Is it worth selling on Vinted? Our honest thoughts

With prices rising and wages staying flat, more than ever people are looking to earn additional money to supplement their main income. Getting a 2nd job isn't an option for everyone as not everyone has the time to do that, but selling unwanted items is a great way to earn a bit of extra cash easily and quickly.

Vinted has emerged as one of the biggest and most popular platforms to use for selling unwanted items such as clothes and furniture, but because it's quite new many people are still unsure as to whether or not they should sell their items on Vinted. We wanted to publish a guide looking at Vinted to see if it's worth selling things on this platform, let's get into it:

What can you sell on Vinted?

A lot of people think Vinted is just for selling vintage clothes, but actually you can sell a number of different items via the platform, and people are often very surprised at how much Vinted will happily let you sell. As well as clothes for men, women, and children including shoes and accessories like sunglasses, you can also sell products like perfumes and other beauty products, plus gadgets.

You can also sell things like video games and consoles, as well as puzzles and board games. You can also sell DVDs and CDs, as well as books which have an ISBN code.

But it’s also worth noting that Vinted has some really stringent restrictions around what you can sell - for example, you can’t sell any video games which feature loot boxes. Nowadays, lots of the most popular multiplayer games have a loot box feature, so that really restricts what video games you’ll be able to sell.

You also can’t sell things like smartphones, TVs, or tablets via Vinted, which are among the most popular types of items that people often want to resell and would want to make the most money from, so that often surprises people.

You can sell some pet items like clothing for animals or toys, but you can’t sell food for pets or any electronic items for pets such as an electric grooming tool.

What are the fees for sellers?

One of the big draws of Vinted is that the platform advertises itself as 100% free to sell your items, without any upfront seller fees. This is actually the case, which is really impressive. Instead of charging the seller fees, Vinted actually charges the buyer instead. The app is free to download too.

What sort of money can you make on Vinted?

Because there are no seller fees and because Vinted takes payments via the platform rather than via something like Paypal, you keep every penny that you make when you sell items via Vinted.

In theory, you might think this would mean that you could make quite a bit of money from Vinted. But keep in mind that most people who are buying items from Vinted are looking for a bargain, and the buyers are also aware that most of the items they're buying are second-hand, so they're not really willing to spend huge amounts on items.

There is actually a feature on the app which suggests prices that you should list your items for, to prevent you from setting a price which is too high and won't attract any buyers. This is useful for helping you to make sales, but also means you'll be selling your items at a price which is lower than you might like. And you should definitely be aware that the prices Vinted suggests will likely be a lot lower than what you had in mind.

For example, we wanted to see what the Vinted app would suggest we list our brand-new Vivobarefoot shoes for. We bought these shoes for more than £100 and we've barely used them, so we listed them as being in 'Very Good' condition.

We were very surprised to find that Vinted suggest we sell these shoes for £30, and that other sellers on the platform were selling Vivobarefoot shoes in similar condition for that price.

We even had someone reach out and ask if we'd sell them for £35 (we listed them for £50, which isn't exactly a huge amount of money), which demonstrates our point that people on Vinted are looking for a bargain.

What is the selling process like on Vinted?

If we were to give one reason to sell your items on Vinted, it would be because of how easy it is to get started as a seller - the app is free to download and it takes seconds to sign up, especially if you’re happy to link it to your Facebook or Google account.

There is no verification process or anything like that, and you don’t even need to link a bank account or payment method to get started - you can sort that out once there is money in your Vinted account.

We also love all of the extra features that Vinted gives you to make selling easier. For example, there is a feature called ‘Item Bump’ which makes your product listings appear higher in search results. It costs as little as 85p for this feature which is actually really good value considering how much extra visibility it gives you.

Other seller features that we love include ‘Holiday Mode, which allows you to hide your items from product listings at the touch of a button. Often it can be a nightmare to remove your products from listings on platforms such as eBay, but Vinted makes it incredibly easy to remove them temporarily and then list them again when you’re ready to sell.

You can also set up bundle discounts, so that if someone orders more than one item from you they receive a discounted price. There are preset discounts that you can choose from within the Vinted app, or you can create a custom discount (e.g if someone buys 2 items they’ll get 25% off, etc.)

The last seller feature that we really like is the ‘Donations’ feature - this makes it really easy to donate a portion or all of the proceeds from your sale to a charity, and Vinted takes no fees from this. Our only slight criticism would be that the only charity you can donate to at the moment via Vinted is Médecins du Monde, but they’re a great charity so donating to them certainly isn’t a bad thing.

Commercial selling

So far we’ve been talking about someone selling items they have around the home for a bit of extra cash, but there are quite a few people wondering if they could make a full time income from Vinted. Well, we’ve got some bad news for you. As it states in the Vinted terms and conditions:

If members are selling with the goal of making a regular income or profit from Vinted, we’ll view them as commercial sellers.

And the issue with this is that commercial selling is not allowed on Vinted. This means if you’re selling as a business then you’ll immediately get banned from Vinted.

But even if you’re not selling as a business, you might still find Vinted cracking down on you - the Vinted subreddit is full of posts like this one from people claiming that Vinted has seemingly randomly removed all or some of their listings on the platform. But the thing which all of these people seem to have in common is that they were typically listing more than 1 item for sale at a time - around 5 listings at a time on Vinted seems to trigger some kind of inspection or bot which classes you as a commercial seller and removes your listings.

What do third-party reviews say?

Vinted has almost 25,000 reviews on Trustpilot and an ‘Average’ rating, but many of the reviews on the profile are from buyers rather than sellers, however, you can filter Trustpilot for keywords like ‘sell’ to find reviews from sellers that have used the platform. We found hundreds of reviews from people who were very satisfied with the experience of selling via Vinted, with most of the users remarking on how easy it was to use the platform.

So, is it worth selling your items on Vinted?

Overall, we’d say yes, it’s absolutely worth selling via Vinted if you have a few items that you're looking to get rid of and you want to make a bit of extra cash. But realistically, you'll never make huge amounts of money from the platform as commercial selling isn't allowed.

So what do you think of our guide? Let us know if you've tried Vinted or if you've tried any other platforms like this for selling your old items!