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: 43.5 million registered users, $1 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2025, and a user base that is 90% under 34 (Business of Apps, FashionUnited).

Building a marketplace in this space doesn't mean 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 explains how Depop works, how it makes money under its current fee model, what features drive its success, 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. The platform handles payment and buyer protection.

Depop has changed ownership twice. Etsy acquired Depop 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 on July 15, 2026. Depop operates as a standalone brand within eBay. The acquisition reflects eBay's strategy 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 (approximately $128 million) in 2024, up 42% year-over-year (FashionNetwork). The platform is still unprofitable, with 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 is worth understanding if you're designing your own commission structure.

The old model: sellers paid 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% + $0.45 per transaction. On a $50 sale, a seller keeps roughly $47.90 after fees.

Depop shifted the fee burden to buyers. Since July 2024, buyers pay up to 5% of the item purchase price plus up to $1, applied to each 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: optional paid promotion at 12% of the sale price, charged only when the boosted listing results in a sale (Flipsail). This is performance-based advertising, not a listing fee.

For founders designing competing platforms, this shift matters. Zero-seller-fee is now the competitive expectation in peer-to-peer resale. Platforms that charge sellers 15-20% commissions 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) is a strategic choice, not just a pricing one.

What makes Depop work: key features

Depop's success comes from a combination of social mechanics and operational tooling. Here is 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. 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 ("Offer to Likers"), creating a soft lead-nurturing mechanic built into the platform.

AI-powered one-photo listing (January 2025). Sellers upload one 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 the friction of listing, 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 600,000 daily listings to approximately 600 ranked options per session, updated based on in-session behavior. This is 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 being listed. This helps active sellers know what to source and list.

Buyer Protection. The platform handles disputes and refunds for items that don't match their description. This is not optional; it is built into every transaction.

Ship with Depop. Integrated USPS label purchase with platform-negotiated rates. Sellers buy labels directly through the app without leaving the platform.

How to build a marketplace like Depop

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

1. Define your niche within secondhand fashion

Depop, Poshmark, and Vinted each serve a different version of the same category. Depop skews young (90% of users are under 34), fashion-forward, and community-driven, centered on vintage, Y2K, and individual seller aesthetics. Poshmark (now owned by South Korean tech company Naver) has a slightly older demographic and stronger presence in designer and professional fashion. Vinted launched in the US in January 2026 and is growing fast on a zero-seller-fee model. It positions itself as the practical choice for everyday secondhand.

The opportunity is in specific communities, aesthetics, or geographies that none of these platforms serves well. Sustainable outdoor apparel, plus-size vintage, workwear for trades, regional fashion communities where local pickup matters: each of these is a real, underserved niche.

The question to answer before building: where do potential sellers feel that existing platforms fail them specifically? Seller success drives inventory. 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.

If you charge sellers 15-20%, you'll lose established sellers who've done the math on Depop or Vinted. If you charge buyers too much, buyers go elsewhere. The most sustainable models are low-friction for both sides, with optional paid features for sellers who want more visibility.

3. Recruit sellers before you market to buyers

Your first 50 listings set the tone for everything. Recruit them directly: target people already selling on Depop, Poshmark, or Instagram with established followings and aesthetics that match your niche. Offer a clear reason to list with you, whether that's lower fees during launch, better seller support, or access to a buyer segment that generalist platforms don't reach.

One seller with 500 followers in your niche is worth more than 100 sellers with no audience. Quality and curation matter more than listing volume in the early stage.

4. 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 is how the build paths look.

Vibe coding from scratch. AI tools can produce an impressive-looking fashion marketplace demo 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 logic, dispute resolution flows, fraud detection, and seller protection mechanics. A documented Sharetribe experiment ran 60+ hours to reach demo quality but found critical payment bugs and a security exploit that would have allowed price manipulation via direct API call. Bringing the output to production standard requires significant time, testing, and a clear understanding of how the different components of a web application fit together. Vibe coding from scratch is a useful prototyping tool, but should probably not be recommended for a launch.

Custom development from scratch. Expect $20,000-$100,000 and 6-12 months for a first launch. Fashion resale platforms have specific complexity around image-heavy listing flows, mobile-first UX, and social mechanics that add to the base cost. Custom builds make sense when you have requirements no existing platform can handle.

Building on a marketplace operating system like Sharetribe. You start with the foundation already built: payments, user accounts, transaction flows, messaging, and the API layer. You add the fashion-specific social layer on top. Three paths within this approach, which most founders combine:

• No-code builder. Configure listing types, transaction flow, and marketplace settings from the Sharetribe Console without writing code. Gets most founders to a live 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, vibe coding on top of it is low-risk. A bug in your social feed customization doesn't touch the payment flow.
• Custom code. Build directly on the developer platform for more complex requirements, or hire from the Sharetribe Expert Marketplace.

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 different. 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 those 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.

7. Deepen the social layer over time

The longer-term work is adding features that make returning to your platform feel like a social habit. Seller analytics, live demand trend data, and personalized feed ranking all come after the core mechanic works. 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 took 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 ML. 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: user profiles, item listings with photos, search, messaging, and a payment system with buyer protection. That is the core mechanic. Discovery sophistication comes later, once you have 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. The payment escrow, fraud detection, dispute resolution, and payout timing are not visible but they're what keeps both sides participating. Starting from scratch with AI tools means building all of that before you can 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.

