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.
You are kneeling on your bedroom floor beside a bin bag of clothes bought by the kilo, tape measure in one hand, phone in the other. On top is a blouse you could list at £25. Your heart lifts. Then you wonder what that £25 really leaves you.
Money like this matters when everything else is squeezed. The rent went up again. Your hours at work feel fragile. Friends keep posting new things while you put off buying shoes you need. You want something that is yours, run from your room, that pays for the gaps.
Vintage moves fast. The sellers who source well and learn the fees now grab the best kilos at the warehouse and build the follower base that makes later sales easier. The ones who wait arrive to picked-over bales and buyers who already have favourite shops. Your local sources will not hold their best pieces for you.
Here is the honest shape of it. Post that blouse second class as a small parcel and £3.95 goes to Royal Mail before the platform takes a penny, and the jumper next to it might still be in that bag months from now. £50 to £300 gets you started, your first money usually lands inside one to three weeks, and the bottom of the monthly range is £500.
Tonight, weigh one garment you already own and look up what it would cost to post. Knowing your real margin before you buy a single kilo puts you ahead of most people who start.
I have written this guide the other way round from most. We start with the fees exactly as the platforms publish them, then look at what a kilo of stock really costs you at each level of the supply chain, then walk through the sums on a real bale. The aesthetics and the algorithm talk can wait until you know the numbers.
Two things have changed since most reselling advice was written, and both matter to you more than any sourcing tip.
First, Depop dropped its seller commission in its two biggest markets. Second, eBay completed its purchase of Depop on 30 July 2026, days before this guide was last revised. So if a guide still tells you Depop charges a flat ten per cent, it is describing a fee that has not existed in the UK since March 2024. And if it calls Depop an Etsy company, it is describing an owner that has moved on.
What Changed in 2024, and Why Old Fee Advice Will Mislead You
Depop announced that UK sellers would stop paying its ten per cent selling fee on new listings created from 20 March 2024 onwards. In the same announcement it brought in a charge on the buyer: 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 says US selling fees were removed on 15 July 2024, limited to "sellers located in the U.S. and to USD sales only", with the matching 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 small print: "the usual payment processing fee will still apply". This is the one that catches you out, because zero selling fees still leaves a fee on every sale.
Depop charges you, the seller, a payment processing fee calculated on the whole transaction, postage and taxes included. Several independent fee calculators and the press coverage of the 2024 announcement put it at 2.9% plus £0.30 for UK sellers and 3.3% plus $0.45 for US sellers. I 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 match across every secondary source I checked, and they match the Mirror's reporting of the March 2024 announcement at the time, but they are not a direct read of the primary page. Check them against your own payout breakdown before you price anything.
Outside the UK and US, the ten per cent selling fee reportedly still applies, with payment processing on top. Secondary fee calculators put Canada at ten per cent plus 2.9% and CA$0.30, and Australia at ten per cent plus processing. Again, I could not verify those non-UK/US rates against Depop's own published table.
There is one more trap hiding in the changeover. The fee removal applied to new listings created after the switch date. Several fee guides say older listings that were never edited or relisted still carry the old ten per cent commission. If you have a sleepy Depop account with stock listed before 2024, relist it rather than assume.
Vinted works in a different way altogether. You pay nothing to list or to sell. The buyer pays a compulsory Buyer Protection fee on every order. Vinted's own UK price list says 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".
If you sell as a business, Vinted charges your buyers a separate Buyer Protection Pro fee. Vinted's help page says that for orders under £500 this is a fixed £0.30 to £0.80 plus three to eight per cent of the item price, and for orders of £500 and above it drops to a flat three per cent of the item price including VAT. That taper above £500 is worth knowing if you deal in pricier pieces.
Vinted also lists 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 shipping from you to the hub. Listing bumps and Showcase placements are priced at checkout, with no published rate card.
Depop's optional promotion, Boosted Listings, only charges you when a boosted item sells. Here the sources genuinely disagree, so handle the number with care. 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 say UK sellers now pay twelve per cent, one of them dating the rise from eight per cent to December 2025, with eight per cent kept for the US and Australia. A third source flips the geography: twelve per cent for the UK and US, eight per cent elsewhere. I could not settle this against Depop's live page. When you model your numbers, assume the higher figure, and read your own boost confirmation screen before you switch it on.
