Buy vintage and Y2K fashion from thrift stores for $2-$10 per piece and resell on Depop for $25-$100+. Gen Z's favorite marketplace for secondhand fashion has created a new generation of full-time resellers earning $500-$5K/month.
Almost every guide to reselling second-hand clothing online opens with a markup story: bought for three pounds, sold for forty. The markup is real. It is also the least interesting number in the business, because it says nothing about how many of the other items in that haul never sold, what the postage cost, what the platform took from the buyer's side of the transaction, or how many hours went into photographing stock that is still sitting in a bin bag eight months later.
This guide is built the other way round. It starts with the fee structures as the platforms actually publish them, moves to what a kilo of stock genuinely costs at each tier of the supply chain, and works through the arithmetic of a real bale before touching anything about aesthetics or algorithms.
Two things have changed materially since most reselling advice was written, and both matter more than any sourcing tip.
The first is that Depop removed its seller commission in its two largest markets. The second is that eBay completed its acquisition of Depop on 30 July 2026, days before this guide was last revised. Any guide that still tells you Depop charges a flat ten per cent is describing a fee structure that has not existed in the UK since March 2024, and any guide that describes Depop as an Etsy company is describing an ownership structure that no longer exists.
What Actually Changed in 2024, and Why Most Fee Advice Is Stale
Depop announced the removal of its ten per cent selling fee for UK sellers on new listings created from 20 March 2024 onwards. In the same announcement it introduced a buyer-side charge: from 15 April 2024, UK buyers pay a marketplace fee of "up to 5% of the item purchase price, plus a fixed amount of up to £1, excluding taxes and postage costs".
The United States followed. Depop's own newsroom states that US selling fees were removed on 15 July 2024, restricted to "sellers located in the U.S. and to USD sales only", with the equivalent buyer marketplace fee of up to five per cent plus a fixed amount of up to one dollar applying from 18 July 2024.
Both announcements carry the same caveat: "the usual payment processing fee will still apply". This is the fee that catches people out, because zero selling fees is not zero fees.
Depop's payment processing charge is levied on the seller and calculated on the total transaction amount including postage and taxes. Multiple independent fee calculators and the coverage of the 2024 announcement put this at 2.9 per cent plus £0.30 for UK sellers and 3.3 per cent plus $0.45 for US sellers. This audit could not read Depop's own seller fees page directly, because the Depop help centre returns an HTTP 403 to automated requests; the figures above are consistent across every secondary source consulted and consistent with the Mirror's contemporaneous reporting of the March 2024 announcement, but they are not a direct read of the primary page. Check them in your own payout breakdown before pricing anything.
Outside the UK and US, the ten per cent selling fee reportedly remains in place, with payment processing on top. Secondary fee calculators put Canada at ten per cent plus 2.9 per cent and CA$0.30, and Australia at ten per cent plus processing. Again, this audit could not verify those specific non-UK/US rates against Depop's own published table.
There is a further trap in the transition. Depop's fee removal applied to new listings created after the changeover date. Several fee guides describe older listings that were never edited or relisted continuing to carry the legacy ten per cent commission. If you have a dormant Depop account with stock listed before 2024, relist rather than assume.
Vinted's structure is different in kind, not just in degree. Vinted charges the seller nothing to list or sell. It charges the buyer a mandatory Buyer Protection fee on every order. Vinted's own UK price list states that this fee "typically includes a percentage of the item's or bundle's price, as well as a fixed fee: usually 3% to 8% + £0.3 to £0.8".
For business sellers, Vinted operates a separate Buyer Protection Pro fee. Vinted's help page states that for orders under £500 this is a fixed amount in the range £0.30 to £0.80 plus a variable amount of three to eight per cent of the item price, and that for orders of £500 and above it drops to a flat three per cent of the item price including VAT. The tapering above £500 is worth knowing if you deal in higher-value pieces.
Vinted also publishes two paid seller services on the same price list: an Item Verification service at £10 and an Electronics Verification service at £5, each covering the verification fee and the shipping cost from seller to hub. Listing bumps and Showcase placements are priced variably at checkout, with no published rate card.
Depop's optional promotion product, Boosted Listings, charges only when a boosted item sells. Here the sources genuinely disagree and you should treat the number with caution. Depop's own help centre page, as indexed, describes an "8% boosting fee on the item sale price (excluding taxes)". At least two commercial cross-listing services state that UK sellers now pay twelve per cent, one of them specifying an increase from eight per cent in December 2025, with eight per cent retained for the US and Australia. A third source reverses the geography, giving twelve per cent for UK and US and eight per cent elsewhere. This audit could not resolve the disagreement against Depop's live page. Assume the higher figure when modelling, and read your own boost confirmation screen before enabling it.
Depop's help centre also states that boosting fees are not charged on Depop-generated shipping labels, only on the item price and on any postage you arrange yourself.
The Take Rate the Marketing Does Not Mention
"No seller fees" is a true statement that people consistently misread as "no fees". The money still comes out of the transaction; it comes out of the buyer's side, which means it comes out of what the buyer is willing to pay you.
Vinted publishes enough to see the scale of this. In its results for 2025, published 9 April 2026, Vinted reported that its members traded €10.8 billion in gross merchandise value, up 47 per cent year on year, and that the group generated €1.1 billion in revenue with €62 million in net profit.
