willhaben vs Vinted — Where Austrians Should Actually Sell

On this page

• The short answer
• Fees — the comparison that isn’t one
• Reach and audience
• What sells where, according to Austrians
• Beyond clothes: what each platform actually covers
• Shipping: PayLivery vs Vinted
• Haggling, no-shows and the reputation gap
• Rules and listing lifetime
• How much work each listing takes
• Which should you choose?
• Running both without listing twice
• Sources and verification

The short answer

Sell clothes on Vinted. Sell everything else on willhaben. Sell clothes on both if you can do it without typing twice, because listing costs nothing on either platform and the two audiences barely overlap.

That is not a hedge — it is what Austrian sellers tell each other, unprompted, in thread after thread. The interesting part is why the split falls where it does, and it has almost nothing to do with fees.

Fees — the comparison that isn’t one

Most platform comparisons open with a fee table because that is usually where the argument is. Here there is no argument: neither platform takes a cent from the seller.

On a €45 jacket you receive €45 on either platform. The buyer pays roughly €2.03 in Käuferschutz on willhaben plus postage, or a comparable Buyer Protection charge plus postage on Vinted. Any page telling you one of these platforms will save you money as a seller is inventing a difference that does not exist.

There is one genuine financial fork, and it catches people who scale. willhaben reclassifies anyone selling “regelmäßig bzw. in hohem Volumen oder mit Gewinnabsicht” — regularly, in high volume, or with intent to profit — as a commercial seller regardless of whether they hold a trade licence. At that point ads cost €19.99 excluding VAT each. The free private listing is not a business model you can grow into, and willhaben permits only one account per person, deactivating extras without warning. Vinted has no equivalent volume trigger for private sellers.

Reach and audience

Austria’s population is about 5.6 million, so roughly 4.3 million monthly Austrian unique users is close to saturation of the online population. willhaben is not a marketplace Austrians use; it is the one they default to.

Vinted cannot compete on that domestically, and does not try. Its advantage is the border. Austrian members could already trade with France and Italy, and in April 2026 Vinted opened cross-border trading between Austria and Germany and added Österreichische Post as a carrier. That is the single most consequential recent change in this comparison, and most existing content predates it — you will still find Austrians describing Vinted as France-and-Italy-only, which was true until a few months ago.

willhaben, by contrast, is domestic by construction rather than by choice of emphasis. Its help centre states that sending items abroad through PayLivery is fundamentally not possible, that its carriers ship only within Austria, and it actively advises sellers to avoid selling abroad at all. Prices must be quoted as Austrian gross consumer prices and ads must be written in German.

So the reach comparison resolves cleanly: willhaben gives your item more Austrians; Vinted gives it more countries.

What sells where, according to Austrians

This is the section where the received wisdom is unusually well evidenced, because Austrians discuss it constantly and agree with each other.

On clothing, the verdict is consistent:

“Ich benutze Vinted schon seit 3 Jahren und die Kleidung lässt sich besser verkaufen als auf willhaben, und es sind keine teure oder vintage Stücke die ich verkaufe”

“I’ve been using Vinted for 3 years now and clothes sell better there than on willhaben — and these aren’t expensive or vintage pieces I’m selling.”

— r/wien, February 2024

“Keine Käufer. Auf Willhaben zB. hab ich anderweitig schon sehr viel verkauft aber Kleidung scheint dort gar nicht zu funktionieren.”

“No buyers. On willhaben, for instance, I’ve sold plenty of other things, but clothing just doesn’t seem to work there at all.”

— r/wien, November 2023

“Was auf Willhaben keiner anschaut verkaufe ich auf Vinted teurer”

“What nobody even looks at on willhaben, I sell for more on Vinted.”

— r/wien, April 2026

Note what the second quote actually says, because it is the most useful sentence in this comparison: willhaben works well for that seller for everything except clothes. That is the split in one line.

It is worth holding this against the raw numbers, though, because “clothing does not work on willhaben” is a relative claim, not an absolute one. willhaben carries 2,398,919 live fashion ads, over 1.75 million of them womenswear. That is an enormous inventory by any measure. The complaint is about competition and buyer intent — people arriving at willhaben are usually looking for a sofa, a bike or a phone — rather than about an absence of demand.