Depop's help centre also says boosting fees are not charged on Depop-generated shipping labels, only on the item price and on any postage you arrange yourself.
Fee rules keep moving, and the sellers who check their numbers each time are the ones still standing a year later. Get into the habit now, while your shop is small and mistakes cost little. The longer you wait, the more you will have to unlearn when the next change arrives.
The Fee Nobody Puts in the Advert
"No seller fees" is true, and you will be tempted to hear it as "no fees". The money still comes out of the sale. 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 for you to see the scale. In its results for 2025, published 9 April 2026, Vinted reported that its members traded €10.8 billion in gross merchandise value, up 47% year on year, and that the group earned €1.1 billion in revenue with €62 million in net profit.
Divide revenue by GMV and you get a take rate of roughly 10.2%. Vinted charges you nothing and still keeps about a tenth of everything traded on the platform, through Buyer Protection fees, shipping margin, promoted listings and advertising. That is a marketplace doing what marketplaces do, and I am not criticising it. It does change how you should think about it. A better mental model: "Vinted's fee is charged to the person deciding whether your jacket is worth twenty-two pounds."
The Depop numbers teach you even more, because Etsy disclosed 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 what you paid for the stock, before postage, before processing, before packaging, and before you put any value on your own time.
Where do you think your own shop would sit against that $336 a year? The spread is certainly lopsided. A serious full-time shop will sit far above that average, and a great many accounts sit close to zero. Still, the average is the honest headline for the platform, and you cannot live on it. Look at the ratio too: 7.0 million active buyers against 3.2 million active sellers, roughly 2.2 buyers for every seller. Every guide urging more people to open a Depop shop is pushing on the wrong side of that ratio.
Will eBay change any of this? Nobody knows yet. 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". Companies buying other companies always say this. Fees are usually the first thing to move once integration starts, and a marketplace with zero seller commission sitting inside a group whose main business charges final value fees is an obvious candidate. Please do not build a plan that only works at a zero per cent seller commission.
What a £25 Sale Leaves in Your Hand
Let's take that £25 blouse, sold in the UK and posted as a small parcel.
On Depop, using Depop's own Evri labels, your 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, your buyer pays £30.75 in total.
Now your side. Payment processing is 2.9% plus £0.30 on the total transaction. Taking the transaction as item plus postage, £28.50, that is £0.83 plus £0.30, so £1.13. Take off the £3.50 label and you are left with £23.87 from a £25 headline.
One honest grey area: Depop says processing applies to the "total transaction amount (including taxes and shipping costs)", and I could not establish whether the buyer's marketplace fee sits inside that base. If it does, your processing charge goes up by a few pence. The conclusion stays the same.
So what does the platform take in all? Roughly £30.75 paid by your buyer, minus £23.87 reaching you, minus £3.50 to the carrier: about £3.38, or 13.5% of the item price. Around a third of that falls on you and two thirds on your buyer.
On Vinted, the same £25 listing leaves you £25.00, because Vinted takes nothing from the seller. Your buyer pays £25 plus a Buyer Protection fee. In the middle of Vinted's published band, say five per cent plus £0.70, that is £26.95 plus postage.
On your side, the comparison is clear: Vinted leaves you £25.00 and Depop leaves you £23.87 at the same price. On the buyer's side the gap is much smaller than it looks, because your buyer sees a total. Price both listings so the buyer pays the same total, and the two platforms take broadly similar amounts; they simply split it differently. The real difference is in your head. On Vinted the price you list is the money you get, so it is easier to price well and harder to be surprised.
I 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 shows the price at checkout, so treat any postage figure you see quoted in a blog as unverified.
Small margins add up in a way you can feel. If your shop leaves you around £500 a month after stock, fees and postage, that is your gas and electric paid from a rail of dresses in the corner of your bedroom, with the bills sorted before payday. Work out your own net on a £25 sale first, and you will know how many sales that rail needs to make.
