Crosslist from Square to Depop — Taking a Shop Catalogue onto a Social Marketplace
Depop charges UK and US sellers no selling fee, which makes it one of the cheapest channels a shop can add. The work is elsewhere: original photographs, a condition field Square never captured, write-once SKUs, and a till that does not tell Depop anything.
- Depop charges UK, US and Australian sellers no selling fee at all. You pay payment processing — 2.9% + £0.30 in the UK — and nothing else unless you boost.
- Boosting rose from 8% to 12% in the UK and US on 23 March 2026. Most guides still quote 8%.
- Your Square photos will probably get your listings removed. Depop’s rule is absolute: use original photos, and a listing using stock or supplier imagery is taken down.
- Depop SKUs are write-once. Unlike Square’s editable SKU field, a published Depop SKU cannot be changed or reused — you have to delete the listing.
- The counter sale is the dangerous one. Square only decrements stock from its own channels, so a jacket sold over the till stays live on Depop until something tells it otherwise.
- Cost: from £9/month. There is no free plan, but every new account gets a 7-day free trial.
On this page
- Why a shop adds Depop
- What Depop actually costs now
- The photo rule that removes listings
- Square catalogue against a Depop listing
- SKUs behave differently, and it matters
- The double-sell problem, and why it is worse for a shop
- How to crosslist with FLUF Connect
- What syncs, and the gap you cover
- Shipping, protection and getting paid
- What it costs
- Sources and verification
Why a shop adds Depop
If you run a vintage shop, a thrift store, a charity shop or a market stall on Square, your stock is already catalogued. It has names, prices, SKUs, photographs and per-location counts. What it does not have is an audience beyond the people who walk past your door.
Depop is a very large audience of exactly the buyers your stock suits. Its last full set of published figures showed 55.6 million registered users at the end of 2025, 7.0 million active buyers — up 37.7% year on year — and 3.2 million active sellers, up 41.1%. Gross merchandise sales were $1,074.9m for 2025, up 36.3%. Ninety-three per cent of that was apparel, 74% of it from US buyers, and 92% of it happened in the app.
The audience skews young, though not as young as the folklore suggests. The current published claim is that 87% of Depop buyers over the past year were under 34 — not the “90% under 26” figure that still circulates.
One ownership correction, because it is very recent and most articles have it wrong. Depop was bought by Etsy in 2021, but eBay completed its acquisition of Depop on 30 July 2026 for around $1.4bn. Depop’s own guidance says accounts will not be merged with eBay and there are no planned changes to fees or payments at present. If you read that Depop is Etsy-owned, the page is out of date.
Depop is also unusually explicit about welcoming this workflow. Its guidance for business and charity sellers states plainly that it works closely with crosslisting tools via API connection, and its own bulk-import tool tells sellers they can add subsequent items through the app, the website, or a crosslisting service. You are not working against the grain here.
What Depop actually costs now
The fee structure changed twice in ways that most published guidance has not caught up with.
| Where you sell from | Selling fee | Payment processing | Boost |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 0% | 2.9% + £0.30 | 12% |
| United States | 0% | 3.3% + $0.45 | 12% |
| Australia | 0% | 2.6% + A$0.30 | 8% |
| Rest of world | 10% | PayPal’s rate | 8% |
The selling fee was removed in the UK in March 2024, in the US in July 2024 and in Australia in July 2026. Processing is charged on the item price plus shipping and any applicable taxes, and it reverses automatically if you refund. Boosting went from 8% to 12% in the UK and US on 23 March 2026, on new listings — if a guide tells you boosting costs 8% in Britain, it is more than a year out of date.
There is also a buyer-side Marketplace fee of up to 5% of the item price plus up to £1 or $1, shown at checkout. It does not come out of your payout, but it raises what the buyer pays, and sellers report it dampening conversion. As one put it: “As a buyer the depop fees stop me from buying too and it sucks cz sellers will have very reasonable prices sometimes.”
Put in shop terms: a £40 jacket with £3.49 postage costs you 2.9% of £43.49 plus 30p, so about £1.56. Boost it and add 12% of £40, taking it to roughly £6.36. The same £40 taken over the counter on Square costs 1.75% — about 70p. That gap is not a reason to skip Depop, but it should shape which stock you list and what you price it at.
The photo rule that removes listings
This is the single most likely reason a shop’s first Depop listings disappear, and it is worth reading before you do anything else.
