The biggest sourcing mistake new resellers make isn’t picking the wrong thrift store — it’s starting at the thrift store at all. The best first source for inventory costs nothing and is sitting in your own home right now.

Start with your own closet. Quality apparel, decor, unopened gifts, electronics you don’t use — anything in good condition that you no longer need. This is the fastest, lowest-risk way to learn the actual mechanics of listing, photographing, and shipping before you’ve spent a single dollar on inventory.

Then move to thrift stores — Goodwill, Savers, and local shops — timed around restock days, usually early in the week. Natural fabrics like silk, linen, and wool, plus activewear and recognizable brands, are worth the extra minute of digging. Asking an employee when new racks hit the floor is a small question that saves a lot of wasted trips.

Garage and yard sales reward early arrival for the best individual pieces, and late arrival — often right before closing — for cheap bulk box deals when sellers just want things gone.

Estate sales, especially on the last day or during half-off hours, are where a lot of genuinely valuable vintage home goods, solid wood furniture, and designer clothing surface. Sign up for local estate sale alerts and inspect items closely for storage damage before you buy.

Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp are worth checking daily, particularly in the evening, for bulk clothing lots and moving-sale posts. Search terms like “moving sale,” “declutter,” and “closet cleanout” tend to surface the best bulk opportunities.

Retail clearance racks round things out — end-of-season sections with 70% or more off new-with-tags apparel and discontinued home goods. A quick barcode scan with a resale app tells you in seconds whether the resale math actually works before you buy.

The pattern across all of these: start where the risk is lowest and the learning is fastest, then expand into higher-margin sourcing once you know what actually sells for you. A full sourcing hierarchy, plus platform-by-platform fee and audience comparisons, is part of the Second Hand Muse Starter Kit.