How to build a website like Depop

The US secondhand apparel market reached $51.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $74 billion by 2029, according to ThredUp's 2025 Resale Report. Online resale specifically grew 23% in 2024, the second consecutive year of accelerating growth. A record 58% of consumers bought secondhand clothing that year. Depop sits at the center of this shift: more than 56 million registered users, roughly $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2025, and a user base that is about 90% under 34 (Depop, Barchart).

Building a marketplace in this space doesn't require competing with Depop head-to-head. Depop has clear gaps in geography, in the communities it serves, and in the aesthetics it centers. This guide covers how Depop works, how it makes money under its current fee model, what features drive its success, who competes with it, and what it takes to build a platform in the same category.

What is Depop and how does it work?

Depop is a peer-to-peer fashion resale marketplace founded in 2011 by Simon Beckerman in London. It operates more like Instagram than eBay: sellers build personal profiles, post items as they would social media content, and attract followers who browse their closets. Buyers discover items through a social feed, hashtag search, and algorithmically curated recommendations. Negotiation happens through direct messages, and the platform handles payment and buyer protection.

Depop has changed ownership twice. Etsy acquired the platform in July 2021 for $1.625 billion. eBay then acquired it from Etsy in July 2026 for approximately $1.4 billion after purchase price adjustments, with UK Competition and Markets Authority clearance granted July 15, 2026. Depop now operates as a standalone brand within eBay, a move that reflects eBay's push to reach Gen Z buyers it cannot attract through its main platform.

By the end of 2025, Depop had 43.5 million registered users, 7 million active buyers, and 3.2 million active sellers, with sellers growing 41% year-over-year in Q4 2025 (FashionUnited). Revenue reached £101.6 million, roughly $128 million, in 2024, up 42% year-over-year (FashionNetwork). The platform remains unprofitable, posting an operating loss of £42 million in 2024, down from £49 million the year before.

How Depop makes money

Depop's fee model changed significantly in 2024, and the shift is worth studying if you're designing a commission structure for a competing platform.

The old model charged sellers a flat 10% Depop fee on every sale. That fee was eliminated for US sellers in mid-2024. Sellers now pay only a payment processing fee of 3.3% plus $0.45 per transaction. On a $50 sale, a seller keeps roughly $47.90 after fees.

Depop shifted the fee burden to buyers instead. Since July 2024, buyers pay up to 5% of the item purchase price plus up to $1, applied per order. This mirrors the structure Vinted established in Europe: sellers pay nothing, buyers pay a protection fee. In March 2026, Depop introduced Boosted Listings for US sellers, an optional paid promotion at 12% of the sale price, charged only when the boosted listing results in a sale (Flipsail). That's performance-based advertising, not a flat listing fee.

For founders designing a competing platform, this matters directly. Zero seller commission is now the competitive expectation in peer-to-peer resale. Platforms charging sellers 15–20% face pushback from experienced sellers who know they can list on Vinted or Depop for less. Deciding where the fee lands, buyer, seller, or split between the two, is a strategic choice about who you're optimizing to retain, not just a pricing detail.

What makes Depop work: key features

Depop's success comes from a combination of social mechanics and operational tooling built up over more than a decade. Here's what actually drives the platform.

Social-first discovery. Sellers have followers, not just listings. Buyers see a personalized feed of items from sellers they follow, plus algorithmically surfaced items from sellers they don't. This creates repeat engagement that typical marketplace browsing doesn't produce. A buyer who follows 50 sellers checks back regularly even when not actively shopping.

DM-based negotiation. Buyers message sellers directly about condition, measurements, or pricing. Sellers can push price offers to buyers who have liked their items, a feature called "Offer to Likers," creating a lead-nurturing mechanic built directly into the platform.

AI-powered one-photo listing. Launched in January 2025, this feature lets sellers upload a single photo. Depop's image recognition identifies the brand, color, category, and sub-category automatically, then generates a listing description in the casual, community-specific tone Depop is known for. This reduces listing friction, which directly affects how many items get posted.

Personalized For You feed. Depop's machine learning model processes a user's last 300 views and narrows roughly 600,000 daily listings to about 600 ranked options per session, updating in real time based on in-session behavior (Depop). This represents years of investment in behavioral data and model training.