And there is something quieter than the money. The first time a stranger writes to say the dress fits perfectly, you feel the pride of having picked something good out of a heap. That feeling keeps you going through the slow weeks.
Sourcing: What a Kilo Really Costs You
So now you know what a sale leaves in your hand. What you paid for the thing you just sold is the other half of the sum, and you decide it long before anyone clicks buy.
This is where most guides swap arithmetic for anecdote. In the UK you have three broad tiers of supply, and the price per kilo differs by roughly eight times between the cheapest and the dearest.
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 gives you a working range of £4.80 to £6.00 per kilo. Category 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.
Look closely at that minimum order. Do you have £1,300 you could leave tied up in bin bags while it sells? At 100kg minimum and £13 per kilo, the smallest order you can place on that rate card is £1,300, and at £15/kg it is £1,500. That is the real barrier to entry at tier two, roughly thirty times what most beginner guides tell you a startup costs. Every item on that rate card showed as sold out when I checked, which tells you something about demand at the wholesale level too.
Tier three: retail second-hand. Charity shops, car boot sales, jumble sales and public kilo sale events. Nobody publishes a rate card here, because none exists. I could not find current, reliable UK data on average charity shop clothing prices. The most recent Charity Retail Association survey figures I could reach date from 2017, when 76 charities running 6,722 shops reported combined income of £863 million. That is too old to help you price anything, and I do not offer it as a current benchmark.
What I can tell you without inventing numbers is how the market is shaped. Larger charity retailers now run their own online resale channels and use specialist pricing on donated vintage and designer stock. The dream of buying a £3 charity shop jacket and selling it for £45 depends on the shop not knowing what it has, and the number of shops that don't know has been shrinking for a decade. When did you last find something in a charity shop priced well below what it was worth? Think of charity shops as a low-volume, hit-and-miss channel you visit for fun, and look elsewhere for a dependable supply chain.
The grading words mean whatever the seller says they mean. "Grade A" is defined by the wholesaler selling it. No independent body certifies second-hand clothing grades in the UK. Two suppliers both advertising Grade A stock, one at £13/kg and one at £5/kg, are selling you different things, and you will not always see the difference in photos of the bale. The only reliable test is to buy the smallest unit a supplier will sell you, count and weigh what turns up, and work out your own real cost per saleable item.
The Weight Problem
A price per kilo still leaves you guessing at the price per item, and the conversion depends entirely on what you buy.
I could not find a published, authoritative figure for garments per kilo by category, and any such figure would be a range anyway. As a reasoned estimate, and I am labelling it 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. How many of your own T-shirts would it take to make a kilo? Weigh your own stock on kitchen scales and find out, then build your own table. It takes one afternoon, and it will be the most useful private dataset you own.
Now run the tiers through that estimate. At £5 per kilo for light tops at four per kilo, each garment costs you 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.
Then add the part nobody puts in the spreadsheet: you cannot sell everything in a bale. You will find stains, moth holes, broken zips, missing buttons, damp, smells you cannot place, and pieces in sizes no plausible buyer wears. Wholesalers promise you nothing about how much will sell. 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, though "should be" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Your true cost per saleable item is the bale cost divided by the number of items you can actually list, which is smaller than the number that arrived.
Then add delivery of the bale itself. It is usually left out of the headline price, and for a 25kg bag it is a noticeable slice of a £150 order.
Postage Decides What Is Worth Listing
Royal Mail's published online prices, valid from 7 April 2026, set the benchmark for what it costs you to move a garment in the UK:
| Format and weight | First class | Second class |
|---|
| Large Letter up to 100g | £3.20 | £1.55 |
| Large Letter up to 250g | £3.30 | £1.90 |
| Large Letter up to 500g | £3.30 | £2.40 |
| Large Letter up to 750g | £3.30 | £2.70 |
| Small Parcel up to 2kg | £5.15 | £3.95 |
| Medium Parcel up to 2kg | £7.35 | £6.25 |
| Medium Parcel up to 10kg | £9.35 | £8.05 |
| Medium Parcel up to 20kg | £14.75 | £12.45 |
Stamp prices from the same date are £1.80 first class and 91p second class for a standard letter.
