TikTok Shop vs Depop — Which Is Better for Selling Clothes in the UK?
One charges you nothing and lets anyone list. The other takes 9% and gates used clothing behind an application with a £500 ceiling. A straight comparison for UK sellers, with the numbers each platform actually publishes.
- Cost to sell: Depop charges UK sellers no selling fee, only 2.9% + £0.30 processing. TikTok Shop takes 9% commission inclusive of applicable taxes, plus £0.50 per delivered order if you ship yourself.
- Who can list used clothing: anyone on Depop. On TikTok Shop, only sellers approved through a category application, and never above £500 per listing.
- How demand arrives: Depop is searched and browsed. TikTok Shop is watched — its demand is content-led, which is a workload as much as an audience.
- Registration: Depop needs an email. TikTok Shop needs a sole trader or company registration, UK photo ID, a selfie holding it, a verification video and a UK bank account.
- Scale: Depop reported 7 million active buyers and over 3 million active sellers at the end of 2025. TikTok passed 300,000 UK small-business sellers in July 2026.
- Ownership changed: eBay completed its acquisition of Depop on 30 July 2026. Depop is no longer Etsy-owned.
On this page
- The short answer
- Who is allowed to sell what
- Fees, side by side
- Audience and scale
- The effort gap nobody prices in
- Discovery: how a buyer actually finds your item
- Shipping and fulfilment compared
- Listing rules compared
- Registration, verification and getting paid
- Which should you choose?
- Running both without doing everything twice
- Sources and verification
The short answer
If you sell second-hand clothes in the UK and you are choosing one, choose Depop. It costs less, it lets you start today, it has no price ceiling, and its entire buyer base arrived looking for used fashion. TikTok Shop is the better addition than it is a replacement — a second channel with a different demand mechanism, once you have the volume and the appetite to make content for it.
If you sell new goods, the comparison inverts. Depop’s audience expects resale; TikTok Shop is a general retail marketplace where new products are the norm and none of the second-hand restrictions apply.
The rest of this page is the evidence for that, including the parts that do not flatter either platform.
Who is allowed to sell what
This is the difference most comparisons omit, and it decides the outcome for a lot of people before fees ever matter.
Depop imposes essentially no gate. It is a second-hand marketplace by design — 93% of its GMS is apparel — and you can list a used jumper within minutes of installing the app.
TikTok Shop treats used goods as a restricted category. Its UK Restricted Products Policy states that “all second-hand products can only be sold if a seller has been onboarded via a limited, ‘invite-only’ process.” The phrase is misleading in one helpful way — you apply yourself, in Seller Center under Qualification Center, rather than waiting to be approached — and misleading in one unhelpful way: approval is not guaranteed and sellers report it taking well beyond the stated seven days.
Once approved, second-hand fashion carries constraints Depop has no equivalent of:
| Rule | Depop | TikTok Shop UK |
|---|---|---|
| Approval to sell used clothing | None needed | Category application required |
| Maximum price per used listing | No limit | £500 |
| Required title wording | None | Must contain “Second-hand”, “pre-owned” or “pre-loved” |
| Flaw photography | Encouraged | Mandatory — at least one image showing imperfections |
| Mystery bundles | Permitted | Prohibited for second-hand goods |
| Used underwear, socks, swimwear | Restricted | New or new-with-tags only |
The £500 ceiling is the one that reshapes a business. If your margin comes from archive pieces, designer outerwear or grails, the top of your rail simply has no TikTok Shop destination. Other second-hand categories have their own rules: graded trading cards are gated and capped at £1,000, ungraded ones need no application at all, and refurbished electronics, graded comics and refurbished appliances are each gated separately.
One further scoping point specific to crosslisting: our own TikTok Shop connection is approved for the United Kingdom only. TikTok Shop operates around twenty seller markets, but a seller outside the UK cannot authorise FLUF Connect for it today.
Fees, side by side
| Depop (UK seller) | TikTok Shop (UK seller) | |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | None | None |
| Selling / commission fee | 0% since 20 March 2024 | 9%, inclusive of applicable taxes including VAT |
| Reduced commission categories | — | 5% on electronics and selected beauty and personal care |
| Payment processing | 2.9% + £0.30 | No separate processing fee documented |
| Fulfilment charge | Label bought by seller or buyer | £0.50 per delivered order when you ship yourself, since 15 July 2025 |
| Buyer-side fee | Marketplace fee, up to 5% + up to £1 | Included in the displayed price |
| Promotion | Boosted Listings 12% in the UK since 23 March 2026 | Affiliate commission, seller-set |
On a £50 sale the seller-side cost is roughly £1.75 on Depop against £5.00 on TikTok Shop — near enough three times. On a £200 jacket it is £6.10 against £18.50.