Revenue divided by GMV gives a take rate of roughly 10.2 per cent. Vinted charges sellers nothing and still extracts about a tenth of everything traded on the platform, through Buyer Protection fees, shipping margin, promoted listings and advertising. That is not a criticism of Vinted; it is a marketplace doing what marketplaces do. But it means the correct mental model is not "Vinted is free". It is "Vinted's fee is charged to the person deciding whether your jacket is worth twenty-two pounds".
The Depop numbers are, if anything, more instructive, because Etsy disclosed the seller and buyer counts in its final results before the sale. In its full-year 2025 results, Etsy reported Depop GMS of $1,074.9 million, with "active sellers totaled 3.2 million, a 41.1% increase year-over-year; active buyers were up 37.7% to 7.0 million".
Divide the first by the second and you get roughly $336 of gross merchandise sales per active seller per year. That is gross: before cost of goods, before postage, before payment processing, before packaging, before any value placed on the seller's time.
The distribution is certainly skewed, and a serious full-time operation will be far above that mean while a great many accounts sit near zero. But the mean is the honest headline number for the platform, and it is not a living. Notice too the ratio: 7.0 million active buyers against 3.2 million active sellers, or roughly 2.2 buyers per seller. Every guide encouraging more people to open a Depop shop is pushing on the wrong side of that ratio.
Whether eBay changes any of this is unknown. eBay's completion announcement of 30 July 2026 says Depop "will operate as a complementary business, retaining its distinct brand, platform, customer experience, and culture", and eBay's chief executive is quoted saying the goal is "to preserve Depop's strong brand, community, and product experience". Those are the things acquirers always say. Fee structures are the usual first thing to move once integration begins, and a marketplace with zero seller commission sitting inside a group whose core business charges final value fees is an obvious candidate for revision. Do not build a business model that only works at a zero per cent seller commission.
What a £25 Sale Actually Nets
Take a £25 blouse, sold in the UK, posted as a small parcel.
On Depop, using Depop's own Evri labels, the buyer pays the £25 item price, the marketplace fee of up to five per cent plus up to £1, and the postage. At the maximum published rate that is £25 + £1.25 + £1.00 = £27.25 before postage. If postage is £3.50, the buyer's total is £30.75.
Your side: payment processing at 2.9 per cent plus £0.30 on the total transaction amount. Taking the transaction as item plus postage, £28.50, that is £0.83 plus £0.30, so £1.13. Deduct the £3.50 label and you are left with £23.87 against a £25 headline.
One honest ambiguity: Depop describes processing as applying to the "total transaction amount (including taxes and shipping costs)", and this audit could not establish whether the buyer's marketplace fee falls inside that base. If it does, the processing charge rises by a few pence. It does not change the conclusion.
Net platform extraction on that transaction is approximately £30.75 paid by the buyer, minus £23.87 received by you, minus £3.50 that goes to the carrier: about £3.38, or 13.5 per cent of the item price. Roughly a third of that lands on you and two thirds on the buyer.
On Vinted, the same £25 listing nets you £25.00, because Vinted takes nothing from the seller. The buyer pays £25 plus a Buyer Protection fee. At the middle of Vinted's published band, say five per cent plus £0.70, that is £26.95 plus postage.
So the seller-side comparison is not close: Vinted nets you £25.00 and Depop nets you £23.87 on an identical price. But the buyer-side comparison is much closer than it looks, because the buyer sees a total, not a headline. Priced to give the buyer the same total, the two platforms extract broadly similar friction; they simply split it differently. What actually differs is psychological: on Vinted your listed price is your net, so it is easier to price accurately and harder to be surprised.
This audit could not verify Vinted's UK postage prices from a primary source, because the shipping fee pages did not return usable content. Vinted negotiates carrier rates and displays the price at checkout; treat any postage figure you see quoted in a blog as unverified.
Sourcing: What a Kilo Actually Costs
This is where most guides substitute anecdote for arithmetic. There are three broadly distinct tiers of supply in the UK, and the price per kilo differs by roughly eight times between the cheapest and the most expensive.
Tier one: ungraded and lightly graded bulk bags. To Be Worn Again, a long-established UK wholesaler, publishes 25kg bulk bags by category. Their listed prices at the time of writing include short-sleeve blouses at £150 per 25kg bag, patterned short-sleeve men's shirts at £150, track pants and joggers at £150, and long-sleeve dresses at £120 reduced from £145. That is a working range of £4.80 to £6.00 per kilo. Category-specific bales of higher-value goods are priced separately: vintage denim jackets from £325, plain vintage sweatshirts from £325, vintage fashion dresses from £270 reduced from £325.
Tier two: graded branded vintage sold per kilo. London Vintage Wholesale publishes a per-kilo rate card in 20kg units with a stated minimum order of 100kg. Their listed prices include a T-shirt mix, jumper and knitwear mix, sweatshirt and hoodie mix, trousers, jackets, shirts and fleece all at £260 per 20kg, which is £13 per kilo. A Y2K mix and American sports mix are £280 per 20kg (£14/kg). Single-stitch T-shirts, American vintage mix, outdoor mix, a Ralph Lauren, Fred Perry, Tommy and Lacoste mix, and an old-label Disney mix are £300 per 20kg (£15/kg). A workwear mix is £320 per 20kg (£16/kg). At the top of the card, two women's designer mixes are £800 per 20kg, or £40 per kilo.