The rates Vinted and Depop negotiate are lower than Royal Mail's retail prices, but you face the same shape of problem: a jump in cost between what fits in a Large Letter and what needs a parcel, and another jump above two kilos.
Vinted's parcel size limits page gives you the rule that bites. For standard items such as clothing, shoes and bags, the maximum weight is 2kg across Evri, InPost, Yodel and Royal Mail 2nd Class. Size 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 no more than 160cm, and Evri at length plus twice width plus twice height no more than 245. Heavy items go to 15kg on Evri and 20kg on Royal Mail 2nd Class.
What this means for you: a winter coat weighing 1.8kg once packed is a workable but pricey listing, and a coat at 2.3kg lands in a very different postage bracket. Weigh it before you list it, long before it sells. Getting the parcel size wrong at the drop-off point is a well-known way to have a parcel refused or surcharged, and you are the one who pays.
What is the cheapest thing you were planning to list? Here is what most guides skip: there is a floor price below which a garment is not worth posting at all, and it is higher than you might think. If your real postage is £3.20 and your processing is roughly 3% plus 30p, then a £6 T-shirt brings you back something like £5.40 against £1.25 of stock cost, before packaging and before any value on the fifteen minutes you spent measuring, photographing, listing, answering questions and packing. Selling more of them will not fix this. It multiplies it.
Measuring Is the Whole Job
Postage has told you which items are worth listing at all. From here on, the work is about whether your buyer keeps what you send.
Vintage sizing does not line up with modern sizing, and modern sizing does not even line up with itself from brand to brand. A garment labelled size 12 from 1994 will not fit someone who wears a size 12 today, and a US size 8 is a different size from a UK size 8. You have no standard to fall back on.
How many times have you sent something back yourself because the size was a guess? That leaves you with one habit that shapes your return rate more than anything else you do: list flat measurements, always, in centimetres and inches, and say 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
Say whether your measurements are flat or doubled. "Waist 38cm" is ambiguous and brings returns; "waist 38cm flat, 76cm total" is clear.
Also tell your buyer, 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 photo of each: pilling, fading, small holes, marks, repairs, missing buttons, sticky zips, altered hems, replaced linings
- Whether you have washed or cleaned it
Being exhaustive about flaws is the decent thing to do, and it also protects you. On both platforms, an undisclosed flaw turns a finished sale into a not-as-described dispute, and a dispute costs you the item, the postage both ways, and your time.
Photographing Without the Folklore
You will see a lot of reselling advice pin made-up multipliers onto photo tips: "on-body shots outperform hanger shots by three to five times". I could not find any published, sound study backing a specific multiplier like that for second-hand fashion marketplaces. Assume figures of that kind are invented until someone shows you the data.
What I can tell you without inventing numbers is practical:
- Daylight, indirect, near a window, costs you nothing and beats any ring light at showing true colour. Colour accuracy matters, because "the colour was different in real life" is a legitimate not-as-described claim.
- Shoot on a plain, consistent background. Consistency matters more than which background you pick.
- Photograph the garment flat and photograph 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 these are evidence: a knowledgeable buyer uses them to date the piece and judge whether it is authentic.
- Photograph every flaw you listed, one by one, close up.
- Skip filters that change colour or hide wear. They turn into disputes.
Depop and Vinted both favour recent and active listings in their feeds, so you are generally advised to list steadily instead of in one big batch. I could not verify the details of either platform's ranking, because neither publishes it, and anyone who tells you they know the algorithm is passing on folklore.
Good flat lays and honest measurements build a shop people come back to. When a buyer messages to ask what else you have in her size, and a friend wants to know how your corner of Depop looks that good, you have built a reputation with a phone and a white wall. Keep the background plain and the tape measure in shot.
Returns and Disputes: Two Very Different Clocks
This is the practical difference between the two platforms that will affect you most, and you rarely see it said plainly.
