Mercari vs Vinted — Where Each One Actually Operates, and What It Costs

On this page

• The map decides this
• The only real contest
• At a glance
• Fees compared, with the maths
• Getting paid
• Shipping and postage
• What actually sells on each
• Listing effort and offers
• Returns and disputes
• What sellers are saying
• How to choose
• Crosslisting with FLUF Connect
• What syncs between them
• What it costs
• Sources and verification

The map decides this before the fees do

Most head-to-head comparisons assume both platforms are open to you. That assumption fails here. Mercari and Vinted barely overlap geographically, so for most people searching this question the honest answer is not “it depends on your category” — it is “one of these does not operate where you live”.

In FLUF Connect, Mercari is a United States channel and nothing else. Vinted covers Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Ireland, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Denmark, Sweden and Finland — plus the US and Australia. Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia arrived in 2025 (Vinted 2025 results, 9 April 2026); Australia on 1 July 2026 (Vinted newsroom).

A seller in Manchester, Lyon, Berlin, Warsaw or Milan cannot list on Mercari at all. Their real comparison is Vinted against Depop, eBay or a local classifieds site, and our Depop vs Vinted and eBay vs Vinted pages will serve them better than this one. The reverse is now also true: since January 2026 a Mercari seller in Ohio has been competing with Vinted for the same buyers, on the same phones, under a fee model built as the inverse of Mercari’s.

One practical consequence: if a tool offers to push your European catalogue “to Mercari”, it is describing something neither we nor Mercari support. Mercari runs a Japanese marketplace and a US one, and the channel FLUF connects to is the US one.

The United States: the only real contest

Vinted is not new to America — it launched there in September 2013 and pulled back in May 2016, closing its San Francisco office and cutting headcount from around 240 to 150 to retrench on Germany and France (TechCrunch, 4 September 2018). That retrenchment is why Vinted charges sellers nothing today: the same 2016 restructuring removed the seller fee and introduced Buyer Protection in its place (Vinted, 15 years of Vinted). The 0% model is not a launch promotion; it is a decade-old business model that happens to look radical in America.

The app stayed downloadable throughout, at roughly 500,000 US installs a year. Then Vinted announced its return — “Vinted has landed in New York” — on 22 January 2026, Marketplace CEO Adam Jay citing “huge value in what’s sitting at the bottom of closets across the country” (Vinted newsroom).

The response was immediate. Appfigures recorded 1.2 million US downloads in April 2026 alone, and 2.6 million between January and April against 286,000 in the same window of 2025 — up roughly 800%. In that snapshot Vinted passed Depop (1.1 million) for the first time and towered over Poshmark (219,000, down 28%), with only Whatnot ahead at 2.2 million (Appfigures, 4 May 2026).

Downloads are awareness, not sell-through. Vinted’s CEO Thomas Plantenga has been careful to call the US a test whose outcome is unknown, and Adam Jay is blunt about why they are trying: “the US is much, much, much less mature in terms of secondhand than the European markets” (Business Insider, 24 May 2026).

Mercari, meanwhile, is not the collapsing incumbent the Reddit threads suggest. In results announced on 5 August 2026 for the year to 30 June 2026, US GMV rose 11.2% to $810 million, US revenue reached $263 million on a 32.6% take rate, and the US segment posted a $20 million adjusted operating profit — its first meaningfully profitable year. Quarterly US GMV grew 14.9% to $208 million, monthly active users 4.2% to 4.20 million (Mercari investor relations).

Two caveats. That $810 million is still below the $913 million the US segment did in FY2024, so this is recovery rather than a new high; and 4.2 million US monthly actives is a fraction of the 24.19 million Mercari counts in Japan.

At a glance

Mercari is a general US marketplace where the seller pays the commission. Vinted is a fashion-led European marketplace, now in the US, where the buyer pays and the seller does not. Almost everything else here follows from those two sentences.

That last row is easy to skim past and matters commercially. Vinted Pro exists in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Belgium and the UK — not the United States. Every US Vinted seller, hobbyist or full-time reseller, is a private seller on the 0% model.

Fees compared, with the maths

On Mercari the seller pays the platform; on Vinted the buyer does. Mercari charges sellers 10% and buyers 3.6%; Vinted charges sellers nothing and US buyers $0.70 plus 5%. Every other difference here is smaller than that one.

First, correct the error still circulating in 2026 guides. Mercari abolished seller selling fees in March 2024 and reversed the decision nine months later: “Effective January 6, 2025, a 10% selling fee will apply to item price and buyer-paid shipping for new and updated listings”, alongside “a Buyer Protection fee of 3.6%” (Mercari fees, fee change FAQ). That structure was still in force when Mercari last updated the page in May 2026.