Note the minimum order. At 100kg minimum and £13 per kilo, the smallest order on that rate card is £1,300, and at £15/kg it is £1,500. That is the actual barrier to entry at tier two, and it is roughly thirty times what most beginner guides quote as a startup cost. Every item on that particular rate card showed as sold out when this audit checked, which is itself informative about demand at the wholesale level.
Tier three: retail second-hand. Charity shops, car boot sales, jumble sales and public kilo sale events. There is no published rate card, because there is no rate card. This audit could not obtain current, reliable UK data on average charity shop clothing prices; the most recent Charity Retail Association survey figures this audit could locate through accessible sources date from 2017, when 76 charities operating 6,722 shops reported combined income of £863 million. That is too old to be useful for pricing and is not cited here as a current benchmark.
What can be said without inventing numbers is structural. Larger charity retailers now operate their own online resale channels and employ specialist pricing on donated vintage and designer stock. The naive arbitrage of buying a £3 charity shop jacket to sell for £45 relies on the shop not knowing what it has, and the population of shops that do not know what they have has been shrinking for a decade. Treat charity shops as a low-volume, high-variance channel, not a supply chain.
The grading vocabulary is not standardised. "Grade A" means whatever the wholesaler selling it says it means. There is no independent certification body for second-hand clothing grades in the UK. Two suppliers both advertising Grade A stock at £13/kg and £5/kg are not selling the same thing, and the difference is not always visible in photographs of the bale. The only reliable way to evaluate a supplier is to buy the smallest unit they will sell, count and weigh what arrives, and calculate your own realised cost per saleable item.
The Weight Problem
Cost per kilo is not cost per item, and the conversion depends entirely on what you buy.
This audit could not find a published, authoritative figure for garments per kilo by category, and any such figure would be a range in any case. As a reasoned estimate, and stated plainly as an estimate: a light cotton T-shirt or blouse tends to run three to five items per kilo; a sweatshirt or hoodie one and a half to three; a denim jacket or heavy coat one or fewer. Weigh your own stock on kitchen scales and build your own table. It takes one afternoon and it is the single most useful private dataset a reseller can have.
Run the two tiers through that estimate. At £5 per kilo for light tops at four per kilo, your cost per garment is about £1.25. At £15 per kilo for branded single-stitch T-shirts at four per kilo, it is about £3.75. At £40 per kilo for designer womenswear at three per kilo, it is about £13.33.
Now add the part nobody puts in the spreadsheet: not everything in a bale is saleable. Bales contain stained items, moth holes, broken zips, missing buttons, damp, unidentifiable odours, and pieces that are simply the wrong size for any plausible buyer. Wholesalers do not warrant sell-through. A realistic unsaleable rate for tier-one ungraded stock is, as an estimate, ten to twenty-five per cent; for tier-two graded stock it should be lower, but "should be" is doing work in that sentence. Your effective cost per saleable item is your bale cost divided by the number of items you can actually list, not the number that arrived.
Then add delivery of the bale itself, which is generally not included in the headline price, and which for a 25kg bag is a meaningful fraction of a £150 order.
Postage Decides Which Items Are Worth Listing
Royal Mail's published online prices, valid from 7 April 2026, set the benchmark for what it costs to move a garment in the UK:
- Large Letter up to 100g: £3.20 first class, £1.55 second class
- Large Letter up to 250g: £3.30 first, £1.90 second
- Large Letter up to 500g: £3.30 first, £2.40 second
- Large Letter up to 750g: £3.30 first, £2.70 second
- Small Parcel up to 2kg: £5.15 first class, £3.95 second class
- Medium Parcel up to 2kg: £7.35 first, £6.25 second
- Medium Parcel up to 10kg: £9.35 first, £8.05 second
- Medium Parcel up to 20kg: £14.75 first, £12.45 second
Stamp prices from the same date are £1.80 first class and 91p second class for a standard letter.
Marketplace-negotiated rates through Vinted and Depop are lower than Royal Mail's retail prices, but the structure of the problem is identical: there is a step change in cost between what fits in a Large Letter and what needs a parcel, and another between two kilos and above.
Vinted's own parcel size limits page gives the operative constraint. For standard items such as clothing, shoes and bags, the maximum weight is 2kg across Evri, InPost, Yodel and Royal Mail 2nd Class. Dimensional limits vary by carrier: InPost lockers and home delivery cap at 64 x 38 x 41 cm, Royal Mail 2nd Class at 61 x 46 x 46 cm, Yodel at a longest side of 60cm with length plus width plus height not exceeding 160cm, and Evri at length plus twice width plus twice height not exceeding 245. Heavy items go to 15kg on Evri and 20kg on Royal Mail 2nd Class.
The practical consequence: a winter coat that weighs 1.8kg after packaging is a viable but expensive listing, and a coat that weighs 2.3kg falls into a materially different postage bracket. Weigh before you list, not after you sell. Underestimating a parcel size at the drop-off point is a well-known way to have a parcel refused or surcharged, and the seller absorbs it.
The corollary that most guides skip: there is a floor price below which a garment is not worth posting at all, and it is higher than people think. If your realised postage is £3.20 and your processing is roughly 3 per cent plus 30p, then a £6 T-shirt returns you something in the region of £5.40 against a £1.25 cost of goods, before packaging materials and before any value on the fifteen minutes it took to measure, photograph, list, answer questions about and pack. Volume does not fix this; it multiplies it.
