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.
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.
Promotion is the cost that quietly eats the margin
Bumps, wardrobe spotlights 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 they never appear on the sold item.
A bump that costs a little and shifts a stale item is good business. 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.
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. It becomes yours in two situations worth planning for: when you offer a shipping discount to move something that has been sitting too long, and when a sale happens outside the platform's own shipping flow. Both are choices, which means both belong in your numbers before you make them, not after.
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.