The resale wars will be won upstream
Every piece I've read about the eBay-Depop deal asks the same question: what does eBay get from buying Depop? Younger buyers. Gen Z credibility. A demographic gap it has never been able to close on its own. That's the right answer to the wrong question. The better question is why every major resale platform in the world spent the last two years giving away seller fees. That question explains the eBay-Depop deal, the rise of Whatnot, and where the real competition in secondhand fashion is headed.
Why supply is the constraint
Demand is not the problem. Millions of people want to buy used clothing. The hard thing is getting enough quality inventory onto any given platform to serve them. New goods are simple. A brand manufactures on forecast, ships to warehouses and lists online. Secondhand doesn't work like that. Every item is unique. It has to be sourced, checked, described, photographed, and priced individually. The supply side is slow, labour-intensive, and fragmented. That makes supply the hard problem. Not demand. In secondhand fashion, supply is not the thing that makes a marketplace better. It's the thing that makes a marketplace. Whoever controls supply wins. Seller fees cut against that. A fee is a barrier to listing. Raise it high enough and sellers don't bother, or they go somewhere cheaper. The inventory that might have been on your platform goes elsewhere. Remove the fee, remove the barrier. More sellers list. More inventory flows in. That is why every major platform made the same move.
How Vinted started a fee war
When Vinted launched in the UK, it removed seller fees entirely. Sellers keep 100% of their sale price. Buyers pay a small protection fee, and Vinted monetises on its logistics infrastructure instead. The logic was not generosity. It was supply aggregation. Make selling free, make it frictionless, and watch the inventory flow in. It worked. Vinted now has 17.4 million UK users. Among fashion retailers, only Primark and Next have more. Depop followed in July 2024. eBay removed fees for private sellers in September 2024. Three major platforms, the same structural move, within 18 months of each other. That is not a coincidence. That is a supply war.
Then Whatnot stopped competing on fees entirely
Not every platform played the same game. Whatnot's livestream model only works if sellers are moving inventory fast and continuously. Dead air is death. So Whatnot built around high-throughput sellers: tiered bonuses, reduced commission rates, promotional windows. All designed to pull wholesale-volume supply onto the platform. It surpassed $6 billion in global GMV in 2025, more than double the year before. Different mechanism, same logic. Compete for supply.
What the eBay-Depop deal actually is
At Fleek, we see the same dynamic playing out directly. The resellers doing serious volume aren't loyal to one platform. They're cross-listing across Depop, Vinted, eBay, and Whatnot simultaneously, spreading the same inventory wherever it sells fastest. Every platform is competing for the same supply. eBay is buying three things. First, a seller base it has never been able to attract. The same Gen Z cohort that buys on Depop also sells on Depop. Second, US market momentum. Vinted has effectively won Europe. The American market is the one major geography where the resale wars aren't yet decided, and Depop grew nearly 60% year-on-year there in 2025. Third, a brand. Depop has genuine cultural credibility among younger shoppers that eBay couldn't have built from scratch. Three substantial assets, and a logical use of $1.2 billion. The question the deal doesn't answer is what happens upstream. Those sellers are sourcing their inventory from somewhere. The wholesale channels, the graders, the sourcing networks. That layer is still fragmented, still hard to access, and still being built out. Whoever cracks it will accelerate everything above it.
Where the war is actually being fought
The resale wars are not being fought on the apps. They are being fought upstream, in the supply chains that feed them. Vinted didn't win the UK market by building a better app than Depop. It won by making it easier to sell. The platforms that crack the supply problem will win demand as a consequence. For resellers, this dynamic is worth understanding. The platforms removing fees are not doing you a favour. They are competing for something they need. Keep listing everywhere, depend on none of them. The resellers who treat platforms as distribution channels rather than destinations will keep selling regardless of who wins. The resellers cross-listing across Depop, Vinted, eBay, and Whatnot are sourcing that inventory from somewhere. A growing share of it moves through Fleek before it ever reaches an app. We're not competing in the resale wars. We're building the supply chain behind them. The infrastructure behind secondhand fashion is still being built. Whoever cracks it will accelerate everything above it.