ThredUp launches peer-to-peer Direct Listing as Vinted’s CEO tells CNBC secondhand shopping is a structural shift.
Secondhand apparel is becoming a permanent fixture of how people shop, and two of resale’s biggest names made moves this week that point in the same direction. ThredUp opened the beta of Direct Listing, a peer-to-peer selling tool built into its marketplace, while Vinted’s marketplace chief told CNBC the company is watching consumer habits harden around resale as the market matures on both sides of the Atlantic.
ThredUp’s Direct Listing folds an instant, single-item peer-to-peer listing tool into the platform’s existing managed Clean Out service. Sellers have long had to pick between convenience and control: send in a Clean Out Bag and let ThredUp do the work, or list items themselves on a peer-to-peer app. Direct Listing closes that gap, letting sellers post high-value pieces quickly while drawing on ThredUp’s marketplace, technology, and logistics.
“For 15 years, we’ve built the infrastructure that makes resale easy and seamless,” James Reinhart, Co-Founder and CEO of ThredUp, said in a statement. “Along the way, we’ve learned that consumers don’t always want to sell the same way. Sometimes they want to send us a bag and let us do the work. Other times they have a single high-value item they want to sell immediately.” With Direct Listing and a new premium service, he added, “we can now meet them where they are… we believe we can make selling secondhand dramatically easier and more trustworthy while creating a true one-stop shop for resale.”
The tool carries zero seller fees, so sellers keep their full earnings to cash out or reinvest. AI handles the listing work, drawing on ThredUp’s proprietary dataset to remove backgrounds, auto-fill product details, and recommend pricing within minutes. ThredUp manages returns through its distribution centers, removing the dispute-management friction common to traditional P2P apps, and individual listings flow into the main marketplace in front of millions of daily buyers.
The beta numbers suggest the premium angle is working. Direct Listing drove double-digit month-over-month growth in both listings and orders and unlocked a higher-value category of inventory. Nearly 18 percent of Direct Listings were priced above $100, and the average selling price reached $60, more than double the average on ThredUp’s traditional marketplace. Sellers behaved like operators, too, with 74 percent covering shipping costs and 29 percent covering returns to make their listings more competitive. Clean Out Bags remain the simplest way to clear an entire closet, while Direct Listing gives sellers a route for individual, high-value pieces, and the two together let ThredUp serve more selling occasions.
Across the Atlantic, Vinted is seeing the demand side of the same shift. The consumer-to-consumer platform, which lets people sell clothing, electronics, and furniture, has grown quickly as shoppers hunt for value against rising living costs. The value of items sold on the platform grew nearly 50 percent last year as it launched in more European markets.
“It’s a fundamental change in consumption towards second-hand, and I think that is very much here to stay,” Adam Jay, CEO of Vinted Marketplace, told CNBC. “Vinted was growing well before the current economic difficulties, the cost of living crisis, inflation, and has continued to grow well in times of difficulty and stress.”
Jay’s comments followed an €880 million secondary share transaction completed in late April that valued the Lithuanian company at over $9 billion. The deal, led by EQT, brought in institutional investors including Schroders Capital and BlackRock while letting existing shareholders such as Baillie Gifford add to their positions. The company raised no new primary capital, and its cash-positive balance sheet leaves it under little pressure to go public soon, even as its valuation fuels IPO speculation.
Online secondhand apparel is growing at twice the pace of the overall market, according to market research firm GlobalData, and Jay frames the appeal as mutual. “You’ve got this habit being formed, you’ve got this big social impact, climate impact, and that… combines to be the Vinted equation,” he said. The company’s own “Vinted math” describes shoppers who weigh resale value when buying new; users saved €21.6 billion on fashion in 2025 versus retail prices, paying on average 72 percent less, according to its 2025 Impact Report.
Now Vinted is extending that formula beyond fashion and beyond Europe. “It took us a long time before we decided to go beyond fashion, and we really needed to be confident that our fashion marketplace was working right across Europe,” Jay said. The U.S., where Vinted has operated since 2013 but only recently began marketing aggressively, represents an “enormous opportunity,” though success could take “weeks, months, and maybe years.” High shipping costs remain the central obstacle, and the company is building out Vinted Go and Vinted Pay to address logistics and payments.
Those investments are showing up on the bottom line. Net profit fell 19 percent in 2025 even as revenue rose 38 percent to €1.1 billion and gross merchandise value climbed 47 percent to €10.8 billion. Vinted still trails eBay, which reported $79.6 billion in GMV last year and is buying Depop from Etsy for about $1.2 billion to court younger shoppers.
“We’re here for the long term,” Jay said. “We’re trying to make the investments, all of it is the unsexy stuff, make the unsexy investments that make secondhand first choice worldwide.”
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