Wallapop, formerly known as Fleapster. Wallapop It was founded on May 23, 2013 in Barcelona with that name that referred to the famous “flea markets”. Its promoters, Agustín Gómez, Gerard Olivé and Miguel Vicente, started with the support of the Antai Venture Builder accelerator and an initial catalog that they had obtained by shopping at flea markets. The app was designed to meet someone nearby and do the exchange in person, so geolocation was essential for this first version.
The team understood a couple of ideas that gave the app a definitive boost: sending a sofa from Seville to Vigo is a pain, and trust between buyers and sellers grows when the seller is three streets away. To make themselves known, they gave part of the company to Atresmedia in exchange for television advertising space. The result was a campaign that turned “Walla!” into a recognizable catchphrase before anyone knew quite what it meant.
Vinted, the power of moving. Vinted has five more years of history. Milda Mitkute founded it in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuaniawhen I was 22 years old and needed to get rid of more than a hundred clothes before moving. At a party he met Justas Janauskas, a computer engineer who built the first version of the site in ten days. The original name was manodrabuziai.l (“second-hand clothes” in Lithuanian) and in the first version they forgot to include a buy button. The platform expanded to Germany the following year, under the name Kleiderkreiseland did not arrive in Spain until many years laterwhen Wallapop already dominated the local market.
Differences in use. The most visible difference between both platforms, and the one that most influences the behavior of their users, is who assumes the costs of the transaction. At Vinted the seller does not pay commission. Publish, sell and receive the full price in your wallet. The buyer assumes a protection fee of 0.70 fixed euros plus 5% of the price of the item, which covers incident management and payment retention until confirmation of receipt. Vinted eliminated seller fees in 2023.
At Wallapop, in-person sales have no commission, which for bulky or high-priced items is more profitable for the seller. When Wallapop Envoys is used (the logistics service integrated into the app, which generated 74 million euros in 2024) the platform applies a management fee of around 10% of the sales price. There is also a second way of monetization for the platform, which has grown strongly: visibility services that give more relevance to an ad. generated 22 million euros in 2024, 27.6% more than in 2023. An important income for Wallapop, since it represents money for the platform regardless of whether the sale closes.
The figures. Let’s look at some figures from 2024 and 2025 that allow us to trace the real state of each company. Vinted closed 2024 with 813 million euros in revenue36% more than the previous year, and a net profit of 76.7 million, which represents an increase of 330% compared to 2023, its first positive year. In 2025, Revenues rose to 1.1 billion (+38%). Net profit, however, fell 19% that year to 62 million due to spending on the expansion of Vinted Go to Spain and Portugal and the launch of Vinted Pay.
Wallapop, for its part, closed 2024 with 101 million in revenue (+13%)consolidated losses of 25 million and the first break-even operating in the Spanish market since its foundation. In an average year, platform users generate sales of between 2,000 and 2,500 million euros, according to the company itself. Since 2013 it has accumulated more than 120 million euros in lossesalthough the trend is for a sustained reduction in those red numbers.
Enter Korea. This same year, Naver, South Korea’s largest technology company, completed in January 2026 the acquisition of 100% of the company in an operation valued at 600 million euros. The transaction makes Wallapop the European spearhead of Naver in the recommercejoining Poshmark, which already performs these functions in the US and which the Korean group bought in 2023. The CEO of Naver Europe, Seokjoo Han, declared in Barcelona that the group intends to use the city as a base to expand into more European cities, relying on the parent company’s capabilities in artificial intelligence and search.
Southern Europe: here we are. What is happening right now in Spain is the clearest reflection of the evolution of the sector. The trade in reused items in Spain reached a volume of 13.8 billion euros annually by 2025equivalent to 0.86% of the national GDP. It is a market that has been growing at a faster rate than general consumption for years, driven by inflation since 2021. Vinted has responded to this situation with the launch of Vinted Go in 2025. The company already operates this network in five markets (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain), following the leap that Wallapop made some time ago from being a second-hand app to having a delivery infrastructure (although Vinted has its own logistics operator and Wallapop works with InPost).
Wallapop, meanwhile, has been expanding its catalog beyond household objects for years. The engine is one of the categories where it maintains leadership in Spain. And the entry of Naver introduces the possibility of technological improvements in search and personalization that until now were out of reach. Both are getting closer to their rival as time goes by: Vinted is becoming less specialized in clothing, Wallapop is becoming more technological.
A final and personal appreciation. Without this implying tipping the balance towards one of the two apps (which is not the purpose of this article), I would like to express my personal experience, linked to my long career selling items especially related to leisure (books, comics, movies, video games). For some time I have noticed how Vinted, which just a couple of years ago did not allow you to buy much beyond clothing, has made a very notable leap towards collecting: its presence in more markets in Europe makes it more complete than Wallapop when it comes to buying, for example, imported DVDs and Blu-Rays.
Vinted is also, in many aspects, more economical than its competitor, especially due to the insurance rates and commissions that Wallapop charges, and which in Vinted, again due to its experience and financial muscle, are not so high. And although there we already enter into very personal and, possibly, partial assessments, the search and translation filters are much better worked on in Vinted. For now, the conflict continues, and as always, if you are interested in the second-hand market, it is best to have an account in both apps and opt for one or the other depending on the nature of the item you are going to sell.
In Xataka | I am a five-star seller on Wallapop. This is how I survive in this second-hand jungle
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings