Reality is beginning to dawn upon us

Are we beginning to realize that the lure of becoming independent or simply generating a side second income by selling online is not all what it is made out to be. I have been through that consideration process and went as far as opening seller accounts at Amazon and eBay, only to find out that it these are economic suicide schemes.

Isn’t it bizarre that radio stations seem to synchronise so that adverts are run pretty much simultaneously…. Despite all being totally independent, they all run advertisements at the same time like synchronised swimming partners… How can totally independet radio stations with entirely different programmes run advertisements at the same time? You can’t switch from one station to another to escape advertisements because all other stations have also just sitched their adverts on…

What I noticed with online sales platforms it pretty much the same thing… They all charge pretty much the same commission of around 12%.. Now that’s a hefty commission.! Think about it. If you were to put your money away into a savings account, as of August 2025, you will not get more than 7% – per annum…. Yet, you sell an item online and you’re charged 12%… This is simply Seppuke aka harakiri. It simply would not pass Dragon’s Den for a viable business model. Yet many people run their health to the ground in trying to be a seller on these platforms.

When I lookedd into this about 5 years ago. It was an instant turn off. Whilst I don’t have a MBA, I spotted it instantly. In essence I would have to invest capital on buying goods, consider taxes, packaging, supporting after sales, marketing and on top of that a significant commission to the platform! No thanks! I thought and ruled it out.

I know eBay has recently changed its business model and there are no more sellers fees. But anyone who has since sold goods on the platform must have noticed that the fees have been shifted onto the buyers. As you price and list and your items, once posted, you notice that the list-price is actually higher than you listed it for. Obviously, buyers do not know any different! So the games these platforms play go on.

The caviat to this is of course HMRC now wishes to know about our trading activities on these platforms and they have summoned the platforms to report us to HMRC if we are working too hard to get rid of our second hand items in an effort to recover some of our expenditure (paid for with monies we earned and already paid income tax upon)..

It’s raining profits

Did you know that Amazon has made 60million ($ /£ ?) profit in one year from Prime membership alone!! This is of course a small fraction of annual profits but there is no doubt that it is the host that makes money on these platforms whilst buyers and sellers battle it out.

Whay aren’t we taught practical skills at school?

If I had not been taught about a very important Statistics phenomena (please skip reading the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to know how we are all sure-things out there). I will not go into too much detail but a summary of this is worth you knowing about since the idea is widely used for marketing and is taught as an introduction to Statistics. The concept is very simple and about having a set of samples and looking at the distribution and variance of a certain attribute for each sample from the set.

So. If we had a set of 100 samles and we plotted these on a chart – let’s call this set about how tall men are and we took out a survey and jotted down heights of 100 samples of men. We typically end up with an upside down bell shaped curve that shows the average or mean height of men in the centre and shorter men to the left and taller men to the right of this ‘norm’. Coincidently, this is where the word ‘normal’ comes from. You would be considered to be normal if your height was the same as many peers and either short or tall if your heigth deviated from this normal-height-group in the ceter.

The mathematics of it is really not that difficul or boring!

The upside down bell shape curve is referred to as a Normal distribution or Gaussian Distribution Curve and looks like this;

The vertical in the center is the Norm. We then have other vertical lines that represent deviation points in the positive and negative directions. The two vertical lines to the right and left of the centre line (the norm) represent -1 Standard Deviation and +1 Standard Deviation from the Norm.. The significance of these – and + 1 Standard deviation is that they represent -34.13% and +34.13%, giving us a range of 68.26%. This is the region where men’s heights are not quite normal but vary by a small margin. As we push away from the center toward subsequent verrtical lines, referred to as – and + 2,3 and 4 Standard Deviations (steps away), the % of our sample set tends toward 100%. The farther away, say 3 Standard deviations means the heights of these men deviate significantly from the mean average height represented by the center vertical line.

What does this have anything to do with sales, or selling online. Well. If we assume the normal is represented by people who open account son Amazon or eBay to boost heir income by selling goods. 68.26% will simply accept it as a worthy solution. Beyond that, to the right of 1 Standard Deviation will be extreme advocates and claim to love the platform. On the other side and on the fringes you will see people like me who totally disagree with the business model and will only buy from the platforms for convenience but will not commit to becoming a seller.

Moral of the (sub) story of Statistics

The moral of that story is that as long as these platforms have 68.26% of the population fooled, then the opinions of the rest of us don’t really matter much. But it is comforting to see that we are not all dumbos and living through experiences we are beginning to realise that thse platforms are not all as they are portrayed to be.

Back to the main article

Anyway, much of the above is validated by a random article I came across online and had to duplicate it here because it resonated with me so much that I felt like saying, I told you so but I don’t even know this lady!!

All that follows below is ditto of the published article (link to it given at the end of this page). Ps.I borrowed and included the picture in that article lessen the strain of reader’s imagination). Also, beware that links in the article are likely to spoil your screen with ads, so click on them at your own risk.

Brit divorces Vinted after 3 years

For the last three years, Vinted has been my digital happy place. A little dopamine hit every time a parcel arrived on my doorstep, or when someone snapped up the too-snug dress I hadn’t worn since before I had my two babies, or when I offloaded a bundle of babygrows they’d outgrown. During two long, often financially tricky, maternity leaves, it felt like a way to clear out wardrobes and simultaneously justify the occasional “new-to-me” splurge without the guilt. 

