Etsy to sell Depop, Gen Z’s Favourite Hub for Vintage Clothing, to eBay This Year

According to a recent article from TechCrunch, virtual retailer Etsy is selling Depop, Gen Z’s preferred online platform for buying and selling vintage clothing, to eBay for US$1.2 billion in cash.

Depop, which was founded in 2011, gained traction as one of the most trusted trading posts for pre-owned clothing on the internet, servicing a growing market of young consumers hoping to channel the styles of simpler times. In the last several years, the fashion industry’s return to the trends of the 2000s (dubbed the “Y2K era” on social media and commentary) has been a particular boon for the platform. Across the site, millennials and Gen-X vendors are handing down their staple pieces from those years – items like curvaceous Coach purses, lace-lined tank tops and Von Dutch trucker hats – to the next generation of trend-driven teens and twenty-somethings. But despite the nostalgic and often obscure nature of the wares sold on Depop, the scale of its operations is anything but quaint. In 2025 alone, the platform generated approximately US$1 billion in gross merchandise sales. Of the seven million active buyers totaled at its year-end, 90% were under the age of 34.

A mammoth online retailer in its own right, Etsy acquired Depop almost five years ago, at a time when the latter platform’s soaring popularity among younger internet users gave it a US$1.62 billion price tag. However, per TechCrunch, Etsy has struggled to grow its own business in the post-pandemic era, as the global surge in e-commerce continues to siphon sales from the once-dominant platform. The arrival of competitors like Temu and Shein, along with users’ increasing reliance on Amazon, has sent Etsy’s year-over-year growth into decline. And in late 2025, the platform announced that longtime CEO Josh Silverman would be stepping down, to be replaced in 2026 by Kruti Patel Goyal, herself a former CEO of Depop from before its acquisition.

This is not the first time that Etsy has acquired and then promptly divested from a niche online marketplace. It has made this move before, with Brazilian e-commerce site Elo7 and with Reverb, a marketplace for musical instruments. As Etsy confronts its own downward trends, it is likely that its sale of Depop represents another instance of this pattern: in offloading a promising asset, it also re-trains the corporation’s energies on the Etsy brand itself.

As Goyal stated in a press release about the Depop sale, the transaction “allows us to focus on the compelling opportunity we see in front of us: to grow the Etsy marketplace in ways that matter most to our buyers and sellers.”

The Etsy-eBay deal is expected to close in Q2 of 2026.

Author: Sarah Farb, 2025/2026 Articling Student-at-Law