For the last three years, Vinted has been my digital happy place. A little dopamine hit every time a parcel arrived on my doorstep, or when someone snapped up the too-snug dress I hadn’t worn since before I had my two babies, or when I offloaded a bundle of babygrows they’d outgrown. During two long, often financially tricky, maternity leaves, it felt like a way to clear out wardrobes and simultaneously justify the occasional “new-to-me” splurge without the guilt.
But lately, the app that once felt like a treasure trove of cheap children’s coats and more affordable designer labels – as well as a handy source of a bit of extra spending money – has become a real drag. Endless lowball offers, rude buyers, and items languishing unsold for weeks; what used to be a thrill now feels like one long petty argument and I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to log off for good.
First things first, I must admit I’ve made some decent money from Vinted. I’ve seen sales of £1,155 since I first downloaded the app in 2022 – all on stuff that would probably otherwise still be hanging in my wardrobe.
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When you sell items on Vinted, however, the money doesn’t hit your bank account directly; instead, you build up a Vinted balance, and it can feel all too easy to spend it on something else right away. A £90 Farm Rio dress here, a £60 Sézane top there, I have found it sometimes tempting to spend instead of sensibly transferring my Vinted balance into my bank account.
Particularly during my two maternity leaves, when many months saw no pay cheque arrive, I’ve used my little balance of £50 or £60 here and there as a way to allow myself a tiny window into my ‘normal’ life as the assistant editor of a glossy magazine, treating myself to some new clothes and giving myself a bit of a style boost in the process. Plus, being a size 14, I’ve monopolised on all the Ozempic weight loss to get some real bargains in my size.
As time has gone on, however, I have begun to hit some blockers in my love affair with Vinted. There’s a lot of admin, for a start: whilst the uploading of your items for sale is a fairly simple process it does take time to get all of your ‘marketing’ just right (and the right photos and sales patter do matter). Then there are the buyer questions, the time-wasting offers (“Will you accept £12 for this?” Um, considering it’s on sale for £55….no?) and the bartering, oh the bartering.
Whether it’s from the buyer or the seller’s side, you find yourself at a sort of mad digital carboot sale where everyone is trying to haggle (a single pound is a lot in the world of Vinted) using weird and wonderful excuses in the process. Having once made an offer of £25 on a dress listed for £30, I was told that by making such an offer I was depriving the pugs the seller had recently valiantly rescued of vital funds for their food. I was once made an offer of £20 on a Free People cardigan I was selling for £50, because the buyer had lost theirs and needed to replace it for “sentimental reasons”. It’s a minefield of madness.
None of this ends once you’ve secured a sale or a purchase, of course. You then must jump over several hurdles as a seller: will they collect the parcel? If not, it gets returned to you and you have to relist the item again. Will they have an issue with the item?
One lady reported me when she found a single hair on a dress I’d sold, meaning my payment was held in the Vinted ether (it was finally released once she’d brushed it off, though she did leave me a three-star review). As a buyer you have to hope you receive what you’ve actually paid for. I once got a pair of Tu leggings when I’d bought a Sweaty Betty pair (I was refunded in the end) and, more recently, got scammed with fake Olaplex shampoo and conditioner (it took a couple of washes to realise it was fake, by which point the transaction had been completed, meaning I couldn’t get my money back). I’ve also recently come to the realisation that a good 50% of clothing items I’ve bought for myself either don’t fit or don’t suit me, and I relisted them.
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There is no doubt that business is booming at Vinted, which started out in 2008 in Lithuania, when two friends, Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauska, built a simple site to help clear out their wardrobes. What started as a side project for swapping second hand clothes quietly snowballed into a European tech success story. The company now counts more than 100 million members across 20 countries, with the UK among its biggest markets. Valued at around £4 billion, it has gone from scrappy start-up to one of the world’s largest resale platforms, riding the boom in second-hand fashion as shoppers look for cheaper, greener ways to refresh their wardrobes. Last year Vinted’s net profit soared to £65m.
Behind-the-scenes, however, there is a sense that I’m not the only one with Vinted vexation. Reddit threads are filled with complaints from sellers about declining visibility, shadow banning, unpredictable algorithms, and poor customer support. A straw poll of my friends and followers said that the Vinted users among them have seen languishing sales, with items sitting unsold for weeks and months, and buyers increasingly unwilling to part with more than £25 for almost anything, regardless of the label. One friend was sent a Dorothy Perkins dress instead of Gucci sunglasses, leading to an exasperating back and forth, during which the seller agreed to refund my friend ‘once she sent back the sunglasses’ – which she had never received.
I can personally pinpoint the exact moment that I felt like life was perhaps too short to spend it running a failing Vinted side-hustle. I had found myself engaged in a dispute with a buyer from Romford over a £1.50 newborn cardigan which hadn’t yet arrived. ‘What are you piping up for?!’ she wrote via DM when I gently suggested it would arrive soon given she had a tracking number. I realised that second hand reselling had started to feel like an enraging customer service job, and that perhaps £1.50 didn’t seem worth getting high blood pressure for.
Farewell then, Vinted. My joy might have slowly got lost in the post, but the memories we’ve made will last a lifetime.