Sometimes it is the little things that cause the most frustration as committed Vinted user Hannah discovered recently.
The online marketplace that allows people to buy and sell things – mostly clothes – to each other was founded in 2008 but only really became wildly popular in this part of the world recently. And it is wildly popular, with annual sales growth jumping by 499 per cent in Ireland in the 12 months to the end of May.
Hannah has been one of those who started using the service in that period but got in touch after what she said was a “really disappointing experience with Vinted’s customer service as a seller”.
When she first started using Vinted at the beginning of this year she started using it as a buyer before moving on to “list things of my own for sale. Overall, I’ve had a positive experience. I’ve found some great things at good prices, have managed to find new homes for old items, and made some money in the process,” she writes.
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“However, in April, something went wrong with one of the items that I sold, and I was naive in thinking that Vinted would help to sort it out, especially given I had done everything correctly.”
She sold a charm for a Pandora bracelet for €10 and had it packaged and dropped off at the post office on April 22nd.
“Usually, items arrive with people in Ireland the next day,” she explains. “However, I noticed two contradictory things happening in the Vinted app: the first was that I was able to use the in-app feature to track the shipping for the item, which confirmed the item had been shipped. The second was that the Vinted app kept telling me to ship the item before the deadline (April 30th), or the order would be cancelled. This was clearly some sort of malfunction in the Vinted app itself. It was simultaneously confirming that I had shipped the item, and claiming that I had not shipped the item,” she says.
Hannah contacted the buyer to explain what was going on “and they confirmed they received a notification [from Vinted] that the item was shipped. I decided to give it some time, but after a few weeks went by, I contacted An Post, who revealed they sent the item to the UK, instead of to Bray. They asked me to fill out a form, after which I think your response goes into the abyss,” she continues.
“As the deadline neared and the app was still registering the item as both shipped and not shipped, I got worried that the order would be cancelled (meaning the buyer would be refunded), so I got onto Vinted customer service to ask them to extend the shipping time. I got in touch the day before the deadline and proceeded to go back and forth with their AI bot before being told I would be referred to a human, which could take up to 48 hours.”
Hannah points out that this “was obviously not helpful for my situation as the order was going to be cancelled the next day, and that is exactly what happened. The order was cancelled, the buyer got a refund, and I was left with no charm, and no money.”
She says what followed “was one of the most infuriating interactions with a ‘customer service’ team I’ve ever had.”
She sent us screenshots of the conversation and an edited version of what happened.
“After providing all of the evidence that the AI bot asked me to provide, an agent connected with the chat and asked me for information and documents I had already provided to the AI,” she says.
“This was annoying but I did it anyway and re-explained the whole situation, this time asking for compensation for the money I’d lost since the order was cancelled. I was then told they would follow up with the shipping provider, which could take up to 35 days.”
She says she “received the next message six days later when I was told the shipping provider confirmed the item was never sent and therefore their decision was not to compensate me.”
This is despite the fact, she notes that “An Post confirmed it was shipped and it was sent to the UK, and I provided a screenshot of this conversation, a picture of the receipt and a screenshot of the in-app tracking, all evidence that the item was indeed shipped. I immediately responded to point out all of those things and requested that they review all of the documentation I provided before responding, because clearly no one had done that up to this point.”
She quickly received a response.
She was told that “while the carrier initially confirmed the parcel was not sent, the documentation you’ve provided shows that it was scanned and handed over to An Post, then forwarded to the UK. This indicates the issue occurred during the carrier’s handling, not on your side.”
She was told “it would be followed up on and I would be compensated if it was lost by An Post.”
She heard nothing back for the guts of a month and it took a “prompt from me to get any kind of update, and their response was that after ‘carefully reviewing’ my case, they will be ‘proceeding with the original decision’.”
That was – in case you are not keeping up – that Hannah had never sent the item so was not eligible for compensation. This was, she says, “despite the evidence provided and their own admission to the contrary. They closed the chat so that I could not take it any further. It was one month since I’d first started the conversation.”
In the meantime, An Post did correct their mistake and delivered the item to the buyer, who got the charm and their refund, while Hannah was left with nothing.
“According to the Vinted website, their suggested solution to this problem is to relist the item, ask the buyer to purchase it again (and hope no-one else tries to buy it in the meantime), print the shipping label, then contact Vinted to tell them that the buyer already has the item and they will then update the system and give you your money - I would have very little faith in Vinted actually following through on this given my experience with them this time around. Despite that, I attempted to do this and messaged the buyer, who has chosen not to respond,” Hannah says.
She finishes by saying Vinted is a great service and “I have benefitted as a buyer and a seller. However, I feel really hard done by in this situation, not least because I did everything they asked: I shipped the item the next day, I communicated clearly with the buyer, I tried to resolve the issue with An Post and I provided plenty of evidence to Vinted, but it was clear that without being prompted, their customer service team did not look at any of the evidence or properly read any of my messages.”
She says the amount she sold the item for “was not substantial, but I have sold other items at a much higher price. At the end of the day, I’m out an item and money because their app didn’t function as it should, and if I let it go every time, it would add up very quickly. If the app is able to register something as shipped and also not shipped at the same time, that’s something they need to fix,” she suggests.
“Since Vinted closed the door on me I was not really sure where else to turn, and I do feel that as the app grows in popularity, more people are likely to run into issues. I think Vinted needs to be held to account and that they need to actually engage with people when they get in touch with problems, read messages properly and go beyond the copy and paste responses to actually help and keep their users. I also want other people who run into the same issue that I had to know that they should contact Vinted right away instead of waiting to see if the app will update, to try and resolve it before their order cancels and they lose out.”
We contacted the company and received the following statement.
“We’re sorry this happened. With millions of transactions on our platform, occasional mistakes can happen. If they do, we try to put things right quickly, and continuously refine how we work to make sure buying and selling on Vinted feels safe for everyone.The member in question was compensated and informed. We are also reviewing the handling of this case internally to help prevent similar situations from occurring in the future.”
