Excellent news! 
The first article from The Times concerning Vinted’s customer service has just been published.
More articles are expected to follow, and we hope they will also address the situation of Vinted Pro sellers.
In the meantime, I invite you to share your experience by answering this survey, which served as the starting point for the article: https://sadvintedfaces.com/
Below is the French translation of the article
Update! I contacted the lady, who confirmed to me that the next article will deal with restrictions on commercial use for Pro users.
Catherine Warrilow bought and sold hundreds of items on Vinted over five years. The ability to refresh her wardrobe while consuming more sustainably made it, in her opinion, a great way to shop. Then the problems started.
Warrilow, 47, a freelance marketing consultant in Oxford, sold a Zara necklace for about ÂŁ10 in March. The buyer claimed to have received an empty envelope. Vinted refunded the buyer, but not Catherine, explaining that it was her fault for using unsuitable packaging.
“How do you know?” she asked customer service, demanding proof. The response was that it was their “sincere belief.”
Warrilow spent an entire evening scrolling through footage from her Ring doorbell camera until she found a clip clearly showing her leaving her home with the correctly packed parcel. She sent this video to Vinted, but the company remained firm.
The stress of customer service
In May, Warrilow bought a beaded collar advertised as a vintage accessory and categorized as an adult item. What she received was a cheap children’s item, made in China, new and in a plastic bag. According to her, Vinted ignored her complaint for so long that by the time the platform finally responded, the return window had expired. She was then told she would not be entitled to any refund.
Warrilow used to earn about £50 a month from Vinted, but she has stopped selling on the platform. The risk of losing money, combined with the stress of customer service—or, in her opinion, the lack thereof—is no longer worth it.
Frustrated, and noticing a flood of similar complaints in Vinted-focused Facebook groups, she created an online poll titled “Sad Vinted Faces” and shared it in Vinted communities on Facebook and TikTok. In 36 hours, it had garnered 244 responses; by the time the article was written, that figure had risen to 907, with an average satisfaction rating of 1.51 out of 5.
According to this poll, among those who contacted customer service, about 87% received no response or a response that did not address their question. In some cases, these delays meant customers missed the 48-hour return window. When a response finally arrived, it seemed automated, possibly written by AI bots that didn’t actually answer questions, or was completely incoherent. One response rejecting an appeal was even signed with paw print emojis.
The countdown begins
One of the main points of friction is the buyer protection period, limited to 48 hours. As soon as a package is marked as delivered, the countdown begins: buyers have two days to report a problem before the money is released to the seller. If this deadline is missed—due to being on vacation, customer service being unreachable, or simply being unaware of it—it becomes much harder to get a refund.
A user buying on Vinted for the first time had ordered a ÂŁ14 birthday gift for her teenage son. The envelope arrived empty, except for a piece of paper. Unable to get the app to work properly and receiving no response to emails sent to what she thought was customer service (she would later discover this email address was no longer active), she opened a dispute with her bank.
Vinted then wrote to her stating that it was too late to get a refund and asking her to close the bank dispute, adding: “Please keep in mind that we reserve the right to block your account if we receive further chargebacks.” The company also stated that in case of “suspicious activity,” communications could be shared with her bank “to protect Vinted’s interests.” At no point was it acknowledged that she herself might have been a victim of fraud.
Martyn James, a consumer rights specialist who reviewed this email, called it intimidating: “A reasonable person reading it would think they have no other option and just give up.”
It took Hannah Burke 17 days—and over 20 hours of effort—to get a £95 refund for a pair of boots ordered on Vinted in January. When she went to collect her package from an InPost locker, she immediately knew something was wrong: the package was far too light. Inside was a small USB-powered desk lamp.
She would later discover that at the InPost drop-off point used by her seller, two packages had been picked up together: her boots and someone else’s H&M return. The labels had been swapped at the time of collection. The lamp ended up in her pickup locker, while her boots were sent to the H&M warehouse.
Vinted told her the issue was with InPost, while InPost told her to contact Vinted. Burke, 41, who works in financial services in London, says: “I became Miss Marple for three weeks trying to sort this out.”
Thanks to the return slip found in the H&M package, she tracked down the other recipient on Facebook and confirmed the error. Then, she and her seller both exercised their right to personal data access, requesting InPost’s CCTV footage from the locker. The footage proved the error. The refund finally came almost three weeks later, but she never got her boots back.
On Trustpilot, where Vinted has over 68,000 reviews in the UK, ratings are extremely polarized: they focus almost exclusively on one star or five stars.
Earlier this year, Vinted updated its packaging recommendations, notably stating that sellers should not use “unpadded bags” for fragile items. Some fear that this new rule will give the platform more grounds to refuse refunds.
Vinted invites its most active sellers to register as “Pro” sellers, a status reserved for registered professionals that requires identity verification and imposes a 14-day return right. However, this verification process can prove particularly laborious.
A seller who wrote to consumer affairs columnist Holly Thomas this year had £32,000 in revenue frozen while she repeatedly submitted the same documents, each time receiving generic emails asking her to start over. The problem ultimately stemmed from a single missing document—a “ultimate beneficial owner” declaration indicating her company’s directors—which Vinted had never asked her to provide.
There is no phone number to reach Vinted; the verification process is handled by a third-party tech company, and communication is limited to in-app messages and emails. It took a week of back-and-forth before the issue was resolved and the funds were unfrozen.
Vinted said: “We want all our members to have a smooth and secure experience. If an issue is reported within the two-day window, the order is put on hold while it is reviewed, and response times from support should not affect this protection. With millions of transactions on our platform, errors can occasionally occur. When they do, we do our best to correct them quickly.”
The company adds that the vast majority of issues are resolved directly between buyer and seller, with its support team only intervening when they cannot reach an agreement.
Warrilow remains a fan of Vinted nonetheless. She simply wants the company to improve its customer service.
“The company has just been valued at £7 billion. It has the means to do things correctly. I want the old Vinted back. The old Vinted was great.”
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