Two clarifications, because the internet is confidently wrong about both. There is no separate TikTok Shop payment-processing fee; the widely repeated “1.4% + £0.20” is generic UK card-acquiring pricing, and TikTok’s own fee documentation lists commission, shipping fees, affiliate commission and adjustments only. And the “1.8% for 90 days” new-seller rate has no primary source. TikTok’s UK policy confirms a reduced new-seller rate exists but does not publish its value or duration, so treat any specific figure as unverified.
Depop’s headline “no fees” also deserves a caveat in the other direction. The 10% selling fee was not abolished so much as moved: buyers now pay a Marketplace fee of up to 5% plus up to £1, introduced in the UK in April 2024, a month after the seller fee came off. Your take-home improved; the total cost of a Depop transaction did not fall as far as the headline suggests. And UK Boosted Listings rose from 8% to 12% in March 2026, which is a real seller-side increase most comparisons miss.
The UK zero-fee position applies to sellers based in the UK, the US and Australia. Elsewhere Depop’s 10% selling fee still applies, so this comparison changes shape entirely outside those three markets.
Audience and scale
| Depop | TikTok Shop UK | |
|---|---|---|
| Active buyers | 7 million (31 December 2025) | Not published |
| Active sellers | Over 3 million globally | 300,000+ UK small businesses (July 2026) |
| Annual GMV | Around $1 billion (2025) | Not published for the UK |
| Age skew | Nearly 90% of active buyers under 34 | 47% of UK Gen Z and millennials used it in the past three months |
| Category mix | 93% apparel | General retail; beauty especially strong |
| Markets | UK, US, Australia | ~20 seller markets; FLUF connects the UK |
| Growth signal | Around 60% growth in US active sellers in 2025 | New sellers joining up 200% year on year; LIVE sales up 55% |
A word on what is missing from that table. TikTok has never published a UK GMV figure or a UK active-buyer count, and no credible third party has one either — every such number in circulation is a mislabelled global figure. We have left the cells empty rather than fill them, because a comparison built on invented numbers is worse than an incomplete one.
What TikTok does publish is directional and genuinely impressive: 300,000 UK small-business sellers as of July 2026, double the 200,000 reported in November 2025, with LIVE shopping sales up 55% year on year and more than 6,000 UK live sessions a day. Over Black Friday 2025 UK sales rose 50% on the previous year, peaking at 27 items sold per second.
The most useful single statistic for a fashion seller is this: 41% of UK TikTok Shop revenue comes from items priced over £100, against a global average of 2.8%. The UK behaves very differently from the platform’s reputation. The band between £100 and the £500 second-hand ceiling is both TikTok Shop’s strongest-converting range and entirely available to an approved pre-loved seller.
Depop’s numbers come with their own caveat. Its reported growth is US-driven — active sellers there grew around 60% in 2025 — and the UK is now the minority market. Do not read Depop’s global growth as UK growth.
The effort gap nobody prices in
A fee table implies the two platforms ask the same work of you for different money. They do not.
On Depop, a listing is a listing. Photograph the item, write a description, publish; the marketplace’s own search and feed do the distribution. On TikTok Shop, a listing is a product record that mostly does nothing until content points at it. The commission is the smaller cost; the content is the larger one.
Sellers say this plainly. A UK operator managing multiple TikTok Shops:
“I manage a couple of Tiktok shops as part of my role. One does really well selling American Candy, circa 150k p/a in their first year 2025. Another does terribly selling fashion stuff. I think its about purchase intent and pricing, people brain rotting on tiktok are more likely to drop £10 on a bag of sweets than £200 on a pair of shoes.”
— r/AskUK, June 2026
And on the production volume required:
“Tik Tok shop isn’t sustainable. It is a lot of work to get high quality videos. You get a small percentage of the sale. You’d need to crank out nearly 25 videos a day to see any bit of success with probably 5 different products.”
— r/AskUK, June 2026
That second quote is from a US seller answering a UK question, and it is one person’s view rather than a benchmark — but the direction is consistent across the seller commentary we found. Note also that the first quote’s counterexample is instructive: high-volume, low-price consumables are TikTok Shop’s natural fit, and used clothing is close to its opposite — one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable, and impossible to run as a repeat-purchase video campaign.