Vinted gives your buyer two days. Vinted's Buyer Protection page says a buyer must press "I have an issue" within 2 days of being told the item should have arrived. If they do not report an issue in that time, or they press "Everything is OK", the order completes and your payment is released. If a buyer says an item is significantly not as described, you 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 your buyer thirty days. Depop's help centre says a buyer reporting an item not as described will get a full refund if they report it "within 30 days of the date of purchase". Depop's Resolution Centre gives you 48 hours to respond before the dispute escalates and, per Depop's own page, if you do not respond the buyer can be refunded without escalation. Where a return is agreed, the buyer "must send it back within 7 days of a return being agreed".
On top of that, buyers who paid by PayPal have PayPal's own dispute window, widely reported as up to 180 days, which runs outside the platform's timetable entirely.
Could you wait a full month to know a sale has really stuck? Fifteen times the exposure window matters a great deal. If you sell something on Depop on the first of the month, that money is not safely yours until the thirtieth. Plan your cash around that, and resist spending a platform balance on more stock the day it lands.
Where the Trader Line Sits, and Why It Matters More Than Tax
That is your shop running. The rest of this page is about what running it makes you in the eyes of HMRC, the platform and the law.
Most sellers worry about whether they owe tax. The bigger risk for you is becoming a trader under consumer law, because trader status brings duties that have nothing to do with HMRC.
HMRC's Business Income Manual sets out nine badges of trade it uses to tell trading apart from selling off 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 stresses that no single badge settles it.
If you are clearing your own wardrobe, you fail almost every badge. If you buy a 25kg bale to break up and relist, you pass almost all of them. In the case this guide describes, the line is clear: 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 where you stand. Your customer 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, completely separate from any fault with the item.
The penalty for not telling them is severe, and people miss it all the time. Business Companion says 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". So if you trade and never mention the right to cancel, every sale you make could be cancelled for over a year.
The general UK refund rules on GOV.UK fill in the practical detail: your customer 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 they paid it, and "you cannot deduct any fees from their refund, unless the item has been used or damaged". Customers are entitled to handle goods as they would in a shop, trying them on included.
Some exemptions touch clothing: sealed goods that are unsuitable for return for health protection or hygiene reasons need not be taken back once unsealed. In practice that only helps you with underwear and swimwear if you actually seal them.
Vinted's own Pro seller guidance says the same thing: professionals (sole traders, non-profits and companies) must declare themselves as Pro Sellers or face sanctions under consumer contract regulations. Vinted's guide then summarises the Consumer Rights Act 2015 remedies that 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 it is five years. Vinted's guide also says Pro Sellers alone are responsible for registering with the business registry and meeting their tax obligations, and must register for VAT once over the threshold, with VAT included in the listing price.
Here is the uncomfortable part: a properly compliant business reseller has to accept no-fault returns for 14 days, and a private seller does not. Plenty of sellers who are plainly trading run private accounts, which is one reason private-account prices can undercut compliant business prices. If you do the same, you are carrying a risk you have chosen, and it is easy to mistake it for an edge you have earned.
UK Tax: The Trading Allowance and What Reporting Really Means
The trading allowance is £1,000 of gross income per tax year. GOV.UK calls it "a tax exemption of up to £1,000 a year for individuals with trading income". The word that matters is gross. It applies to your takings, before costs. Sell £1,400 of clothing that cost you £900 and you are over the threshold, even though you made only £500 profit.
If your gross trading income goes over £1,000 you must register for Self Assessment, and you must do it by 5 October in the following tax year. You can then either claim the £1,000 allowance instead of expenses, or deduct your actual expenses, but you cannot do both: GOV.UK says plainly that "you cannot deduct any other expenses or allowances if you claim the allowances". With real stock costs, deducting actual expenses almost always wins, so in practice the trading allowance works as the line that decides whether you have to file, and you will rarely end up using it as a relief.
Platform reporting and owing tax are two separate things, and people mix them up constantly. HMRC's guidance says new rules started in the UK from 1 January 2024 requiring digital platforms to collect and report seller information. You fall outside the reporting requirement if you make "fewer than 30 sales of goods in a calendar year" or "receive less than 2,000 euros (about £1,700)" in that period. Platforms gather data over the calendar year, send it to HMRC by the following January, and must give you a copy of what they reported.
HMRC is explicit that being reported "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, whatever a platform filed about you.
