Starting To Sell On Depop? Keep These Facts In Mind!

I wrote earlier this week about navigating Depop from a buyer’s point of view, but it’s equally — if not more — important to understand the tool you’re using from a seller’s point of view.

To recap, I’ve been buying and selling items on Depop for over two and a half years now. 2018 feels so close yet so far. I’ve had moderate success — I’ve sold over 70 items — and I’ve been featured on the explore page once for an item. That basically was 20 seconds of fame which I will never forget.

I’m miles away from becoming a “Top Seller”, however. Those are a different breed of people.

To become a “Top Seller”, I’m pretty confident you have to be selling at least 25 items per month. It’s a pretty far reach, and from my understanding, someone would have to make Depop basically become their full-time job in order to achieve something like that. Which, honestly sounds like a pretty dope job, to be honest.

Nevertheless, IMO it’s kind of a f*cked up, self-serving program to become a Top Seller. If you smash through that threshold and receive the blue verified check mark, it’s basically just an endless circle-jerk that Depop provides, which effectively makes the “rich” richer, and pumps up all of their sales.

“Have you met xXSellerXx? Check out their vintage pieces…”

Etc. They promote the big guys, and as a result, those Top Sellers get hundreds to thousands of ensuing sales. This program isn’t super supportive of the smaller stores and undiscovered talented curators and sellers that are also out there.

There isn’t an algorithm that connects your style interests with the promoted sellers either, so often the stores recommended to me are vintage, cheesy y2k, or men’s clothing, which are all styles I’m not particularly interested in.

There I go dissecting problematic functions again. I digress.

To have at least a basic understanding of how this selling-thing works on Depop, I’ve compiled some quick ideas you should keep in mind as a newb.

Make sure that you:

• Read Depop’s Reddit page for tips.

This is an awesome opportunity to catch up on current events on Depop. Algorithm updates, feature updates, style trends, etc.

There is constantly amazing gossip and tips swirling around there. It’s not a great place to advertise your items, although I see people still do in addition to asking questions about curating their profile in order to reach a higher audience.

I don’t exactly know how I feel about that, since there are Facebook groups dedicated to showing off your store to receive affirmation and new followers.

Otherwise, the Subreddit offers an FAQ, questions, answers, technical support discussions, and tips to conquer the algorithm. I highly recommend searching your questions here first for opinions and/or troubleshooting.

• Pick a style of clothing to represent your shop.

Most successful shops right now are busting out thousands of “1990–2000’s Y2K”, which is basically the weird sh*t we used to wear in elementary school. “We” being young millennials and old gen z’s. Anyone who was in elementary school from 1999–2007 or so.

It’s important to brand yourself, and by extension your profile/store. If you are — like most of us (IMO) — just trying to get your old stuff out and make some kind of money off it, and don’t really have a general “style” for your store, don’t feel bad!

I couldn’t figure out what mine was for the longest time. I had stuff from the 2010’s — Abercrombie, American Eagle, Brandy Melville, etc. All things that were absolutely not my style anymore, and I wanted them all gone. I think that sometimes I’m embarrassed by my style development — I went from pretty girly to preferring boyish pretty quickly. (I’ve sold a ton of skirts on Depop.)

Because I realized a large part of my clothes that I was selling were typically girly brand, 2010–2019 inspired clothing, that was the label I made for myself.

It doesn’t matter that this style doesn’t represent me now, it’s what works to represent my Depop store. Don’t sweat it.

• Use a static background when shooting items.

When I started off on Depop, I was taking pictures of my items laying flat on my bed over a cute patterned comforter duvet which served as the “background”.

I was constantly getting requests to try on the items, so at a certain point I started just “modeling” them for pictures to upload to my store. BUT, like an idiot, I was posting mirror selfies — which, let’s be honest — aren’t the best quality. It shows a lack of commitment, in my opinion, and doesn’t automatically attract a buyer to your item.

Scrolling from bottom to top of my listings on my profile will really show and prove the progression of my listing tactics. From laying flat to mirror selfies, and then balancing my phone on random surfaces to take timed photos to purchasing a bluetooth photo “clicker” that automatically takes the photo for me, and now finally utilizing consistent backgrounds.

The key is to keep posting your generalized style and keep the backgrounds in your pictures static. Over time, people will catch on and appreciate your profile and listings.

However, I know that when I search for random things, I’ve often seen random items haphazardly photographed on a bed or floor, and it’s totally shocking when they actually sell. Meanwhile, the item I was featured for, and has over 350 likes, has not sold yet. Okay…

• Compare your item prices with other seller’s.

This is, as you are uploading. Consider the competition!

Generally, most Depop sellers set a price just slightly above what they’re looking for. They expect lowlifes like me to ask for a couple dollars decrease.

It’s a buyers market! Why not try to get the best deal you can?

As for the shipping options —

Keep your eyes peeled — Depop will automatically make the listing “Seller pays for shipping”, suggesting that the potential of your item selling is twice as likely (in terms of what time span, I don’t know).

While true, people are generally going to be leaning towards purchasing an item with free shipping, it’s super weird that this is an automatic function. When shipping large items, a seller might have to pay over $10 of their own money to ship something. For a f*ck up like that, I would definitely be complaining to Depop.

• Commonly refresh your items after posting.

Refreshing your posts — or going into “edit” them and immediately pressing “save” — sends your posts to the tops of your item’s category.

Despite that, people are constantly posting. You’re going to need to do a lot of refreshing to get your posts seen. There is so much content on Depop at this point in time, it’s a competitive market, even though maybe your posts look clearly like a lot of effort has been put into them.

With great power comes great responsibility.

While each item mentioned above is imperative for a basic understanding of how the Depop world rotates, there are some notes that are important NOT to do.

For example, don’t:

• Message someone who just liked your item, sending a copy and pasted note about your sale or other self-promotion tactics.
• Tag your item listing to hell with random keywords, or misrepresent what brand/where your item was bought from.
• Comment on a listing and ask for “lowest [$]?”

Unfortunately, Depop doesn’t have the best notification structures. You can’t opt out of getting notifications for receiving likes or follows, which ultimately don’t really mean anything, because those don’t really mean anything in the big picture. Yes, getting your items getting liked does mean they have a higher chance of being found/seen, but it’s not something worth opening the app for.

I am constantly confusing notifications for messages on my listings with messages I receive for commenting on other people’s listings. As a result, I’m often set up for disappointment. I’ve read that some people on Reddit turn their notifications off in total, but check in once or twice a day to see if there are comments or sales, but that honestly feels a little too risky for me.

Enjoy!