And there is a counterweight worth printing, because Vinted is not universally loved either:

“Vinted ist absolut wertlos da hab ich noch nie was verkauft weil sich alle erwarten das man es ihnen schenkt und ihnen dafür den Versand auch noch übernimmt”

“Vinted is absolutely worthless, I’ve never sold anything there because everyone expects you to hand it over for nothing and cover the shipping on top.”

— r/Austria, May 2026

Lowballing exists on both. The difference is its shape: on Vinted it arrives as a frictionless offer button you can ignore, on willhaben it arrives as a chat message you have to answer.

Beyond clothes: what each platform actually covers

The “clothes on Vinted, everything else on willhaben” rule is a good default, but both platforms are less specialised than their reputations, and knowing where the boundary really sits stops you writing off a channel that would have sold the item.

willhaben is a genuine everything-marketplace. Its Marktplatz alone runs to roughly 12.5 million live ads across 19 top-level categories and a taxonomy up to four levels deep, and that sits alongside entirely separate verticals for property, vehicles and jobs. Nothing in Vinted’s model approaches that. If you are selling a car, letting a flat or advertising a role, there is no comparison to make — willhaben is the only one of the two that does it at all.

Vinted’s non-fashion range is wider than most people assume. Its catalogue is not limited to garments: the Home branch carries a full tools and DIY subtree — power tools, drills, hardware, protective gear — alongside cookware, kitchen tools, small appliances, textiles, tableware, office supplies, and garden and pet care. Electronics spans phones, computers, cameras, televisions, consoles and wearables. A cordless drill genuinely has a home on Vinted. What it does not have is furniture: there is no wardrobe or sofa category anywhere in the tree, and the shipping-first model would not support one if there were.

That single exclusion explains most of the practical division of labour. willhaben’s local-pickup culture — the thing that produces the haggling and the no-shows discussed below — is also precisely what makes it the only realistic option for anything heavy, awkward or fragile. Vinted’s parcel-shaped model is what makes it effortless for anything that fits in a bag, and useless for anything that does not.

So a more accurate rule than the folk version is this: Vinted for anything postable, willhaben for anything postable and everything that is not. The two overlap heavily in the postable middle, which is exactly the range where running both costs you nothing but time.

Shipping: PayLivery vs Vinted

Both platforms have integrated pay-and-ship, and they work more similarly than their reputations suggest.

willhaben’s PayLivery holds the buyer’s money in escrow, gives the seller a print-at-home label or a Post QR code, and releases funds after delivery. It is free for the seller. The buyer pays shipping plus Käuferschutz. Sizes run from a €4.40 Post Versandtasche up to €9.90 for a large parcel, with DPD alternatives from €5.60. The seller must ship within seven days or the buyer is refunded; payout follows within 48 hours of delivery; the buyer has 48 hours to raise a protection claim.

Two PayLivery details catch sellers out. The package size cannot be changed once selected, so an optimistic guess costs you. And personal handover is not possible within a PayLivery transaction — you choose escrow-and-ship or you choose local pickup, not both for the same transaction.

Vinted works the way most fashion marketplaces now do: the buyer selects and pays for the label at checkout, the seller drops the parcel off, funds release after the buyer confirms. Since April 2026 Austrian sellers also have Österreichische Post as a carrier option alongside the existing arrangements.

The practical difference is not the mechanics but the default. A large share of willhaben’s transactions are still local pickup with cash — which is exactly where the friction lives.

Haggling, no-shows and the reputation gap

If you ask Austrians what selling on willhaben is like, you get a remarkably specific answer:

“Die Hauptaufgabe bei Willhaben ist das Beantworten (oder Blockieren) von ‘Was ledsde Prais’ Anfragen.”

“The main job on willhaben is answering (or blocking) ‘wots yer last price’ enquiries.”

— r/willhaben, July 2026

The phrase in quotation marks is a deliberate phonetic mangling of “Was letzter Preis?” — an Austrian and German internet meme for a lowballer, to the point that there is a subreddit named after it. The English rendering above keeps the mangling because a clean translation would lose the joke entirely.