Measuring, and Why It Is the Whole Job
Vintage sizing is not comparable to modern sizing, and modern sizing is not comparable to itself between brands. A garment labelled size 12 from 1994 does not fit a person who wears a size 12 today, and a US size 8 is not a UK size 8. There is no standard to appeal to.
This has one practical consequence that determines your return rate more than anything else you do: list flat measurements, always, in centimetres and inches, and state how you measured.
The minimum set for a top:
- Pit to pit, measured flat across the chest under the arms
- Length, from the highest point of the shoulder to the hem
- Shoulder to shoulder, seam to seam across the back
- Sleeve, from shoulder seam to cuff
For trousers and skirts:
- Waist, flat across, doubled
- Hips, flat across at the widest point, doubled
- Rise, front waistband to crotch seam
- Inside leg
- Leg opening, flat across the hem
State whether measurements are flat or doubled. "Waist 38cm" is ambiguous and generates returns; "waist 38cm flat, 76cm total" is not.
Also state, in plain words:
- The tag size, and separately what it actually fits
- Fabric composition where the label survives, and that the label is missing where it does not
- Every flaw, with a close-up photograph of each: pilling, fading, small holes, marks, repairs, missing buttons, sticky zips, altered hems, replaced linings
- Whether the item has been washed or cleaned
The reason to be exhaustive about flaws is not ethics, though it is that too. It is that on both platforms an undisclosed flaw converts a completed sale into a not-as-described dispute, and a dispute costs you the item, the postage in both directions, and the time.
Photographing Without the Folklore
A great deal of reselling advice attaches invented multipliers to photography advice: "on-body shots outperform hanger shots by three to five times". This audit could not find any published, methodologically sound study supporting a specific multiplier of that kind for second-hand fashion marketplaces, and figures of that shape should be assumed to be made up until someone shows the data.
What can be said without inventing numbers is mechanical:
- Daylight, indirect, near a window, is free and better than any ring light for showing true colour. Colour accuracy matters because "the colour was different in real life" is a legitimate not-as-described ground.
- Photograph on a plain, consistent background. The consistency matters more than the choice.
- Shoot the garment flat and shoot it worn or on a mannequin. Flat shows shape and measurement; worn shows drape and scale.
- Photograph the label, the care tag, and any brand or union tag. On vintage this is not decoration; it is the evidence a knowledgeable buyer uses to date the piece and to decide whether it is authentic.
- Photograph every flaw you listed, individually, close up.
- Do not use filters that alter colour or hide wear. It converts to disputes.
Depop and Vinted both weight recency and activity in their feeds, so listing steadily rather than in single large batches is generally advised. This audit could not verify the specifics of either platform's ranking behaviour, because neither publishes it, and anyone who tells you they know the algorithm is describing folklore.
This is the operational difference between the two platforms that matters most, and it is rarely stated plainly.
Vinted gives the buyer two days. Vinted's Buyer Protection page states that a buyer must press "I have an issue" within 2 days from being notified that the item should have been delivered, and that if the buyer does not report an issue in that time, or presses "Everything is OK", the order completes and the payment is released to the seller. Where a buyer claims an item is significantly not as described, the seller can offer a partial refund, give a full refund, or ask for a return, and the buyer then has five business days to send it back.
Depop gives the buyer thirty days. Depop's help centre states that a buyer reporting an item not as described will get a full refund if they report the issue "within 30 days of the date of purchase". Depop's Resolution Centre gives the seller 48 hours to respond before the dispute escalates and, per Depop's own page, a non-responding seller can find the buyer refunded without escalation. Where a return is agreed, the buyer "must send it back within 7 days of a return being agreed".
Separately, buyers who paid by PayPal have PayPal's own dispute window, widely reported as up to 180 days, which sits outside the platform's timetable entirely.
Fifteen times the exposure window is not a detail. If you sell an item on Depop on the first of the month, your money is not safely yours until the thirtieth. Plan working capital accordingly, and do not spend platform balances on more stock the day they land.
Where the Trader Line Sits, and Why It Matters More Than Tax
Most sellers worry about whether they owe tax. The bigger risk is whether they are a trader in consumer law, because trader status brings obligations that have nothing to do with HMRC.
HMRC's Business Income Manual sets out nine badges of trade used to distinguish trading from disposing of personal possessions. In HMRC's own words they are: profit-seeking motive; the number of transactions, where "systematic and repeated transactions will support 'trade'"; the nature of the asset; the existence of similar trading transactions or interests; changes to the asset made to enhance saleability; the way the sale was carried out; the source of finance; the interval of time between purchase and sale, where quick resale indicates trading; and the method of acquisition, where assets acquired by inheritance or gift are less likely to be trading subjects. HMRC emphasises that no single badge is conclusive.
Somebody clearing their own wardrobe fails almost every badge. Somebody buying a 25kg bale to break up and relist passes almost all of them. The line is not blurry in the case this guide describes: if you are buying stock to resell, you are trading.
Once you are trading, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 apply to your distance sales to consumers. Business Companion, the official Trading Standards-backed guidance service, sets out the position. The consumer has 14 days from the day after receipt of goods to cancel, for any reason or none. That is a right to change their mind, entirely separate from any fault with the item.
The sanction for not telling them about it is severe and frequently overlooked. Business Companion states that if a trader does not provide the cancellation information, "their cancellation period is extended to 14 days, starting the day after the day that you do give them this information", and that the extension "cannot exceed 12 months from when the normal period would have ended". A trading reseller who never mentions the right to cancel is potentially exposed to cancellation on every sale for over a year.
