Vinted posts impressive growth and record profits in 2023

The Lithuanian owned Vinted, an online marketplace for buying, selling and exchanging new or pre-loved items, feels like it came from nowhere and has become a cultural revolution for fashionistas across the UK.

Vinted recently released it's financial data for 2023, showing revenue growth of 61% in 2023 vs 2022, with double-digit profitability. The marketplace expanded into Denmark, Romania and Finland, whilst launching new products (i.e. payments) and increasing their workforce by a third.

Given the macroeconomic backdrop combined with sustainability, Vinted has found its place in the market and looks to be going from strength to strength.

So what has made it a success? I've narrowed it down to the following:

1. Community Building: Vinted has fostered a strong sense of community among its users. By providing a platform for like-minded individuals to connect, share fashion tips, and participate in swapping events, Vinted creates a sense of belonging and encourages user engagement. This community-centric approach not only enhances the user experience but also contributes to word-of-mouth marketing and brand loyalty.
2. Sustainable Messaging: Vinted effectively communicates its value proposition centered around sustainability. By emphasising the environmental benefits of buying and selling secondhand clothing, Vinted taps into the growing consumer demand for eco-friendly options. This messaging not only resonates with conscious consumers but also helps to differentiate Vinted from traditional retailers.
3. Strategic Advertising: Vinted has invested significantly in advertising, utilising both traditional mediums like television and modern digital channels. By targeting scalable, measurable, and efficient marketing channels, Vinted maximises its reach and effectively communicates its value proposition to a wider audience. This strategic approach to advertising has played a crucial role in driving user acquisition and brand awareness, propelling Vinted to become one of Europe's leading online secondhand clothing marketplace.

But is Vinted's growth in the UK replicated throughout Europe? If so, how have they done this?

Here are three key insights about Vinted's digital strategy that you might find interesting.

1. The French j'adore pre-loved items. But the UK is catching up, fast.

Vinted is setup using ccTLDs (country code top level domains) rather than a global domain with dedicated subfolders to each (i.e. vinted.com/fr), which enables us to review estimated traffic via Similarweb :

When just looking at unique users, the UK's growth is ever more impressive, surpassing that of France in Q1:

So, the UK has seen significant growth, but which channels are driving this? Given what seems like a supercharged WOM approach, unsurprisingly, it is direct and organic search that are driving the most traffic to the websites over the past few years:

You can see the UK's growth in direct and organic, which highlights the improving strength of the brand:

Given the above, it looks like us Brits have been mesmerised by Vinted's preloved proposition and are eager for more! This hasn't been reflected in other major European markets (that I can tell), despite having a strong foothold in France previously.

Native app visibility is an essential part of their playbook

Much of the creative follows the same theme, people sorting through their old clothes, then smiling before receiving cash. The brand includes core messaging, such as "no seller fees", which aims to take business away from the likes of eBay, but the tone is consistent throughout - "no matter if you're single, with a partner or have a family, you can make a load of money by selling your old shit".

We've looked previously at traffic to the website, but of course - their app is a crucial part of their digital strategy and features as the main CTA at the end of each creative (see above).

Firstly, caveat, you don't get much data with Apple - so there is a big piece of the pie that we're missing in the analysis.

Looking at Android, Vinted's install penetration has more than doubled since March 2022. This means that more people in the category now have the Vinted app on their phone than there was 25-months ago.

MAU's have also seen considerable growth over the past 25-month, but have recently plateaued:

Finally, for Google Android, the retention rate is much higher than on other apps in the category, so their churn is lower as users return to the app long after they've installed it:

As mentioned, we're missing the insight into the performance on Apple - but the brand has really strong reviews (better than Trustpilot and Google Play) in the app store, so it is clearly an area of focus to grow.

Competing brands know the strength of the brand and leverage Apple Search Ads (ASA) for competitor bidding:

Vinted will no doubt be aware of this, but may have decided (through testing) not to protect their brand via ASA as the searcher will still download the app at some point on their journey.

So, we've seen significant growth in app and web for Vinted over the past 25 months, with the past 12 really showing accelerated growth - but are there any other opportunities?

Search holds the key to further growth opportunities

The growth of the brand has been phenomenal as users embrace the excellent UX, zero seller fees and continuously recommend the platform to their friends.

We've seen direct and organic search take similar tracetories, which means that brand is driving all the growth - i.e. users are going direct to vinted.co.uk (although direct really means it is unattributable, so could also be dark social) and typing 'vinted' into Google. But what about the opportunities for users that do not have a brand in mind when they search?

Over the past 12-months, it is clear to see their organic traffic far outweighs their paid traffic:

89% of traffic to the website via desktop is via brand:

To me, this is highlight huge potential for the brand to make some enhancements and target generic searches.

Firstly, let's take a look at Pi Datametrics leaderboard for pre-loved items. Spoiler alert - Vinted.co.uk is nowhere to be seen:

The above shows the SOV (share of voice) of the main players in organic search (Google). We can see ebay.co.uk, Farfetch.com and depop.com featuring in the top ten, but what is happening with Vinted.co.uk?

One thing I've always stated to clients or to brands where I was in-house is that "more content pages, doesn't always lead to better performance" and Vinted.co.uk looks to have let their indexing (i.e. pages indexed in Google) get out of control.

I've picked two query terms ('dior trainers' and 'nike sliders') as examples, again using Pi-Datametrics, to see organic visibility in Google over the past 12-months:

The above chart shows the domain's erratic visibility going from the bottom of page 1 ('dior trainers') to outside the top 100. The above is a classic case of many URLs competing for the same query term rather than a dedicated category term. When we look under the hood, we can see how 'busy' the chart becomes with multiple URLs:

Each letter represents a different URL featuring in Google (??) and if we take a look at URL A, we get the following page:

What we're seeing is a dedicated product page featuring for the search term 'dior trainers' and once sold, it is deleting from the website resulting in a 404 error page.

This is happening multiple times for this query term and then multiply this by the number of products they offer, there is going to be a lot of erratic movement and a lot of 404 error pages.

My approach would be to:

1. Noindex product listing pages. I've done this previously with e-commerce websites as these page do not need to be indexed. Although it may appear the domain will take a small hit on long tail traffic, the long term gains far outweigh this. These are redundant once the product is sold. ebay.co.uk uses robots.txt to block crawling of their 'items' folder, which although is a different method - they also understand that these pages are only temporary and shouldn't be a main focus of their proposition for Googlebot.
2. Invest in category pages. The brand has category pages that can be discoverable from the top level navigation, but they should expand on this to create category pages for popular products on their website. In this example, the category page would be vinted.co.uk/dior/trainers/, which would host all Dior trainers listings (from a search just now - they have over 500+ of them), perhaps some useful content about the product (FAQs are good for this) and an enhanced filtering system ("dior trainers white")
3. Ensure category pages are discoverable. Discoverability is crucial, both for customers and search so the brand needs to incorporate internal links from the homepage and top level navigation so that these can be found and indexed.

Although it might seem like a lot of work, this can be automated and creative templates can be produced. It will clean up the amount of broken pages there are and consolidate all product items to one single easy to find page.