Even so, thirty sales comes round fast once you break up a bale. How many listings are in your first bag? Assume you will be reported.
The £3,000 change is about paperwork, and it cuts no tax. 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 it 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 slowly. It removes a form for some people. It leaves the trading allowance where it is, and the first £3,000 stays taxable. The announcement says nothing about changing the allowance itself. At the time of writing the change has not taken effect, and no date has been set beyond the end of the parliament.
The rates that then apply to you. For 2026 to 2027, the standard Personal Allowance is £12,570; the basic rate is 20% on taxable income from £12,571 to £50,270, the higher rate 40% to £125,140, and the additional rate 45% 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% on profits from £12,570 to £50,270 and 2% above.
VAT becomes compulsory once your taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, and you must register within 30 days of the end of the month in which you crossed it. It is a rolling twelve-month test, measured on any twelve months rather than the tax year. A reseller turning over £8,000 a month crosses it, and second-hand goods are not zero-rated. The VAT margin scheme for second-hand goods exists and can cut the bill a lot, but it has its own record-keeping rules and is beyond this guide; get advice before you near the threshold rather than after.
Capital Gains Tax is the other side of the coin. It applies to genuine personal possessions, and your trading stock falls outside it. GOV.UK says 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 money is income 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 stock you bought.
Other Countries
Tax and licensing rules vary a lot, so check locally and treat none of the following as advice for your situation.
United States. The IRS says 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 again and again in recent years and is the point on this page most likely to change. The IRS is clear that the threshold governs the platform's paperwork, and your own liability stands regardless: "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 varies state by state and is outside this guide.
Canada. The Reporting Rules for Digital Platform Operators, Canada's version 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 you 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 I could not read the CRA guidance pages directly because canada.ca returned HTTP 403 to automated requests, so I have not stated the exact Canadian-dollar equivalents. Check the CRA guidance before you rely on any threshold.
Australia. Australia's Sharing Economy Reporting Regime requires electronic distribution platform operators to report certain transactions to the ATO, starting 1 July 2023 for ride-sourcing and short-term accommodation and widening from 1 July 2024 to all other reportable transactions. A PwC Australia tax alert on the regime says transactions "where only the legal title or ownership of goods or real property are exchanged" are excluded from reporting, which would put plain second-hand goods sales outside SERR. I could not verify that exclusion against the ATO's own page, which returned HTTP 403. The exclusion only concerns reporting; your Australian income tax on trading income is unaffected either way.
Licensing and Product Law Most Guides Skip
Scotland requires a second-hand dealer's licence. Section 24 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 says 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 anyone dealing in second-hand goods or articles of any description. Subsection (3) exempts pawnbrokers, wholesale dealers buying only 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 makes no distinction by sales channel; on its face, selling online earns you no exemption. Licences are issued annually and each licensing authority sets its own fees. 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.
I could not establish how consistently Scotland applies this to people reselling clothes online from home, and found no council guidance that tackled the point directly. If you trade from Scotland, ask your local licensing board before you build a business on the assumption that it does not apply to you. England and Wales have no equivalent general requirement, though local authority conditions can apply to particular categories of second-hand goods.
Second-hand clothing still falls under textile fibre labelling law. Business Companion's guidance on textile labelling says that "second-hand clothes have to comply with the Regulations", while accepting that older items, especially pre-war handmade garments, rarely carry modern labelling and "it is unlikely that sellers would be expected to provide that level of detail". The Textile Products (Labelling and Fibre Composition) Regulations 2012 contain no blanket second-hand exemption. In practice: where the composition label survives, quote it; where it does not, say so instead of 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 keeps pointing out 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 legal exposure for you. The same reasoning reaches any second-hand item that has a safety standard attached.
Counterfeits are a crime, well beyond a broken platform rule. 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 owner's consent. The maximum penalty on summary conviction is six months' imprisonment or a fine up to 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 bites in vintage resale because bootlegs and reproductions are everywhere in exactly the categories that sell best: band tees, 90s sportswear, workwear and heritage American brands. Nobody authenticates a bale. A supplier's Grade A label says nothing about whether the Ralph Lauren shirt inside is really a Ralph Lauren shirt. Could you prove the branded shirt on top of your pile is genuine? If you cannot authenticate a branded piece with confidence, either list it without the brand or leave it out. "I bought it in a bale" is a weak reasonable-grounds defence for someone who buys bales for a living.
