Reselling News: Depop Ends Independent Shipping on New US Listings, and ThredUp Guides to a Down Holiday Quarter

Two developments surfaced this week and they point the same direction. A marketplace took away a shipping choice, and a public resale company told investors its holiday quarter will be smaller than last year's. Both come down to who controls the cost of getting a cheap item from your closet to a stranger.

Depop closed the independent shipping option on new US listings

If you have an older Depop account, you may have been buying your own postage and marking listings as "Other" rather than using Depop's prepaid labels. That option is gone going forward. As of October 28, every new US listing uses Depop Shipping, which means a prepaid USPS label or QR code issued after the sale, with the buyer paying the shipping charge. Value Added Resource reported the change on November 5 and quotes Depop's own wording: "From October 28, 2026, 'Other' is no longer available for new listings. Everything you list from that date uses Depop Shipping. If you set a listing to 'Other' before October 28, 2026, it stays that way until it sells."

Read that second sentence twice, because the exception has a trap in it. Your old listings keep independent shipping only while they stay the same listing. Delete one and put it back up, which is exactly what a lot of sellers do to refresh stale inventory, and it comes back as a Depop Shipping listing. If buying your own postage is cheaper for your item mix, the cheapest thing you can do this week is stop deleting and relisting on Depop.

The rollout is not uniform by country. Australia went mandatory with Australia Post for new accounts on October 6 and existing accounts on October 26. The UK keeps independent shipping alongside its Evri integration. The US is the one that just closed.

One early complaint is worth watching. Value Added Resource notes a seller whose lightweight pants were assigned a large or extra large package size by the system, which narrows the label options and raises the cost. Check the size Depop picks before you accept the label, and if it consistently oversizes your category, that is a real line item, not a rounding error.

ThredUp guided to a smaller holiday quarter

ThredUp posted third quarter results on November 4 that read fine on the surface. Revenue was $88.2 million, up 7 percent year over year, with a record 1.82 million active buyers, up 16 percent, and 1.89 million orders, up 17 percent, against a $5.5 million net loss, per the company's own earnings release filed with the SEC.

The guidance is the story. ThredUp told investors to expect fourth quarter revenue of $77.0 million to $79.0 million, roughly a 2 percent decline year over year at the midpoint, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 4 percent to negative 2 percent. That is a shrinking holiday quarter at a company whose buyer count is growing. Chief executive James Reinhart framed it as navigating "a highly competitive environment." The market took it badly, and analysts moved quickly, with Northland cutting the stock to market perform and pointing at heavier discounting pulling average selling prices down.

That competitive environment is the thing you have been reading about here all week. Poshmark dropped buyer shipping to 99 cents on November 3. Depop and Vinted have been buying down buyer shipping for months. Depop just took over label issuance on US listings. When platforms fight for the same secondhand buyer by lowering what the buyer pays, the discount has to come out of somewhere, and on a used clothing item it usually comes out of the price the item finally sells for.

What to actually do with this

Price against sold comps from the last 30 days rather than from a stronger month earlier in the year, because a softer average selling price shows up in comps before it shows up in a headline. On Depop specifically, leave your grandfathered listings alone and recheck your margin on anything you list fresh.

A seller who knows the real landed cost on each item can absorb a quarter like this. One who priced off a number from six months ago finds out in January. Working out that number per item, per platform, is what members and I grind through together at The Income Lab.

Hero image: the Depop wordmark, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.