< p>Vinted began as the online flea market for a Lithuanian student moving apartments and needing to clear out her wardrobe. Wallapop, by contrast, looked more like a Barcelona\u2011based digital market designed for meetups in the metro. By 2025, one revenue line is eleven times larger than the other, and both keep growing. Perhaps the question to ask isn\u2019t which one is winning this clash between two second\u2011hand giants, but what has driven them to do very different things with similarly valued items.<\/p>\n
< p>Wallapop, formerly known as Fleapster.<\/strong> Wallapop was founded on May 23, 2013 in Barcelona under that name, a nod to the famous \u201cflea markets.\u201d Its founders\u2014Agust\u00edn G\u00f3mez, Gerard Oliv\u00e9 and Miguel Vicente\u2014began with the backing of the Antai Venture Builder accelerator and an initial catalog built up by scouring flea markets. The app was designed to meet someone nearby and carry out the exchange in person, so geolocation was essential for this first version.<\/p>\n < p>The team homed in on a couple of ideas that gave the app a definitive boost: shipping a sofa from Seville to Vigo is a hassle, and trust between buyers and sellers grows when the seller is just three streets away. To gain visibility, they handed a portion of the company to Atresmedia in exchange for television advertising space. The result was a campaign that turned \u201c\u00a1Walla!\u201d into a recognizable catchphrase before anyone really understood what it meant.<\/p>\n < p>Vinted, the power of the move.<\/strong> Vinted carries five more years of history. Milda Mitkut\u0117 founded it in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania, when she was 22 and needed to get rid of more than a hundred garments before a move. At a party she met Justas Janauskas, a software engineer who built the first version of the site in ten days. The original name was manodrabuziai.l<\/em> (\u201csecond\u2011hand clothing\u201d in Lithuanian) and in the first version they forgot to include a buy button. The platform expanded to Germany the following year, under the name Kleiderkreisel<\/em>, and Spain only arrived many years later, after Wallapop had already dominated the local market.<\/p>\n < p>Usage differences.<\/strong> The most visible difference between the two platforms, and the one that most strongly shapes user behavior, is who bears the transaction costs. On Vinted the seller pays no commission. It posts, sells, and receives the full price into their wallet. The buyer bears a protection fee of \u20ac0.70 plus 5% of the item price, which covers issue management and withholding payment until receipt is confirmed. Vinted eliminated seller fees in 2023.<\/p>\n < p>In Wallapop, in\u2011person sales carry no commission, which makes it more profitable for sellers of bulky or high\u2011value items. When using Wallapop Env\u00edos (the integrated logistics service in the app, which generated \u20ac74 million in 2024), the platform applies roughly a 10% processing fee on the sale price. There is also a second monetization stream that has grown strongly: visibility services that boost a listing\u2019s prominence generated \u20ac22 million in 2024, up 27.6% from 2023. This is a meaningful revenue source for Wallapop, since it brings money to the platform regardless of whether the sale closes.<\/p>\n < p>The figures.<\/strong> Let\u2019s look at some 2024\u20132025 numbers to gauge the real state of each company. Vinted closed 2024 with \u20ac813 million in revenue, up 36% from the year before, and a net profit of \u20ac76.7 million, a 330% jump from 2023, its first year in the black. In 2025, revenues rose to \u20ac1.1 billion (+38%). However, net profit fell about 19% that year to \u20ac62 million, due to spending on expanding Vinted Go into Spain and Portugal and the launch of Vinted Pay.<\/p>\n < p>Wallapop, for its part, closed 2024 with \u20ac101 million in revenue (+13%), consolidated losses of \u20ac25 million, and the first operational break-even in the Spanish market since its founding. On average, platform users generate between \u20ac2.0 and \u20ac2.5 billion in sales each year, according to the company itself. Since 2013 it has accumulated more than \u20ac120 million in losses, though the trend shows a sustained reduction of those red figures.<\/p>\n < p>Enter Korea.<\/strong> In the same year, Naver, South Korea\u2019s largest tech company, completed in January 2026 the acquisition of 100% of Wallapop in a deal valued at \u20ac600 million. The transaction positions Wallapop as Naver\u2019s European flagship in the recommerce market, joining Poshmark, which already handles similar functions in the United States and which the Korean group acquired in 2023. Seokjoo Han, CEO of Naver Europe, stated in Barcelona that the group plans to use the city as a base to expand into more European cities, leveraging the parent company\u2019s AI and search capabilities.<\/p>\n < p>Southern Europe: here we are.<\/strong> What is happening right now in Spain is the clearest reflection of the sector\u2019s evolution. The market for reused goods in Spain reached \u20ac13.8 billion in 2025, about 0.86% of the national GDP. It\u2019s a market that has grown for years at a rate faster than overall consumption, driven by inflation since 2021. Vinted responded to this situation by launching Vinted Go in 2025. The company already operates this network in five markets (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain), continuing the leap Wallapop took earlier by moving from a second\u2011hand app to built\u2011in delivery infrastructure (though Vinted has its own logistics operator and Wallapop works with InPost).<\/p>\n < p>Wallapop, meanwhile, has been expanding its catalog beyond household items for years. The engine remains one of the categories where it still leads in Spain. The entry of Naver opens the possibility of technological improvements in search and personalization that had previously been out of reach. Both are drawing closer to each other over time: Vinted is less clothing\u2011centric all the time, and Wallapop is becoming increasingly tech\u2011driven.<\/p>\n < p>A personal take and closing thoughts.<\/strong> Without intending to tilt the balance toward one app or another (that isn\u2019t the aim of this piece), I\u2019d like to share a personal experience drawn from my long history of selling leisure items (books, comics, movies, video games). For some time now I\u2019ve noticed how Vinted, which barely allowed buying beyond clothing a couple of years ago, has made a notable leap into collecting: its presence in more European markets makes it easier to buy, for example, imported DVDs and Blu\u2011rays than on Wallapop.<\/p>\n < p>Vinted also tends to be cheaper in many respects\u2014especially given the insurance and commission fees that Wallapop takes, which are not as high on Vinted thanks to its veteran status and financial muscle. And while these are highly personal and potentially partial observations, the search filters and translations are notably better on Vinted. For now the conflict continues, and as always, if you\u2019re into the second\u2011hand market, the best approach is to have accounts on both apps and choose the one that suits the item you\u2019re trying to sell.<\/p>\n < p>En Xataka | I am a five\u2011star seller on Wallapop. Here\u2019s how I survive in this jungle of second\u2011hand goods<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"yoast_head":"\n