You find the perfect jumpsuit on Vinted, you pay the full asking price, you don’t even try to haggle a few pounds off because you’re not annoying like that. You pay the final amount including buyer protection and delivery, and you wait for news that the item is on its way.
And you wait.
And you wait.
Deep down you know something is wrong, but Vinted’s silence and the unhelpfully long timeframe a seller has to get items sent means you are left in limbo for ages before it finally becomes clear that your jumpsuit is not coming after all.
I mean who does that!? Who goes to the trouble of photographing and listing an item, then doesn’t send it when someone buys it for the price they asked? Who are these people? Were they put on this earth simply to waste everyone else’s time? Apparently so!
Thankfully, just like with buyers who don’t collect items they have bought (and they can get in the bin too), this is relatively rare, but when it does happen, it’s insanely annoying. What’s more, if you haven’t been through it before, you might be feeling anxious about what happens if a seller does not send the item.
Vinted’s terms are long and boring but the answer is simple, so I’ll explain it for you here instead.
How the Process Works
I actually had this happen to me not so long ago. I was buying some new Lee Cooper jeans for my fella (I let him buy his own clothes most of the time 😂), and the donut selling the jeans didn’t bother to post them, so I will use my real world example.
When you buy something on Vinted, the seller has 5 business days to get their act together and ship the item. With weekends, that means it could be 7 days before the item is declared ‘unsent’, depending on when you bought it.
You don’t get any contact unless it is shipped though, so you’re stuck wondering what’s going on. You could message the seller, but Vinted email them reminders anyway, so contacting them yourself is fairly pointless. If they are ignoring Vinted’s emails they will ignore yours too. You just have to wait.
When the seller’s time is up, Vinted will end you a very short, to the point email:
As the email says, your money is sent back to you, the sale is cancelled, and the seller officially becomes a 🔔🔚, in the words of my other half.
And he’s right.
You Get an Automatic Refund
The bad news is you’ve had your time wasted and won’t be getting the Lee Cooper jeans you just bought. The good news is that your refund is automatic, and so is the bad feedback the seller will get from Vinted.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t write your own bad feedback too.
I did, and it made me feel a bit better. I also saw that I wasn’t the only one, two other people had bought from this seller in the same week and not received anything. Pro tip: check a seller’s recent feedback and when they were last active.
The refund can take another week to get back to you, so if you have bought something moderately expensive that money is tied up for up to 2 weeks before you get it back. That’s a long time if you don’t have lots of extra cash lying around.
Still, at least you don’t lose anything – except your patience and your trust in other people.
So all in all the process is long, but simple. You might have to wait 7 days to find out the item isn’t coming, then another 7 days to get your automatic refund, but you don’t actually have to do anything to make it happen. Once you complete the purchase, every other step is handled by Vinted behind the scenes.
Annoying? Yes. End of the world? No.