The general UK rules on refunds set out on GOV.UK add the operational detail: the consumer has a further 14 days to return the goods after telling you, you must refund within 14 days of getting the item back, you must refund standard delivery if the consumer paid it, and "you cannot deduct any fees from their refund, unless the item has been used or damaged". Consumers are entitled to handle goods as they would in a shop, including trying them on.
There are exemptions relevant to clothing: sealed goods that are not suitable for return for health protection or hygiene reasons, once unsealed, need not be accepted. In practice that helps with underwear and swimwear only if you actually seal them.
Vinted's own Pro seller guidance states the position in the same terms: professionals (sole traders, non-profits and companies) must declare themselves as Pro Sellers or face sanctions under consumer contract regulations. Vinted's guide summarises the Consumer Rights Act 2015 remedies that then apply to your sales: a refund if faulty within 30 days, repair, replacement or refund up to six months, and compensation for durability failures for up to six years. That six-year figure is the limitation period in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; in Scotland the equivalent period is five years. Vinted's guide also states that Pro Sellers are solely responsible for registering with the business registry and complying with their tax obligations, and must register for VAT once the threshold is exceeded, including VAT in the listing price.
The uncomfortable implication: a properly compliant business reseller has to accept no-fault returns for 14 days, and a private seller does not. A great many sellers who are plainly trading operate as private accounts, which is one of the reasons private-account pricing can undercut compliant business pricing. That is a risk you are carrying, not a competitive advantage you have earned.
UK Tax: The Trading Allowance and What Reporting Actually Means
The trading allowance is £1,000 of gross income per tax year. GOV.UK describes it as "a tax exemption of up to £1,000 a year for individuals with trading income". The critical word is gross. It applies to turnover, not profit. Sell £1,400 of clothing that cost you £900 and you are over the threshold despite a £500 profit.
If gross trading income exceeds £1,000 you must register for Self Assessment, and you must do so by 5 October in the following tax year. You may then either claim the £1,000 allowance instead of expenses, or deduct actual expenses, but not both: GOV.UK states plainly that "you cannot deduct any other expenses or allowances if you claim the allowances". For a reseller with real cost of goods, deducting actual expenses is almost always the better choice, which means the trading allowance is in practice a threshold for whether you have to file, not a relief you will end up using.
Platform reporting is separate from tax liability, and the two are constantly confused. HMRC's guidance states that new rules started in the UK from 1 January 2024 requiring digital platforms to collect and report seller information. A seller is outside the reporting requirement if they make "fewer than 30 sales of goods in a calendar year" or "receive less than 2,000 euros (about £1,700)" during that period. Platforms collect data over the calendar year and send it to HMRC by the following January, and must give the seller a copy of what was reported.
HMRC is explicit that this "does not automatically mean that you owe tax". Reporting is a data-matching exercise. Whether you owe tax depends on the badges of trade above, not on whether a platform filed a return about you.
That said, the thirty-sale threshold is very low for anyone breaking up a bale. Assume you will be reported.
The £3,000 change is a reporting change, not a tax cut. In March 2025 the government announced plans to raise the Income Tax Self Assessment reporting threshold for trading income from £1,000 to £3,000 gross within this parliament, which runs to 2029, with the Treasury estimating this would take around 300,000 people out of Self Assessment. GOV.UK's announcement notes that of those, "an estimated 90,000 of them will have no tax to pay and no reason to report their trading income to HMRC in the future at all", and that those who do owe tax will be able to pay through a new simple online service instead of a full return.
Read that carefully. It removes a form for some people. It does not raise the trading allowance, and it does not mean the first £3,000 is tax-free. The announcement does not mention changing the allowance itself. At the time of writing the change has not taken effect and no implementation date has been set beyond the end of the parliament.
The rates that then apply. For 2026 to 2027, the standard Personal Allowance is £12,570; the basic rate is 20 per cent on taxable income from £12,571 to £50,270, higher rate 40 per cent to £125,140, additional rate 45 per cent above that. Income tax bands differ in Scotland. Self-employed National Insurance for 2026 to 2027: Class 2 contributions are treated as paid where profits reach £7,105 or more, with a voluntary rate of £3.65 a week below that; Class 4 is 6 per cent on profits from £12,570 to £50,270 and 2 per cent above.
VAT becomes compulsory once taxable turnover for the last 12 months exceeds £90,000, with registration required within 30 days of the end of the month in which you crossed it. This is a rolling twelve-month test, not a tax-year test. A reseller at £8,000 a month of turnover crosses it, and second-hand goods are not zero-rated. The VAT margin scheme for second-hand goods exists and can substantially reduce the liability, but it carries its own record-keeping requirements and is beyond the scope of this guide; take advice before you approach the threshold rather than after.
Capital Gains Tax is the other side of the coin and applies to genuine personal possessions rather than trading stock. GOV.UK states you may have to pay CGT "when you sell (or 'dispose of') a personal possession for £6,000 or more". Clothing sold from your own wardrobe below that figure is not a CGT event, and if you are trading, the receipts are income rather than capital anyway. The £6,000 chattels rule is why clearing your own wardrobe genuinely is tax-free in most cases, and it is also why that fact tells you nothing about reselling bought stock.