Depop’s selling guidance is unambiguous: always use original photos, and your listing will be removed if you use stock images. If your Square catalogue is populated with supplier photography, manufacturer shots or anything lifted from a brand’s website — as boutique catalogues very often are — those images cannot be used, and pushing them across produces removals rather than sales.
Even where your photographs are your own, they were shot for the wrong purpose. Square recommends roughly 2000 by 2000 pixels at a 1:1 ratio, which produces one flat, evenly lit, front-on frame per item designed to be recognisable on a till screen. Depop is 92% app, expects up to eight images, and rewards detail shots, texture, flaws and something that reads as styling rather than stock control.
One honest caveat on the number: Depop’s own help centre contradicts itself, with one article saying four photos and one video and a newer one referring to making use of the eight-image feature. Treat eight as the working maximum and check in the app before you build a process around it.
Square catalogue against a Depop listing
Square holds a genuinely detailed item record — names up to 512 characters, HTML descriptions up to 65,535, up to 250 variations across six options, SKUs, barcodes, per-location price and stock overrides. It is a shop system, and the gaps show up exactly where a shop system would have them.
| Depop needs | Square holds | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| Category and subcategory from Depop’s fashion tree | Whatever you typed — “Rail 3”, “Denim”, “£10 bin” | Full remap. A missing value does not just rank badly; it drops the item out of the filter entirely. |
| Brand | No native field | Usually sits in the item name, or nowhere. Must be extracted. |
| Size | A free-text variation name | Normalise to Depop’s values. |
| Condition | Nothing at all | A till does not record whether the jacket has a cuff mark. For a vintage shop this is the biggest single gap. |
| Colour, up to two, and style | Sometimes a variation, usually prose | Map or infer. |
| Plain-text description, five hashtags plus two brand hashtags | Up to 65,535 characters of HTML | A dumped HTML description is unrenderable, and Depop warns that excess irrelevant information can harm exposure. |
| One listing per physical item | One item with a stock count and up to 250 variations | See below — this is structural. |
The one-item-per-listing point deserves spelling out, because Depop’s own SKU guidance states it in the clearest possible terms: a t-shirt in three sizes and two colours needs six SKUs, one per combination. A Square item with a size set and a count of five has to be exploded into up to five separate listings, each with its own photographs, price and SKU.
For a vintage or thrift shop this is far less painful than it sounds, because the stock is genuinely one-of-one already. For a boutique holding depth in multiple sizes, it is real work.
SKUs behave differently, and it matters
Depop supports SKUs, and it recommends them specifically for sellers who manage stock across channels or already use an offline inventory system — which is precisely the shop described on this page. But they do not behave like Square’s.
Depop SKUs are unique and write-once. Once published, a SKU cannot be repeated or edited; to change one you have to remove the original listing and start again. Square’s SKUs are editable free-form strings, and plenty of shops recycle codes across seasons or renumber a rail after a reorganisation. Do that with Depop SKUs in play and you get collisions you cannot fix in place.
Two practical consequences. Decide your SKU scheme before you list rather than after, and make it globally unique rather than shelf-relative — a code that means “third rail, fourth hanger” will be wrong the moment you move the rail. And be aware that Depop SKUs are searchable only within the Selling Hub on the website, not in the app, so the till and the phone are not interchangeable for stock lookups.
The double-sell problem, and why it is worse for a shop
Every crosslisting page mentions overselling. For a shop running Square it is materially more dangerous than for a pure online seller, for four specific reasons.
Square only sees its own sales. Stock counts decrement from the point-of-sale app, Square Invoices and orders shipped through Square Online — and nothing else. A Depop sale is invisible to Square, and a counter sale is invisible to Depop. Square does set a sold-out flag automatically when a count reaches zero, per location, but nothing carries that signal across on its own.
Your stock is one-of-one. A vintage shop has a quantity of one on nearly everything. There is no buffer at all: the first over-the-counter sale makes the Depop listing a liability the same minute.
A shop sells faster than you can update. A Saturday on a market stall is dozens of transactions with no natural pause to open an app. A purely online seller is working through a queue they control.
The penalty is automatic and financial. If you cannot ship, the order is cancelled — in the US automatically after ten days, with a full refund to the buyer. Refunds against a zero balance push you into a negative Depop balance, and new sales are consumed until it clears. Cancellations also count against the disputes threshold in Depop’s Top Seller criteria, which requires disputes under 3% of lifetime sales.
