How to List Your Items on Whatnot: A Guide for New Sellers

Listing your items might feel overwhelming at first, but this guide will walk you through your options and help you choose the best setup for your inventory.

Before You Start: Weighing Items Accurately

Your item’s weight determines its shipping cost - so it’s crucial to enter the correct weight when listing.

• Underestimating weight → USPS may return the package to you.
• Overestimating weight → Buyers may overpay for shipping.

💡 Tip: Use a scale. When in doubt, it’s better to round up slightly than under-report.

Types of Listings on Whatnot

When creating a listing, you'll first choose between two formats:

• Temporary Listings
  • Only visible during the live show in which they’re created
  • Disappear when the show ends
  • Fast to create with minimal details
• Quality Listings
  • Stay active even after the show ends
  • Require detailed descriptions and photos
  • Ideal if you want long-term visibility for your items and/or carry items from one show to the next

Each listing, whether Temporary or Quality, can also be set as the following:

• Auction
  • Price increases as viewers bid
  • Runs for a set duration (usually during a show)
• Buy-It-Now (BIN)
  • Fixed price
  • Available throughout the show and beyond (if it’s a Quality Listing)

Additional options for BIN listings only:

• Accept Offers - Let buyers submit offers on BIN listings
• Flash Sales - Temporarily discount BIN items during a show - only available for Quality Listings.

Most sellers use a mix of Auction and BIN listings in their shows; this combination offers buyers more ways to shop.

Shipping Settings for Your First Show

We recommend the following setup:

• Under 3 oz:
  • Leave USPS First-Class Letter OFF for now. (While useful for lightweight cards, it lacks tracking.)
• Domestic Shipments (1–5 lbs and 5+ lbs):
  • Check the USPS Priority Mail option

When creating listings, simply choose a Shipping Profile that reflects the item’s weight (from the dropdown menu). If your item is in between weights, choose the higher weight to avoid under-reporting the weight and risk having USPS send the item back to you.

Which Listing Format Should You Use?

✔️ Selling a handful of unique items you want to show off one-by-one?

Use Quality Listings with clear photos and descriptions. You can list each as an Auction or a BIN.

✔️ Selling a high volume of items, many of which are similarly weighted?

Use Temporary Listings grouped by weight.

For example, if you’re auctioning off 100 items that weigh between 1 and 2 pounds, you can do the following:

• Create a listing titled “1–2 lbs”
• Set quantity to 100
• Keep “List these products individually” turned off
• As you run items, Whatnot will auto-label items as “1–2 lbs #1,” “1–2 lbs #2,” etc.
• Use sticky notes or labels as you run the items to track which item corresponds to which number

This method is great for high-volume or randomized inventory.

✔️ Selling a high volume of items and want to create a Quality Listing for each item?

Try our CSV uploader.

✔️ Running a card break?

Use our Breaks Feature. 

✔️ Running a Surprise Set?

Use our Surprise Sets Feature.