The no-show pattern is described with equal precision:

“Für 25€ online gestellt, und schon kommen die Anfragen rein… 20€ und Abholung um 8 Uhr Abends werden vereinbart. Um 20:30 kommt mal die Meldung, dass es doch ein wenig länger dauert… Natürlich auch keine 20€ dabei, sondern nur 17€.”

“Listed it at €25 and the enquiries come straight in… €20 and pickup at 8pm is agreed. At 20:30 comes the message that it’ll take a bit longer… And of course they don’t have the €20 on them, only €17.”

— r/Austria, April 2026

Against which, the reason many sellers prefer shipping:

“Hab meine Switch Lite auf Vinted verkauft. Klar dort gibt es auch viele Anfragen, aber wenn es einen Käufer gibt dann funktioniert das viel einfacher mit dem Versand als mit 10 Leuten die Sagen sie kaufen es und ich mir einen Termin vereinbare und dann ist funkstille”

“I sold my Switch Lite on Vinted. Sure, you get a lot of enquiries there too, but once there’s a buyer it works far more easily with shipping than with 10 people who say they’ll buy it, I arrange a time with them, and then radio silence.”

— r/wien, April 2026

The reputation gap is structural

Austrians frequently say willhaben lacks a rating system. Strictly they are wrong, and revealingly so — willhaben’s help centre states that only PayLivery transactions can be rated. So a seller who does local handover exclusively, which is a large share of willhaben’s activity, accumulates no visible reputation however much they sell. The commenter who wrote “Willhaben fehlt einfach ein Bewertungssystem, die Leute wären dann wahrscheinlich netter und zuverlässiger” — “willhaben simply lacks a rating system; people would probably be nicer and more reliable then” — is describing his lived experience accurately even though the feature technically exists.

That has a practical implication: if reputation matters to you on willhaben, offer PayLivery rather than pickup-only. It is the only way to accumulate one. On Vinted every transaction is rateable by design, which is part of why its trust signals feel stronger to sellers moving between the two.

Rules and listing lifetime

Two of those rows deserve emphasis for anyone moving listings between the platforms. The German-language requirement is real and enforced, so an English Vinted description cannot simply be pasted across. And the ban on referencing other selling platforms means the standard “see my other items on Vinted” sign-off is a removal risk rather than a marketing tactic.

The 45-day expiry is willhaben’s most annoying property, and the obvious workaround is the one thing its policy explicitly punishes. willhaben has also changed re-publishing so it no longer resets your position in date-sorted results, closing the last of the benefit. Expired ads keep their images for only two to three months, after which the ad is not meaningfully recoverable.

How much work each listing takes

The two platforms ask for different information, and the gap decides how painful it is to run both by hand.

Vinted asks for more structure. Every listing needs a category leaf, a brand from a controlled list, a size scoped to that category group, a condition from a five-point scale, and a package size chosen at listing time so the buyer can be charged the right postage. At least two photos are mandatory. That is a lot of fields for a t-shirt, but they are all pickers rather than free text, so a practised seller moves quickly and the resulting listing is highly filterable — which is a large part of why Vinted’s search works well for buyers.

willhaben asks for less, and expects prose. The mandatory set is a category, a price, one of four condition values — NEU, NEUWERTIG, GEBRAUCHT or DEFEKT — and a handover method. There is no controlled size field at all, so garment sizes live in the title and description. Images are unlimited on free private ads, capped at 6MB each, converted to JPEG at a maximum 1200 pixels on the long edge, with the first becoming the cover.

Two willhaben content rules have no Vinted equivalent and are worth internalising, because breaching them costs you the ad rather than merely the sale. Descriptions must be in German — English may be appended as a translation, but nothing else is permitted, and HTML tags are banned. And you may not refer to your profile on another selling platform, nor include links, email addresses or QR codes. The habitual Vinted sign-off pointing at the rest of your wardrobe is, on willhaben, a removal risk.