There is a cost complaint worth hearing too, on the £0.50 fulfilment charge introduced in July 2025:
“this is an outrageous charge 50p per order because I dont use their shipping system this will cost me upwards of £25k a year.”
— r/TikTokshop, June 2025
At that seller’s volume the charge implies around 50,000 orders a year, so it is a big-seller grievance rather than a typical one. But it illustrates the general point: TikTok Shop’s cost structure is built for repeatable products at volume.
Discovery: how a buyer actually finds your item
Fees and rules are easy to tabulate. The deeper difference between these two platforms is the mechanism by which a stranger ends up looking at your jumper, and it determines what you spend your time on.
Depop is a marketplace with a search box. A buyer arrives with an intention — a brand, a size, a silhouette — and filters until something matches. Your job is to be findable: accurate brand and size, honest condition, a title containing the words someone would type, and enough listings that you appear often. Effort compounds into inventory. A listing made a year ago can still sell tomorrow without you touching it.
TikTok Shop is a feed with a checkout attached. Nobody searches TikTok Shop for your jumper. The product reaches people because a video reached them, and the video reached them because the algorithm judged it worth showing. Your job is not to be findable but to be watchable. Effort does not compound in the same way: a video that performed in March does not keep selling in August, and a product page with no content behind it is close to invisible however well filled-in it is.
That asymmetry explains a lot of the seller commentary. It is why consumables and repeat-purchase products thrive on TikTok Shop — one good video can sell the same SKU a thousand times — and why one-off second-hand pieces struggle, because each item needs its own content and can only ever be sold once. It is also why the platforms complement each other rather than compete: a piece of content made for TikTok Shop drives attention that a Depop listing can capture, and a Depop catalogue provides the depth that a TikTok audience browses once it arrives.
There is a structural consequence worth thinking about before you commit. On Depop your listings are an asset that keeps working. On TikTok Shop your reach is rented from an algorithm, and a change in distribution can flatten a month’s sales without any change on your side. Neither is safer in the abstract, but they fail in different ways, which is itself an argument for not depending on one.
Shipping and fulfilment compared
This is where a fee comparison quietly stops being accurate, because the two platforms push the cost around differently.
| Depop | TikTok Shop UK | |
|---|---|---|
| Integrated labels | Ship with Evri, bought in-app | Platform-arranged shipping, or ship it yourself |
| Cost of shipping yourself | Your own courier, no platform charge | £0.50 per delivered order |
| Geographic coverage of integrated labels | UK Mainland only | UK |
| Who chooses the carrier | Seller, or buyer at checkout | Depends on the fulfilment option selected |
| Dispatch expectations | Set by Depop’s policies | Enforced through seller performance metrics |
Two details deserve attention. First, Depop’s integrated shipping is narrower than most sellers realise: Ship with Evri covers UK Mainland only, excluding the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and every international destination. If you sell to those places you are buying your own labels and handling any customs paperwork yourself, which is a real workload that no fee table shows.
Second, TikTok Shop’s £0.50 charge applies specifically when you do not use its shipping system — it is a charge for independence, introduced in July 2025. Sellers also report that when you do use platform labels, commission is calculated on the buyer-paid shipping as well as the item, which follows from TikTok’s published commission formula: it applies to net sales plus customer-paid shipping fee plus platform discount. That is easy to miss and makes the effective rate on a low-value, high-postage item higher than 9% of the item price alone.
The practical conclusion is that TikTok Shop’s cost advantage never materialises at low order values, and its economics improve as the item price rises — which is consistent with the UK’s unusual skew towards items over £100.
Listing rules compared
| Depop | TikTok Shop UK | |
|---|---|---|
| Photos | Up to 4 | Up to 9, minimum 800×800px, square, colour only |
| Photo minimum for used fashion | 1 | 2, one of which must show imperfections |
| Video | Supported in listings | One optional video per listing, up to 5MB |
| Description | Free text | Minimum 30 words; API accepts up to 10,000 characters |
| Title | Free text | Guidance sets 25–255 characters; no clickbait, marketing copy or references to other platforms |
| Listing quality tiers | None | Poor / Fair / Good, affecting distribution; five or more images reaches “Good” |
| Mandatory attributes | Minimal | Category-dependent; fashion generally needs size, colour, material and a size chart |
The practical reading: TikTok Shop’s listing requirements are stricter and more structured, which is a real cost when you are photographing one-off second-hand items rather than a product line. Black-and-white photography is rejected outright, which catches out sellers with a monochrome aesthetic. On the other hand, its description ceiling is far more generous than Depop’s habits require, so nothing is lost in that direction.
