Reselling News
Reselling News: Vinted Took More Than Half the UK Used Clothing Market and eBay Hires a Fashion Boss
UK regulator figures put Vinted at 50 to 60 percent of used clothing sales while eBay names a fashion GM over a 10 billion dollar category.
Most reselling news tells you what a company plans to do. This week gave us something rarer, a government file showing what already happened to one used clothing market when a free to sell app moved in.
A regulator put hard numbers on what Vinted did to eBay and Depop
When the UK Competition and Markets Authority reviewed eBay's purchase of Depop, it had to size the market first, so it collected gross merchandise value data from both companies and cross checked it against competitors. The result sits in Table 1 of the CMA's published decision, and Value Added Resource pulled it back out this week. The CMA publishes shares as bands, not exact figures.
| Share of UK C2C apparel GMV | 2021 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Vinted | 5 to 10 percent | 50 to 60 percent |
| eBay | 30 to 40 percent | 10 to 20 percent |
| Depop | 10 to 20 percent | 0 to 5 percent |
| Facebook Marketplace | 10 to 20 percent | 5 to 10 percent |
The CMA put limited weight on static share numbers, since these platforms are built differently and buyers do not treat them as interchangeable. It was blunter about the cause. The decision records that both eBay and Depop watched Vinted closely, named its free to sell model and its marketing spending as the pressure, and responded by removing their own seller fees. Depop stopped charging UK sellers a selling fee on new listings in March 2024.
What to do about it: read the shape of that table, not the country it came from. A market that looked settled in 2021 was upside down by 2025, and the platform that won charged sellers nothing. Vinted is running the same free to sell playbook in the US now. That is not a reason to abandon the platform paying your bills. It is a reason to keep your listings in more than one place, so a shift in where buyers go is an inconvenience and not an ending.
eBay put a fashion veteran over a 10 billion dollar category
On August 17, WWD reported that eBay named Renee Paradise global general manager of fashion, starting August 25 and reporting to Chris Prill, the VP of focus categories. She worked at eBay from 2014 to 2019, including a stint as senior director and general manager of fashion, then went to Bloomingdale's and to Neiman Marcus Group as chief digital officer. eBay says fashion now produces more than 10 billion dollars in annual GMV across luxury and non luxury, and Value Added Resource has the full background.
Put the hire next to the table above and the reasoning is not hard to follow. eBay paid 1.4 billion dollars for Depop, closed the deal on July 30, and now owns a brand whose UK share went to nearly nothing while it was busy losing its own. Clothing is the category eBay has to defend, and a person is now accountable for it.
What to do about it: expect the apparel rules to get stricter before they get looser. eBay's standardized sizing for apparel and footwear took effect this month, and a category getting executive attention gets more data requirements, not fewer. Fill in size, measurements, brand, color, and material on every clothing listing you touch, including the ones already live.
eBay UK is buying its way back into cheap fashion
The spending is visible too. From September 1, eBay UK moves Simple Delivery to value based rates for private sellers on items priced 75 to 750 pounds, applied automatically to live listings as well as new ones. Alongside it, buyers get free Click and Collect on eligible fashion items priced 20 pounds and under from private sellers between September 1 and October 31. ChannelX and Value Added Resource both covered it on August 17.
That is a UK program, so it does not touch your US postage. It is still worth noting, because subsidizing delivery on cheap clothing is what a company does when it wants low priced fashion volume back, and eBay tends to try things in one market before it tries them in another.
The takeaway
A free to sell rival went from a rounding error to the biggest player in one country's used clothing market in four years, and the incumbents cut their fees only once it was too late. You cannot control which platform wins that fight. You can control how many of them your inventory sits on, and how complete your listings are when the buyers arrive. Building that second and third sales channel without doubling your workload is what we work through inside The Income Lab.
Hero photo by MAKY.OREL, released under CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
