Sometimes we don't quite believe in everything that is free. Deep down when something is free we think it is bad or misleading because currently everything is worth money.
If you have thought about starting to sell on Vinted but you really don't trust doing it, then you have to know why they say that Vinted is free and that it does not have any commission or charge anything to the seller or the buyer.
Why is Vinted free?
As you know, Vinted is a startup born in the European Union. If the greatest proposal in front of customers and sellers is to allow them to easily sell clothes from their homes to other people inside and outside their country without any commission.
The reason why Vinted is free is because Vinted obtains its benefits from other sources, this is clear, since if it were not the case the company could not survive due to the fact that they must bear the expenses of paying personnel and infrastructure that maintains the web and APP daily.
Theories about how Vinted makes the money that would justify the fact that it is free and can have the luxury of not charging any commission to sellers or buyers are varied.
First you should know that Vinted has advertising on its website and users spend a lot of time browsing through your pages looking for articles, so Vinted earns a lot of money from advertising, but not that much. enough to be able to support itself only from advertising, but it would be a first resort.
Second, and something that makes more and more sense to be the main tool to support Vinted, is the fact that sellers are increasingly subjected to more competition because there are more sellers.
Note that Vinted does a lot of advertising to attract buyers and sellers from TV and other media. What it does is fuel competition between them and there are more and more sellers.
This leads sellers to have less and less visibility as would happen, for example, among Amazon sellers.
In order to gain visibility and show up to more customers, sellers will promote their ads by paying Vinted in order to get more visits and more sales. This way when sellers want to make their sales and are desperate to sell but are in a bad time they will also use advertising promotion.
I'm sure this is the main way that Vinted makes money thanks to its ad revenues that sellers pay for to drive more traffic to their closets.
Something that is interesting is the fact that Vinted not long ago put shipping insurance for all their orders and that customers must pay. This allows us to imagine a possible form of income such as the fact that the Vinted commission is included in the shipment as a percentage, but this is only a theory.
This could be very possible since Vinted has many daily shipments from different countries and the shipments could even be cheaper due to the high volume they have. So they could probably be getting ten to thirty percent of the shipping price as benefits for them that would be another form of income.
On the other hand, we know that Vinted as a startup enters into investment rounds where investors contribute money, but this money would only intervene for the development of the company and not as a benefit, since this money must return again increased to the pockets of investors so we rule out this way of earning money by Vinted.
Anyway, Vinted is currently making enough money to make sure they don't have to add a commission to their clients.
Although it is not ruled out that in the future he wants to charge sellers by putting a small commission on them for publishing ads, or in any other way, but he would never put this commission on customers because the fact of "no commission" is the value proposition by which Vinted stands out in the landscape of second-hand sales applications.
At the moment, Vinted is free and looks to remain free in the near future. Without any kind of problem, you can use Vinted and feel that this application is reliable to make your purchases and sales.