The business model behind Vinted’s success

Vinted has helped turn second-hand shopping from a niche activity into a mainstream retail habit. Its success, however, is not simply the result of growing demand for used clothing.

The company has built a large consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace that makes it relatively easy for individuals to sell unwanted goods and for other consumers to find, pay for and receive them. It has then built payments, delivery and other services around those transactions.

For readers unfamiliar with the platform, Vinted is an online marketplace where individuals can buy and sell second-hand goods directly to one another. It began with fashion but has expanded into categories including electronics, books, homeware, sports and collectibles.

The scale of the business is now significant. In 2025, goods worth €10.8bn were traded through Vinted, measured as gross merchandise value (GMV), up 47% from 2024. Group revenue rose 38% to €1.1bn, while net profit reached €62m. Vinted was operating in 26 markets at the end of 2025.

GMV represents the value of goods traded through the marketplace, rather than the revenue Vinted itself receives. The difference illustrates an important feature of the model: Vinted does not need to buy the products listed on its platform in order to participate in the economic activity they generate.

The wider resale market is expanding too. Research by GlobalData, commissioned for ThredUp, projects that the global second-hand apparel market will reach $393bn by 2030 and grow twice as fast as the overall apparel market.

For retailers, Vinted therefore provides a useful case study in how a digital marketplace can achieve scale by making it easier for consumers to supply, discover and trade products — while building a business around the services that support those transactions.

How Vinted’s marketplace model works

The starting point of the Vinted business model is simple: Vinted does not own the inventory being sold by ordinary users.

Sellers provide the products, create the listings and set their asking prices. Buyers browse the marketplace and decide what to purchase. Vinted provides the technology and services that connect the two sides.

That gives the business a fundamentally different cost structure from conventional retail.

A retailer normally has to acquire or manufacture inventory, finance stock, manage warehouses or shops and take the risk that products will remain unsold. Vinted does not have to finance the goods traded between its members.

Its challenge is different. It needs enough sellers to create a useful selection of products and enough buyers to make selling worthwhile.

Vinted addresses the supply side by keeping the barrier to listing low. In the UK, for example, standard sellers do not pay a fee to list or sell items. Vinted says users can list as many items as they like without selling fees.

That matters because many of the products on a second-hand marketplace have relatively low values.

A consumer clearing out a wardrobe may not bother selling a £5 or £10 item if listing it costs money or involves a complicated process. Removing the standard selling fee makes it easier for consumers to put more goods onto the platform.

More listings create more choice for buyers. More buyers, in turn, make it more attractive for other consumers to list products.

This is the network effect at the centre of the Vinted business model.

More sellers create more choice. More choice attracts more buyers. More buyers increase the likelihood of sales, encouraging more sellers to participate.

The marketplace can therefore become more useful as it grows.

How Vinted makes money

Vinted does not need to charge ordinary sellers a listing fee to generate revenue. Instead, it monetises activity around the marketplace.

One of the main mechanisms is Buyer Protection. When a buyer uses Vinted’s payment system, a Buyer Protection fee applies. The service provides support and a refund mechanism for qualifying problems, including an item being lost, damaged or significantly different from its description.

Vinted also offers additional paid services. These include promotional tools that can increase the visibility of listings, as well as verification services for certain higher-value goods. Professional sellers can also use Vinted Pro in markets where the service is available.

The model therefore separates the cost of entering the marketplace from the monetisation of activity on it.

This is strategically important.

Keeping supply cheap and easy helps Vinted attract listings. Once buyers and sellers are active, the company has more opportunities to generate revenue from transactions and related services.

The result is a marketplace flywheel:

low barriers to selling → more supply → more buyers → more transactions → more revenue → greater investment in the marketplace.

Scale also gives Vinted an incentive to reduce the cost and inconvenience associated with each transaction.

That helps explain why the company is investing beyond the marketplace itself.

Why payments and logistics matter

Buying and selling a second-hand product between two individuals is inherently more complicated than buying from a conventional retailer.

The buyer needs confidence that the product exists and matches its description. The seller needs to receive payment. Someone needs to transport the item from one individual to another. Both sides need a way to resolve problems.

Vinted has increasingly invested in the infrastructure behind those transactions.

Through delivery partners, the company gives members access to more than 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points across Europe. Its Vinted Go business operates its own carrier services in selected markets and expanded into Spain and Portugal during 2025.

Vinted has also been developing its own payments infrastructure. Vinted Pay began rolling out its wallet solution in selected European markets in 2025, allowing sellers to receive funds into a Vinted wallet and use them for purchases or withdraw them to a bank account.

In March 2026, Vinted Pay received an Electronic Money Institution licence from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. Vinted said the licence enables it to issue electronic money and provide payment services in the UK, while the company continues to work with other payment providers.

