There may be two other benefits for you in going professional:
You comply with sales law.
If you don’t see any benefit for yourself, going professional when offering products to your clients, since the buyer benefits from better guarantees when purchasing from a professional. So for the same price, you offer a more complete service to your client. Perhaps your buyers would be sensitive to this? Wouldn’t you better enhance the value of your goods by presenting yourself as a professional? Wouldn’t your clients have more confidence, wouldn’t they feel like they were buying an item of greater value if you were a professional?
You say « What’s a shame is that the other platforms have collapsed. Because if I did what I used to do on Rakuten, LBC or even Beebs, I could delete my Vinted account ».
They didn’t collapse by chance: it’s Vinted that killed them by offering a better quality alternative from the buyer’s point of view.
A few years ago Vinted was different, but today, besides being completely run by a more than crappy AI, all the management is really crappy. As a general rule, the purchases made from my closet are impulse buys. Whether they are professional or not doesn’t matter to them. They fall in love with an item, they buy it, and some have become so loyal that they no longer go through Vinted to make their purchases. Besides, not mentioning my professional status has served me rather than hindered me so far.
I would add that I prefer to pay and have a site that does everything possible to offer a structure that allows professionals to work correctly, rather than a free, haphazard site.
I would be less enthusiastic but it would take a very long time to develop. From my point of view, Vinted is on the contrary the worst platform I have seen and I have been using it for 20 years.
Yes, and what the site charges you, you will pass on to the price of your merchandise, so it will be less attractive to buyers. It’s not for nothing that Vinted killed the other sites.
In reality, Vinted is attractive for sellers; on this forum, it’s the place for tears and recriminations. Vinted would be a nightmare, and at the same time, some are undertaking crazy legal action to get unbanned: if they bother to do that, it’s because Vinted is a good marketplace, and without an alternative for them, otherwise, they would give up and go elsewhere.
But indeed, Vinted does not offer solid guarantees:
for buyers, you have to be crazy to buy an item for €1000 on Vinted
for professional sellers, it is difficult to build a business on a site that can ban you by mistake from one day to the next.
Nevertheless, this is where the business is done, for many categories of sellers.
So, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions too quickly. LBC and eBay, for example, are bigger than Vinted.
We have a bit of a Franco-French perspective because Vinted performs exceptionally well in France compared to other countries, and besides, they don’t do everything.
Speaking of Rakuten, has the news of their probable closure spread widely yet? I haven’t had a single sale there in 10 days, which has simply never happened before. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than a 2-3 day dip, so 10 consecutive days is huge. A sale came in today, for a hand-delivery, and I’d say that doesn’t count if it’s about trusting the site.
I had decided that from June onwards I would refuse any large transaction, for fear that the platform would go bust before I could be paid. But this decision seems to have already been made for me
As a matter of fashion, out of habit, one can find plenty of reasons… But people don’t always go for what’s most qualitative; I have plenty of examples of that.
For me, the key to Vinted’s success was the smartphone. They understood that it would all come down to that and immediately went all-in on it when the established platforms were slow to switch to mobile apps. And it’s true that the user experience is friendly, with simplified listing forms and similar shipping management. The other side of the coin is that for me, as a professional, it’s actually too simple; it lacks options. I don’t need an external app like Vinted to have basic features on eBay. But Vinted handles everything, and yes, that can seem reassuring for individuals getting rid of a few things, but for me, this lack of flexibility is stifling. Something as simple as having imposed carriers is a pain. Another simple example: commercial photos are forbidden. Well, sometimes I’m really stuck when I have sealed boxes that don’t show what’s inside.
On this point, I don’t feel any frustration at all. I’m even happy that the platform offers plenty of carriers to customers. Can you remind me what irritates you?
For me, Vinted is just one tool among others. For some sellers, Vinted is their only source of income, so it can quickly become problematic or catastrophic the day there’s a restriction or a ban. That’s not the case for me; I don’t keep a large stock there intentionally, I don’t generate a lot of revenue, and I wouldn’t move heaven and earth for my account. Currently, I’m restricted. I could have reacted, contested it, or something else, but I had anticipated this, so it allowed me to adapt to this situation without any hassle and continue working.