Other Jurisdictions
Tax and licensing rules differ substantially, and you must check locally rather than rely on any of the following as advice.
United States. The IRS states that third-party settlement organisations must report on Form 1099-K where "the total amount of payments you receive for goods or services through the platform exceeds $20,000 in more than 200 transactions". That threshold has moved repeatedly in recent years and is the one point on this page most likely to change again. The IRS is unambiguous that the threshold governs the platform's paperwork, not your liability: "No matter the amount of reported payments, if you receive payments for selling goods or services, you must report all income on your tax return." US state sales tax on marketplace sales is generally collected by the marketplace under marketplace facilitator laws, but that is state-by-state and outside this guide's scope.
Canada. The Reporting Rules for Digital Platform Operators, Canada's implementation of the OECD model rules, took effect for the 2024 calendar year with the first Part XX information returns due 31 January 2025, and platform operators must give each reportable seller a copy of what was reported by 31 January following. Canada's excluded-seller test follows the same OECD structure as the UK's, but this audit could not read the CRA guidance pages directly because canada.ca returned HTTP 403 to automated requests, so the exact Canadian-dollar equivalents are not stated here. Check the CRA guidance before relying on any threshold.
Australia. Australia's Sharing Economy Reporting Regime requires electronic distribution platform operators to report certain transactions to the ATO, commencing 1 July 2023 for ride-sourcing and short-term accommodation and expanding from 1 July 2024 to all other reportable transactions. A PwC Australia tax alert on the regime states that transactions "where only the legal title or ownership of goods or real property are exchanged" are excluded from the reporting requirements, which would place straightforward second-hand goods sales outside SERR. This audit could not verify that exclusion against the ATO's own page, which returned HTTP 403. The exclusion concerns reporting only; Australian income tax on trading income is unaffected either way.
Licensing and Product Law Most Guides Skip Entirely
Scotland requires a second-hand dealer's licence. Section 24 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 states that "a licence, to be known as a 'second-hand dealer's licence', shall be required for carrying on business as a second-hand dealer", covering a person dealing in second-hand goods or articles of any description. Subsection (3) exempts pawnbrokers, wholesale dealers purchasing exclusively from licensed second-hand dealers, charities on the Scottish Charity Register, businesses where second-hand dealing is merely incidental to an unrelated main activity, and hire-purchase and similar financing arrangements. The statute does not distinguish by sales channel; there is no online exemption on the face of it. Licences are issued annually and fees are set by each licensing authority. Standard conditions can include record-keeping and, in Edinburgh's published conditions, a rule that no item is disposed of for at least 48 hours after acquisition, with clothing and textiles required to be traceable.
This audit could not establish how consistently the Scottish licensing regime is applied to home-based online resellers of clothing, and found no council guidance that addressed the point directly. If you are trading from Scotland, ask your local licensing board before you build a business on the assumption that it does not apply to you. There is no equivalent general requirement in England and Wales, though local authority conditions can apply to specific categories of second-hand goods.
Second-hand clothing is not exempt from textile fibre labelling law. Business Companion's guidance on textile labelling states that "second-hand clothes have to comply with the Regulations", while acknowledging that older items, particularly pre-war handmade garments, rarely carry modern labelling and "it is unlikely that sellers would be expected to provide that level of detail". There is no blanket second-hand exemption in the Textile Products (Labelling and Fibre Composition) Regulations 2012. In practice: where the composition label survives, quote it; where it does not, say so rather than guessing.
Product safety law covers second-hand goods. The General Product Safety Regulations 2005 apply to second-hand items placed on the market in the course of business, which is why Trading Standards guidance repeatedly notes that BS EN 14878 can be used to assess the flammability of second-hand children's nightwear. If you sell vintage children's sleepwear, that is a real regulatory exposure and not a theoretical one. The same logic reaches any second-hand item with a safety standard attached to it.
Counterfeits are a criminal matter, not a policy violation. Section 92 of the Trade Marks Act 1994 makes it an offence, with a view to gain or with intent to cause loss, to apply a sign identical to or likely to be mistaken for a registered trade mark to goods, or to sell or distribute such goods, without the proprietor's consent. The maximum penalty on summary conviction is six months' imprisonment or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, or both; on indictment it is a fine or imprisonment for up to ten years, or both. There is a defence where the defendant "believed on reasonable grounds that the use of the sign... was not an infringement".
This matters specifically in vintage resale because bootlegs and reproductions are endemic in exactly the categories that sell best: band tees, 90s sportswear, workwear and heritage American brands. Bales are not authenticated. A supplier's Grade A designation says nothing about whether the Ralph Lauren shirt in it is a Ralph Lauren shirt. If you cannot authenticate a branded piece with confidence, either do not list it as that brand or do not list it at all. "I bought it in a bale" is not obviously a reasonable-grounds defence for someone who buys bales professionally.
Scams and Losses That Specifically Target Sellers
Research by Which?, as reported in the business and consumer press, indicates that buyers on pre-loved marketplaces are more likely to be scammed than sellers, and most published advice is written accordingly. But there is a distinct set of seller-side losses worth naming, and they are under-covered precisely because sellers are the smaller victim group.
- The off-platform payment request. A buyer says the app is glitching, or offers a better price if you deal directly, and proposes bank transfer, PayPal "friends and family", Revolut or a courier they arrange. Consumer guidance is consistent that this removes all platform protection. Note the second-order effect: PayPal's friends-and-family route has no seller protection either. If the money is reversed, you have no recourse, and you have also breached both platforms' rules, which can cost you the account.
