Vinted has officially added bikes and e-bikes to the items which can be sold on its app, with door-to-door shipping now also provided too.
The online marketplace has enjoyed a boom in recent years, challenging established selling platforms like eBay and Depop, largely due to gaining popularity with people shopping for second-hand clothes and clearing out their wardrobes. Its no selling fee policy has also proved so popular that eBay has now followed suit to keep up, Vinted also having a fairly strong reputation for reliability and ensuring sellers and buyers are protected and happy with transactions.
If you’re on Vinted you might well have seen bikes on there already, some people having used the platform to advertise their second-hand rides to anyone happy to travel to them and collect them or arrange their own shipping.
However, now Vinted has made bikes and e-bikes an official part of its app and is offering users door-to-door shipping in one to two business days via AnyVan. That’s up to 200kg, or 80kg for disassembled items, so there’ll be no worries for bikes and e-bikes.
With that said, the price of the door-to-door convenience appears to be quite steep; all the bikes we looked at this morning saying they would cost £82.89 to be shipped. If you live local to the seller dropping by to check the bike out in person and talk it through might still be the best option.
One plus over some online second-hand buying experiences is that Vinted has its ‘buyer protection fee’, a mandatory extra that you pay for when you buy on the app and is applied at checkout. Essentially, for orders priced less than £500 it’s a fixed amount between 30p and 80p plus between 3 to 8 per cent of the purchase price. For orders above £500 it’s just 3 per cent of the item’s price (including VAT).
It turns out to be a fairly small extra percentage of an order, for example a £600 bike would have an £18 buyer protection fee, although if you’re getting a good deal in the first place that might not seem like the end of the world.
It means if your purchase doesn’t arrive, arrives damaged, or is significantly not as described then you should get a fairly stress-free refund and be able to return items once you’ve raised the issue in the app. Buyers have two days to confirm their order is acceptable and can raise any issues regarding condition or authenticity of items very easily on the app, users generally finding Vinted’s returns and refunds experience fairly straightforward.
One potential issue, especially when door-to-door delivery is going to cost £82, is that if the seller doesn’t offer to pay for the return then the buyer will presumably have to pay again to get the bike back to seller, as is the case with orders on clothes. This might be a barrier that could put some people off.
Obviously when buying second-hand you want as much info as possible and all the same rules apply about what to look for. Plenty will still want to see their purchase in person before parting with any money, so maybe Vinted’s bike addition won’t be an instant game-changer for buying and selling bikes online.
There’s no shortage of bikes up for sale already. We’ve seen a £300 Cannondale Synapse, a ‘perfect condition’ Pinarello Prince with Di2 Ultegra for £3,299, an ‘only ridden a few times’ Trek Domane AL2 for £450, a Trek Emonda SL5 at £1,150, a Boardman Air 9.2 for £650, and a 2016 Cervelo S3 for £800 with Ultegra and Zipp 404 rim brake wheels.
As ever, we’d quite like these to be being sold locally so we could go and take a look before putting down any money for them, but Vinted’s certainly got our attention as a new place to lose copious amounts of time scrolling through second-hand bikes.
What might be more interesting is parts and components, where postage costs are going to be in the same ballpark as clothes (around £2 or £3 per delivery) and the buyer protection fee will be much smaller too.
A quick scroll this morning found a pair of ‘like-new’ Continental GP5000 tyres being sold for £50, plenty of new new in-box Shimano and SRAM components, and pedals, saddles, seatposts, bars, and the rest of it, all at more wallet-friendly prices than buying new.
Again, you’ll want to be really thorough when inspecting any purchase, but with far less shipping paid than with a full bike, it’s going to be a far smaller deal when trying to get an 11-speed chain for half price.
One other thing worth highlighting here is that in January last year it was announced that digital platforms such as eBay, Etsy and Vinted will now have to collect extra information about the people who sell using their websites and apps and share it with HMRC.
At the time it sparked concerns among sellers, side-hustlers, and New Year garage-clearers that they could end up paying more tax, or at least have to spend time and effort on a self-assessment tax return.
Rumours (incorrectly) spread online of a new tax for people using re-selling sites to earn a bit of money on the side and, with such a busy second-hand market for bikes and components, some may have been left wondering if this applies for those of us using the internet to clear our wardrobes of those old jerseys, and occasionally maybe even selling a bike or two.
The bottom line is there is no new tax. As it was before, online sellers have a £1,000 annual trading allowance from selling personal items, and only after exceeding that will tax need to be paid on profits; the key word here being ‘profits’, i.e. if you’re selling a bike for less than you paid for it (or potentially more, but didn’t sell with the intention of making a profit) then this doesn’t apply to you, even if you’ve sold a bike for considerably more than £1,000.
Have you used Vinted for cycling stuff? Let us know your experience with the app in the comments, we’re interested to hear what bargains people have found and if it’s worth downloading.
5 thoughts on “Is Vinted the new home of cycling bargains? App now lets users buy and sell bikes, e-bikes and parts with door-to-door shipping”
There doesn’t seem to be the
There doesn’t seem to be the option to focus a search geographically, which makes it less attractive for buying a bike (at least to me). My experience of Vinted suggests that sellers don’t provide much text about their items either (which isn’t always a problem but I like them to be clear about what they’re selling, including flaws).
Maybe Vinted will improve these aspects, let’s see. It would be good to have decent competition for an increasingly irritating ebay.
How many of these bikes are
How many of these bikes are stolen?
Probably not that many –
Probably not that many – easier to sell those on FB Marketplace or Gumtree that allow much greater levels of anonymity.
Just be aware of how many
Just be aware of how many fakes make their way on to Vinted – brand new with tags Ralph Lauren shirt for £29? Sure thing!
For tenner you can use the
For tenner you can use the Vinted validation/authetication service. I use it for new cycle clothing. Prices are v good but the validation service is an excellent add on