Note “and buyer-paid shipping”: Mercari’s commission is charged on the postage as well as the item. Vinted’s fee is explicitly “5% of the item price agreed to between the Buyer and the Seller, not including the shipping costs” (Vinted US price list), and on the seller side: “There are no selling fees on Vinted. You keep 100% of what you earn” (Vinted, how it works).

That inverts the usual objection. The Vinted buyer’s visible fee genuinely is larger — $3.20 against $2.09 — but Mercari’s 10% does not disappear; it gets priced into the item and the buyer pays it anyway, invisibly, at a worse total. The argument turns only at the bottom of the price ladder, where Vinted’s $0.70 fixed component is regressive: on a $6 t-shirt it is a meaningful share of the buyer’s outlay, while Mercari’s percentage scales down smoothly.

Two costs sit outside both tables. Mercari has no paid ad product at all — “Promote” buys visibility in exchange for a permanent price cut of at least 5%, and repeat use means beating the item’s historic low each time, so it is a ratchet rather than a lever (Mercari, how Promote works). On Vinted the cost is attention: no seller commission means enormous listing supply, and paid bumps exist because organic visibility is scarce. One caveat: Vinted’s UK price list gives the fee as “usually 3% to 8% + £0.30 to £0.80” — a range, not a rate. Outside the US, read your own market’s price list.

Getting paid: rate-and-release vs the two-day clock

Both hold your money until the buyer has had a chance to complain, and define “had a chance” differently. Turning over stock, that difference is working capital.

Mercari runs a rating-and-release flow. The buyer has 72 hours after delivery to review; if they do nothing, “Mercari automatically rates a transaction within 72 hours of carrier-confirmed delivery” with five stars, and auto-rating is suspended if the buyer raises an issue. Direct deposit is free — the old $2 per-cash-out charge went on 6 January 2025 — processed the next business day and up to five business days to arrive. Instant Pay to a debit card costs a flat $3, capped at $600 a month. Worth flagging: Mercari’s own documentation contradicts itself on whether you must also rate before funds move. Assume you do.

Vinted’s clock is shorter and fully mechanical. An order completes when the buyer presses “Everything is OK”, or “2 days after the buyer gets the order but doesn’t confirm this or report any issues”, and then “you will receive your payment within 2 days” (Vinted, getting paid for a completed sale). Available balance can be withdrawn — up to five business days — or spent on Vinted, which is a genuinely different behaviour from Mercari, where a balance is money waiting to leave rather than currency inside an ecosystem.

Shipping and postage

Both buy the postage and put the label in the app. The differences are carrier choice, who absorbs the cost, and how much of the network the platform owns.

Mercari gives sellers a genuine fork. Take a prepaid label across USPS, UPS or FedEx up to 100 lbs — Mercari claims an average 54% saving against retail carrier pricing, on a comparison dated January 2026 — or “ship on your own” and paste in tracking, which forfeits Shipping Protection (otherwise up to $200 on standard, economy and Media Mail labels). Crucially, the seller chooses who pays: pass the label cost to the buyer, or absorb it. Items must ship within 3 business days.

Vinted is more opinionated. Its US help centre lists exactly three options — a Vinted-generated USPS prepaid label, custom shipping, or no shipping for a local meetup — across all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico, with no seller-pays-postage route in the standard flow: “buyers pay for shipping. You get a prepaid label and flexible drop-off options that fit your schedule”. In Europe the operation is far deeper: over 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points, and Vinted Go running its own carrier in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

Two corrections to widely repeated claims. Mercari Local no longer appears in Mercari’s help centre. What exists is Meetup (beta), restricted to eligible area codes in greater Los Angeles and New York City, and “Mercari Meetup Transactions are not eligible for Mercari’s Refunds and Returns policy, shipping protection, Buyer Protection or Seller Protection” — anything handed over in person is entirely on you. Separately, several guides list UPS as a US Vinted carrier; Vinted’s own US shipping page lists USPS only.

The under-appreciated line is “commission on postage”. Mercari’s 10% is levied on item price plus buyer-paid shipping, so postage inflation quietly raises your commission — and carrier rates moved twice in 2026 already. Vinted’s fee never touches shipping. On a heavy, cheap item that asymmetry is larger than it looks.

What actually sells on each

These two are converging less than the launch coverage implies. Mercari’s own investor data sheet, published 5 August 2026, breaks US GMV down by category, and the trend is unambiguous.

Entertainment & Hobbies — collectibles and trading cards — has gone from under a fifth of Mercari’s US GMV to nearly a third in two years, overtaking womenswear. Everything Mercari ships points the same way: First-Class Envelope labels are exclusive to trading cards, a 49¢ envelope promotion for cards and paper collectibles runs to 31 December 2026, and Mercari’s US Global App launched in June 2026 around collectibles and anime imported from Japan. Fashion and electronics are both shrinking as a share.

