Selling and Making Money on Depop the Real Secrets
200K Depop Girl
Depop is the way Generation Z shops
In this article, I am going to not only share with you how I make more money than my parents but also have gained massive popularity in the process of becoming a Depop selling Diva.
BEFORE YOU START SELLING ON Depop
If you haven’t heard of Depop yet, where ya been? You can buy, sell and share millions of unique items, vintage & luxury fashion, sneakers, art, illustration, books and records. Build your own community of sellers and buyers. It is the fastest way I know to go from nobody to somebody. I have gained major influencer status just selling on Depop. My customers have become my friends.
All right. So, in this article, I will do my best to try and give you all the basic knowledge that you need to know to be able to sell on Depop.
1. You Gotta Have a Paypal Account
So, the first and foremost thing is that you cannot sell on Depop without a PayPal account. If you want to sell on there, go make yourself an account.
2. You Need to Understand the Commission’s Depop and Paypal Will Subtract from Your Sale Price
I have heard most of my young life, it takes money to make money, however, for me that has not been true, selling on Depop.
The first 20 items I sold came from my own closet as probably did for most Top Depop sellers.
However, you are going to need to take some of the money you make to cover basic fees and business expenses. I don’t drive yet, so I have an Uber take me to the 2nd hand stores where I find my clothes, once a week. Those Uber fees come out of my profits.
The next thing that you need to know is the commission that Depop and PayPal will take. So Depop will take a 10% commission on all the money that the buyer gives you, and PayPal will take and 3.4% commission on any money that goes through their payment system.
So, this will be the item cost plus the postage. Let me give you an example. So, let’s say that you sell something for 10 pounds and you also charge the customer three pounds for postage. So, in total, they pay you 13 pounds. Depop will take one pound thirty, PayPal will take 64 pence, and then you still need to pay the three-pound postage.
So, after all, commission and fees and after postage, you get eight pounds zero six leftovers and sent to your PayPal wallets. I would recommend using a spreadsheet to keep track of all these costs and how much money you’ll be making from each sale.
I’ve got the template that you can use, which I will post at the bottom of this article.
3. You Will Lose Money on Refunds
Something else really important about this that you need to know, if you give somebody a refund, so let’s say you sold a pair of jeans or something. The person bought them and then messaged you going, oh hey, I’m sorry I didn’t realize these weren’t the size that I was expecting, can I please have a refund? (It is not my fault, you couldn’t keep yourself out of the ice cream container, but whatever)
Since you haven’t posted your no refund policy yet, let’s say that you haven’t said all sales are final and you give them a refund, you don’t get all your money back. Depop and PayPal will keep the fees that they’ve taken and you will get about 85% of your money back.
So, that is something important to keep in mind. If all that is sounding okay, let’s move onto your profile.
Yes! I am trying to talk all Whitney butts with no concept of wholesale, retail, and business expenses from trying to sell on Depop.
Clueless spoiled brats don’t need to be buying or selling on Depop in my opinion. They just muddy up waters for all of us.
Ok, you still hanging with me? 🙂
4. Choose Your Username Wisely
You get one user name that you signed up with. So, it’s pretty important to think it through and make sure that it’s something searchable and memorable and kinda sexy or seductive, but not ridiculous!
Something that you know you won’t be particularly ashamed of later. 13YrOldTwerker may not be the best username if you think you might be selling on Depop when you are 19.
Depop has recently put in a slight change to this saying that you can change your username once, but only once.
If your account is in good standing, they haven’t specified what this means. I will have a link to that statement about it below.
The gist of it is basically that you just email them directly, give them your current username and what you want to change too, and they sort it out for you, but once you’ve changed it, that’s it.
You can’t change it again. Something quite important on your profile is your bio. So here you can put information about yourself, about any terms and conditions that you have about your sales.
Some people won’t ship internationally and that’s fine as long as you let people know. Some people will do swaps and some people don’t. Other people offer returns and other people won’t. So, clarifying things like this in your bio can be really useful.
5. Clearly Stated Policies Create More Buyers
I think putting some information about yourself can be a good use of the space because the bio is quite short. I would personally recommend getting an FAQ post so this could cover specifics. In mine, I put about making offers. I talk about standard postage or international postage and other terms and conditions that I would like people to know if they’re going to be making purchases from me.
Again there are a lot of spoiled brat buyers that have no clue about anything and are surprised that it cost more to send a package across the ocean than it does down the street.
6. Know What You Can Sell and What You Can’t
Okay, so let’s move on to your Depop listings.
