eBay buys Depop for $1.2bn

eBay is buying Depop for $1.2 billion (£890 million), a deal that is less about “sustainability” than about capturing a demographic before it ages out of novelty shopping.

According to The Independent, eBay will acquire the London-founded resale app from Etsy, which bought Depop in 2021 for $1.62 billion and is now selling it at a substantial loss. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year. Depop will keep its name, brand, and “culture,” the companies promise—an assurance that typically lasts right up until the first integration roadmap.

Depop, founded in 2011, has become a major marketplace for second-hand fashion. The Independent reports seven million active buyers at the end of last year, with almost 90% under 34. Depop has also seen rapid U.S. growth, with sales in the country rising nearly 60% over the past year.

For eBay, the attraction is obvious: Depop is a social-forward, app-native funnel for consumer-to-consumer fashion—exactly the category where platforms can harvest fees from both sides while calling it “community.” eBay CEO Jamie Iannone framed the purchase as a way to reach a “younger demographic” and accelerate growth, per The Independent.

For Etsy, the sale is an admission that “portfolio strategy” is another way of saying “we overpaid at the peak.” Etsy CEO Kruti Patel Goyal said the divestment lets Etsy focus on growing its core marketplace.

The point isn’t that big tech is evil; it’s that platform capitalism is increasingly a toll-road business model dressed up as empowerment. Depop’s sellers—often small, semi-professional resellers—take on the operational risk: chargebacks, fraud disputes, shipping problems, and the constant churn of algorithmic visibility. The platform takes a cut and reserves the right to change the rules.

Depop’s own CEO Peter Semple pitched the eBay deal as a way to “accelerate” expansion, citing eBay’s experience in C2C fashion and “shared belief” in opportunity. That’s one way to describe it. Another is that C2C platforms are maturing into regulated financial intermediaries in everything but name: payments, identity checks, tax reporting, and increasingly strict enforcement against sellers who don’t fit the risk model.

Resale apps sell themselves as decentralised thrift—an anti-corporate aesthetic—while the underlying market structure is pure consolidation. Niche communities build liquidity and trust; incumbents buy the network effects; fees and compliance ratchet upward; and the smallest sellers discover they’ve become contractors to a private rule-maker.

Depop may keep its “culture.” The spreadsheet will keep the rest.