After Catherine Warrilow sold a Zara necklace for £6 on Vinted, she packed it up and posted it off, just as she had done with many things before. Only this time the buyer claimed the parcel arrived empty. Warrilow, 47, from Oxford, provided Vinted with photos and videos of the package, including date-stamped Ring doorbell footage of her leaving the house to post it.
But she says the resale platform refunded the buyer and left her out of pocket. In 2025, users traded €10.8bn (£9.1bn) worth of goods through the platform – a 47% increase on the previous year. It generated €1.1bn in revenue and made a €62m profit.
It now operates across 26 markets and has expanded beyond clothes into books, toys, sports goods and collectibles, as well as building its own shipping and payments businesses. It is a success story, but some sellers feel that the odds are stacked against them. Warrilow had used the app for five years, usually selling items her children had outgrown or things she had “fallen out of love with”.
After having problems as a buyer, too, she had had enough. In both cases, “small amounts” of money were lost, Warrilow says. Within two days, hundreds of people had responded.
Since then, she says, more than 6,400 cases have been collected. One of the users who claimed, via Warrilow’s website, that she had had a bad experience, was Maggie, who did not want to give her last name. She says she sold a pair of Birkenstock Boston clogs for £72.
When the buyer disputed their authenticity, she provided photographs of the shoes, and a bank statement showing she had bought them from Office. But Vinted decided the shoes were counterfeit, she says. The buyer was refunded and kept them, and Maggie permanently lost her account.
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