Trend Reports for sellers. Sellers can see live search demand data showing what buyers are actively searching for that isn't currently being listed. This helps active sellers decide what to source next.

Buyer Protection. The platform handles disputes and refunds for items that don't match their description. This isn't an optional add-on; it's built into every transaction and is a major reason buyers trust strangers with their money.

Ship with Depop. Integrated USPS label purchase with platform-negotiated rates lets sellers buy shipping labels without leaving the app.

The competitive landscape

Depop doesn't operate in an empty category. Several platforms compete for the same sellers and buyers, each with a distinct approach.

Poshmark is Depop's closest direct competitor in the US. It does well with a more curated, "closet" shopping experience and strong social selling tools like Posh Parties (live group selling events). It falls short with an older, less fashion-forward user base and a seller fee that remains 20% on sales over $15, which is expensive relative to Depop's zero-commission model for U.S. sellers (Depop newsroom). The opening this creates: sellers who've priced out Poshmark's take rate are actively looking for lower-fee alternatives, especially younger sellers who don't identify with Poshmark's brand.

Vinted launched in the US in January 2026 and is growing quickly on a zero-seller-fee model, with buyers paying a protection fee. It does well on practical, everyday secondhand items and has strong momentum in Europe already. It falls short on the social and aesthetic layer that makes Depop sticky. It's built for transactional resale, not community discovery. The opening: a platform that combines Vinted's fee structure with genuine niche community building can win sellers who want lower fees without giving up Depop-style discovery.

Mercari does well as a general secondhand marketplace covering categories well beyond fashion, with fast, simple listing flows. It falls short on fashion-specific discovery; there's no social feed, no follower mechanic, and no fashion-community identity. The opening: fashion-focused sellers on Mercari often maintain a second account on Depop or Poshmark specifically for style-forward items, suggesting demand for a platform that does fashion resale well without the general-marketplace clutter.

Vestiaire Collective does well in authenticated luxury and designer resale, with in-house authentication services that build buyer trust for high-value items. It falls short for everyday, lower-price resale; its authentication process and fee structure make it impractical for a $15 t-shirt. The opening: platforms serving mid-market or budget fashion resale aren't competing with Vestiaire at all, since it has effectively ceded that segment.

Instagram and TikTok Shop aren't dedicated resale marketplaces, but they compete for the same sellers' attention and, increasingly, their transactions. They do well at building audience and driving discovery through short-form content. They fall short on transaction infrastructure: no built-in buyer protection, weak dispute resolution, and no dedicated resale search. The opening: a marketplace that captures sellers who've built an Instagram following and gives them proper transaction infrastructure, without asking them to abandon the audience they've built, has a real acquisition angle.

How to build a marketplace like Depop

Building a secondhand fashion marketplace is a supply-first problem. No buyer sticks around for a platform with thin or random inventory. These steps reflect how successful platforms in this category have actually launched.

1. Define your niche within Depop's category

Depop, Poshmark, and Vinted each serve a different version of the same broad category. Depop skews young, fashion-forward, and community-driven, centered on vintage, Y2K, and individual seller aesthetics. Poshmark has a slightly older demographic and stronger presence in designer and professional fashion. Vinted positions itself as the practical, low-fee choice for everyday secondhand.

The opportunity sits in specific communities, aesthetics, or geographies that none of these platforms serves well. Sustainable outdoor apparel, plus-size vintage, workwear for trades, or regional fashion communities where local pickup matters are all real, underserved niches. The question to answer before building anything: where do potential sellers feel that existing platforms fail them specifically? Seller success drives inventory, and inventory drives buyers.

2. Design your fee model before you build

Your commission structure shapes every part of your platform, from payment flow to seller recruitment to how you explain your product to both sides. The current category standard is trending toward zero seller fees, with revenue coming from buyer fees, performance-based promotion, or subscription seller tools.

Charge sellers 15–20% and you'll lose established sellers who've already done the math on Depop or Vinted. Charge buyers too much and they'll go elsewhere for the same item. The most sustainable models are low-friction for both sides, with optional paid features for sellers who want more visibility layered on top.