Buyers notice, and say so publicly. One posted: “Can sellers please keep track of what they sell? This is like the 3rd time this has happened to me. don’t sell the same item in different places if you can’t ensure people don’t double purchase.” A reply described the same thing from the other side — a seller who had sold the item elsewhere and simply stopped responding.
The counterpoint is worth keeping in view too, from a seller in the same thread: “I crosslist on 5 platforms and I have never once made this mistake.” It is a solvable problem. It is just not solvable by hand at shop speed.
How to crosslist with FLUF Connect
Square connects through a standard authorisation you approve once, and reads your catalogue — items, variations, prices, SKUs, images and per-location stock — directly through Square’s own API. There is nothing to leave running.
Depop is reached through your own signed-in Depop session rather than a server-to-server API, so pushes there are paced deliberately rather than fired all at once.
The mapping work is where the value is. FLUF Connect maps your Square categories onto Depop’s fashion taxonomy, extracts brand from the item name where it is there, normalises variation names into Depop’s size values, converts your HTML description into the plain text Depop expects, and explodes a multi-quantity Square item into the separate listings Depop’s model requires. Condition is the field it will ask you for rather than guess, because Square never captured it and inventing it would be inventing the product description.
On photographs, the honest advice is the same as the section above: the pictures are the work. No tool can turn a supplier image into an original one, and no tool can photograph the cuff mark. Budget time for reshooting, and treat the crosslisting as the part that stops being manual afterwards.
What syncs, and the gap you cover
| Event | What happens |
|---|---|
| An item sells on Depop | Detected automatically. Depop order sync picks the sale up and the Square stock is dropped, along with any other channel carrying it. |
| An item sells over the counter on Square | Not detected automatically. Square order sync is not implemented, so mark the item sold in FLUF Connect and the fan-out to Depop and everywhere else runs from there. |
| You change a price or description | Pushed out to the channels carrying that item. |
| A listing goes stale on Depop | Relisting is supported and included in every plan. |
Be clear-eyed about row two, because it is the row that matches your actual risk. The direction that is not yet automatic is the one you use most — the till. Until Square order sync ships, marking counter sales in FLUF Connect is the habit that keeps Depop honest, and it is worth building into your close-of-day routine rather than trusting to memory on a busy Saturday.
One thing worth saying plainly on relisting: Depop’s own documentation states that newer items are only slightly favoured in search and that recency has significantly less influence than other factors. The widespread belief that constant refreshing is the main lever is not supported by what Depop publishes — one seller described spending six hours a day refreshing 300 listings. Depop’s stated levers are relevance, accurate description, using all the image slots, and boost.
Shipping, protection and getting paid
Depop Shipping runs on Evri in the UK and USPS in the US, issuing a QR code by email for drop-off along with a printable label, and tracking is handled for you. You can use your own postage instead, but it must be tracked and you add the tracking manually.
Two traps for a shop owner specifically.
Do not select Depop Shipping and then post it yourself. If you choose a Depop label you must use it — posting through your own courier account voids seller protection and the order may be automatically cancelled and refunded. For someone used to walking parcels to their own courier, this is exactly the habit that costs an order.
Do not hand a Depop order over the counter. A local buyer offering to collect sounds efficient and voids both buyer and seller protection. It is an uninsured transaction on both sides.
Seller protection itself is UK and US only, requires a Depop Shipping label used within five days of the sale, and is capped at £250 or $300 including item price, shipping and taxes.
Payouts run through Depop Payments. Using a Depop label you are paid two to three working days after tracking shows delivered, or ten working days after the sale, whichever comes first. Arranging your own shipping, you wait the full ten working days regardless — so own-postage is meaningfully slower to cash as well as riskier.
What it costs
FLUF Connect starts at £9/month on Starter, covering 300 products, with Growth at £19/month for 1,000. There is no free plan, though every new account gets 7 days of full access with no card required. Relisting, offers and bulk operations are included in every plan rather than sold as add-ons.
Sources and verification
Checked against Depop’s and Square’s own documentation in August 2026, with Depop’s published article update dates where available. Both platforms revise these pages regularly.
