Paying Taxes on Vinted: Why It Frustrates Me

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There are people who say that paying taxes on sales made on Vinted is fair. I write this post to demonstrate how shortsighted this view is: please don't hold it against me, but I take two things very seriously: taxes and the issues related to consumerism in the fashion industry.

Bradipa and Taxes: My Overall Position

Let’s make a preliminary statement: I am a freelancer, and yet I have never complained about taxes (except, I admit, when I ended up in the emergency room or in the hospital: unfortunately, in my region, there have been many cuts, and practically the taxes are paid for nothing. Just one example: booking any exam in the public sector if you don’t have an arm detached from your body is impossible; they won’t even put you on the waiting list. If you have money, you go private; otherwise, tough luck). I pay and have paid taxes on everything, including the tutoring I provided in high school (my accountant still teases me about it). Does the tax burden in Italy bother me? I’m a freelancer; that was a rhetorical question, right? However, I don’t think that working off the books is the solution; on the contrary, the possibility of not paying without serious consequences, in my opinion, inhibits legitimate protests.

Do You Really Have to Pay Taxes on What You Sell on Vinted?

Yes: if you exceed 30 sales and/or 2000 euros in earnings, Vinted will report you to the Revenue Agency, which will come to collect what is due under something called Dac7; if you’re interested, google it, and a (sad) world will open up. How much is due in your case? I have no idea; I’m not an accountant. I can tell you how much it is in my case because I asked my accountant: a 20% withholding tax. It’s the same amount I pay on income derived from affiliations (for example, from selling photo presets), and in that case, I find it fair. It’s passive income; I don’t invest money or time to obtain it, and even if the amounts are tiny, I’m glad that part of it can be used, in theory, for essential services.

Who Should Pay Taxes on Vinted

I write “Vinted,” but by now, it works like this everywhere (except on Facebook Marketplace, which, as we know, cares little about taxes, and I don’t know about you, but that annoys me). Up to a certain point, I agree with the supporters of this idea: there are people who have been conducting a professional activity on Vinted for years without declaring it (because commercial activities, for example in France, were already regularly taxed, while in Italy, you couldn’t sell as a business on Vinted). So what did they do? When a collection from a major designer for Zara or H&M came out, they immediately bought a bunch of identical items (and perhaps they weren’t even at the computer, leaving this thankless task to bots that did it automatically), and when the collection was sold out, which was practically immediately, they sold the items for double the value. It’s the free market, darling: they can do it (in general, on Vinted, theoretically not), and surely someone pays those amounts. In this case, since they have very high revenues, it’s fair that they pay taxes.

Where Do Used Clothes End Up

Most sellers on Vinted, however, are not people of this kind. They are people like you and me, who, when young and immature, bought a lot of clothes, then started to educate themselves about environmental impact, discovered that the clothes they donated to charity didn’t go to the poor, and that in general, used clothing mostly ended up in piles of trash in Africa that, when things go wrong, catch fire (in 2019, Europe exported 1.7 million tons of used clothing. Do you really think the poor need all these clothes?). So, these people have found in Vinted and in general in second-hand a way to declutter ethically. Because, let’s be clear, most of us on Vinted don’t make big profits. Sure, it’s nice to have some money to invest in the app (yes, you have to pay taxes even if you spend it immediately without Vinted sending the money to your bank account), or to trade some delicious breakfasts for the clothes you sell at a loss, but keeping up with Vinted is an activity that takes a lot of time between photos, shipping, and responses to messages that often result in nothing. As a freelancer, there would be far better activities I would implement to earn more. Not to mention that, as I mentioned in another article, if you want to sell well, you need to promote your wardrobe, and it doesn’t come cheap. Too bad that you also pay taxes on that money you will never see because Vinted pockets it.

Why It’s Not Ethically Right to Pay Taxes on Vinted

From the previous paragraph, you will surely understand that selling on Vinted is no longer worthwhile for me as it once was. Let’s say I sell a trench coat for 15 euros (which costs the buyer more, including shipping costs and purchase protection). After paying taxes, I receive 12 euros. Not bad in theory, right? After all, I have the shipping point nearby, it takes me 15 minutes to take the photos and upload them, so let’s say that with two sales, I earn 24 euros net in an hour. Much less than what I earn with my job, but since I don’t do it (only) for the money, that’s fine.

Too bad that the average price of the items I sell (used to sell) on Vinted isn’t 15 euros. I’ve listed cheap t-shirts for 2/3 euros (cheap not in the sense of “broken,” but plain items I never expected to sell), amortizing the “time costs” because thanks to promotions, I also did 5/6 shipments a week all together, and it was going great: that t-shirt that cluttered my wardrobe and my life made someone else happy, who might use it, instead of going to swell piles of trash in Africa as it would have done if I had thrown it away. Now, however, what happens? Promoting no longer makes much sense, and with 90 followers, I rarely manage to make more than one shipment a week. On 3 euros, the taxes amount to 60 cents, so I earn 2.40 euros for half an hour of work. 4.80 euros an hour. Plus the time to respond to any questions about the item. You understand that at that point, the t-shirt for 3 euros “I donate to the poor.” And that would also be fine, since it’s in perfect condition. But if you’ve read the articles (I also recommend the enlightening read of The Dark Side of Fashion – A Journey into Environmental Abuses (and More) of Fast Fashion by Maxine Bédat), you will have already understood that no, those clothes won’t reach the poor, but will end up adding to the pile of trash in Ghana.

It Would Have Taken So Little...

Now, as you may have understood, economically this tax issue doesn’t change much for me. I will definitely sell fewer items, selecting only those I can sell for 7/8 euros and will stop promoting my wardrobe. What bothers me is that this way, I, and all those who have a fetish for calculating when it comes to money, will forcefully return to being part of the problem of waste disposal in the fast fashion industry. In the end, what the state earns from taxes from those who sell 200/300 euros a year on Vinted loses in waste disposal from those like me who stop. It would have been enough to set only an economic limit (let’s be clear: if you’re not already rich, making more than 500 euros a year on Vinted is almost utopian, and if you’re already rich, you probably don’t sell on Vinted unless you do it for business) and not a limit on the number of sales (if you sell 30 t-shirts at 3 euros, you earn 90 euros, of which 18 goes to the state: that doesn’t seem like an unmissable amount, although I would be curious to know exactly how much it costs to dispose of 30 t-shirts that end up in the trash, if anyone has a reliable source, please write it in the comments?)

In the meantime, it seems to me just another measure born from a six-month time horizon that ignores the emergency we are in regarding pollution, exploitation, and lack of resources. In the meantime, if you want to come visit my (from now on, very selective) Vinted wardrobe, I’ll be waiting for you!

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