Reselling News: Depop's Hidden Checkout Fee Draws Another Lawsuit and eBay Puts Affiliate Links in the App

Both of this week's items come down to the same question: who actually pays, and do they see it coming. One is a courtroom fight over a fee buyers meet at the last screen. The other is a way for you to get paid for traffic you are already sending.

Depop is back in court over the fee buyers do not see until checkout

Value Added Resource reported Monday that a new proposed class action landed against Depop on September 15 in the Northern District of Illinois. The plaintiff, Javier Rivera, says he bought a $400 item in August 2025 and only saw a $20.70 Marketplace Fee once he reached final checkout, on top of $7.99 shipping and $43.94 in sales tax, for a total of $472.63. The complaint calls that drip pricing and cites the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act.

None of this is new ground. A California federal case filed by Linsey Dinh in February was voluntarily dismissed in July without any ruling on whether the practice was legal, and a state court case in California is still moving. The Illinois filing is the third swing at the same target.

The fee itself is not a secret. Depop dropped its 10 percent US selling fee on July 15, 2024 and three days later started charging buyers a Marketplace Fee of up to 5 percent of the item price plus up to a dollar. The company was upfront that the money was moving from one side of the transaction to the other. The dispute is about where that number appears, not whether it exists.

Here is why it lands on you. Depop is the platform whose whole pitch to sellers is zero commission, and that pitch is real, US sellers still pay only the 3.3 percent plus 45 cents in payment processing. But the buyer looking at your $45 jacket is going to pay closer to $48 before shipping and tax, and they find that out after they have decided. If you cross-list, that is the gap between what your Depop price looks like next to your eBay price and what it costs. Price the item, then do the checkout math yourself once, so you know what your listing actually asks for. And keep in mind who owns the outcome now: eBay closed its acquisition of Depop on July 30, so any fee redesign that comes out of these cases comes from eBay's side of the table.

eBay Ambassadors can now make affiliate links without leaving the app

eBay emailed its Ambassador affiliates on September 17 with two changes, covered by Value Added Resource. Ambassadors can build affiliate links straight from the current iOS or Android app, and they now get Smart Share, the Chrome extension that eBay Partner Network affiliates have had for years. Smart Share generates a tracking link from whatever eBay page you are looking at and flags which items are commissionable, so you stop copying URLs into a portal.

The Ambassador program pays up to 7.5 percent commission and it is self-service, which is the part most resellers skip past. If you already post hauls, comps, or thrift finds anywhere with an audience, you are pointing people at eBay for free right now. Linking a find you did not buy costs you nothing and pays if someone else buys it.

Read the program terms before you point those links at your own listings. Affiliate programs generally do not pay you for sending people to inventory you own, and eBay has not published a plain answer on that for Ambassador. Treat it as a way to earn on the stuff you talk about, not a discount on your own sell-through.

The takeaway

The thread between these two is that the money in reselling keeps moving to places the eye does not go: a line item on the last checkout screen, a commission on a link you were giving away. Neither one shows up in your profit spreadsheet unless you go looking.

Sorting out which of these is worth an afternoon and which is worth ignoring is easier with people running the same numbers. That is what we do inside The Income Lab.

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