Registration, verification and getting paid
Depop asks for an email address and payment details. TikTok Shop asks considerably more, and this is where casual sellers stop.
TikTok Shop UK recognises Sole Traders and Corporate Sellers. The sole-trader route requires that you are at least 18, hold a UK-issued passport or driving licence, provide “a selfie of themselves holding the ID document” plus a verification video recorded by scanning a QR code, evidence a UK residential address with a bank statement or utility bill from the last three months, and supply bank details from an institution located in the UK in a matching name. Corporate sellers additionally need incorporation documents, a company registration number, director ID and a signed letter of authorisation from a current director.
A VAT number is requested only if you are already VAT registered, so it is not a barrier to entry. Neither is a following: the 1,000-follower rule that gets quoted constantly applies to affiliate creators promoting other people’s products, not to shop owners. As a UK seller put it, “you don’t need followers to sell on TikTok shop in the UK.”
The honest summary is that TikTok Shop expects a business and Depop expects a person. If you are not prepared to register as a trader, the comparison ends there regardless of which platform’s economics look better on paper.
Which should you choose?
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Are clearing a wardrobe or selling casually | Depop. TikTok Shop’s registration alone outweighs the opportunity. |
| Sell used clothing above £500 | Depop. TikTok Shop cannot list it at all. |
| Sell £30–£300 branded pre-loved and enjoy making video | Both. This is the band where TikTok Shop’s UK audience genuinely converts. |
| Sell new goods or your own brand | TikTok Shop. No second-hand restrictions, and Depop’s audience is not looking for new stock. |
| Sell high-volume repeatable products | TikTok Shop. Its whole cost structure assumes repeat SKUs. |
| Have no appetite for making content | Depop. A TikTok Shop listing without content is a shop on a quiet street. |
| Sell outside the UK, US or Australia | Neither is cheap. Depop still charges 10% there, and FLUF connects TikTok Shop in the UK only. |
Running both without doing everything twice
For most people who qualify for both, the answer is not to choose. They serve different demand, and the same garment can sit on each.
The obstacle is duplication. Listing twice means retyping titles to satisfy TikTok Shop’s pre-loved wording, re-cropping photos square, walking a category tree, filling mandatory attributes — and then remembering to delist the moment either sells. FLUF Connect handles that from one catalogue, and it is currently the only route: no reseller crosslisting tool supports TikTok Shop. Vendoo, List Perfectly, Crosslist and Zipsale each publish supported-marketplace lists and TikTok Shop appears on none of them, because it is an approval-gated API channel that browser-extension tools cannot reach.
One limitation to plan around, which we would rather state than have you discover: sale detection on TikTok Shop is not yet implemented. When an item sells on Depop, its TikTok Shop stock drops automatically. When it sells on TikTok Shop, nothing happens elsewhere until you mark it sold in FLUF Connect, which then fans out to every other channel. We have deliberately not claimed order sync on TikTok Shop while that is true.
Plans start at £9/month for 300 active products, with automation included in every plan rather than sold as a paid add-on, and yearly billing saving 40%. There is no free plan, but every new account gets a 7-day free trial. The same catalogue also reaches Vinted, eBay and more.
