Why I only ever buy on Vinted

I went through a year and a half of my own Vinted orders recently for a different post and noticed something I hadn't clocked before: every single one of them is a purchase. Sixty-odd orders, over two hundred items, and not one instance of me being the seller. It's a one-way habit, and I don't think that was ever a decision — until I sat down to write this and had to actually defend it.

The advice I've never taken

Frugality writing treats selling your old stuff as close to free money — photograph it, list it, post it, bank the difference. I believe that's true. I've just never done it, despite presumably having a wardrobe's worth of things sitting exactly as idle as the ones I keep buying from other people.

The same mistake I already wrote about

The honest reason looks a lot like the argument from the certification post: comparing a small amount of money against a real cost in time is often the wrong comparison to make at all. A used t-shirt might list for three or four pounds. Photographing it properly, writing a description, answering questions from a buyer, packaging it, and getting to a post office is easily half an hour, spread across several sittings whenever someone actually bites. Three pounds for half an hour of intermittent admin doesn't clear the bar, and it's never cleared it consistently enough for me to start.

So the clothes go to a charity shop instead, in a bag, in five minutes, for nothing. That's a worse financial outcome and a better time outcome, and I'd been treating it as an oversight rather than a trade I was making on purpose.

Where the maths might change

The admin cost is mostly fixed per listing, not per item — which suggests the actual failure isn't selling individually, it's never having let anything build up into a lot worth doing all at once. A single afternoon photographing and listing a whole bag's worth might clear the bar in a way that one t-shirt at a time never will. I haven't tried it. This post is mostly a note to actually run that version of the experiment before writing the next one.

Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any, and this one's really about time, not money.