Running a marketplace like Depop

Going live is when the real operational work starts. Secondhand fashion has specific ongoing challenges that don't exist in most other marketplace categories.

Counterfeit goods. This is the largest content moderation problem in secondhand fashion. Sellers listing fake designer items are common on every peer-to-peer platform. You need explicit prohibited item policies, a user reporting mechanism, and a process for removing listings and suspending accounts when violations are found. Clear policies and responsive enforcement matter from the first listing.

"Not as described" disputes. When a buyer receives an item that doesn't match the listing, who pays for the return? Your dispute resolution policy needs to answer this clearly before your first order. The platforms that lose sellers fastest are those that handle this inconsistently.

Chargebacks and payment fraud. Peer-to-peer marketplaces attract payment fraud. Cards get stolen; buyers claim non-delivery on legitimate orders. Sharetribe's platform includes AI-powered fraud detection and GDPR/PSD2 compliance out of the box. The dispute and chargeback workflows are yours to manage, but the payment infrastructure handling them is already in place.

Content moderation at scale. As your platform 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 it once listing volume makes manual review impossible.

Development costs and timeline

Three realistic scenarios:

Vibe coding from scratch: Free or very cheap to start. A working prototype in hours. The production-readiness gap for a peer-to-peer fashion marketplace is wide: payment security, dispute resolution flows, and mobile-first image-heavy UX all surface problems well into development. A useful proof-of-concept tool, not a cost-effective path to a live business.

Custom development from scratch: Expect $20,000-$100,000 for initial development and 6-12 months to a first launch. Fashion resale platforms require mobile-first UX, image handling at scale, and social mechanics that each add engineering complexity. Ongoing maintenance runs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month depending on traffic and codebase complexity. Custom builds make sense when you have requirements no existing platform can meet.

Building on Sharetribe: Subscription pricing ($99–$299/month, billed yearly) covers the platform foundation: payments, infrastructure, fraud detection, and compliance. Custom features, added via AI tools or a developer, scale to your needs. Most founders reach a live marketplace in one to four weeks. Ongoing costs are lower because Sharetribe's multi-tenant infrastructure costs less to run than a custom production setup at comparable scale.

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: the social follow system, the hashtag search layer, the offer-to-likers mechanic, and seller analytics. These are the features specific to secondhand fashion social commerce. They're buildable. 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 between $20,000 and $100,000 for a first version, plus a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month in ongoing maintenance. Building on Sharetribe is substantially faster and cheaper: subscription pricing ($99–$299/month, billed yearly) covers the platform foundation, and you add custom features incrementally. Either approach 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. Sellers now pay only a payment processing fee of 3.3% + $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 for US sellers, a performance-based promotion at 12% of the sale price, charged only when a sale results. Zero seller commissions is now the competitive standard in peer-to-peer resale. Vinted's buyer-fee model drove the shift.

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. These create repeat engagement. On top of that, Depop has AI-powered one-photo listing (January 2025), 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 at launch.

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

Depop is social-first and skews young (90% of users are under 34), centered on vintage, Y2K, and individual seller aesthetics. Poshmark (now owned by Naver) has a slightly older demographic and stronger presence in designer and professional fashion; its seller fee remains 20% on sales over $15. Vinted launched in the US in January 2026 and charges sellers nothing, with buyers paying a protection fee; it's growing fast on a practical, value-focused positioning. All three have over 40 million users, and the competition for sellers is real.

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. 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. The platforms that fail fastest are those that market to buyers before solving the supply problem.

How long does it take to launch a resale marketplace?

Two to four weeks on Sharetribe, depending on how much customization your niche requires. Six to twelve months for a custom build. The timeline matters less than when you'll have your first real transaction, which is the only test that tells you whether your market hypothesis is correct. Launching fast with a focused niche and real inventory almost always produces better outcomes than a long build cycle aimed at a spec nobody has tested.

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. Depop operates as a standalone brand within eBay. eBay's stated rationale: Depop gives it access to Gen Z buyers it cannot 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, 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.

How do you handle trust and safety on a secondhand marketplace?

The main issues are counterfeit goods, misrepresented item conditions, and payment fraud. You need a clear buyer protection policy and dispute resolution flow before your first order. For counterfeits, explicit prohibited item policies and a user reporting system matter more than verification technology at early scale. Sharetribe's platform includes fraud detection and PSD2-compliant payment processing. The specific policy and enforcement decisions remain yours.

Is the secondhand fashion market still growing?

Yes. The US secondhand apparel market reached $51.9 billion in 2024, projected to reach $74 billion by 2029, per ThredUp's 2025 Resale Report. Online resale grew 23% in 2024, the second consecutive year of accelerating growth. A record 58% of consumers bought secondhand clothing in 2024, with strongest adoption among buyers aged 18-44. The global secondhand apparel market is estimated at $210 billion in 2025, growing at approximately 10.7% annually (Future Market Insights).

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