What comes out of your payout, and what does not
Sort every euro attached to a sale into one of three buckets and the picture stops being confusing:
- Paid by the buyer, on top of your price. The Buyer Protection fee charged at checkout, and the delivery the buyer selects. These raise the total the buyer pays; they do not reduce what you receive.
- Paid by you, before the sale exists. What the item cost you, the mailer and tape you packed it in, and any optional promotion you bought to push the listing. Real money, spent whether or not the item ever sells.
- Deducted from the sale. For private sellers in Vinted's main markets, this bucket has been empty — which is exactly why it surprises people when their payout still feels small. Professional (Pro) accounts are the exception and are billed on their own terms.
Rates, thresholds and even which bucket a charge falls into vary by country and change over time. Treat your local Vinted help pages as the authority on the numbers; this page is about the shape of the thing. When that money actually reaches you, and what can hold it up on the way, is on Vinted pending balance.
The Buyer Protection fee is not your fee — but it is your problem
Because it is added at checkout rather than deducted from your payout, Buyer Protection never shows up in your profit maths. It does show up in the buyer's decision. Someone comparing two similar jackets is comparing the totals on their screen, protection and postage included — so an item priced just under a psychological round number can land just over it by the time the buyer sees it.
The practical move is not to discount for it. It is to know what the buyer's total looks like at your price before you set the price, and to spend your attention on the cost side, which is the side you actually control.
Vinted is changing what this charge is called. Its help centre puts it in one line: “You may have noticed in our updated Terms and Conditions that the Buyer Protection fee is getting a new name: Vinted fee.” The same page calls this a rename rather than a new or additional charge, and says the name is being updated across Vinted gradually, so one page can already read Vinted fee while another still reads Buyer Protection fee. On that point the help centre is explicit: “Both refer to the same existing fee.” The terms text currently shown, marked as applying from a later date, uses the new name throughout, while the price list and the older fee help page still carry the old one.
None of that moves the charge onto your side. The same help page asks whether sellers are now charged this fee and answers “No. There are no selling fees on Vinted. Buyers will continue to pay this fee at checkout, as before.” The newer definition page puts the charge in the same place: “The Vinted fee is a mandatory platform fee paid at checkout when you place an order through Vinted.” So the arithmetic above does not move. It sits on the buyer's bill and it does not come out of your payout. That definition page states a typical range, and the rename note says the name update does not change how the fee is calculated. Because that bill and the buyer's decision are settled on one checkout screen, the note's answer on protection reaches your side too: when the buyer uses the Buy now button, “the same support and protection continue to apply to your order”.
Promotion is the cost that quietly eats the margin
Bumps, Showcase (which Vinted used to call Wardrobe Spotlight) and whatever a given market calls its paid visibility options are the only place most private sellers genuinely hand money to the platform — and they are the easiest cost to lose track of, because you pay for them separately from the sale and nothing on the sold listing reminds you of the spend afterwards.
A bump that costs a little and shifts a listing nobody has touched is money well spent. The same bump spent repeatedly on a low-priced item can quietly turn a small profit into a small loss. If you promote, book the spend against the item as a cost — that is what the item cost field in the calculator below is for. What a bump actually changes, what sets the price you are shown, and what Showcase does differently are on Vinted bumps and Showcase.
Postage: usually theirs, sometimes yours
The buyer picks a delivery option and pays for it, so in the normal case postage is not your cost at all. Note what is not on that list: there is no setting that lets a seller offer free postage. The only discount you can set yourself applies to the item price when someone buys several things at once. Postage becomes your cost in a small number of specific situations instead — a return you offer to cover, or a sale sent outside the platform's own shipping flow. Which carriers a buyer is shown, and why that is mostly out of your hands, has its own page: Vinted shipping for sellers (and in German, Vinted Versandkosten).
Pro accounts play a different game
Professional sellers are billed on terms that differ from the private-seller picture above, and those terms are not the same in every country. If you sell as a business, the numbers on your local Vinted Pro help pages are the ones that apply to you — and the arithmetic below still works, you simply have a non-empty deduction bucket to feed into it.
Tax is a separate question from fees
"Do I owe tax on this?" is not the same question as "what was I charged?", and it has a different answer in every country. Marketplaces across the EU and the UK report seller data to tax authorities above set thresholds, so the honest advice is to check your own national tax authority rather than a forum thread — and, whatever the answer turns out to be, to keep a record of what each item cost you. Tax on trading is generally about profit, not turnover, and a cost you cannot evidence is a cost you cannot deduct. Hemly is a calculator, not a tax adviser.
What this means when you set a price
Work backwards from the money you keep. Take the price you are considering, subtract what the item cost you, the packaging, any postage you have decided to absorb and any promotion you have bought against it — and look at the result as a percentage, not just a euro figure. €6 on a €10 dress and €8 on a €60 coat are not the same kind of sale: the first turns your money over six times faster, and turnover is what a reseller's income is actually made of.
The Vinted profit calculator on the home page does exactly that subtraction, in your market's currency. It reads its fee table from the same configuration file the Hemly extension uses, so the site and the extension can never quote you two different schedules.