If 2023 was the year resale became more widely adopted, 2024 was the year of the resale fee wars.
For years, resale platforms have implemented seller and/or buyer fees to offset the costs of payment processing, website hosting and marketing. However, as resale became a more crowded space, platforms started tinkering with fees to make themselves more attractive to users. In the last 12 months, eBay, Mercari, Poshmark and Depop all changed their fee structures, sometimes multiple times. When announcing updates, resale platforms often said they wanted to make buying and selling “as easy as possible.”
In some of the cases, users applauded these policy changes. For instance, sellers praised Depop and eBay U.K. for lowering their selling fees to 0% in July and October, respectively. Not all changes were welcomed, however. In October, Poshmark sparked seller outcry after lowering fees for sellers but upping them for buyers — a move sellers worried would lead buyers to abandon purchases at checkout. In December, Mercari said it was getting rid of its 0% selling fee — something it had implemented in March — and passing fees onto buyers and sellers alike. Responding to the Mercari change, one user wrote on Reddit, “They literally said[,] ‘Now everyone gets to be unhappy.'”
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