The question in threads is "is this cheaper than retail", and it always gets answered with one order: somebody posts a haul, adds up the items, compares against a retail price they looked up, and produces a ratio. That arithmetic is fine as far as it goes, and it does not go as far as a year.
An annual figure is not a per-order figure multiplied. It has rows a single order cannot have, because they are all consequences of doing this more than once. Below is the ledger. We cannot fill in a single number in it, and the last section says why that refusal is the useful part.
Six rows a per-order budget does not have
Items that never got worn
The row that dominates, and the one people leave out because it is embarrassing. Cheap items get bought speculatively — the price is low enough that the decision is not really a decision — and a proportion are worn once or never. Retail prices are, among other things, a filter on impulse; remove the filter and volume goes up. The annual cost of the habit includes everything you bought and did not use, and no haul post has that row.
Orders that ended in nothing
Across a year, some proportion of orders produce no wearable object. Items go out of stock after payment, a listing turns out to be a different item, a parcel disappears, an exchange reproduces the same fault, something gets written off rather than reshipped. Each has a page here — out of stock after payment, reship or write off — and each costs money that produced nothing. You cannot know your own rate before you have one.
The clock running in a warehouse
Storage is free for a window and then charged per day, per item, from the moment each item is shelved rather than from when the haul is complete. Across a year of hauls stalling on one slow seller, that becomes a real line. Warehouse storage fees sets out how the clock runs.
Replacement, which is the row that decides everything
The row that makes an annual figure differ most from a per-order one, and the one nobody can compute for you. If an item lasts a season and is replaced, its cost per year is its price; if it lasts four years, a quarter of it. A cheap item replaced annually and an expensive one replaced every third year can land on the same annual number while feeling completely different in the wearing. Every argument about batches and price tiers is really an argument about this row.
The float sitting with your agent
Refunds and cancellations usually return as a balance in the agent's system rather than to your card. Over a year, and especially across a switch, a residue accumulates: money already spent that you can only spend again in one place. Not lost, not available either. Switching shopping agents covers what happens to it.
The hours
Not a currency cost, and it belongs in the ledger anyway. Finding links, reading albums, messaging for measurements, comparing QC photos, tracking parcels, arguing about one that went wrong. If the hunt is part of the appeal that time is a benefit rather than a cost — but decide which it is deliberately rather than by default.
What our record can contribute, which is almost nothing
This site holds 237 quoted Reddit comments about 124 sellers. Nineteen of those comments contain a currency figure of any kind, across fifteen sellers, and every one of them is a price for a single item or a single parcel. Exactly one comment in the entire corpus uses the phrase "a year", and it is a buyer describing how long they spent looking for a duffle bag before buying one.
So there is no annual-spend evidence here, and there is none anywhere else either that is worth more than a stranger's memory of their own habit. What the record does hold is a good illustration of why a per-item price is a bad basis for a yearly estimate. The same shoe, at four sellers, in one week:
I don't understand what's up with summer walks AP version everyone sells them for different price koala 660, Kevin 760, Aristide 850 yuan, and now ice cream for 720 yuan. It's clear for me that everyone has a margin on them with aristate being the most overpriced of the bunch.
u/Little-Selection7004, r/stockholmreps, 16 May 2026
A spread of that size on one identical product means "what a rep costs" has no single value at the level of one item, let alone a year. That comment and its thread are on the seller's page.
The second reason a projection fails is that the shipping half of the bill is not knowable in advance, and is not always the published number:
Justgokick really treated me like an idiot. On his website, express shipping costs $20, but he asked me for $61 in shipping per hoodie.
u/Fyourk, r/RepsneakersDogs, 8 March 2025
One buyer, in 2025, one exchange, held in full on their evidence page. Whatever happened there, the shape is not unusual — why shipping prices move explains the legitimate half of it.
Keep the ledger yourself, in four columns
An hour of bookkeeping across a year beats every estimate anybody will give you. Four columns, one row per item, filled in as things arrive rather than at the end:
- What left your bank, in your own currency — not the yuan price, and not the checkout display.
- Everything else attached to that parcel: the domestic leg, the service fee, freight, storage, import charges and handling.
- What happened to it: worn, worn once, returned, written off, still in a warehouse.
- Whether you would buy it again.
At twelve months you will have the only figure that describes you, plus the two ratios that matter more than the total — how much of your spend produced something you actually wear, and what your failure rate is.
Two levers that change the annual number structurally
Consolidation, and buying less often. Both work on the same mechanism: freight is priced per parcel with an opening band, so the number of parcels drives the annual freight bill more than the number of items does. One buyer put the proportions bluntly:
But I honestly don’t understand why people even ask. 36€ or about 100€ for a few Nikes, in the best quality, where you would otherwise pay 500-1000€ for and you worry about 36€ shipping costs? Wild
u/Rich-Imagination-238, r/RepsneakersDogs, 3 April 2026
That is one person's arithmetic about one parcel, on their evidence page, and it argues for exactly one thing: shipping cost is worth optimising by batching rather than by agonising. Building a haul is the mechanics.
No figure appears on this page
We have not bought a haul, paid duty in any country, or held a receipt. Nobody here has run a year of this and kept books, so an annual figure from us would be a guess dressed as research — and this site takes a commission when someone opens an agent account through its links, which is exactly the reason to distrust any cost estimate we published. The methodology page says how we handle that.
Start from what a single haul costs, line by line, keep the four columns, and let your own first year produce the number.