Reselling News: Vinted Rewrites Its Terms for October 8 and eBay Quietly Widens Extended Bidding

Terms of service updates are the part of this business nobody reads, and they are also where the platforms tell you exactly what they are about to do. Two documents changed shape this week. One is a rewrite with a date on it. The other is a deletion nobody announced.

Vinted posted new terms, and the US date is October 8

Vinted published updated terms across ten European markets this week, effective October 5, with separate updates scheduled for the United States and the United Kingdom on October 8. Value Added Resource read the new documents line by line. The US terms were not posted yet as of this writing, and Vinted's US terms page still shows the version dated December 18, 2025, so what follows is what the European text does and what to watch for when the American one appears.

Three changes stand out. The first is the money plumbing. Vinted is moving balances off Mangopay, the third-party payment provider it has used, onto its own Vinted Pay. Users with an activated balance have to accept the new payment terms, and the European text says anyone who declines will no longer be able to use Vinted, though they can request a payout first.

The second is naming. The mandatory fee buyers pay is no longer described as a Buyer Protection fee in the new European text. It is now a Vinted fee that, in the company's words, contributes to its costs of operating the site. The refund protections themselves are still there, listed separately. Nothing about the amount changed, and the US price list still reads as a fixed $0.70 plus 5 percent of the item price, shipping excluded. Sellers on Vinted still pay nothing on a sale.

The third is counterfeits, and it cuts both ways. Sellers flagged for authenticity now get 48 hours to respond instead of 24. Vinted also gives itself explicit permission to dispose of, recycle, or destroy an item confirmed as counterfeit after a six-week holding window if the seller does not object.

What to do about it: log in before October 8 and confirm your balance is actually cashed out or that you are willing to accept the new payment terms, because a payout you left sitting in the app is the thing a terms migration can strand. Then take the counterfeit clause seriously if you source from bins. Two days is not much time to produce a receipt for something you bought in a pile.

eBay took the category limits off its Extended Bidding page

Extended Bidding is the feature that kills sniping. eBay's own bidding help page now states it plainly: "We're testing extended bidding on auction listings in some categories. Any bid placed in the final 60 seconds resets the clock to 60 seconds." The clock keeps resetting until a full minute passes with no new bid.

eBay started this in trading cards, added vehicles, and rolled it out to every auction in Australia on August 17. What did not get announced is that the help pages in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany dropped their references to specific categories in mid-August, which is how a limited test usually stops being limited. eBay's September seller news, published this week, does not mention it at all.

What to do about it: if you run auctions, stop treating the end time as the sale. Under the old rules the last five seconds decided everything, and a lot of sellers scheduled endings to catch a specific evening crowd. When the clock can extend, the ending stretches to wherever real demand stops, and the item that had two people fighting over it in the final second now has room to keep going. That is generally good for your number. It also means your listing may close later than you planned, so do not schedule an auction to end thirty minutes before you have to leave the house.

The takeaway

Both of these arrived without a push notification, which is the normal way platform rules change. The sellers who get surprised are the ones who find out from a buyer. Reading the boring documents on a schedule, and knowing which lines actually touch your money, is part of the routine we build inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: the Vinted logo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.