Reselling News: eBay Downgraded Twice Over Depop, and PSA Faces a Grading Class Action

Both stories this week are about somebody else's money, and both of them still change what you should do with your next hour of listing time. One is a pair of analyst notes about a marketplace you probably already sell on. The other is a lawsuit against the company whose plastic case sets the price of your trading cards.

Two downgrades in two days, and what they say about where the buyers are

eBay got cut twice this week. Wells Fargo moved it from equal weight to underweight on August 3, and Citizens followed on August 4 with a cut from market outperform to market perform. Both notes land on the same worry: what eBay is going to have to spend on Depop now that it owns it.

The figures in the Citizens note are the part worth your attention. Citizens estimates Depop's marketing spending could pass 250 million dollars in 2026, up from 119 million in 2025, with 42 million of that in the first quarter alone. The reason is Vinted. Vinted's US paid search spending went from roughly 16,000 dollars in February to 236,000 dollars in June, and the app climbed to fifth in Apple's App Store rankings. eBay paid 1.4 billion dollars for Depop and now has to defend it.

That is a stock story. The seller story sitting inside it is simpler. Two secondhand clothing apps are about to spend a fortune dragging American buyers onto their platforms, and neither one charges you to be there when those buyers arrive. Vinted takes no selling fee from US sellers, with no listing fee and no commission, and the buyer covers a protection fee of about 5 percent plus a fixed 70 cents. Depop is now the marketing budget in that Citizens note.

If you sell clothing and everything you own is listed on eBay only, this is the quarter to fix that. Paid advertising is how these apps get buyers, and your listing does not cost anything extra to be sitting there when the ads work. Start with the twenty items in your closet that have gone the longest without a watcher, because those are the ones a new audience helps most.

The company that grades your cards is being sued over how it grades them

PSA and its parent, Collectors, are now facing three separate cases over grading. The newest is Funk v. Collectors Universe, filed July 28 in the US District Court for the District of Maryland by a Baltimore collector seeking to represent a nationwide class. It argues that grading is sold as objective but is shaped by subjective standards, production quotas, and an inconsistency the company profits from every time a collector pays for a review or resubmits a card. The complaint points at the T206 Honus Wagner, the first card PSA ever certified, alleging it was trimmed and graded NM-MT 8 anyway. A second suit from collector Steve Lichtman was filed July 21 and moved to federal court on July 30, and an antitrust case over the SGC and Beckett acquisitions was amended August 3.

Collectors says the claims are without merit, that a grade is an expert opinion, and that it would never compromise its grading independence. None of the allegations have been tested in court.

Nothing about your inventory changes today. Slabbed cards still sell for more than raw ones, and the number on the label is still what most buyers price off. What should change is how hard you lean on that label in your own listing. Photograph the card itself, front and back through the holder, and describe centering, corners, edges, and surface in your own words instead of letting the grade do all the talking. If this conversation gets louder over the next year, the listings that actually showed the card will keep selling, and the ones that only showed a number will have to answer questions.

The takeaway

Neither of these stories asks you to change what you buy this week. They are both early signals, one about where buyers are being bought and one about how much a third party's opinion is worth in your description. Telling the news that should move your hands apart from the news that is just noise is a large part of what we work through together inside The Income Lab.

Hero uses the Vinted wordmark, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.