Going the other way has its own friction: a willhaben ad carries no structured brand or size, so crosslisting it to Vinted means those fields have to be inferred from the text rather than copied. Neither direction is a straight transfer, which is the honest reason this pair is tedious by hand and worth automating.

Which should you choose?

Running both without listing twice

The conclusion most Austrian sellers reach on their own is to use both, and they say so to each other:

“Kleiner Tipp; stell deine Sachen gleichzeitig auch auf Vinted rein, dann hast du eine größere Reichweite. Auf Vinted hatte ich nie Probleme und dort habe ich Kleidung/Schuhe und eine Kamera zu einem guten Preis verkauft.”

“Little tip: put your things on Vinted at the same time, then you have a bigger reach. On Vinted I’ve never had problems, and I’ve sold clothes/shoes and a camera there at a good price.”

— r/Austria, April 2026

Since listing is free on both, the only real cost of running both is your time — and the risk of selling the same item twice. That is what crosslisting removes.

FLUF Connect publishes to both from one catalogue, rewriting descriptions into German for willhaben, mapping Vinted’s five-point condition scale onto willhaben’s four values, and mapping its category tree. Practically no other tool covers this pair: no reseller-focused crosslisting tool supports willhaben at all, and the two products that do reach it are a German classifieds extension built around Kleinanzeigen and a dealer-oriented feed tool, neither of which covers the wider marketplace mix.

One honest limitation. Sale detection on willhaben is deliberately not wired, and that is a safety decision rather than an unfinished feature. The only cheap way to detect a willhaben sale is to treat an ad vanishing from the public index as a sale — but ads expire after roughly six weeks by design, so a vanished ad almost always means expired. Wiring that up would mass-delist healthy stock across every other channel you sell on, every six weeks, permanently. Instead, mark an item sold in FLUF Connect when it goes on either platform and the fan-out runs from there.

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 eBay, Kleinanzeigen and more.

Run willhaben and Vinted from one catalogue

Sources and verification

• willhaben Pressebereich — “größter digitaler Marktplatz Österreichs”, founded 2006, free private Marktplatz, ad volumes
• willhaben — Anzeigenaufgabe — free private Marktplatz ad at 45 days; commercial ad €19.99 excluding VAT at 60 days
• willhaben Hilfe — ad duration — run times by ad type and unlimited images on free private ads
• willhaben Anzeigenrichtlinien — German-language requirement, the ban on referencing other selling platforms, the anti-churn rule, commercial reclassification and one account per person
• willhaben Hilfe — PayLivery costs — free for the seller; Käuferschutz from €1.99 or 4.5%
• willhaben Hilfe — parcel sizes — Post and DPD price tiers and weight caps
• willhaben Hilfe — payouts — within 48 hours of delivery
• willhaben Hilfe — cross-border PayLivery — not possible
• willhaben Hilfe — ratings — only PayLivery transactions can be rated
• willhaben Hilfe — mandatory fields — price, the four condition values, category and handover method
• willhaben — Mode und Accessoires — 2,398,919 live fashion ads, read August 2026
• INTERNET WORLD Austria, October 2025 — ÖWA September 2025: roughly 4.3 million Austrian unique users
• INTERNET WORLD Austria, April 2026 — Austria–Germany cross-border trading and Österreichische Post as a Vinted carrier
• Vinted Hilfe — uploading an item — required fields including brand, size and package size
• Statistik Austria — Austrian population
• Seller experiences quoted verbatim from public Reddit threads in r/wien, r/Austria and r/willhaben, 2023–2026, with English translations

Verified in August 2026. willhaben does not publish private-seller upgrade prices or exact title and description character limits, so none are given. Vinted publishes no Austria-specific user count and its Buyer Protection is a fixed amount plus a percentage that varies by market, so no single figure is stated. ÖWA changed methodology in January 2025, so reach figures before and after are not directly comparable. Live ad counts come from willhaben’s own public category pages and move daily.

Related pages

• Crosslist from Vinted to willhaben
• Crosslist from eBay to willhaben
• Kleinanzeigen vs Vinted — the German equivalent
• How to sell on willhaben
• How to sell on Vinted
• All marketplace guides