Depop has got a prohibited list of items that you are not allowed to sell. Again, this is something you can find on their website, so TAKE THE TIME TO READ IT. No! You can’t sell your virginity and yes some chick in Liverpool tried to.
Just make sure that you don’t sell anything on this list. It’s as simple as that.
7. Photos and Videos
Every single listing that you post has space for one video and up to four photos. You don’t have to use every single one of these slots, but if you want to try and show as much information as possible, it’s recommended to use all four photo slots.
The key thing for these photos is having decent lighting and showing off the item properly. You want the colors to look more or less what it looks like in real life and actually have at least one photo of the entire item like top to bottom.
I would also recommend putting in a close-up of any details or even just the texture of the material and also if you’ve got any flaws on the item also put those into the photos. It is very important that your buyer is aware of any flaws.
If you or a friend can model what the outfit looks like, that has been proven to definitely increase Depop sales. This is one of my actual listings, they say a picture is worth 1,000 words, and that is definitely the case when you are selling on Depop!
The description in the listing should be a general summary of the item that you’re selling. It’s not really enough to just have the photo because if people search for it, it won’t come up very easily.
8. Description and Item Summary
Even a sentence or two of such full terms, so it could be the brand it could be color, style, occasion that it might be useful for the condition of the item. These are all good things to put into your description.
I also like to put in a little bullet point section at the bottom of my listings about what I think people should know, so this can include whether or not you take returns or swaps. This could be what kind of postage this item will have. If you’re not sure about how to price an item that you are selling, I would recommend searching through the app for either the same item or something very similar and using what other people have listed those for. If you want the edge to try and get your stuff to sell as soon as possible and you can price it competitively.
I heard someone say “you make money when you buy, not when you sell”. That is the philosophy I run my Depop business with.
I only look for super awesome clothes and deep bargain prices.
9. Understanding Sales and Customer Service
So, let’s move on to sales. Depop has recently added a basket feature which is basically like your typical shopping cart. This means that people don’t have to buy each item separately if they want more than one thing on your page and something that you can do is offer a discount and people buy more than one item.
Another really important thing is to have good communication, this can be as simple as just saying hello when you first start to talk to someone, make sure that you are being polite to people and that you respond in a timely manner. Also, updating your customers on when things are going to be shipped or if they have been shipped when they might arrive is really, really useful.
This helps people feel like they’re being kept in the know. I would also make sure that you are updating your sales spreadsheet that I mentioned earlier, so this will keep you on top of when people bought things, how long it took you to ship, how much money you were making. Overall something else is that you should keep every single proof of postage that you get, which I will talk about more in a future article.
Having a good stock of mailing supplies is also important, so this can be mailing bags, shoe boxes, just things that you need to be able to send stuff off.
10. Deal with Disputes Quickly, Honestly, and Professionally
Finally, let’s move onto cases and disputes. Yes, I know there are cheap ass bitches who make a habit out of buying on Depop, wearing the skirt to the Club the week it arrives and returns it the next week.
I have had to learn this the hard way. I thoroughly inspect and truthfully list every item that I sell. If someone returns an item to me, I will not accept a sale from them again. That is my unspoken policy, but I live by it.
So, if something goes wrong with a purchase, buyers have 180 days after the purchase was made to bring up a case or escalate it to a dispute with PayPal because PayPal takes commission and fees from everything that you sell, what this means is that you get solid protection. This also means that the buyers get buyers’ protection, and some try to take advantage of that.
There are two main reasons why people can make a claim. Number one is that the item that they bought was not delivered and two, that the item that they bought was significantly not as described, which is why it’s very, very important to have your listings as accurate as possible and have photos that accurately reflect the condition of the item that you’re selling.
I would recommend reading through the PayPal user agreement to get into all the details of this, but this is why you should also keep all of your proof of postage having as much evidence as possible about everything that happened.
So, this can be conversations, this could review that people left, this could be the actual proof of postage that ends up winning you the case. So if somebody says that their item never arrived but you type in the reference code on the proof of postage and it says the item was delivered on this date and that is the evidence which directly contradicts the buyer and you can have.
I don’t put up with this crap, I will tell these scammy people that I have proof it was delivered, well it was and hopefully if they decide to escalate the case I will win the case and there we go.
That is pretty much all the information that you absolutely need to know before you start selling on Depop. I have got other tips and tricks that you might be interested in that I will write about in future articles. In the future, I will be going into a bit more depth on the different topics that I have covered here. If you are a good dude or dudette, Hopefully, this has been useful information and enough to get you selling on Depop.
Happy Depop Selling!
Bye Bye.
