Cook Group Glossary: Every Reselling Term Explained (UK Edition)

Open any cook group Discord for the first time and the chat reads like a foreign language, Ws and Ls, bricks and grails, AIOs and ACO. Here’s every term worth knowing, in plain English, grouped by theme. Bookmark it; the jargon stops being intimidating after about a week.

The basics

• Cook / cooking: successfully buying limited or underpriced stock to resell at profit. The word the whole scene is named after.
• Cook group: a paid (sometimes free-tier) community providing monitors, drop info, guides and chat. See our full explainer.
• Flip: buy low, sell high; the generic unit of reselling.
• W / L: win / loss. Posted constantly in group chats (“big W on the JD restock”).
• Brick: an item that resells at or below what you paid. Failed flip, dead money.
• Grail: a holy-grail item; something rare and personally coveted, often kept rather than sold.
• Resale value: what an item actually sells for on the secondary market (StockX, eBay sold listings, Vinted), not what people list it at.
• Cop / drop: to buy (“cop”), and a product release (“drop”).

Tools of the trade

• Monitor: software that watches sites and pings a Discord channel the instant something happens: a restock, a price drop, a new Vinted listing under market value. The core paid-group tool.
• Bot / AIO: software that automates checkout itself. “AIO” = All-In-One, a bot supporting many retailers. Faster than humans; can breach a retailer’s terms of service, and retailers actively fight them. Full explainer: what is a sneaker bot?
• ACO: Auto-checkout: services or group perks where someone else’s bot checks out for you, usually for a fee or sub.
• Proxy: an intermediate IP address that makes one person look like many shoppers, used to bypass one-per-customer limits. Sold in batches (“resi” = residential proxies, harder to detect; “DC” = datacentre, cheaper and easier to block).
• Captcha solver: tooling that handles the “prove you’re human” checks during automated checkouts.
• Profile / billing profile: a saved set of checkout details; multi-entry strategies need many of them.

Drops and buying

• Raffle: a retailer’s lottery for the right to buy a hyped release. Most UK Nike/adidas hype now moves through raffles rather than first-come-first-served.
• Restock: previously sold-out stock returning, often quietly. Where monitors earn their keep.
• Price error: a retailer mislabels a price (a £200 jacket at £20). Groups run dedicated channels; retailers may cancel orders, but plenty ship.
• Early link / backdoor: a product page link before public release. Early links are a classic group edge; “backdooring” (staff selling stock out the back) is the scene’s dirty-laundry term.
• Sit / sitting: stock that isn’t selling (“these are sitting on StockX”).
• Lowkey / hyped: under-the-radar profitable items vs. headline releases everyone’s fighting over. Lowkey flips are where consistent money usually lives.

Selling terms

• BNWT / BNIB: Brand New With Tags / Brand New In Box. Condition shorthand that materially changes price.
• DS / VNDS: Deadstock (unworn) / Very Near Deadstock. Sneaker-specific condition grades.
• StockX / GOAT: sneaker/streetwear marketplaces with authentication; the de-facto price oracles for hyped goods.
• Fees / payout: what the platform takes vs. what lands in your account. Always calculate flips on payout, not sale price.
• Comps: comparable sold listings; the evidence you price from.

Money and admin

• All-in: your true total cost: item + postage + fees. Profit is sale payout minus all-in, nothing else.
• Trading allowance: a UK tax-free allowance for small amounts of trading income. We do not give tax advice; see GOV.UK for the current rules.
• ROI: return on investment, the percentage you made on what you risked. A £20 profit on £40 all-in (50% ROI) beats a £30 profit on £200 (15%) for capital efficiency.

That’s the vocabulary. If you’re now wondering whether to actually join one of these groups, start with are cook groups worth it? and then our ranked comparison of the UK options.