Why Vinted Is Getting into the Payments Business

Peer-to-peer resale platform Vinted is an outlier in the industry: it’s profitable and still growing — reporting a 330% jump in net profits to €76.7 million in 2024. To capitalize on that position, it’s introducing payments through Vinted Pay.

The company is building an in-house wallet and payout service for its members, in what it says is a bid to “create a more seamless, secure and user-friendly way to make payments through the app”, to replace the third-party wallets and payout services it’s relied on in the past. It’s a move that will also cut costs for Vinted, as the more of the payment process it handles, the less fees it has to pay to third-party payment providers. It’s currently testing an in-house wallet service with a small group of members in Lithuania, Finland, Greece, Slovakia and Croatia, a spokesperson confirmed.

While resale is an operationally heavy, low-margin business, payments is a high-margin, high-volume and infinitely scalable business that has borne some of the most valuable startups in the world, including Stripe, Block and Adyen. Typical gross margins for payment companies range from 60% to 90%, while resale platforms’ gross margins hover up to 30%.

“By developing our own, in-house capabilities and services, we aim to be faster and more responsive as we grow,” the spokesperson added, underlining that the Vinted Pay business is in its “early stages”, and that the company will continue to work with its existing payment service providers (PSPs), including Mangopay, Checkout.com and Adyen, across its 26 markets.

In a panel conversation at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Vinted senior brand director Andrew Smith told me that where margins are “razor thin” in the secondhand business, systematically moving into other categories beyond fashion has been part of the company’s vision from the get-go.

“It’s really all about achieving economies of scale through size and establishing network effects by having a large group of buyers and sellers,” Smith said. “We really do believe that the only way we can make secondhand first choice worldwide is by being a very large and dominant player.”

It comes as Vinted is gearing up to debut in the US. This week, it launched the first phase of an expansion into the market, testing customer appetite with a cross-border connection between buyers and sellers in London and New York. Resale is a seller’s market, and Vinted’s success is often attributed to the fact it foregoes seller fees — a tactic that both Ebay in the UK and Depop in the US have followed this summer, in a bid to acquire more customers.