3. Choose your development approach

Building a secondhand fashion marketplace requires three core capabilities that generic e-commerce platforms don't provide out of the box: user-to-user following, messaging with offer mechanics, and commission-based payments with delayed payouts. Here's how the three build paths compare.

Vibe coding from scratch. AI tools like Cursor, Lovable, and Bolt can produce a working Depop-style prototype quickly. For pressure-testing a concept or demonstrating it to early users, they're genuinely useful. For launching a platform that handles real money between strangers, they're probably not sufficient. What vibe-coded outputs reliably don't produce is the infrastructure underneath: payment escrow, dispute resolution, fraud detection, and compliance. A documented Sharetribe experiment ran 60+ hours to reach demo quality but revealed a critical checkout exploit that would have allowed any user to manipulate transaction prices via a direct API call. Bringing the output to production standard requires significant time, testing, and a clear understanding of how the different parts of a web application fit together. A useful prototyping tool, not a cost-effective path to launch.

Custom development from scratch. Hiring developers, who will likely use AI heavily themselves, gives you full control. A Depop-type marketplace with follow-based profiles, messaging, and commission payments but without escrow-heavy authentication or real-time logistics falls into the Tier 1–2 range: a simple MVP runs $30,000–$80,000 over 8–20 weeks, while a production-grade build with reviews, identity verification, escrow, and a dispute flow runs $80,000–$200,000 over 16–28 weeks (Codica, RaftLabs). The low end assumes offshore teams; US or Western Europe teams push toward the top of each range. Fashion resale specifically adds cost around image-heavy listing flows and mobile-first UX. This path makes sense when you have requirements no existing platform can meet.

Building on a marketplace operating system like Sharetribe. You start at roughly 90% done on the standard marketplace foundation: payments, user accounts, listing management, messaging, transaction flows, fraud detection, and compliance. Your time and budget go toward the features specific to secondhand fashion social commerce. Three paths within this approach:

• No-code builder. Configure listing types, transaction flow, and marketplace settings from the Sharetribe Console without writing code. Gets most founders to a live, transactable marketplace in one to four weeks.
• AI-assisted development. Connect Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex to Sharetribe's open APIs and open-source template. Prompt the features your platform needs: a follow-based seller feed, an offer mechanic, hashtag search. Because Sharetribe handles the payment and compliance infrastructure, AI-assisted development on top of it carries much lower risk than building from scratch. A bug in your social feed customization doesn't touch the payment flow.
• Custom code. Build directly on the developer platform for deeper integrations, or hire from Sharetribe's Expert Marketplace.

Most founders start with the no-code builder, launch, then add features via AI tools or a developer as they learn what their users actually need.

4. Solve the cold start problem

Secondhand fashion marketplaces face a specific version of the chicken-and-egg problem: buyers won't browse a platform with thin inventory, but sellers won't list on a platform with no buyers. Depop solved this early by focusing tightly on London's vintage and streetwear scene, recruiting sellers who already had a following on Instagram and Tumblr, then letting word of mouth spread within that community before expanding geographically.

A new entrant should follow the same logic at smaller scale. Recruit sellers directly: target people already selling on Depop, Poshmark, or Instagram with established followings and aesthetics that match your niche. Offer a clear reason to switch, whether that's lower fees during launch, better seller support, or access to a buyer segment generalist platforms don't reach. Focus geographically or aesthetically tight at first; a platform for vintage workwear in the Pacific Northwest will out-convert a platform for "sustainable fashion everywhere" every time, because concentrated supply creates a browsing experience that actually feels complete. One seller with 500 engaged followers in your niche is worth more than 100 sellers with no audience.

5. Build trust infrastructure before you need it

Secondhand fashion has a specific trust problem: item condition is subjective. What a seller calls "good condition" and what a buyer receives are often two different things. Your platform needs a clear buyer protection policy, a dispute resolution flow, and a review system tied to completed transactions before your first order, not after your first complaint.

Set explicit expectations on what constitutes "not as described" and who bears the cost when the answer is contested. The platforms that lose sellers fastest are the ones that automatically refund buyers without giving sellers a chance to respond.

6. Grow through community mechanics, not just marketing

Paid acquisition brings users; community mechanics keep them. Early on, what works for fashion resale platforms is seller spotlights, style challenges, and category drops, not paid ads. Find the 20 sellers whose listings best represent your platform's aesthetic and build content around them. Their followers become your early buyer base, often at a lower cost than any paid channel could deliver.

