Where to Sell Clothes Online in the US: Vinted vs Poshmark vs Depop vs Mercari

There is no single winner

Every comparison of US resale apps opens with a fee table and closes with a recommendation. This one opens with a warning: the headline percentage is the least useful number in the whole comparison, because an item that does not sell earns you exactly nothing regardless of the fee.

Four platforms dominate everyday clothing resale in the US, and they have genuinely different economics. Two charge sellers no commission at all. One takes a fifth of every sale above $15. One takes 10% but calculates it on a base that includes shipping. Meanwhile, three of the four charge the buyer a fee that most seller-focused comparisons never mention, even though it changes what your item costs the person deciding whether to buy it.

Below, all of it in one place, with each figure sourced to the platform's own published page and dated. Then the part the fee table cannot answer: who is actually shopping where.

The fees, side by side

What you keep on a $40 item

Percentages are abstract. Here is the same $40 sweater on all four, with $6 of shipping where the platform does not set it.

Two things jump out.

The gap between best and worst on the seller side is $8 on a $40 item — a fifth of the price. That is real money if you are shifting volume, and close to irrelevant if you are clearing one wardrobe.

The buyer's total is much closer than the seller's payout. On Vinted the buyer pays a fee that Poshmark's buyer does not; on Poshmark the seller absorbs a commission that Vinted's seller does not. From the shopper's point of view, the four platforms are far more similar than the fee tables suggest, which is exactly why the fee is not what decides where your item sells.

Who is actually shopping there

This is the part that decides your outcome, and it is also the part where honest numbers are hardest to find. The figures below come from third-party analyses and company statements, not from a single comparable source, and several are dated. Treat them as rough shape, not as a scoreboard.

Poshmark is the established US incumbent for everyday and mid-market fashion, with a large registered user base — the last widely cited figure, around 80 million registered users, dates from 2022, before Naver acquired the company in 2023 and stopped reporting it separately. Its distinguishing feature is social: sharing, parties, and a community rhythm that rewards daily activity.

Mercari is broad rather than fashion-specific — electronics, home goods and toys sit alongside clothing — with third-party figures putting its active buyer base at roughly 134 million globally and around 70% of that in the US. If your item is not fashion, this is often the one.

Depop is the youngest audience by a wide margin: third-party analyses put roughly 90% of its users under 26, with around 2.5 million active sellers. That is a specific buyer, and it is the reason vintage, Y2K, thrift flips and streetwear do well there while classic workwear does not.

Vinted is the newcomer in the US, having launched in January 2026 with New York as its first market. Its European base is enormous, but that does not transfer directly: US buyer density is what will determine whether your items sell, and six months in, that is still building. What it has in the meantime is far less competition for search terms and far fewer sellers fighting for the same shopper.

What each platform asks of your photos

Different display formats, different first impressions, one underlying truth: the first photo is the entire advertisement.

Photo limits move — Depop's own help pages have carried both a four-image and an eight-image figure at different points — so check what the app offers you rather than trusting any table, including this one.

What matters more than the count is what the first frame does. On a dense grid of thumbnails, a garment photographed flat on a bed, dimly lit and slightly crumpled, is indistinguishable from the forty around it. The listings that stop a thumb show the garment clearly, in decent light, filling the frame, ideally in a way that lets someone imagine wearing it.

That is the same advice on all four platforms, which is convenient: shoot once, use everywhere. We go into the specifics of the first frame in the first photo that actually sells, the full setup in the complete photo guide, and the question of worn-look images in AI worn photos, what they can and can't do. If the question you actually have is whether to use AI photography at all across these marketplaces, that is its own subject: AI photos for reselling on Poshmark, Depop and Mercari.

The rules are not the same either

Fee structures are published clearly. Photo and content rules are not, and the differences matter if you use any kind of editing.

Mercari is reported by multiple third-party sources to prohibit stock, catalog and web-sourced images — we could not locate that wording verbatim on its help centre, so treat it as consistently reported rather than as a quotation.

Depop's terms of service make the seller responsible for the accuracy of AI-generated content, including output from its own description-from-photo feature. That is a responsibility clause, not a prohibition.

Vinted's catalog rules require photos of the actual item, taken by you, shown as it is.

Poshmark's community guidelines set out general honesty principles; we did not find an explicit clause about AI or edited imagery in them.

Which one for which seller

You are clearing a family wardrobe of everyday clothes. Vinted's model fits this best: no commission on items that are individually worth little, and no expectation of daily activity. Mercari is the alternative if your pile includes non-clothing items.

You have mid-market and mall brands, and you enjoy the community side. Poshmark. The 20% is the price of a mature US buyer base and a discovery system that rewards showing up. If you will not show up, the maths gets worse.

Your items are vintage, Y2K, streetwear or thrift flips. Depop, comfortably. The audience skew that makes it wrong for everything else makes it right for this, and there is no selling commission on the sale.

You are selling a mix, including electronics or homeware. Mercari, which is a general marketplace with a clothing section rather than a fashion app.

You are selling genuine luxury. None of the four is really the answer. Authentication-focused platforms exist for a reason, and buyer expectations around provenance are different enough that it is a separate decision.

One platform or several?

The obvious move is to list everywhere and let the market decide. It is a reasonable strategy, with one real cost and one hidden one.

The real cost is delisting discipline. When an item sells on Poshmark, it has to come off Vinted, Depop and Mercari within minutes, not by the weekend. Selling something you no longer have produces a cancellation, and cancellations damage exactly the seller reputation you are trying to build. Crosslisting tools exist to automate this, and they are the reason the category exists at all.

The hidden cost is learning speed. Four platforms means four sets of feedback muddled together, and it takes far longer to work out whether a listing failed because of the photo, the price or the audience. One platform gives you a clean signal.

The pragmatic sequence: pick the platform that matches most of your pile, get your listing routine down to minutes per item, then add a second. If listing is still an evening's work per item, adding platforms multiplies a problem rather than solving one.

The bottom line

The fee difference between the cheapest and most expensive of these four is about a fifth of your sale price. The difference between an item that sells and one that does not is the whole of it. Pick on audience fit first, verify the current fees yourself before you price, and put the effort you save into the photo, because that is the part every platform judges you on identically.

If Vinted is the one you landed on, the mechanics — labels, the protection window, what changes coming from Poshmark — are in our guide to selling on Vinted in the US. Whichever you pick, the fraud patterns differ by platform too, and knowing them in advance is cheaper than learning them: reselling scams in the US, platform by platform.

FAQ: Choosing a US Resale Marketplace

Sources

Fee figures verified against each platform's own published pages on 31 July 2026:

• Vinted Help Centre — Buyer Protection fee and How shipping works; Vinted Group Newsroom — Vinted has landed in New York
• Poshmark — Fee Policy, What are the fees for selling on Poshmark? and What are the shipping rates on Poshmark?
• Depop Newsroom — Depop removes selling fees in the United States; Depop Help Centre — Seller fees and charges (current payment processing rate)
• Mercari Help Centre — Fees on Mercari (10% selling fee, 3.6% buyer protection fee, no payment processing fee, effective 6 January 2025)

Audience and user-base figures are third-party estimates of varying dates, not comparable measurements, and are described as such in the text above. Marketplace fees, policies and thresholds change — check the current version of any page before you rely on it.