really weighing three variables: payout percentage, speed, and workload.

A buyout typically lands you 40%–70% of the final resale value, but you’re paid within days and you’re done. It’s the fastest and lightest option.

Consignment can push your payout to 50%–80%, but expect a 3–4 month timeline and moderate involvement. You’re outsourcing the work, but you’re also sharing the upside.

Self-listing offers the highest theoretical payout—80% to 95%. But the timeline is indefinite and the workload is real. Photography, copywriting, pricing, negotiating, shipping, returns, chargebacks. You become the reseller. And there’s no guarantee your net proceeds will exceed your next-best consignment offer.

So how do you decide?

Start with urgency. If you need the cash now, take the buyout. Clean break. No lingering inventory. No mental bandwidth spent tracking price drops.

If you’re willing to wait, ask yourself what matters more: convenience or maximizing return. If convenience wins, consignment (or buyout for lower-value items) is your lane. If maximizing return is the priority, then you need to honestly assess whether you’re prepared to manage the sale yourself — potentially for months — with no certainty of outcome.

Use this decision tree to weigh your options:

1. How quickly do you want to be paid?

   1. ASAP → Buyout

   2. I don't mind waiting for a higher payout → Continue to Q2

2. Which matters more to you when selling your items — convenience, or maximizing return?

   1. Convenience → Consignment or buyout (*)

   2. Maximizing return → Continue to Q3

3. Like any reselling business, self-listing requires ongoing management and a whole lot of patience. Even then, there is no guarantee your proceeds will be higher than your next best consignment offer. Are you willing and able to take on the reseller role for however long it takes to sell your items?

   1. Too much hassle → Consignment

   2. What, like it's hard? → Self-list (**)

Here’s where commission structures matter.

Most resellers use tiered commissions. Lower-value items often sit at 40/60 or 50/50 splits, while higher-ticket pieces earn progressively better splits for the consignor. Why? Because the operational work is roughly the same regardless of price, but the upside is dramatically different. A $10,000 bag generates meaningful commission. A $900 bag doesn’t, at least not relative to the labor required.

That’s why many resellers quietly discourage low-value items for consignment or impose minimum fees. And that’s why you need to pay attention to the math.

As a case study, I submitted a Louis Vuitton Monogram Popincourt to Rebag using the photos and information from our listing.

The consignment quote came back with a payout range of $830–$1,300 based on an estimated sale price of up to $1,565. The immediate buyout offer was $985. That becomes a judgment call.

Yes, consignment could theoretically net more. But it could also land below the buyout once pricing adjustments, time on market, and commission splits play out. The higher end of a consignment range is not a guarantee; it’s an optimistic projection.

The takeaway is simple: if the differential between buyout and projected consignment payout is under $1,000, seriously consider taking the buyout. Money in hand now often beats waiting months for an uncertain payout that you still have to split with the reseller.