Scams and Losses Aimed at Sellers
Research by Which?, as reported in the business and consumer press, suggests buyers on pre-loved marketplaces are more likely to be scammed than sellers, and most published advice is written for them. There is still a distinct set of losses that land on you as the seller, and they get little coverage precisely because sellers are the smaller group of victims.
- The off-platform payment request. A buyer says the app is glitching, or offers you a better price to deal directly, and suggests bank transfer, PayPal "friends and family", Revolut or a courier they arrange. Consumer guidance agrees that this strips away all platform protection. And there is a knock-on effect: PayPal's friends-and-family route gives you no seller protection either. If the money is reversed, you have no comeback, and you have broken both platforms' rules, which can cost you the account.
- The fake payment notification. A phishing email or text dressed up as Vinted or Depop support, saying a payment is "pending" and asking you to click through to release it, usually to a page that harvests card details. Real platform payouts never ask you to enter card details to receive money.
- The escalation. A claim that the payment failed 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 you agree a return, what comes back is a different item, or nothing at all. Photograph everything you post, including the packed parcel and the label, and keep the postage receipt with tracking. It guarantees nothing, but it is the only evidence you will have.
- The item-not-received claim on a parcel that really was delivered. Use tracked services through the platform's own labels wherever you can, because platform-generated tracking is the evidence the platform will actually look at.
- Chargebacks. Separate from platform disputes and run on the card network's timetable, which is longer than either platform's. One more reason to avoid treating a platform balance as settled money.
The thread running through all of these: on both platforms, your protection depends on doing everything inside the platform. Every step you take outside it (the chat, the payment, the postage label) removes a piece of the evidence you will need later.
A Worked Bale, Start to Finish
Let's put it all together. I use sourced prices where they exist and clearly labelled estimates where they do not. Treat this as a way of working out your own numbers; it makes no forecast about them.
You 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 your landed cost £170.
At an estimated four blouses per kilo, that is 100 items, or £1.70 each landed. Assume an estimated 15% are unsaleable through stains, holes or awkward sizing: 85 listable items, at an effective £2.00 each.
Now the number that decides everything. Sell-through is the share 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. I could not find any credible published sell-through data for Depop or Vinted, so any specific percentage here is an estimate. For illustration, say 40% sell within six months at an average realised price of £14 after offers and discounts: 34 sales, £476 of gross merchandise value.
On Depop, take off payment processing at 2.9% plus £0.30, with postage of roughly £3.95 inside the transaction base: 34 × (£0.52 + £0.30) = £27.90. Take off packaging at an estimated £0.35 per order: £11.90. In this model your buyer pays the postage and it passes straight to the carrier, so it cancels 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 your flat.
Now your time. At an estimated eight to twelve minutes per item to sort, wash, measure, photograph, write up and list, 100 items takes you 13 to 20 hours. Packing and sending 34 orders at roughly six minutes each is 3.4 hours. Add sourcing research, messages and disputes, 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 you put any value on the space the stock takes up. 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 pays you slightly less than a minimum wage job, and you carry the stock risk and the 51 unsold items on top. Would you take a job on those terms if someone offered it to you?
Change the assumptions, though, and the picture changes sharply, which is the real lesson:
- If sell-through is 60% rather than 40, revenue rises to £714 and profit to roughly £484, which over the extra packing time works out at about £20 an hour.
- If your average realised price is £22 rather than £14 on the same 40%, revenue is £748 and profit roughly £530.
- If sell-through is 25% at an average of £11, revenue is £231 and profit about £38, which over twenty-odd hours of work is no business at all. And you are left holding 64 unsold garments.
Your two levers are sell-through and average selling price, and both come from what you buy far more than from how you photograph it. Better buying beats better marketing by a wide margin. That is exactly why tier-two graded stock at £13 to £16 per kilo can earn you more than tier-one at £5, despite costing three times as much: you are paying for a bigger share of items someone actually wants.