7. Deepen the social layer over time

The longer-term work is adding features that make returning to your platform feel like a habit rather than a chore. Seller analytics, live demand trend data, and personalized feed ranking all come after the core mechanic works, not before. Add them based on what your users actually do, not what you imagine they'll want.

Do you need to build everything Depop has?

No. Most of what Depop has built is years of accumulated investment, not launch requirements. The AI-powered one-photo listing system required image recognition models, a training dataset of millions of fashion items, and fine-tuning on Depop's specific community language. The For You feed processes 300 user views against 600,000 daily listings using real-time machine learning. Trend Reports surface live search demand data to sellers. None of this exists in a new marketplace at launch, and none of it is what gets your first 100 sellers and buyers to transact.

What you need at launch is simpler: user profiles, item listings with photos, search, messaging, and a payment system with buyer protection. That's the core mechanic. Discovery sophistication comes later, once you have real usage data to build on.

This is also the honest answer to "I'll just vibe-code a Depop clone." The social mechanics visible on Depop's surface are a fraction of what makes it work. Payment escrow, fraud detection, dispute resolution, and payout timing aren't visible, but they're what keeps both sides participating. Starting from scratch with AI tools means building all of that before you can safely list your first item. Starting on Sharetribe means it's already there, and your AI tokens go toward the social features that make your platform specific instead of toward reinventing payment infrastructure.

Trust and safety for a Depop-type marketplace

Counterfeit goods are the largest content moderation problem in secondhand fashion. Sellers listing fake designer items appear on every peer-to-peer resale platform eventually. You need explicit prohibited item policies, a user reporting mechanism, and a clear process for removing listings and suspending accounts when violations are found. Enforcement matters as much as policy; a rule nobody applies is worse than no rule at all.

"Not as described" disputes are the second recurring issue. When a buyer receives an item that doesn't match the listing, who pays for the return shipping and who issues the refund? Your dispute resolution policy needs to answer this clearly before your first order, not improvised on your first complaint. Payment fraud and chargebacks round out the category's risks: stolen cards and false non-delivery claims are common in peer-to-peer resale specifically because transaction values are low enough that fraud is rarely investigated aggressively by card networks.

Sharetribe's platform includes fraud detection and PSD2/GDPR-compliant payment processing through Stripe Connect out of the box, along with transaction flows that support delayed payouts and dispute windows. The specific policy decisions, what counts as "not as described," how long buyers have to report an issue, whether sellers get a chance to respond before a refund is issued, remain yours to make and enforce.

Running a marketplace like Depop

Going live is when the real operational work starts. Content moderation at scale becomes a real cost center as listing volume grows; user-generated listings will include prohibited items, misleading condition descriptions, and spam. Setting up even a basic moderation pipeline early, while volume is manageable, is far easier than retrofitting one once manual review becomes impossible.

Depop manages counterfeit detection, dispute resolution, and payment fraud at a scale of millions of listings, work you won't need to replicate at launch. What Sharetribe handles automatically at any scale is the payment infrastructure itself: fraud detection, PCI-compliant processing, and the transaction state machine that tracks a sale from listing to payout. Your operational focus in the early months should stay on policy enforcement and seller support, not on rebuilding payment plumbing that already works.

Development costs and timeline

Three realistic scenarios:

Vibe coding from scratch: Free or very cheap to start, with a working prototype achievable in hours. What you can't get from here is a production-ready platform: payment escrow logic, dispute resolution flows, fraud detection, and seller protection mechanics all require work that AI coding tools don't shortcut. A documented Sharetribe experiment logged 60+ hours to reach demo quality and still found a critical checkout exploit allowing price manipulation via direct API call. A useful proof-of-concept tool, not a cost-effective path to a live business.

Custom development from scratch: A simple Depop-type MVP, listings, search, messaging, and basic commission payments, runs $30,000–$80,000 over 8–20 weeks. A production-grade build adding reviews, identity verification, escrow, and a formal dispute flow runs $80,000–$200,000 over 16–28 weeks (Codica, RaftLabs). The low end assumes offshore teams; US or Western Europe teams push toward the top. Ongoing maintenance typically runs 15–25% of the original build cost per year. This path makes sense when you have requirements no existing platform can meet.