- Depop seller fees and charges — 0% selling fee in UK, US and Australia; processing rates; the 12% boost
- Depop Marketplace fee — the buyer-side charge
- Selling on Depop — the original-photos rule
- How to list an item — hashtags, required fields, drafts
- How to use SKUs on Depop — write-once behaviour and per-variant SKUs
- How Depop ranks search results — recency has less influence than believed
- How to ship, US — the 10-day auto-cancellation
- How payouts work, UK — payout timing and negative balances
- Depop Protection for sellers — the 5-day label rule and cover limits
- Selling as a charity or business — Depop on working with crosslisting tools
- Top Seller criteria — the 3% disputes threshold
- Etsy FY2025 Form 10-K — Depop users, buyers, sellers, GMS and buyer age
- Etsy completes sale of Depop, 30 July 2026
- Square CatalogItem reference — field limits
- Square inventory tracking — which channels decrement stock
- Square sold-out behaviour
- Square image guidance — 2000 by 2000, 1:1
- Square UK pricing
Deliberately omitted: Depop Shipping label prices, which Depop does not publish; any Depop title or description character limit; app download counts; and a hard photo maximum, because Depop’s own articles disagree between four and eight.
Related guides
Frequently Asked Questions
In the UK, US and Australia there is no selling fee at all. You pay payment processing — 2.9% + £0.30 in the UK, 3.3% + $0.45 in the US, 2.6% + A$0.30 in Australia — charged on the item price plus shipping and applicable taxes, and it reverses automatically if you refund. Sellers elsewhere in the world still pay a 10% selling fee. There is also a buyer-side Marketplace fee of up to 5% plus up to £1 or $1, which does not come out of your payout but does raise what the buyer pays.
12% in the UK and US, and 8% in Australia and the rest of the world. The UK and US rate rose from 8% to 12% on 23 March 2026 for new listings, so any guide quoting 8% for Britain is more than a year out of date. On a £40 item boosting costs £4.80, which is more than three times the payment processing on the same sale — worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
Only if they are genuinely your own. Depop's rule is absolute: always use original photos, and a listing using stock images will be removed. Boutique catalogues are frequently populated with supplier or manufacturer photography, and pushing those across produces removals rather than sales. Even your own Square photos were shot for a till screen — flat, front-on, one per item — whereas Depop is 92% app-based and expects several images including detail and flaw shots.
It has to become up to five separate listings. Depop is one listing per physical item, and its own SKU guidance states the consequence plainly: a t-shirt in three sizes and two colours needs six SKUs, one per combination. For a vintage or thrift shop this is barely a constraint because the stock is genuinely one-of-one already, but for a boutique holding depth across sizes it is real additional work.
Because they are write-once. A published Depop SKU is unique and cannot be repeated or edited — to change one you must delete the listing and start again. Square SKUs are editable free-form strings, and plenty of shops recycle codes between seasons or renumber a rail after reorganising. Decide a globally unique scheme before you list, avoid shelf-relative codes like “rail 3, hanger 4”, and note that Depop SKUs are searchable only in the Selling Hub on the website, not in the app.
You cannot fulfil, and the penalties are automatic. In the US an unshipped order is cancelled after ten days with a full refund to the buyer. Refunds against a zero balance push you into a negative Depop balance, and new sales are consumed until it clears. Cancellations also count towards the disputes threshold in Depop's Top Seller criteria, which requires disputes below 3% of lifetime sales. Buyers post about repeat offenders publicly, so it costs reputation as well as money.
Not on its own. Square decrements stock only from its own point-of-sale app, Square Invoices and orders shipped through Square Online — nothing external. It does automatically mark an item sold out when a count reaches zero, per location, but nothing carries that signal to Depop by itself. Through FLUF Connect a Depop sale is detected and the Square stock dropped automatically; the direction that still needs you is the counter sale, which is the one you make most often.
You can, but read the rule first. If you select Depop Shipping you must use the label Depop generates — posting it through your own courier account instead voids seller protection and the order may be automatically cancelled and refunded. If you want to use your own postage, choose that option at the outset and add tracking manually. Own postage is also slower to cash: you are paid ten working days after the sale, rather than two to three working days after delivery.
They can, but it voids protection on both sides. Depop's buyer and seller protection both exclude in-person handovers and anything paid outside Depop checkout, so a collection arrangement is an uninsured transaction for you and for them. Seller protection is in any case UK and US only, requires a Depop Shipping label used within five days of the sale, and is capped at £250 or $300 including item price, shipping and taxes.
Probably not, despite how widely it is believed. Depop's own documentation says newer items are only slightly favoured in search and that recency has significantly less influence than other factors. One seller described spending six hours a day refreshing 300 listings on the strength of that belief. The levers Depop actually names are relevance, an accurate description, using all the available image slots, and boosting — which is a rather different use of a shopkeeper's time.