EBay’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop highlights a new phase in resale, where cross-listing tools, centralized search infrastructure, and marketplace consolidation are reshaping how secondhand fashion is distributed.
If you buy or sell secondhand fashion, the experience is about to become more centralized for two of the industry’s biggest players. EBay has agreed to acquire Depop from Etsy for approximately $1.2 billion in cash. The companies said the transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Depop will retain its name, brand, and app.
Depop generated roughly $1 billion in annual gross merchandise sales in 2025, including nearly 60 percent year-over-year growth in the U.S. market, with more than 7 million active buyers — nearly 90 percent of them under age 34 — and more than 3 million active sellers, according to the companies’ announcement.
“Depop has built a trusted, social-forward marketplace with strong momentum in the pre-loved fashion category, and we are confident that as part of eBay, Depop will be even more well-positioned for long-term growth, benefiting from our scale, complementary offerings, and operational capabilities,” Jamie Ianonne, Chief Executive Officer of eBay, said in a statement. “This acquisition presents an opportunity to advance one of our newest and fastest-growing Focus Categories with a marketplace that complements our existing presence, and enables us to reach a younger demographic across the expanding recommerce landscape.”
EBay said it plans to expand the visibility of Depop’s listings, including through cross-listing. That means items currently listed only inside the Depop app could surface more broadly within eBay’s fashion searches.
Etsy acquired Depop in 2021 for approximately $1.6 billion. “We are proud of what the Depop team has built — a truly differentiated brand and product, grounded in clear purpose and strong community — becoming one of the fastest-growing fashion resale marketplaces in the U.S.,” said Kruti Patel Goyal, Chief Executive Officer of Etsy. “I am confident that Depop is well-positioned for its next phase of growth as part of eBay.”
Peter Semple, chief executive officer of Depop, said the platform is “thrilled” to begin this next chapter with eBay, praising the platform’s expertise in the C2C fashion space and a “shared belief in people, opportunity, and a more sustainable future positions us to meaningfully accelerate our marketplace in the U.S. and beyond,” he said, adding that the transaction is “a testament to the significant growth we have delivered as we have evolved our product experience and strengthened our brand’s place in the world. We’re very grateful to Kruti and the Etsy team for their partnership in advancing Depop’s business and mission to make fashion circular.”
Secondhand reseller ThredUp noted in its 2025 Resale Report that the global secondhand apparel market will reach $367 billion by 2029 and grow 2.7 times faster than the overall global apparel market. The report also found that more than half of consumers purchased secondhand apparel in the past year, with younger generations leading participation.
Analysts say resale’s next growth phase is infrastructural; McKinsey & Company notes that resale continues to attract value-driven consumers amid inflationary pressure. As buyers diversify where they shop, sellers increasingly diversify where they list. “Consumers see resale as a channel where they can look for value and uniqueness,” Gemma D’Auria, McKinsey Senior Partner says. “There are a lot of exciting developments in this space that will continue to define the sector.” For eBay, which has invested heavily in sneakers, authentication, and luxury resale, Depop brings a younger audience and a distinctly social interface. For Depop, the move provides global distribution capacity without requiring a shift in identity.
The cross-listing economy
Behind the scenes, resellers have already been operating inside a parallel ecosystem of tools designed to solve one problem: duplication.
Software platforms such as Vendoo, List Perfectly, OneShop, and Flyp allow sellers to publish a single listing across multiple marketplaces — including eBay, Depop, Poshmark, Mercari, and Facebook Marketplace — and automatically delist items once they sell. These services emerged in response to a fragmented resale landscape in which visibility is platform-specific and search algorithms differ.
The logic is straightforward: the more marketplaces an item appears on, the higher its likelihood of selling. But the operational cost is real. Sellers must manage varying fee structures, shipping rules, and audience behaviors. A dress might attract offers quickly on Depop, sit longer on eBay, and command different pricing signals on Poshmark.
EBay’s explicit mention of expanding Depop listing visibility, including through cross-listing, could signal a potential recalibration. If Depop inventory can be surfaced directly inside eBay’s global search infrastructure — without requiring third-party software — that reduces the need for external duplication at least between those two platforms. EBay operates at a scale that smaller resale apps cannot match in global reach and search depth. Integrating Depop listings into that ecosystem could increase liquidity — the speed and probability with which inventory converts to sales — while keeping Depop’s social-native interface intact.
For professional resellers, centralized distribution may streamline operations. For casual sellers, it may eliminate the learning curve associated with multi-platform posting. For buyers, it concentrates supply, increasing discovery within a single search environment. And while the culture of resale may remain decentralized and personality-driven, the infrastructure increasingly may not.
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