Vinted vs Depop: Should eBay spend more to win the second-hand battle in the US?

It took Vinted a few months to become a serious enough problem to appear in Wall Street analyst notes.

The Lithuanian platform has built its peer-to-peer second-hand model for nearly twenty years. It only officially entered the US market in January 2026. However, it is advancing quickly enough to push Depop, now owned by eBay, to accelerate its marketing spend. Consequently, Wells Fargo and Citizens lowered their recommendation on eBay stock in early August, citing the rising cost of this battle.

Vinted still only represents a small part of the US second-hand market. Its progress, however, is already changing the competitive landscape.

Vinted has not yet captured US market

First, let's put the figures into perspective. Vinted does not disclose specific revenue or Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) for the US. This makes it impossible to assign it a precise market share today. Any direct comparison with Depop must therefore be made with caution.

Several indicators, however, show that the platform is rapidly gaining ground. According to Wells Fargo, its US daily active users increased more than sixfold year-over-year in the second quarter, just a few months after its official launch.

In April, Vinted already registered 27 percent more ad impressions than Depop in the US. This was despite its number of daily active users being about five times lower. In other words, the European platform was already spending heavily to build an audience that was still significantly smaller than its competitor's.

This signal is all the more interesting as Vinted has continued to climb the app charts. Citizens noted in August that the app had risen to fifth place in the US App Store, compared to ninth for Depop. These are not yet market shares. They are, however, indicators of traction. This is likely what worries eBay the most.

Depop's head start

In the US market, Vinted is not yet on equal footing with Depop. Depop has long been established in the US and has experienced particularly strong growth there. In 2025, its global GMV reached 1.08 billion dollars, an increase of 36.3 percent. The US was the platform's largest market, and its US GMV had grown by nearly 60 percent year-over-year.

The fourth quarter even showed US growth of 60 percent. At the end of 2025, Depop had seven million active buyers and 3.2 million active sellers worldwide. Nearly 90 percent of its buyers were under 34 years old. The US accounted for 74 percent of the platform's GMV. This is precisely the customer base eBay was seeking when it acquired Depop. The group had announced an acquisition for 1.2 billion dollars in February. It was finally completed on July 30 for approximately 1.4 billion dollars, after adjustments.

Ebay's calculation was therefore relatively clear. Rather than trying to build an in-house proposition to attract a generation of consumers accustomed to social platforms and resale, the group bought an already established community. A few months later, the equation has become more complicated. The acquisition has changed the group's size; it has not yet demonstrated that it can change its growth trajectory.

Why Vinted is such a disruption

The threat from Vinted is not just about its user numbers. It stems mainly from the economic mechanics the platform has already built in Europe. In 2025, Vinted generated 10.8 billion euros in GMV, up 47 percent, and 1.1 billion euros in revenue. Its net profit reached 62 million euros.

This scale is considerable for a company that has just opened its first major market outside Europe. Vinted has also invested heavily in payments, logistics, and the technological tools that streamline peer-to-peer transactions. This infrastructure is precisely its advantage when entering a new market. It arrives not just with an app, but with a model already proven at scale.

In the US, the platform is therefore starting by buying brand awareness and liquidity. The rest can follow. This is where the marketplace model becomes particularly interesting. The more sellers there are, the more attractive the offering becomes; the more attractive the offering, the more buyers it attracts; the more buyers there are, the more incentive sellers have to join.

The real challenge is therefore not just about recruiting users. It is about reaching the critical mass quickly enough to then reduce reliance on advertising.

Battle comes at a bad time for eBay

It is precisely this prospect that explains the analysts' nervousness. According to Citizens, Depop could spend more than 250 million dollars on marketing in 2026, compared to 119 million in 2025. The platform had already recorded 42 million dollars in marketing expenses in the first quarter. Wells Fargo, for its part, estimated that Depop's marketing spend in July was running at about three times Vinted's level.