Building on Sharetribe: Subscription pricing starts at $99/month on the Lite plan, $199/month on Pro, and $299/month on Extend, all billed yearly. This covers the payment infrastructure, user accounts, listing management, messaging, fraud detection, and compliance a Depop-type marketplace needs on day one. Most founders reach a live MVP in weeks rather than months, then add the follow mechanic, offer system, and hashtag search via AI tools or a developer as they learn what their users need.

Why Sharetribe for building a marketplace like Depop

Sharetribe is a marketplace operating system: a complete foundation that handles what every peer-to-peer marketplace needs, payments, user accounts, listing management, messaging, transaction flows, fraud detection, and compliance. You build on top of it, not around it.

For a Depop-style platform, the Sharetribe foundation maps directly to the core mechanics: user profiles with listing management, commission-based payments with delayed payouts via Stripe Connect, two-sided messaging, and a review system tied to completed transactions. What you add on top using AI tools or custom code is the social follow system, the hashtag search layer, the offer-to-likers mechanic, and seller analytics, the features specific to secondhand fashion social commerce. Sharetribe's public APIs and open-source template mean you can point an AI coding tool at the codebase and documentation and get most niche-specific features built in hours rather than weeks.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to build a marketplace like Depop?

The cost depends on your approach. Building from scratch with a development team runs $30,000–$80,000 for a simple version, or $80,000–$200,000 for one with reviews, verification, and dispute flows, plus ongoing maintenance at 15–25% of build cost per year. Building on Sharetribe costs $99–$299/month, billed yearly, covering the platform foundation, with custom features added incrementally. Either approach also requires payment processing fees of around 2.9–3.3% per transaction on top of platform costs.

How does Depop make money if sellers don't pay fees?

As of mid-2024, Depop eliminated its marketplace commission for US sellers, who now pay only a payment processing fee of 3.3% plus $0.45 per transaction. Buyers pay a separate fee of up to 5% of the item price plus up to $1 per order. In March 2026, Depop added Boosted Listings, a performance-based promotion at 12% of the sale price charged only when a sale results. Zero seller commission is now the competitive standard in peer-to-peer resale, a shift driven largely by Vinted's buyer-fee model.

What features does Depop have that make it successful?

The core is the social layer: follow-based seller profiles, a personalized For You feed, and DM-based negotiation, all of which create repeat engagement. On top of that, Depop has AI-powered one-photo listing, Trend Reports showing sellers live search demand, and Buyer Protection built into every transaction. Most of these features were added over years of iteration, not present at launch.

What is the difference between Depop, Poshmark, and Vinted?

Depop is social-first and skews young, centered on vintage, Y2K, and individual seller aesthetics. Poshmark has an older demographic and a stronger designer and professional fashion presence, with a seller fee that remains 20% on sales over $15. Vinted charges sellers nothing and puts the fee on buyers instead, positioning itself as the practical, value-focused choice. All three have tens of millions of users, and competition for sellers between them is real and ongoing.

How do I attract buyers to a secondhand fashion marketplace?

Supply comes first. Buyers won't explore a platform with thin inventory no matter how well-designed the experience is. Recruit sellers directly from existing platforms and social media communities, offering a clear reason to switch. Once you have 50–100 quality listings concentrated in a specific niche or geography, you have enough supply to start bringing buyers in through targeted outreach.

Who owns Depop?

eBay acquired Depop from Etsy in July 2026 for approximately $1.4 billion, inclusive of purchase price adjustments. Etsy had originally bought Depop in 2021 for $1.625 billion, then sold at a loss five years later. Depop now operates as a standalone brand within eBay, a move eBay describes as giving it access to Gen Z buyers it can't attract through its main platform.

Can I build a secondhand fashion marketplace without coding?

Yes. Sharetribe's no-code builder provides the full marketplace foundation, listings, payments, messaging, and user management, without requiring programming. You configure your marketplace from the Console, test it with real users, and add custom features via AI tools or a developer as you learn what your platform needs. Most founders start without writing code and introduce custom development incrementally as their niche requires it.

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