The strategic logic is straightforward. The more transactions Vinted processes, the greater the potential benefit from making payments and delivery more efficient.

That is particularly important for low-value goods.

If payment and delivery costs consume too much of the value of a £5 or £10 item, consumers have less reason to sell it and buyers have less reason to purchase it. Lower friction can therefore make a wider range of second-hand products commercially viable.

Vinted is effectively building more of the infrastructure around its marketplace without taking ownership of the goods being traded.

Growth requires investment

The economics of the model also help explain why rapid growth does not necessarily translate into continuously rising profit.

Vinted’s 2025 results illustrate the trade-off. Revenue increased 38% to €1.1bn, but adjusted EBITDA fell 5% to €151m and net profit declined 19% to €62m. Free cash flow, however, increased 36% to €137m.

Vinted attributed the lower profits partly to investment in areas including the German market, new marketplace categories, Vinted Go and the introduction of Vinted Pay’s wallet.

The figures suggest that Vinted is prepared to invest in the infrastructure and markets that it believes can strengthen the business over the longer term.

That is a familiar strategy in digital marketplaces: spending on technology, logistics and payments can reduce short-term margins while potentially improving the economics of future transactions.

The distinction is particularly important in Vinted’s case because the company is not investing in inventory. It is investing in the system that enables other people to trade inventory.

Why Vinted matters to retailers

Vinted’s significance for retailers extends beyond the growth of second-hand shopping.

The first implication is that resale can expand the competitive set facing a new-product retailer.

A consumer considering a jacket, smartphone, sports product or other item may compare new products across retailers while also considering second-hand alternatives.

This can put additional pressure on retailers to demonstrate the value of buying new.

At the same time, resale can make some new products more attractive.

If consumers believe a product will retain its value and can later be resold, the effective cost of ownership may appear lower. A consumer buying a higher-priced item may therefore consider not only its initial price, but also its potential resale value.

Vinted’s own research illustrates this behaviour. Its 2026 research found that 88% of surveyed buyers check Vinted before buying something new. It also reported that 41% of surveyed sellers consider resale value before buying a new product.

These figures should be treated as indicative rather than definitive market-wide measurements because they come from research commissioned or published by Vinted. Nevertheless, they point to a broader change in consumer behaviour: resale can become part of the same purchasing decision as buying new.

For retailers, that means second-hand commerce is no longer necessarily a separate market sitting alongside conventional retail.

It can form part of the same customer journey.

Resale can also create opportunities for brands

The growth of resale does not automatically mean that every second-hand transaction represents a lost new-product sale.

For brands and retailers, a liquid secondary market can create opportunities as well as competitive pressure.

Trade-in schemes, refurbishment, branded resale and other recommerce models can give retailers a role in the secondary market while strengthening relationships with existing customers.

Resale can also support the value proposition of durable products.

If a consumer knows that a product is likely to retain value and can be sold later, that future value can become part of the original purchase decision. This may be particularly relevant for premium products, where the difference between the original purchase price and eventual resale value can be significant.

Retailers therefore have several strategic choices.

They can compete with resale marketplaces on price and convenience. They can introduce their own resale or trade-in services. Or they can design products and customer experiences that recognise the growing importance of a product’s entire lifecycle.

The right approach will vary by category, but the underlying shift is difficult to ignore: consumers increasingly have more than one route to acquire and dispose of products.

What retailers can learn from Vinted

The broader lesson from the Vinted business model is not simply that second-hand retail is growing.

It is that removing friction can create a powerful marketplace.

Vinted makes it inexpensive to supply products. It provides a large pool of inventory for buyers. Payments are integrated into the transaction. Delivery is increasingly convenient. Buyer Protection and verification services are designed to reduce some of the uncertainty associated with buying from another individual.

None of these elements is unique on its own.

The strength comes from combining them and operating them at scale.

Vinted’s expansion beyond fashion also demonstrates the importance of liquidity. In 2025, the company continued expanding into categories such as sports and collectibles, while its marketplace has increasingly included electronics, books, home and other consumer goods.

Every additional category creates the potential for more transactions, while a larger user base makes it easier to create sufficient supply and demand within those categories.

This creates a model that can extend well beyond clothing.

For retailers, the lesson is therefore broader than “second-hand is growing”. Successful marketplaces need to make participation easy, create enough liquidity to keep buyers and sellers engaged, and remove as much friction as possible from the transaction.

Vinted has applied those principles to second-hand commerce at considerable scale.

Its success has not come from buying and selling second-hand products itself. It has come from making it easier for other people to trade them, then building a business around the payments, delivery, trust and other services that make those transactions possible.

That is what makes Vinted an important case study for the future of retail.