But lately, the app that once felt like a treasure trove of cheap children’s coats and more affordable designer labels – as well as a handy source of a bit of extra spending money – has become a real drag. Endless lowball offers, rude buyers, and items languishing unsold for weeks; what used to be a thrill now feels like one long petty argument and I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to log off for good.

First things first, I must admit I’ve made some decent money from Vinted. I’ve seen sales of £1,155 since I first downloaded the app in 2022 – all on stuff that would probably otherwise still be hanging in my wardrobe.

Read Next: If you’re spending more than a fiver on a T-shirt, you’re a mug

When you sell items on Vinted, however, the money doesn’t hit your bank account directly; instead, you build up a Vinted balance, and it can feel all too easy to spend it on something else right away. A £90 Farm Rio dress here, a £60 Sézane top there, I have found it sometimes tempting to spend instead of sensibly transferring my Vinted balance into my bank account.

Particularly during my two maternity leaves, when many months saw no pay cheque arrive, I’ve used my little balance of £50 or £60 here and there as a way to allow myself a tiny window into my ‘normal’ life as the assistant editor of a glossy magazine, treating myself to some new clothes and giving myself a bit of a style boost in the process. Plus, being a size 14, I’ve monopolised on all the Ozempic weight loss to get some real bargains in my size. 

As time has gone on, however, I have begun to hit some blockers in my love affair with Vinted. There’s a lot of admin, for a start: whilst the uploading of your items for sale is a fairly simple process it does take time to get all of your ‘marketing’ just right (and the right photos and sales patter do matter). Then there are the buyer questions, the time-wasting offers (“Will you accept £12 for this?” Um, considering it’s on sale for £55….no?) and the bartering, oh the bartering.

Whether it’s from the buyer or the seller’s side, you find yourself at a sort of mad digital carboot sale where everyone is trying to haggle (a single pound is a lot in the world of Vinted) using weird and wonderful excuses in the process. Having once made an offer of £25 on a dress listed for £30, I was told that by making such an offer I was depriving the pugs the seller had recently valiantly rescued of vital funds for their food. I was once made an offer of £20 on a Free People cardigan I was selling for £50, because the buyer had lost theirs and needed to replace it for “sentimental reasons”. It’s a minefield of madness. 

None of this ends once you’ve secured a sale or a purchase, of course. You then must jump over several hurdles as a seller: will they collect the parcel? If not, it gets returned to you and you have to relist the item again. Will they have an issue with the item?

One lady reported me when she found a single hair on a dress I’d sold, meaning my payment was held in the Vinted ether (it was finally released once she’d brushed it off, though she did leave me a three-star review). As a buyer you have to hope you receive what you’ve actually paid for. I once got a pair of Tu leggings when I’d bought a Sweaty Betty pair (I was refunded in the end) and, more recently, got scammed with fake Olaplex shampoo and conditioner (it took a couple of washes to realise it was fake, by which point the transaction had been completed, meaning I couldn’t get my money back). I’ve also recently come to the realisation that a good 50% of clothing items I’ve bought for myself either don’t fit or don’t suit me, and I relisted them.

Read Next: Claire’s Accessories wasn’t just a shop – it was a gentle teenage rebellion

There is no doubt that business is booming at Vinted, which started out in 2008 in Lithuania, when two friends, Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauska, built a simple site to help clear out their wardrobes. What started as a side project for swapping second hand clothes quietly snowballed into a European tech success story. The company now counts more than 100 million members across 20 countries, with the UK among its biggest markets. Valued at around £4 billion, it has gone from scrappy start-up to one of the world’s largest resale platforms, riding the boom in second-hand fashion as shoppers look for cheaper, greener ways to refresh their wardrobes. Last year Vinted’s net profit soared to £65m.

Behind-the-scenes, however, there is a sense that I’m not the only one with Vinted vexation. Reddit threads are filled with complaints from sellers about declining visibility, shadow banning, unpredictable algorithms, and poor customer support. A straw poll of my friends and followers said that the Vinted users among them have seen languishing sales, with items sitting unsold for weeks and months, and buyers increasingly unwilling to part with more than £25 for almost anything, regardless of the label. One friend was sent a Dorothy Perkins dress instead of Gucci sunglasses, leading to an exasperating back and forth, during which the seller agreed to refund my friend ‘once she sent back the sunglasses’ – which she had never received.

I can personally pinpoint the exact moment that I felt like life was perhaps too short to spend it running a failing Vinted side-hustle. I had found myself engaged in a dispute with a buyer from Romford over a £1.50 newborn cardigan which hadn’t yet arrived. ‘What are you piping up for?!’ she wrote via DM when I gently suggested it would arrive soon given she had a tracking number. I realised that second hand reselling had started to feel like an enraging customer service job, and that perhaps £1.50 didn’t seem worth getting high blood pressure for. 

Farewell then, Vinted. My joy might have slowly got lost in the post, but the memories we’ve made will last a lifetime.

Article originally published here (caution, that version is full of ads and presumably trackers too!)

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