- The fake payment notification. A phishing email or SMS styled as Vinted or Depop support confirming a payment is "pending" and asking you to click through to release it, usually to a page harvesting card details. Real platform payouts do not require you to enter card details to receive money.
- The escalation. A claim that the payment did not go through and a request for you to send a top-up or a "verification" transfer.
- The empty box and the swap return. In a not-as-described dispute where a return is agreed, the item that comes back is not the item you sent, or the parcel is empty. Photograph everything you post, including the packed parcel and the label, and keep the postage receipt with tracking. It does not guarantee an outcome but it is the only evidence you will have.
- The item-not-received claim on a genuinely delivered parcel. Use tracked services within the platform's own labels wherever possible, since platform-generated tracking is the evidence the platform will actually look at.
- Chargebacks. Distinct from platform disputes and run on the card network's timetable, which is longer than either platform's. This is another reason not to treat a platform balance as settled money.
The structural point: on both platforms your protection is a function of having done everything inside the platform. Every step taken outside it (the conversation, the payment, the postage label) removes a piece of the evidence you will later need.
A Worked Bale, End to End
The following uses sourced prices where they exist and clearly-labelled estimates where they do not. It is an illustration of method, not a forecast.
Buy one 25kg bulk bag of short-sleeve blouses at £150, a real listed price. Add delivery, estimated at £15 to £25 for a 25kg consignment. Call the landed cost £170.
At an estimated four blouses per kilo, that is 100 items, or £1.70 each landed. Assume an estimated 15 per cent are unsaleable through stains, holes or unsellable sizing: 85 listable items, at an effective £2.00 each.
Now the number that decides everything. Sell-through is the proportion of your listings that actually sell in a given period, and it is the figure no platform publishes and no guide will give you honestly. This audit could not find any credible published sell-through data for Depop or Vinted, and treats any specific percentage as an estimate. For illustration, assume 40 per cent sell within six months at an average realised price of £14 after offers and discounts: 34 sales, £476 of gross merchandise value.
Deduct, on Depop, payment processing at 2.9 per cent plus £0.30, with postage of roughly £3.95 inside the transaction base: 34 × (£0.52 + £0.30) = £27.90. Deduct packaging at an estimated £0.35 per order: £11.90. Postage in this model is paid by the buyer and passed to the carrier, so it nets out.
Revenue £476, less processing £27.90, less packaging £11.90, less landed stock cost £170 = £266 over six months, with 51 unsold items still in the flat.
Time. At an estimated eight to twelve minutes per item to sort, wash, measure, photograph, write and list, 100 items is 13 to 20 hours. Packing and dispatching 34 orders at roughly six minutes each is 3.4 hours. Add sourcing research, messages, and dispute handling, and a conservative total is 20 to 25 hours.
£266 over roughly 22 hours is about £12 an hour, before income tax and National Insurance, and before any value assigned to the storage space. The UK National Living Wage for those aged 21 and over from 1 April 2026 is £12.71 an hour.
That is the honest headline. On these assumptions, breaking up a cheap bale is slightly worse paid than a minimum wage job, with the difference that you carry the stock risk and the unsold 51 items.
Change the assumptions and the picture changes sharply, which is the actual lesson:
- If sell-through is 60 per cent rather than 40, revenue rises to £714 and profit to roughly £484, which over the extra packing time is about £20 an hour.
- If average realised price is £22 rather than £14 on the same 40 per cent, revenue is £748 and profit roughly £530.
- If sell-through is 25 per cent at an average of £11, revenue is £231 and profit is about £38, which over twenty-odd hours of work is not a business at all. And you are left holding 64 unsold garments.
The two levers are sell-through and average selling price, and both are functions of what you buy, not how you photograph it. Better sourcing beats better marketing by a wide margin. This is precisely why tier-two graded stock at £13 to £16 per kilo can be more profitable than tier-one at £5, despite costing three times as much: you are paying for a higher proportion of items that someone actually wants.
Cross-Listing: What It Costs You
Listing the same stock on Depop, Vinted and eBay increases exposure. It also creates a specific operational problem: you now have to delist across platforms the instant something sells, and if you fail, you sell the same physical garment twice. Cancelling the second sale damages your standing on that platform, and repeated cancellations get accounts restricted.
Cross-listing tools exist and are marketed heavily to resellers. They are subscription products. This audit did not price them because pricing tiers change frequently and because the more important point is structural: a tool that saves you listing time does not save you the dispatch time, the dispute time, or the sourcing time, and those are the parts that scale worst.
If you cross-list, cross-list a subset. Put your slowest-moving stock on the additional platforms, not your best.
Who should skip this
Be blunt about the disqualifiers.
- Anyone who needs predictable income in the next three months. The money arrives in fragments, on the platform's release schedule, thirty days behind the sale on Depop, and it is entirely dependent on a sell-through rate you cannot know in advance.
- Anyone without somewhere to store 100 to 300 garments. A 25kg bale is physically large. Three of them is a room. Stock that lives in the hallway ends the enterprise faster than any fee change.
- Anyone who dislikes admin. The job is 20 per cent sourcing, 10 per cent photography and 70 per cent measuring, writing, packing, messaging, and record-keeping.
