Move over, eBay. Slide aside, Depop. Pipe down, Poshmark. There’s a new dealer market in town and it’s catching on like wildfire.
I had never heard of Vinted in the last month. Then, within weeks, everyone in my social circle was talking about it. Moms frantically listed clothes and shoes their kids couldn’t fit into, while sheepishly admitting they were buying more than they could afford. Big discounts on new boxed toys. Designer shoes, no signs of wear. Kohl’s $40 sequined dress, worn once, $3.
Is Vinted just another reseller platform that’s popular today and forgotten tomorrow? perhaps. But it’s making some smart moves to ensure that everyone can fall in love with it quickly and hopefully stay hooked after the glow fades.
While Vinted feels new because it’s popular like wildfire, it’s actually been around for a while. Founded in Lithuania in 2008 by Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas, the company has become Europe’s leading online platform for selling and buying second-hand clothing. The concept came from solving a real-life problem: Mitkutė was moving and her new home didn’t have that much closet space, so she decided to launch an app to use the extra space to make money. In 2013, it expanded to the United States.
Vinted has an advantage that eBay and Poshmark don’t: extremely cheap shipping. Currently, as the US market is booming, the company mainly provides shipping cost subsidies for buyers and sellers, which naturally makes the joint venture more attractive a million times. Because everyone knows the worst thing about shopping online is paying for shipping.
By this point, Amazon Prime has spoiled us all. This may not make sense logically, but most of us would rather spend $10 on an item with free shipping than pay $8 for the same item and then spend $2 more to ship. Yes, it costs money to mail things. Yes, postal service is failing. We don’t care. Shipping costs feel predatory and unnecessary, the high shipping costs are enough Cancel purchase On its track.
The people behind Vinted understand this, so they’ve removed the barriers, at least for now. A dedicated Vinted seller social page warns buyers that they must accept the impending and unavoidable increase in shipping costs. But for now, recent converts are reveling in the glory of ultra-cheap shipping.
It’s not just transportation. The platform also rewards people who post frequently. Facebook users noted that the more items they posted in a day, the higher their sales were, as the app fed these fresh items into its algorithm and made them available to buyers around the world.
Look, I see through their ploy, but I’m not immune to the psychological effects. Boy, do they work. The first item I listed immediately attracted 18 people to “favorite” it. I think a lot of people bought a bunny-shaped makeup bag with a label at the same time? No. I suspect many of them are robots? Yes. Did it give me an ego boost anyway? Yes. Next I listed a random cardigan that I didn’t remember buying, and 30 people added it to their favorites. It’s addictive.
It took a few weeks for the makeup bag to finally sell, but a host of other items dug out of the depths of my closet flew out the door. Vintage flared jeans from the early 2000s were a particularly popular item, especially among buyers in London, who received 50 likes and multiple offers for the item. I ship them overseas. Somehow no one pays much.
I sat on the floor of my son’s room after get off work one night and made a list of a ton of stuff and sold them almost as soon as they appeared on the app. By the time I posted my fifth item, the first item had already sold. This brings an air of urgency and excitement to the entire business.
The dopamine rush from selling things makes me make lists, usually every day, and ship frequently. The lady at the post office and I became friendly.
Bargain items are particularly popular, with children’s shirts and pants typically selling for $1 to $3. The whole vibe is less snobbish than Poshmark’s and feels more like a giant online yard sale where everything is up for grabs. Some may think it’s a waste of time, but mums with lots of young children see an opportunity to bulk sell items they no longer need and raise funds while decluttering. This is an overall victory.
Vinted is not a novel concept. Depop in the UK and ThredUp in the US have both competed with eBay’s long-standing dominance of the second-hand clothing market. Poshmark has carved out its own space, especially for high-end brands.
But Vinted feels fun, social, and cheap. It also thrives on a sense of urgency. Vinted has another big benefit: It allows sellers to keep 100% of their profits, which is unheard of. This almost didn’t happen either. A few years after it first launched, the company added commissions to all sales on the site, which Mitkutė calls “one of the biggest mistakes we made in the history of Vinted.”
“This is a disaster…our word-of-mouth, our organic growth…almost instantly went to zero. In 2016, we said we still had seven or eight months to survive,” she said Tell In an interview with the BBC last September.
The company hired a new CEO, who eliminated commissions and began advertising aggressively on television. This is an important turning point. according to fashion businessVinted’s revenue grew by 61% between 2022 and 2023, and the company achieved a net profit of US$20 million in 2023. Vinted usage in the UK has grown from 1.2 million users in 2021 to 8 million in just two years.
Now it is about to enter the US market. Vinted has been in the U.S. for more than a decade, but this year it stepped up its marketing efforts, targeting markets such as New York. according to Appfigures IntelligenceIn April, US users downloaded Vinted 1.2 million times on the App Store and Google Play. Only the live streaming shopping marketplace Whatnot has a higher download volume.
Free Shipping, No Commission: It’s easy to wonder how this company makes money. The answer is a barely noticeable 5% + 70 cents buyer protection fee Buyer pays for each sale. Meanwhile, the only cost to the seller is the optional promotional tools. You can sell anything and earn 100% of the listed price without spending a dime (except shipping supplies).
How does this translate to actual dollars? Let’s say you want to list an item for $50. Selling it on Vinted means you can earn $50. After deducting the 3.3% fee and the 45-cent fee on Depop, you can buy the same item for $47.90. Meanwhile, Poshmark will charge a flat commission of 20%, leaving $40.
Seller is happy. Buyers are excited. But is it too good to be true? Digging into “why” shipping is super cheap doesn’t provide any clear answers. Responses generated by Google’s artificial intelligence suggest this may be a promotion for new users, but Reddit posts suggest users have been questioning the phenomenon for months.
This is a receipt from a book I bought for my son. The itemized charges show that I paid a total of $3.97, including the $2 purchase price, 80 cents buyer protection fee, and 18 cents sales tax. But while postage was supposed to be $6.97, which was the same everywhere else, I got a mysterious $5.98 “discount” and only paid 99 cents for shipping.
Amanda Harding
Reddit users were as skeptical as I was.
“I like it, but it worries me a little,” one commenter on the r/Vinted group wrote of the discount shipping mystery.
“All I’m saying is, buy what you can!! I’ve searched and can’t figure out why I haven’t been charged for the 15 items I’ve purchased on Vinted so far,” another user wrote. “I’m very grateful for that, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to afford it, but how do they do it?”
“There are no hidden shipping costs. So I strike while the iron is hot,” the commenter continued.
I contacted the Vinted press room for comment and clarification but received no response. So now, I’m doing what everyone else seems to be doing: listing everything I can find, taking advantage of cheap shipping, and trying not to spend more money on Vinted than I actually make. Admittedly, this is becoming increasingly difficult.
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