Vinted is travelling the opposite way from a fashion base. Its 2025 results cite “strong performance in women’s and kids’ clothing” alongside expansion into sports and collectables, and in September 2025 it launched Electronics, Books, Collectables & hobbies and Home — “fashion is where our community started, but our mission is much bigger” (Vinted, New Eras Again). Availability varies by market and is far more mature in Europe than the US.

On buyers: Vinted’s audience skews young and female, and its own Australian launch research (1,019 adults, June 2026) found decluttering (67%) outranked cost-of-living pressure (42%) as the reason people sell. Mercari publishes no demographics at all, so any age or gender split quoted for it is third-party estimation, and we have left it out.

Listing effort and offers

Neither is hard to list on. Both are phone-first and have an item live in a couple of minutes. What differs is what they ask for and reward.

Mercari asks for weight early, because the label price depends on it, and allows up to 12 photos with prices between $1 and $2,000 — up to $5,000 for authenticated designer items (Mercari, creating a listing). It explicitly discourages keyword stuffing: “we ask that you don’t add a bunch of brand names and hashtags that aren’t associated with the item”. Mercari behaves like a search engine; buyers arrive with a query.

Vinted asks for less prose and more taxonomy. Category, brand, size, condition and colour drive its filters, and buyers browse feeds far more than they type queries, so photographs carry most of the weight — close to the reverse of Mercari. Vinted is also stricter about listing hygiene, particularly size and care-label photos.

The biggest operational difference is offers. Mercari discontinued Smart Offers — which auto-accepted or auto-countered within a range you set — in late 2024 and replaced it with nothing, leaving negotiation entirely manual (Value Added Resource, November 2024). On Vinted, buyer offers are core to the purchase flow. On a large catalogue, offer handling is now the biggest recurring time cost of the Mercari side.

Returns, disputes and protection

Both sit between you and the buyer, and both side with the buyer more often than you would like. The mechanics differ enough to change how you photograph stock.

Mercari gives the buyer 72 hours from carrier-confirmed delivery, filed through the Order Status or Rating page — requests made anywhere else “do not pause the transaction”. Valid grounds: significantly different from the listing, damaged in shipping, or inauthentic. Not valid: doesn’t fit, changed mind, minor cosmetic flaws, odour, slow delivery. “Sellers are required to accept returns approved by Mercari.” Mercari pays for the return label up to 50 lbs; above that the seller supplies one within 3 days or the order is cancelled and refunded. Once the transaction completes, returns are closed (Mercari, returns and refunds).

Vinted’s window is 2 days after delivery to confirm or report, after which the order completes and payment flows; if a complaint is opened, funds stay frozen until Vinted resolves it. The structural difference is who funds the protection — on Vinted, the buyer’s own fee; on Mercari, a commission the seller pays plus a fee the buyer pays, adjudicated by the party collecting both. One more asymmetry: Mercari Meetup transactions are excluded from every protection scheme, so photograph flaws deliberately, give measurements rather than sizes alone, and keep proof of postage on both platforms.

What sellers are saying

US seller sentiment shifted noticeably during 2026. The dominant theme in multi-channel reselling communities is that Mercari has gone quiet and Vinted is where the volume moved.

“Sales have dwindled on Mercari over the years. I’m lucky to sell three items a month. I renew listings every 60-75 days. Very few views or likes. I feel like since Vinted rolled in, Mercari has died even more.”

— Reddit seller, r/reselling, August 2026

Another seller with 3,000 listings reported not a single Mercari sale in two weeks while Vinted was “my big money maker”. One ran something close to a controlled test: 47 identical clothing listings across four apps over two weeks produced 12 sales on Vinted, 5 on Poshmark, 4 on Depop and none on Mercari — “now Mercari is a ghost town”. That is one seller with one type of stock, and it is clothing — precisely the category Mercari’s own data shows shrinking. It is not a verdict on trading cards. Note too that almost nobody in these threads nets Vinted’s buyer fee against Mercari’s commission; they simply prefer not seeing a deduction.

“I find paying ZERO fees very attractive. I can list an item for cheap and not worry about giving up 20%. […] With Vinted, the price I list is what I get paid. My buyers get the true value of the item I’m selling. No need for mark ups.”

— Reddit seller, r/poshmark, February 2026

The counter-case is just as consistent: Vinted’s US traction is concentrated at the cheap end, and its support reputation is poor.

“Also Vinted is like a garage sale, no one wants to pay more than five dollars for anything and everyone wants a huge discount. If you’re selling true vintage, that’s not the place.”

— Reddit seller, r/poshmark, July 2026

“Vinted — The good: no seller fees, still free shipping & great place to get rid of low priced items. The bad: No customer service, very strict about following the rules or they will ban you, never sell high priced items there — too risky.”

— Reddit seller, r/poshmark

On the January 2025 change, the complaint is not the 10% itself but the sequence — removed in March 2024, reinstated nine months later with a buyer fee on top. Sellers add the two and land on roughly 13.6%: “now it’s 10% + 3.6%… not much different than eBay.”