The problem is not that eBay is investing in Depop. The group had announced from the outset that it would need to finance its growth. The issue is that competition could make this investment much more sustained than anticipated. Ebay itself acknowledges that Depop will weigh on its short-term results. After the release of its second-quarter results, the group projected that the business would cause a decline of about two points in its non-GAAP operating income growth in 2026. The effect on earnings per share was expected to be even more pronounced.

In return, eBay now expects Depop to contribute about 1.5 points to its consolidated GMV growth this year. It is also counting on double-digit growth acceleration for Depop in the second half of the year. The group estimates that the acquisition will become accretive to operating income in 2028.

In other words, eBay is currently willing to sacrifice some of its profitability to buy future growth.

US market is large enough to justify battle

Ebay is also accepting this equation because the market is far from saturated. The US second-hand market grew by 14 percent in 2024, five times faster than the overall apparel market, according to the 2025 ThredUp report conducted with GlobalData. Online resale alone had grown by 23 percent that year and was projected to nearly double over the next five years, reaching 40 billion dollars in 2029.

ThredUp's 2026 data confirms this trend. The US second-hand market continues to take share from new clothing and remains highly fragmented. Globally, the second-hand market is expected to reach 393 billion dollars by 2030, growing at twice the rate of the apparel market as a whole.

This fragmentation is significant. It means Vinted does not need to immediately take dozens of market share points from Depop to become a problem. It only needs to convince a growing fraction of buyers and sellers that the platform is a credible alternative.

US consumers already seem willing to adopt the model. A study commissioned by Depop and conducted in June 2026 indicated that 77 percent of Americans own clothes they no longer need, with a potential resale value of around 400 dollars per wardrobe.

Vinted still has a problem to solve

However, one should be wary of presenting Vinted as the future US leader. Its US presence is still recent. It needs to build a local community, adapt its offering, develop its logistics networks, and, most importantly, achieve the same transaction density as in Europe.

The US market is also much more competitive than the Vinted-Depop duel suggests. Ebay already has a fashion business with over 10 billion dollars in annual GMV. Facebook Marketplace benefits from a huge user base. Poshmark is firmly established, and ThredUp holds a significant position in the second-hand sector. Vinted therefore faces a classic platform market problem: entering quickly does not necessarily mean achieving the liquidity needed to become indispensable. Its first few months in the US show, however, that this is no longer just a geographical test.

What Vinted changes for Depop

Ultimately, it is less Vinted's current market share and more its ability to raise the stakes that interests Wall Street. Depop still had a considerable lead in 2025. Its US GMV was growing by nearly 60 percent, its active US sellers had increased by 60 percent year-over-year, and its customer base was particularly young.

For eBay, the question is no longer just about growing Depop. It must do so faster than Vinted, or at least fast enough to prevent Vinted from creating its own network effect.

A second-hand platform does not win simply because it has the best brand or the largest advertising budget. It wins when it becomes the place where supply and demand naturally meet. Once this habit is established, it becomes much more expensive for a competitor to shift users. This is likely why eBay chose to buy Depop rather than let the market play out without it.

Battle is still open

At this stage, the figures do not allow us to say that Vinted has already taken a significant share of the US market from Depop. They do, however, suggest that Vinted is making the US market much more expensive to conquer.

The European platform boasts spectacular global growth, a proven infrastructure, and a model that has demonstrated its ability to create liquidity between buyers and sellers. Its entry into the US is still recent, but its daily active users have grown strongly, and its App Store ranking has climbed rapidly.

Facing it, Depop has a real head start, namely an already large US community, a brand that is highly recognised among young consumers, and the financial backing of eBay.

The question in the coming months will therefore be less about who currently holds the largest market share and more about who will succeed in transforming their growth into a network effect.

For Vinted, the US is the first real test of its ability to export its model beyond its European home ground. For eBay, Depop has become the bet that should prevent this new generation of second-hand commerce from being built elsewhere.

For Wall Street, the question is much more down-to-earth: how much more will need to be spent before Depop's growth is no longer bought with marketing?