Graded stock at £13 to £16 a kilo looks expensive until you count how much of it sells. If careful buying leaves you enough profit for a few months running, you could quietly pay your dad's phone bill and still keep money back to restock, and when he asks how the vintage thing is going you have a good answer. Buy the smaller, better bale next.
Cross-Listing: What It Costs You
Listing the same stock on Depop, Vinted and eBay gets it in front of more people. It also hands you a specific headache: you now have to delist everywhere the moment something sells, and if you miss it, you sell the same physical garment twice. Cancelling the second sale hurts your standing on that platform, and repeated cancellations get accounts restricted.
Cross-listing tools exist and are marketed hard at resellers. They are subscriptions. I have not priced them, because the tiers change often and because the bigger point is about how the work scales: a tool that saves you listing time leaves your dispatch time, dispute time and sourcing time untouched, and those are the parts that grow worst.
If you cross-list, cross-list a subset. Put your slowest-moving stock on the extra platforms and keep your best where it already sells.
Every week you leave it, the best stock at your local sources goes to someone else. Start with one small kilo and one platform, and learn on cheap garments while the stakes are low. Measure and photograph three items tonight, and list them before you sleep.
Who should skip this
I will be blunt about the reasons to walk away.
- You need 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 depends entirely on a sell-through rate you cannot know in advance.
- You have nowhere to store 100 to 300 garments. A 25kg bale is physically big. Three of them fill a room. Stock living in the hallway ends the venture faster than any fee change.
- You dislike admin. The job is 20% sourcing, 10% photography and 70% measuring, writing, packing, messaging and record-keeping.
- You are unwilling to register as self-employed once you pass £1,000 of gross income. If you buy 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.
- You live in Scotland and have not checked the second-hand dealer licensing position first.
- The "no seller fees" headline is what drew you in. That headline is the reason Depop's seller population grew 41% 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.
- You plan to sell branded goods but cannot authenticate them. The criminal exposure under section 92 of the Trade Marks Act is out of all proportion to the margin on a single shirt.
- You picture it as decluttering that pays. Clearing your own wardrobe is a genuinely good idea, generally sits outside CGT because of the £6,000 chattels threshold, and is a completely different activity from the one this guide describes.
Read that list again and be honest with yourself: which of these is you?
Your First Ninety Days, Realistically
You have now seen the business in pieces. This is the order you will meet them in.
- Weeks 1 to 2. Sell 20 to 30 items from your own wardrobe on both platforms before you spend anything. It is the cheapest possible test of whether you can stand the work, and it gives you your first real data on how long a listing takes you and how buyers behave. Hold off on buying stock.
- 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. Now you have your own cost-per-saleable-item figure in place of a guide's estimate.
- Weeks 5 to 8. List all of it. Record, for each 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 your gross income looks likely to pass £1,000 in the tax year.
- Weeks 9 to 12. Work out your actual sell-through at 30 and 60 days, and your actual average selling price. Only now decide whether to buy a second, bigger bale, and whether to buy at £5 a kilo or £15 a kilo. If your 60-day sell-through is under 25%, the answer is probably to stop and keep your money.
Measure before you scale. The most common way people fail at this 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 shown itself. What would your first ten sales really tell you about the rest of the bale? The honest answer is very little, which is why the 30 and 60 day numbers matter.
Keeping Records That Survive an Enquiry
If you are trading, keep these 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 must give you a copy of
- Monthly platform payout statements, along with 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
That last point catches people out. Buying £2,000 of bales in March does not give you 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 I Could Not Establish
Here, 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 backed up across several independent calculators and press coverage of the 2024 announcement at the time.
- The current Boosted Listings percentage for UK sellers is disputed between 8 and 12% across sources, including a claim of a December 2025 increase I 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 found 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 open assumption.
- Items per kilo by garment category is an estimate throughout, with no source behind it.
- The Australian SERR exclusion for pure transfers of title, and the Canadian excluded-seller thresholds, come 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, I have labelled it as one. If a guide gives you a precise sell-through percentage, a precise income figure, or a precise photo conversion multiplier with no source, treat it 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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