- Anyone unwilling to register as self-employed once they cross £1,000 of gross income. If you are buying stock to resell, the badges of trade point one way, platforms report to HMRC above 30 sales or roughly £1,700, and the deadline to register is 5 October following the tax year.
- Anyone in Scotland unwilling to check the second-hand dealer licensing position first.
- Anyone attracted by the "no seller fees" headline specifically. That headline is the reason the seller population on Depop grew 41 per cent in a single year to 3.2 million against 7.0 million buyers. Zero seller fees is a customer acquisition strategy aimed at you, and it worked.
- Anyone who cannot authenticate branded goods, but plans to sell branded goods. The criminal exposure under section 92 of the Trade Marks Act is disproportionate to the margin on a single shirt.
- Anyone who thinks of it as decluttering that pays. Clearing your own wardrobe is a genuinely good idea, is generally outside CGT because of the £6,000 chattels threshold, and is a completely different activity from what this guide describes.
First Ninety Days, Realistically
- Weeks 1 to 2. Sell 20 to 30 items from your own wardrobe on both platforms before spending anything. This is the cheapest possible test of whether you can tolerate the work, and it produces your first real data on how long a listing takes you and how buyers behave. Do not buy stock yet.
- Weeks 3 to 4. Buy the single smallest wholesale unit you can find, ideally under £100 including delivery. Weigh it. Count it. Count the unsaleable items. You now have your own cost-per-saleable-item figure rather than an estimate from a guide.
- Weeks 5 to 8. List all of it. Record, per item: what you paid, what you listed at, the date listed, the date sold, what it sold for, and the postage band. This spreadsheet is the business. Register for Self Assessment if gross income looks likely to pass £1,000 in the tax year.
- Weeks 9 to 12. Calculate your actual sell-through at 30 and 60 days, and your actual average selling price. Only now decide whether to buy a second, larger bale, and whether to buy it at £5 a kilo or £15 a kilo. If your 60-day sell-through is under 25 per cent, the answer is probably to stop, not to buy more.
Do not scale before you have measured. The single most common failure in this business is buying a second and third bale on the strength of the first ten sales, before the tail of unsold stock from the first bale has revealed itself.
Keeping Records That Survive an Enquiry
If you are trading, keep, for at least the periods HMRC requires:
- Every wholesale invoice, including delivery charges
- The platform's annual report of what it told HMRC about you, which the platform is required to give you a copy of
- Monthly platform payout statements, not just the app's summary screen
- Postage receipts and tracking numbers
- A stock record showing opening stock, purchases, and closing stock at the year end, because unsold stock is not an expense in the year you bought it
The last point catches people out. Buying £2,000 of bales in March does not create a £2,000 deduction in that tax year if £1,400 of it is still in bin bags on 5 April. It is closing stock, and it sits on the balance sheet until it sells.
What This Guide Could Not Establish
Stated plainly, so you know where the gaps are:
- Depop's exact current UK and US payment processing rates could not be read from Depop's own fee page, which blocks automated access. The figures given are corroborated across multiple independent calculators and contemporaneous press coverage of the 2024 announcement.
- The current Boosted Listings percentage for UK sellers is disputed between 8 and 12 per cent across sources, including a claim of a December 2025 increase this audit could not verify.
- Depop's selling fee rates for markets outside the UK and US could not be verified against a primary source.
- Vinted's UK postage prices by parcel size could not be verified from a primary source.
- Current UK charity shop pricing data could not be obtained from a source recent enough to be useful.
- No credible published sell-through data exists for either platform. Every sell-through figure in the worked example is an explicit assumption.
- Items per kilo by garment category is an estimate throughout, not a sourced figure.
- The Australian SERR exclusion for pure transfers of title, and the Canadian excluded-seller thresholds, are drawn from professional-services commentary rather than direct reads of ATO and CRA pages, both of which blocked access.
Where a number here is an estimate it is labelled as one. Treat any guide that gives you a precise sell-through percentage, a precise income figure, or a precise photography conversion multiplier without a source as fiction, however confidently it is written.
Primary sources for the figures on this page. Where a number is not covered below, it is an estimate rather than a measurement and is labelled as such in the text.
A realistic month-by-month plan for reaching $5K/mo with Depop Vintage Reselling:
Depop Vintage Reselling costs $50-$300 to start. Many people start at the lower end.
Reported income: $500-$5K/month. No independently verified income data for this tactic. Any figure shown is an estimate, not a measurement. Results vary by effort and market.
Most people see first profit within 1-3 weeks.
Yes, Depop Vintage Reselling is a legitimate side hustle. Reported income is $500-$5K/month. No independently verified income data for this tactic. Any figure shown is an estimate, not a measurement. Like any business, success depends on your effort, skills, and market conditions. Start with $50-$300 and expect first results within 1-3 weeks.
Yes. Most successful Depop Vintage Reselling practitioners started with no prior experience. The key is following a structured learning path, starting small, and iterating. Free resources on YouTube and blogs can teach you the fundamentals within 1-2 weeks.
Depop Vintage Reselling offers higher income potential (reported $500-$5K/month) and location freedom compared to most jobs, but requires self-motivation and involves more uncertainty. Many people start Depop Vintage Reselling as a side hustle while keeping their job, then transition to full-time once income is consistent.
Startup tools for Depop Vintage Reselling cost $50-$300. At minimum, you need a computer and internet connection. As you scale, invest in specialized software and tools to automate workflows and increase efficiency.
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