Should you’ve been interested by slimming down your wardrobe, excellent news: Depop just removed its selling fees.
Previously, sellers paid a ten% fee on every sale. As of this week, that fee is completely gone for U.S.-based sellers, Depop announced in a news release.
The move by the peer-to-peer clothing marketplace follows a successful experiment with a no-seller-fee policy within the U.K.
Should you’re not familiar, Depop is a stylish shopping app, popular amongst teens and young adults involved in fashion and thrifting. Sellers can curate their very own shops, offering clothes and niknaks at prices they set. The range of sellers is diverse, from individuals simply clearing out their closets to larger sellers with a brand identity — and in some cases, huge social followings.
The corporate said the move should make it easier to show your closet into money. Depop expects that its catalog of 34 million items will grow because of this of the change.
How will Depop generate income without seller fees?
In a news release, it said that “the removal of selling fees is a component of a wider update to Depop’s fee structure, which also includes the introduction of a small marketplace fee for buyers within the U.S. from July 18th onwards.” Sellers will proceed to pay a payment processing fee of three.3% of the worth (including shipping and tax) of every item plus 45 cents.
In line with Depop’s updated terms of service, this marketplace fee shall be as much as 5% of the worth and a further fixed amount of as much as $1. Buyers will see the fee within the checkout process, and so they’ll only pay the fixed amount once per transaction if multiple items from one seller are purchased together. (Depop calls these “bundles.”)
Depop has been owned by Etsy since 2021 and claims sellers have made $3.5 billion to this point.
Effects of Depop fee removal
Sellers might have to brace themselves for smaller margins on their sales, as price-sensitive customers will likely lower what they’re willing to pay once there’s a fee that they should factor into their total cost.
Depop sellers are already used to getting lowball notifications from users with the “Send offer” feature, and which may increase if buyers start asking to get discounts to offset the fee.
Nonetheless, the corporate suggests that the move to source its revenues from the customer side of the transaction should result in more listings, ultimately improving the standard of the marketplace.
“Encouraging more listers and more listings means offering greater alternative for buyers — helping them to search out the items they love, at the appropriate price,” Depop CEO Kruti Patel Goyal said in a Monday statement.
The net resale industry is extremely competitive, and there are a lot of alternative sites for sellers, including Poshmark, ThredUp and eBay. Depop is clearly betting that removing seller fees will help it stand out in a crowded field.
Mercari, one other site much like Depop and its competitors, eliminated its 10% seller fee earlier this yr, claiming it was the first major marketplace to accomplish that. The corporate’s CEO told Modern Retail that Mercari made the change since it was losing sellers who would go and list their directly on the market on social media platforms as a substitute.
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