Two caveats. Vinted’s US shipping promotions are widely described by sellers as temporary, so some of the current sell-through advantage belongs to them rather than the fee model. And both platforms sit at 1.2 out of 5 on Trustpilot — Mercari across 20,524 reviews, Vinted 22,812 — which tells you both samples are complaint-selected and discriminates nothing between them.

How to choose

Outside the United States this is settled already: Vinted is your option and Mercari is not. For US sellers, here is the honest framework.

And the case for both, if you are a US fashion seller: your catalogue is eligible on each, the fee models are opposite, and Vinted’s US buyer base is barely nine months old. Running both is how you find out which moves your stock without betting a season on a guess. That stays a strategy question until you have to keep two catalogues aligned by hand.

How to crosslist with FLUF Connect

Both channels run through your own signed-in session rather than a server-side API. In FLUF Connect your own browser (the FLUF Chrome extension) or the FLUF mobile app acts as the execution host for Mercari and Vinted alike, and work is paced deliberately, so a large batch lands over minutes rather than seconds.

Channel detail lives on our Vinted to Mercari crosslisting page, with walkthroughs for importing from Vinted and importing your listings.

What syncs between them

Being precise matters more here than sounding capable, so plainly: Vinted is the more automated of the two inside FLUF, and Mercari has no relisting and no offer automation at all.

Day to day: sell on Vinted and the Mercari listing comes down, and vice versa. Inventory sync runs both ways and orders land in one place. Beyond that, Vinted gets relisting, offer handling and refund processing. Mercari gets order sync and mark-as-sold, and that is the complete list.

The gap tracks what each platform’s interface exposes — Mercari retired Smart Offers on its own side, so there is no offer automation there for any tool to drive. But if offer volume is what eats your evenings, the Mercari half stays manual. Plan for it rather than discover it.

What it costs

FLUF Connect is £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter — 300 products), with Growth at £19 for 1,000, Seller at £49 for 2,500, Pro at £99 for 5,000 and Super Seller at £299 for unlimited. There is no free plan.

Relisting, offer management and bulk operations are included in every plan rather than sold as add-ons — which for this pair matters mostly on the Vinted side. Running both channels, the subscription buys two-way sale detection so you never oversell a one-of-one item, plus the Vinted automation. It is not a magic layer over Mercari, which stays comparatively manual.

Sources and verification

Checked against primary sources in August 2026. Fee figures come from each platform’s own fee pages; category and financial figures from Mercari’s investor materials and Vinted’s newsroom. Vinted’s Buyer Protection fee varies by market and order, so confirm it for your own country before pricing against it.

• Mercari — fees: 10% selling fee, 3.6% Buyer Protection fee, free listings, prepaid labels
• Mercari — fee change FAQ: structure effective 6 January 2025
• Mercari — returns and refunds: 72-hour window, 50 lb label threshold, auto-rating
• Mercari — how Promote works: 5% permanent price cut, no paid ad product
• Mercari — Meetup terms: LA and NYC only, excluded from all protection
• Mercari investor relations: FY2026 results, 5 August 2026 — US GMV, MAU and category split
• Vinted — US price list: $0.70 + 5% Buyer Protection fee, shipping excluded
• Vinted — how it works: “no selling fees… you keep 100% of what you earn”; buyers pay shipping
• Vinted — getting paid for a completed sale: 2-day confirmation window, payment within 2 days
• Vinted — US shipping routes: USPS label, custom shipping, or none
• Vinted — 2025 results, 9 April 2026: GMV, revenue, profit, Vinted Go, drop-off network
• Vinted — “Vinted has landed in New York”, 22 January 2026
• Vinted — New Eras Again, 22 September 2025: the non-fashion categories
• Vinted — 15 years of Vinted: the 2016 switch to Buyer Protection
• Vinted — our platform: 29.3m EU monthly active recipients, 31 January 2026
• Appfigures, 4 May 2026: US app download figures (secondary)
• Business Insider, 24 May 2026: Adam Jay on the US market (secondary)
• Value Added Resource, November 2024: Smart Offers discontinued (secondary)
• r/reselling, r/Mercari, r/poshmark: seller quotes

Left out because we could not verify them: Vinted’s registered-member count (the repeated “100 million” has no current primary source); Mercari’s demographics, which Mercari does not publish; the exact date Mercari Local was discontinued; and a reported New York soft launch in November 2025, which appears in trade press but not Vinted’s newsroom.

Related guides

• Sell on Mercari — the complete seller guide
• Sell on Vinted — the complete seller guide
• Crosslist from Vinted to Mercari
• Poshmark vs Mercari
• Mercari vs eBay
• How to relist on Vinted
• FLUF Connect vs List Perfectly