Run TikTok Shop and Depop from one catalogue
Sources and verification
- TikTok Shop UK — Restricted Products Policy §4.3 — second-hand onboarding, the £500 fashion cap, pre-loved title wording, imperfection photo, mystery-listing ban, and the trading-card and refurbished-goods rules
- TikTok Shop UK — “Invite Only” Products — the Qualification Center application path
- TikTok Shop UK — Platform Commission Fee — 9% inclusive of applicable taxes
- TikTok Shop UK — Commission Rate Policy — the 5% rate for electronics and selected beauty, and the existence of an unpublished new-seller rate
- TikTok Shop UK — Introduction to Seller Fees — the complete fee list, confirming there is no separate payment-processing fee
- TikTok Shop UK — Seller Registration Policy — sole trader and corporate requirements, UK ID, selfie, verification video and UK bank details
- TikTok Shop UK — product listing guidelines — nine images, 800×800 minimum, square, colour only, 30-word description floor
- Retail Times, July 2026 — 300,000 UK small-business sellers, 200% growth in new sellers, 55% LIVE growth
- TikTok Newsroom — Black Friday 2025 UK figures and daily LIVE session volume
- Ecommerce News EU — 41% of UK TikTok Shop revenue from items over £100
- Depop — seller fees and charges — zero selling fee for UK, US and Australian sellers, 2.9% + £0.30 processing, 12% UK Boosted Listings
- Depop newsroom — the UK selling fee removed for listings created from 20 March 2024
- Depop — Ship with Evri — UK Mainland only, excluding the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and international destinations
- Depop — Marketplace fee — the buyer-side charge of up to 5% plus up to £1, UK from 15 April 2024
- eBay investor relations — Depop’s 7 million active buyers, 3 million active sellers, roughly $1bn GMV and under-34 buyer share
- Depop newsroom — eBay completed the acquisition on 30 July 2026
- Vendoo, List Perfectly, Crosslist and Zipsale marketplace lists — none includes TikTok Shop
- Seller experiences quoted verbatim from public Reddit threads in r/AskUK and r/TikTokshop, 2025–2026
Verified in August 2026. TikTok publishes no UK GMV or UK active-buyer figure and no credible third-party estimate exists, so those cells are left empty rather than filled. The reduced new-seller commission rate exists in TikTok’s policy but its UK value and duration are unpublished. Depop’s reported growth is US-led and should not be read as UK growth. Fee arithmetic is illustrative and excludes promotion. Registration and tax information is general guidance, not advice.
Related pages
Frequently Asked Questions
Depop, clearly. A UK Depop seller pays no selling fee at all, only 2.9% plus £0.30 in payment processing. TikTok Shop takes 9% commission inclusive of applicable taxes, plus £0.50 per delivered order if you ship it yourself, and has no separate processing fee. On a £50 sale that is roughly £1.75 against £5.00. The gap is real but it buys access to a different demand mechanism rather than the same one.
No. TikTok Shop UK's Restricted Products Policy states that all second-hand products can only be sold once a seller has been onboarded through a limited application process, requested in Seller Center under Qualification Center. Depop imposes no equivalent gate — it is a second-hand marketplace by design, with 93% of its sales in apparel.
TikTok Shop's policy states that second-hand fashion products must not exceed £500 per listing. Depop has no price ceiling at all. If your margin comes from archive pieces, designer outerwear or grails, that is the single fact that decides the comparison, because those items cannot be listed on TikTok Shop in any circumstances.
Effectively yes. TikTok Shop UK recognises Sole Traders and Corporate Sellers, and the sole-trader route requires a UK-issued passport or driving licence, a selfie holding that ID, a recorded verification video, proof of a UK residential address from the last three months, and bank details from a UK institution in a matching name. Depop asks for an email address. That difference stops most casual sellers before fees ever matter.
No. The 1,000-follower threshold applies to affiliate creators promoting other people's products, not to shop owners, and UK sellers confirm you can register with no following at all. Whether you sell anything without making content is a separate question — TikTok Shop's demand is content-led in a way Depop's is not.
Honestly, nobody outside TikTok knows. TikTok has never published a UK GMV figure or a UK active-buyer count, and every such number in circulation is a mislabelled global figure — so we have not quoted one. What is published is that TikTok passed 300,000 UK small-business sellers in July 2026, double the November 2025 figure, with LIVE shopping sales up 55% year on year. Depop reported 7 million active buyers and over 3 million active sellers at the end of 2025.
It is one of its harder categories, and sellers say so. The platform rewards content volume and repeat-purchase products, which is close to the opposite of one-of-a-kind second-hand clothing. The encouraging counter-fact is that 41% of UK TikTok Shop revenue comes from items over £100, against a global average of 2.8% — so the £100 to £500 band, which is entirely available to an approved pre-loved seller, is where the UK market actually converts.
No. eBay completed its acquisition of Depop on 30 July 2026, having agreed the deal with Etsy in February 2026. Any guide describing Depop as Etsy-owned is out of date. It has not changed Depop's fee structure for sellers.
If you qualify for both and sell in the £30 to £300 band, yes — they serve different demand and the same garment can sit on each. The practical obstacle is duplication: TikTok Shop needs rewritten titles, square photos, a category leaf and mandatory attributes, and both listings need pulling down the moment either sells. That is what crosslisting is for, and FLUF Connect is currently the only route, since no reseller crosslisting tool supports TikTok Shop at all.
Not yet. Order sync is not implemented for TikTok Shop, so a sale there is not detected and your Depop listing stays live until you mark the item sold in FLUF Connect, which then fans out everywhere. The reverse direction works properly: a Depop sale drops the TikTok Shop stock automatically. We would rather state that limitation than claim a capability we do not have.